Garnering Knowledge for Teaching

Please pardon the extended absence. The new school year beckoned and my brain was otherwise engaged. I’ve had plenty of outrage to share in the interim, but I was lulled out of my blog complacency by today’s big NCLB headline. Here’s Education Week’s news story about the “waivers” being offered by the Obama administration:
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2011/09/obama_administration_sets_rule.html

I’m not sure I could be more disappointed in the current administration’s education policy. I was hoping once there was a regime change, that the new regime would see how expensive, overwhelming, and burdensome the NCLB law has become. I was hoping they would hire a statistician who could explain to them how 100% is an impossible figure to attain in the bell curve world. In fact, I’ve never understood why a policy that is so darned determined to use numbers to describe children’s learning, can’t figure out a simple bell curve. Not everyone can be at the top. Not everyone can score on grade level.

Now the administration offers some “waivers” for states that are coming up short in Adequate Yearly Progress scores. These “waivers” are brilliant from an evil empire perspective. You have a system that legitimately you cannot directly govern, therefore you establish a carrot and stick interaction with this system requiring those who take your carrot to follow all of your rules (their own notwithstanding). It’s “voluntary” of course so the feds are not “dictating” policy, but essentially they are.

In order to qualify for waivers, a state needs to adopt new policies that are essentially anti-teacher, and anti-local control. States must create a teacher evaluation system that includes using student scores to measure teacher effectiveness, and they also must take the bottom 5% of schools and drastically reform them. Before we know it, they will require schools to use a scripted reading program and send out the daily curriculum lessons. We have moved so very far away from what we KNOW works with kids, and so much closer to a horrible, rote, zombie classroom where students mimic teacher information and spit out lists of memorized facts. Remember the middle 90′s when progressive education was everywhere and we were all excited about giving kids “room to learn”? I do. I miss those days.

I am unsure how the Democrats morphed into the Republican education agenda, but the administration has obviously bought into the testing myth and has placed an inordinate amount of time and energy maintaining a policy I think many teachers were counting on The President to destroy. Instead, his team embraced the testing, the number mythology, and the talk of failure.

fail, failure, failed,

All of the above words carry a negative connotation. From a media perspective, FAIL has taken on a meaning of something going wrong (sometimes horribly and hilariously), or not being done right. Failure means you did not succeed AND you gave up on the task. Failure only happens when something does not occur despite efforts. Perhaps schools have failed to improve to the extent that the original NCLB law required, but if you look at schools everywhere, they have improved some in the last decade. However, that improvement means nothing to those outside of education because the test numbers do not match the numbers of the rich, privileged children of congressional members, or the administration. How many politicians actually send their children to public schools? I would wager very few. Here’s an article that examines the wealth percentage of Congress:

http://theweek.com/article/index/213136/the-congressional-millionaires-club-by-the-numbers

Let us be clear. Congress and the administration are regulating education for the masses, not for their own children. I would personally like to see what would happen if all public school classrooms were funded to the extent private schools are. I’m not talking about administrative costs covering overpaid superintendents raking in six figures while they lay off teachers making $30,000 a year. I’m talking about direct cash infusion to classrooms.

If you ask a teacher what is needed to do this job more effectively, you might hear about the need for books for every student, or appropriate supplies when students’ families are losing jobs and have no money for notebooks and pencils. It is already a difficult job planning instruction for students who could have abilities ranging across three or more grade levels in one room, but doing so on a minimal supply budget, little resources, and increasing pressure to perform well on tests makes the job monumental.

Yet, teachers get up every morning and go to work. They work tirelessly to plan for every student in the classroom, and spend their evenings and weekends doing the part of their job that exists outside of the 40 hours per week everyone else enjoys. They do this despite the constant and increasing demonization of them, and regardless of the disregard they are receiving. They do it because it’s not about them. It’s about the kids. No matter what the sheeple are told to repeat, in the end, that classroom will be full on Monday and someone needs to go in there and be “on” for eight hours with barely a moment to go to the restroom. I wonder how many of those angry people can take a bathroom break whenever they need it?

Let’s now go back to the word Failure. These tireless workers who show up to teach the children of this country and do so with ever increasing challenges are now faced with the word Failure. But children *are* learning. Children *do* read, write, and learn math. Teachers have given up on creative work, art, and music in order to make time for more math and reading drill work. Yet, due to the unrealistic expectations of NCLB, that are statistically impossible, these teachers, who work all year, and are making progress, are FAILURES.

How many people out there actually touch other people’s lives in positive ways? Does your job allow you to open a door for another person that may change their life forever? Teaching does. Does your job give you the chance to watch and support the growth and development of another human being on the path towards independence? By the dozens? Teaching does. Teachers are making a difference, and contributing to the betterment of humankind. That simply cannot be considered Failure.

