From The Answer Sheet, Valerie Strauss's often-informative blog in the Washington post, we learn that business leaders are urging Congress to re-write NCLB. I have a love-hate relationship with NCLB: It was being passed at a time when I was deeply cynical about the way Washington was writing and passing legislation. (Since then my cynicism has only deepened, which doesn't bode well for the NCLB rewrite.) It also came as I was learning about what I now think of as the "old way" of teaching: grades based on points with an emphasis placed on completing homework assignments, class placement based on expected future education goals (although I didn't believe in rigorous tracking), special ed students in their own world. I think NCLB went a long way to changing the systemic view of the way schools work. It starts from the philosophy that all students can learn, including those with profound learning disablilities, students who come from nothing, and kids that the teachers really don't like, and from there it draws the conclusion that schools have the responsibility for teaching those students. In the last 10 years, this has resulted in a major shift in the way school systems work, even as we break a lot of the systems that worked fairly well.
On the negative side, a less nuanced reading of NCLB led directly and inevitably to the "blame the teacher" and "test test test" mentalities that permeate the way the education world (and the rest of the world, for that matter) now behaves. The fact that schools can do a better job of the way it organizes information and prioritizes spending has been taken to mean that teachers do a lousy job of teaching our children and teachers' unions are stealing all the money from our classrooms. (In fairness, this is mostly believed by people who already believed that, many of whom make quite a good living believing that.)
Back to today's reading, though, Strauss takes the buisness community's insistence of a rewrite of NCLB as evidence that it is broken beyond repair. I have a different take on it. I of course welcome the engagement of the business community into the conversation about education; the more stakeholders are involved, the richer the conversation will be, even if that doesn't end up doing anything for the final product. I have two worries about this, though. The first is that the business community almost always ends up having more impact on education priorities than educators. Maybe that's just the nature of politics, but I'm not sure asking the CEO of Starbuck's what he wants to see in his prospective employees is the best way to determine education goals. As Strauss puts it, "
"Critics of education reform note that educators don’t presume to
know about business to tell business leaders how to reform their own
institutions, but never mind."
The second, and the more important, is that I'm suspicious at best, and cynical at worst, about big business's motives. When the business community talks about what it wants from schools, all I hear is, "We can't be bothered to train our employees in the skills we want, so we want schools to do it for us. Also, don't tax us to pay for it." Particularly troubling is this part from the Business Roundtable's 2013 Growth Agenda: "America also has a very real skills gap. More than 12 million U.S.
workers are unemployed, yet businesses report close to 4 million open
jobs.(23) Many of these jobs cannot be filled by previously displaced
workers because of gaps in skills and training."
I don't understand why companies can't grab 4 million of the best and brightest of the people they have right now, train them in the skills they need, promote them to the new positions, and then hire 4 million previously-unemployed people to fulfill the new, less-skilled openings. There has to be somebody working in the mail room at Stryker Instruments who really really wants to be a mechanical engineer; send her to mechanical engineer's school. Or better yet, develop an in-house, on-the-job training program that leads to some kind of recognized certification and also provides your employee with the skills you need her to have right now.)
The other aspect of this that bothers me is that, during the height of the recession (depth of the recession?), I read an article (citation needed) that said that qualified people were applying for all of these high-skill jobs; companies didn't want to pay high-skill wages to fill those positions, though. So when they say they can't find people to fill those positions, they're being disingenuous: what they mean is they can't find people to fill those positions for a price they're willing to pay. A greater number of people with engineering degrees will drive down the cost of expertise in engineering. (That also explains business's motivation for immigration reform. Engineering students from India are a whole lot less expensive than engineering students from the US, at least for the first couple of years, and after that, you can fire them and hire new ones.)
None of this analysis of business's motives is intended to get me and my colleagues off the hook. I share the business community's goal of a better-educated work force which is able to learn, unlearn, and re-learn a variety of skills and knowledge bases as high-tech fields develop. I want creativity, clear thinking and effective communicating to be at the heart of our schools. I want every student who comes out of an American public school to be prepared for anything he or she wants to do. Business and I want the same things for our students. I'm just not sure that we want it for the same reason.
Also, I somehow doubt that lawmakers will hear my voice as clearly as they will hear the voices of the CEO's of the Business Roundtable.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Monday, January 14, 2013
Stanford: MI charter schools more effective
Just a quick note to promise more analysis later. I am against charter schools for a wide variety of reasons. One of them was, until this afternoon, that all evidence indicated that charter schools are less effective than public schools. This afternoon, I saw a report released today by Stanford University (download page here; click on Michigan). The conclusion they draw is that Michigan charter schools produce better educational outcomes in students than comparable public schools. I clearly have my doubts, but it seems likely that the researchers at Stanford would have taken these into account. More from me after I actually read the report. I mostly didn't want to feel like I'd neglected information I find inconvenient.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Their teachers' financial stability IS good for students
Michelle Rhee used to be the chancellor (whatever that means) of the Washington, DC school district. She got a lot of traction, at least politically, on the notion that teachers were the problem with her failing school district. (I don't remember the numbers, but I remember believing that the district was underserving its students.) She pushed through a lot of education "reforms" and took the teachers' union out at the knee in a blow it never recovered from. She fired large numbers of teachers at a time and then bragged about it publicly. The film "Waiting for 'Superman'" looks at the reasoning and positive consequences of some of those reforms. (Full disclosure: I never saw it and, if at all possible, I never will. I feel able to critique it because I have a pretty thorough understanding of the issues of charter schools vs. public schools and the sort of lottery entry system depicted in the film.) Now Rhee heads a non-profit organization called Students First. It purports to work towards reforming public schools so that they work well for all students. This is, of course, a laudable goal, one I share and one towards which I work passionately every day I get out of bed.
For Rhee and Students First, teachers are always the problem. The solution is always that if only teachers would care more, work harder, ignore their own lives, selflessly give, separate themselves from their unions and their negotiatied contracts, divorce their spouses and abandon their own children in favor of their students, then schools would just work.
Clearly there is a disconnect there. There are 3.3 million public school teachers in the US (NCSE), and it's just possible that some of them don't feel like they joined a monastic order. We feel a calling to the profession, sure, but does that automatically mean we give up any right to self-consideration? When faced with a choice between our students and EVERYTHING ELSE--ourselves, our families, our not-school-releated interests--do we have to choose our students every time, lest we become bad teachers?
This isn't a straw-man argument. This is the essence of blame-the-teachers education reform. When money goes to teachers, the argument runs, it isn't being spent "in the classroom." It's partially for this reason that Michigan has a law that prevents local millages from being spent on teacher salaries and benefits. (I think that's actually a pretty smart law.) The thinking seems to be that we coddle our teachers too much and so they fail our students. The solution is to put teachers in an atmosphere where fear of losing your job is the norm, where competition is more important than collaboration, where you can't trust your administrator to be your ally because your administrator's primary job is to look for a reason to fire you (and incidentally, replace you with somebody cheaper), where any mentoring has the potential for turning in to training your replacement.
This is all in the context of an article in the Center for Economic Policy and Research (h/t Eschaton Blog) that suggests that Rhee's non-profit organization rates schools and states on whether or not their teachers have a defined-benefits plan--a public pension--or a defined contribution plan--a 401(k) style plan. The more securely-funded the pension, the worse the grade. For all the difference it makes to the report card, a state can be giving the same amount of money to the 401(k) as to the pension. The question seema not to be, "How much on retirement are schools and states spending?", but rather, "Do states put enough market risk on teachers?" As the author notes, it is difficult to see how this has any impact on teachers at all.
I wish I could find it right now. But there's a fairly extensive meta-study out there that indicates that if you want creative people to come up with creative solutions to hard problems, the way to do that is to instill stability into the lives of your work force. You don't have to pay them exorbitant amounts, you just have to take care of them. Rhee's report card and its misplaced emphasis on how schools compensate their teacher is another example of how, when it comes to teachers, our society is doing everything it can to reverse that dynamic. Frankly, it justifies the mistrust a lot of people in the education community have for the benignly named "Students First," and the good chancellor.
For Rhee and Students First, teachers are always the problem. The solution is always that if only teachers would care more, work harder, ignore their own lives, selflessly give, separate themselves from their unions and their negotiatied contracts, divorce their spouses and abandon their own children in favor of their students, then schools would just work.
Clearly there is a disconnect there. There are 3.3 million public school teachers in the US (NCSE), and it's just possible that some of them don't feel like they joined a monastic order. We feel a calling to the profession, sure, but does that automatically mean we give up any right to self-consideration? When faced with a choice between our students and EVERYTHING ELSE--ourselves, our families, our not-school-releated interests--do we have to choose our students every time, lest we become bad teachers?
This isn't a straw-man argument. This is the essence of blame-the-teachers education reform. When money goes to teachers, the argument runs, it isn't being spent "in the classroom." It's partially for this reason that Michigan has a law that prevents local millages from being spent on teacher salaries and benefits. (I think that's actually a pretty smart law.) The thinking seems to be that we coddle our teachers too much and so they fail our students. The solution is to put teachers in an atmosphere where fear of losing your job is the norm, where competition is more important than collaboration, where you can't trust your administrator to be your ally because your administrator's primary job is to look for a reason to fire you (and incidentally, replace you with somebody cheaper), where any mentoring has the potential for turning in to training your replacement.
This is all in the context of an article in the Center for Economic Policy and Research (h/t Eschaton Blog) that suggests that Rhee's non-profit organization rates schools and states on whether or not their teachers have a defined-benefits plan--a public pension--or a defined contribution plan--a 401(k) style plan. The more securely-funded the pension, the worse the grade. For all the difference it makes to the report card, a state can be giving the same amount of money to the 401(k) as to the pension. The question seema not to be, "How much on retirement are schools and states spending?", but rather, "Do states put enough market risk on teachers?" As the author notes, it is difficult to see how this has any impact on teachers at all.
I wish I could find it right now. But there's a fairly extensive meta-study out there that indicates that if you want creative people to come up with creative solutions to hard problems, the way to do that is to instill stability into the lives of your work force. You don't have to pay them exorbitant amounts, you just have to take care of them. Rhee's report card and its misplaced emphasis on how schools compensate their teacher is another example of how, when it comes to teachers, our society is doing everything it can to reverse that dynamic. Frankly, it justifies the mistrust a lot of people in the education community have for the benignly named "Students First," and the good chancellor.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
First post of the new year: Nothing to do with school
This post has nothing to do with school, education, pedagogy, teachers, students, legislation, or administration. I just love this piece of writing. I'm sticking it here so I can find it later, and in the hopes that my readers enjoy it, too.
Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and World War II
Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and World War II
Sunday, December 16, 2012
What makes a good school-wide support system?
I've been heavily involved with a new, mandatory after-school program for students with missing assignments. We call it our After School Assistance program, ASAP. I think our councilor found that name someplace. It's kind of like a detention, but instead of getting one for behavioral problems, students get one when they have less than a C- and are missing assignments. We've been running it twice a week for three weeks now.
[Quick standards-based grading justification of this policy: Obviously, in a traditional grading system, 0's on a homework assignment can kill a student's grade faster than anything. But if you're in an 80-100% standards-based grade system, missing assignments aren't that big a deal to the grade, so why have a special intervention program just to solve that problem? My thinking, as an advocate of both ASAP and standards-based grading, is that, in a SBG system, you need a certain level of proficiency to pass the assessment. The homework, whether it's graded or not, is meant to help you do that. If you ace all the assessments, you obviously don't need the practice for proficiency. If you don't, then the homework's extra practice might be just what you need to help you get the standard.]
We started the program before we had all of the logistics worked out, and part of that was because I really wanted to get it started. Teachers complain about homework assignments all the time. So even without all the lines of communication being operational, we started pulling students in after school. For the first few weeks, teachers asked me, "How do we do X?" My answer was usually, "I don't know. Let's tell the student and the student's parent that she has to come, and we'll work it out from there." With a couple of notable failures, that seems to work out. It's gotten me to thinking about how I would assess this program's achievement so far, and that leads me to ask, what makes a good school-wide learning support system?
So, spitballing: A new program should address a need the school has. It should not take the place of something a teacher should be doing. It should not get in a teacher's way, or place an undue burden on the teacher. It should remove a concern that a teacher has about a small minority of her students, so that she can focus on better instruction for all students--it should deal with small numbers of students with similar learning challenges. It should not enable the systemic marginalization of a minority student population--it shouldn't keep the tough cases out of sight and out of mind. It should SOLVE the problem, not just change the problem or make it look like something else or allow the school to say they have a program in place--it shouldn't be window dressing. Like all things in school, it should have learning as its goal. Like all things in school, it should be student-directed. Like all things in school, it should be data-informed. (I've decided I reject the phrase "data-driven.") It should help answer one of the key questions: What do you want students to know and be able to do? (Curriculum.) How are you going to give it to the students? (Instruction.) How are you going to tell when students get it? (Assessment.) What are you going to do with the ones who don't get it, and what are you going to do with the ones who do? (Differentiation; interventions and enrichments.)
I feel like this program is still in its infancy, as is my capacity to evaluate it. But I think it still scores pretty well: It definitely addresses a need of our school, and I definitely have the data to show why we need it. I think teachers get great benefits for the time they put into it: they fill out a form and agree to give students 50% credit for late work, and in exchange they don't have to chase students for work they need to get done. Students who need extra practice or time or structure get it; students who don't, don't have to sit through it. We have, I'm guessing, about an 80% success rate: with very few exceptions, students who come to ASAP finish their work that day. I don't know how many multiple-offenders we have, but my impression is that it's a relatively small number. In all, it seems like a good school-wide support system. There are improvements to be made, but it seems like a good start.
Readers, what do you think? When schools create programs to help teachers do their jobs better, how do you know they're working?
[Quick standards-based grading justification of this policy: Obviously, in a traditional grading system, 0's on a homework assignment can kill a student's grade faster than anything. But if you're in an 80-100% standards-based grade system, missing assignments aren't that big a deal to the grade, so why have a special intervention program just to solve that problem? My thinking, as an advocate of both ASAP and standards-based grading, is that, in a SBG system, you need a certain level of proficiency to pass the assessment. The homework, whether it's graded or not, is meant to help you do that. If you ace all the assessments, you obviously don't need the practice for proficiency. If you don't, then the homework's extra practice might be just what you need to help you get the standard.]
We started the program before we had all of the logistics worked out, and part of that was because I really wanted to get it started. Teachers complain about homework assignments all the time. So even without all the lines of communication being operational, we started pulling students in after school. For the first few weeks, teachers asked me, "How do we do X?" My answer was usually, "I don't know. Let's tell the student and the student's parent that she has to come, and we'll work it out from there." With a couple of notable failures, that seems to work out. It's gotten me to thinking about how I would assess this program's achievement so far, and that leads me to ask, what makes a good school-wide learning support system?
So, spitballing: A new program should address a need the school has. It should not take the place of something a teacher should be doing. It should not get in a teacher's way, or place an undue burden on the teacher. It should remove a concern that a teacher has about a small minority of her students, so that she can focus on better instruction for all students--it should deal with small numbers of students with similar learning challenges. It should not enable the systemic marginalization of a minority student population--it shouldn't keep the tough cases out of sight and out of mind. It should SOLVE the problem, not just change the problem or make it look like something else or allow the school to say they have a program in place--it shouldn't be window dressing. Like all things in school, it should have learning as its goal. Like all things in school, it should be student-directed. Like all things in school, it should be data-informed. (I've decided I reject the phrase "data-driven.") It should help answer one of the key questions: What do you want students to know and be able to do? (Curriculum.) How are you going to give it to the students? (Instruction.) How are you going to tell when students get it? (Assessment.) What are you going to do with the ones who don't get it, and what are you going to do with the ones who do? (Differentiation; interventions and enrichments.)
I feel like this program is still in its infancy, as is my capacity to evaluate it. But I think it still scores pretty well: It definitely addresses a need of our school, and I definitely have the data to show why we need it. I think teachers get great benefits for the time they put into it: they fill out a form and agree to give students 50% credit for late work, and in exchange they don't have to chase students for work they need to get done. Students who need extra practice or time or structure get it; students who don't, don't have to sit through it. We have, I'm guessing, about an 80% success rate: with very few exceptions, students who come to ASAP finish their work that day. I don't know how many multiple-offenders we have, but my impression is that it's a relatively small number. In all, it seems like a good school-wide support system. There are improvements to be made, but it seems like a good start.
Readers, what do you think? When schools create programs to help teachers do their jobs better, how do you know they're working?
Monday, December 10, 2012
Unions, RTW, and the teaching profession
Full disclosure: I'm a union guy. If (when) RTW passes the Michigan legislature, I will still pay my union dues. I think unions are a net positive force, both in terms of economics and in terms of productivity. If occasionally they end up on the wrong side of history, or defending somebody stupid, or killing the business they purport to serve, well, you can't be right all the time.
After I wrote the introduction, I've spent the last 4 days trying to write something intelligible about the subject. Every tme I think about it, though, I frankly lose my breath at the sheer audacity of what has happened here in Michigan. I can't be rational about it; I don't see the other side's point of view; Gov. Snyder's justification for changing his position is so flimsy as to be laughable; Sen. Schuitmaker's assurances that she is not anti-teacher no longer seem like pleasant half-truths, they seem like insults to my intelligence wrapped in stationary.*
I'm scared for the following reason: every year I have been a teacher, my job has gotten harder, more demanding, and more complicated. I champion many of these changes, and I think that if there's any work force on earth that should embrace lifelong learning as a professional quality, it should be teachers. But it's also gotten less well compensated, and the profession is being systematically denigrated. Public schools are seen as the problem, most notably in situations where poverty is the problem, both with the students and with the public schools. It's as if I were, I don't know, a butcher, who is told he has to become a surgeon, who will be compensated like a lumberjack, and treated like tripe. And I feel that way WITH the union protection.
I saw the union as a way to restore some measure of dignity to the profession. We're never going to be paid what we're worth; we're public employees, after all. But I get the distinct impression that people resent us for even ASKING. Look, my job is 30% harder than it was last year; my retirement health care has more than doubled in cost, my pension has gotten more expensive (yes, I know about private-sector pensions going the way of the dodo; maybe if you'd had a union, your employer wouldn't have been able to steal all your money with no guarantee of repayment), I am less likely to retire before I stop being an effective teacher than I ever was before, and dammit, I'm still good at my job.
But now the official policy of the state of Michigan is that solidarity is wrong. Unions are not a force for good to be respected, they are a cancer to be broken. There is no way for me to see this as anything other than a political attack and a battle in the class war. (The rich are winning the class war, by the way. I just expected to be able to put up more of a fight for longer.) And right now, there's no way for me not to take this as a personal insult.
*During the Great Teacher Purge of 2011, when Michigan passed a state law that made being a teacher much more expensive, I wrote Sen. Schuitmaker an e-mail imploring her not to vote for the package. She sent me a 2-page typed letter in response, with her signature in actual pen at the bottom. It was very nice, it expressed her opinions, and assured me that her children go to public schools, and she wants nothing but the best for them. I believe this; I no longer believe that she thinks public schools are what's best for them.
After I wrote the introduction, I've spent the last 4 days trying to write something intelligible about the subject. Every tme I think about it, though, I frankly lose my breath at the sheer audacity of what has happened here in Michigan. I can't be rational about it; I don't see the other side's point of view; Gov. Snyder's justification for changing his position is so flimsy as to be laughable; Sen. Schuitmaker's assurances that she is not anti-teacher no longer seem like pleasant half-truths, they seem like insults to my intelligence wrapped in stationary.*
I'm scared for the following reason: every year I have been a teacher, my job has gotten harder, more demanding, and more complicated. I champion many of these changes, and I think that if there's any work force on earth that should embrace lifelong learning as a professional quality, it should be teachers. But it's also gotten less well compensated, and the profession is being systematically denigrated. Public schools are seen as the problem, most notably in situations where poverty is the problem, both with the students and with the public schools. It's as if I were, I don't know, a butcher, who is told he has to become a surgeon, who will be compensated like a lumberjack, and treated like tripe. And I feel that way WITH the union protection.
I saw the union as a way to restore some measure of dignity to the profession. We're never going to be paid what we're worth; we're public employees, after all. But I get the distinct impression that people resent us for even ASKING. Look, my job is 30% harder than it was last year; my retirement health care has more than doubled in cost, my pension has gotten more expensive (yes, I know about private-sector pensions going the way of the dodo; maybe if you'd had a union, your employer wouldn't have been able to steal all your money with no guarantee of repayment), I am less likely to retire before I stop being an effective teacher than I ever was before, and dammit, I'm still good at my job.
But now the official policy of the state of Michigan is that solidarity is wrong. Unions are not a force for good to be respected, they are a cancer to be broken. There is no way for me to see this as anything other than a political attack and a battle in the class war. (The rich are winning the class war, by the way. I just expected to be able to put up more of a fight for longer.) And right now, there's no way for me not to take this as a personal insult.
*During the Great Teacher Purge of 2011, when Michigan passed a state law that made being a teacher much more expensive, I wrote Sen. Schuitmaker an e-mail imploring her not to vote for the package. She sent me a 2-page typed letter in response, with her signature in actual pen at the bottom. It was very nice, it expressed her opinions, and assured me that her children go to public schools, and she wants nothing but the best for them. I believe this; I no longer believe that she thinks public schools are what's best for them.
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Longer school days
Thanks to the efforts of a public/private partnership, 5 states are going to experiment with longer school days:
NPR: Days to get longer at some low-performing schools
This is probably a good thing. It all depends on implementation, of course, but longer instructional periods should roughly equate to more learning. If we're going to make longer school days, I for one would prefer to eat into summer break, but that's not my call. I understand why a district would opt for longer days instead. Among other things, Secretary Duncan argues that longer school days also helps to keep students safe in districts with lots of violence, like Chicago, his home turf. That aspect of it had never occurred to me, since I have the great good fortune of coming from a more-or-less violence-free upbringing.
The thing that troubles me, though, is Sec. Duncan's attitude towards why we haven't adopted longer school days as a national model. He treats the arguments of teacher compensation and "who's going to pay for the toilet paper" as minor nuisances. Call me cynical, but when I heard him say that on the radio, I could almost hear his next line: "Teachers have to buy toilet paper anyway; they could just pick up some extra." I'm not opposed to teachers working harder, working more, working better, working together, working differently, even buying school supplies. We're all in this to do what's best for kids. I'm opposed to decision-makers assuming we should do it for free with a smile on our faces, because it's what's best for kids. During scheduled school times, an administration has the right to tell teachers what to do and where to be, as long as it improves instruction, and with the possible exception of planning period, depending on contracts. Anything outside of that is kind of extra. We all know we can't do our jobs well in 6 hours, but there are only so many hours in the day. Now, if Sec. Duncan would like to wash my dishes....
NPR: Days to get longer at some low-performing schools
This is probably a good thing. It all depends on implementation, of course, but longer instructional periods should roughly equate to more learning. If we're going to make longer school days, I for one would prefer to eat into summer break, but that's not my call. I understand why a district would opt for longer days instead. Among other things, Secretary Duncan argues that longer school days also helps to keep students safe in districts with lots of violence, like Chicago, his home turf. That aspect of it had never occurred to me, since I have the great good fortune of coming from a more-or-less violence-free upbringing.
The thing that troubles me, though, is Sec. Duncan's attitude towards why we haven't adopted longer school days as a national model. He treats the arguments of teacher compensation and "who's going to pay for the toilet paper" as minor nuisances. Call me cynical, but when I heard him say that on the radio, I could almost hear his next line: "Teachers have to buy toilet paper anyway; they could just pick up some extra." I'm not opposed to teachers working harder, working more, working better, working together, working differently, even buying school supplies. We're all in this to do what's best for kids. I'm opposed to decision-makers assuming we should do it for free with a smile on our faces, because it's what's best for kids. During scheduled school times, an administration has the right to tell teachers what to do and where to be, as long as it improves instruction, and with the possible exception of planning period, depending on contracts. Anything outside of that is kind of extra. We all know we can't do our jobs well in 6 hours, but there are only so many hours in the day. Now, if Sec. Duncan would like to wash my dishes....
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