Our vocabulary choices, on the other hand, are failures in their attempt to accurately describe the current condition of the American public education system. Utilizing a negative term that has such a finality to it almost pre-disposes something to exist in a negative state. What happens when something “fails”? It’s over. Done. It failed. Period. How exactly does that apply to education? Because come Monday, those kids are going to be back in their seats, waiting for their teacher. All of them will work hard all day, only to be called a failure at the end of it.

I don’t understand.

Today’s post was inspired by a post on Education Week by Nirvi Shah.

In this post is description of a school in Kansas City that addressed progress by students with disabilities by instituting a school-wide policy of integration and inclusion. They went as far as to look at a building map and make sure there was no single space in the school being utilized solely for the purpose of education students with disabilities. The report notes scores for these students increased dramatically.

I would wager that the inclusion policy was only the beginning for that school, but they have the right idea. Inclusion and Good Teaching for Everyone is not something that can be accomplished at the single classroom level. If your classroom is open to those with disabilities but the one next door is not, then the building remains segregated in some form. But returning to my reservations, saying you have an inclusive policy and even going as far as to not have exclusionary spaces is a start, but is not all an institution requires to change how students with disabilities access curriculum.

As noted, I would wager big money that attitudes were what changed the environment at this school. Somewhere between policy and (I would imagine) training, teachers in this school bought the idea that students with disabilities *belonged* in the classroom and began designing curriculum that would allow access at multiple ability levels. Really, anyone who has been in a classroom in the last 10 years will know that ANY public school class will contain a *vast* array of ability levels, with or without students who have been officially diagnosed with an educational disability. Effective teachers are already making these changes to lesson plans in order to reach as many students as possible. The only difference is the diagnosis.

So why not place students with disabilities in the classrooms full time? You might say, “well we already do that don’t we?” and yes, most students with mild disabilities are “placed” in a general education classroom. But then we assign them to a special educator who is expected to work with that student 1:1 in a separate room for a particular period each day/week. Although the argument stands that students with disabilities need targeted intervention for particular challenges they have with learning, those interventions do not need to occur in a separate environment. But we are locked into the idea that students can only get this help with THIS specialist and it would be “disruptive” for that work to occur in the classroom, because, of course, other students in the class couldn’t possibly benefit from the adaptations and alternate methods of accessing the curriculum now would they?
Please forgive my sarcasm.

What is funny to me as an educational researcher is that we KNOW what works for kids. We KNOW that providing multiple means of representation and multiple means of expression are ways *all students* have of accessing curriculum. I’m not only mentioning kids with disabilities, but kids who are acquiring English as a second language, or kids who are “at risk” or even kids who are gifted. They are all in the same classroom completing the same lesson and we know how to craft that lesson so that *everyone* takes something away from it. It’s funny because if you looked at educational research, one would think we have no answers, only questions. When, in reality, we have decades of answers that the education field rarely takes the time to read much less implement. We know what makes an Effective School District.

We have the answers, but we don’t like them.

The answers tell us that a consistent curriculum that is well supplied and allows for multiple ways of teaching something and multiple ways for students to express their learning produces the most curricular access for students regardless of ability or language level. Unfortunately, this is not something that is easily measured. It is messy and does not necessarily follow a developmental chart. It requires vast amounts of time in the set up and then looks effortless for a teacher in execution because by that time, the kids are managing their own learning. But in order to reach that stage, expertise comes into play during the design and set up phases.
This takes time, not in the school hours but in the morning and evening and weekend hours that good teachers work when no one is counting. Teachers have been doing this work for a long time with or without administrative support.

Going back to that school in Kansas City, I submit that administrative support is what took this place beyond where it was and made it somewhere special. Teachers can do what they do, but if their administrators believe they should be doing “something else” (you name it, committees, decorating hallways, implementing Draconian reading programs, collecting DIBELS) then there will be no support for the long hours needed to truly open curriculum to everyone. If, on the other hand, an administrator understands the value of truly Good Teaching, that person will support teachers with time, supplies for extended learning activities, workshops that address direct needs in the building (rather than the district’s latest bandwagon), and curriculum support for creating experiences and activities that are meaningful, accessible, and support the building of student skills and concepts.

Good Teaching for everyone goes hand in hand with Good Administration for everyone. Now administrators, what can you do to support Good Teaching in your school?

Tags: Administrators, Effective Districts, Good Teaching, Inclusion

We all knew it would be coming. We all said it would eventually happen, and it has over the last 20 years of standardized testing in small and large spaces. But I do not believe the cheating has taken on such a profound meaning as the recent disclosures of cheating on state tests over the last six or so months.
Let’s begin with the big one…

The aftermath of Michelle Rhee begins with this USA Today article outlining the most recent investigations of the district’s potential cheating scandal. Valerie Strauss from the Washington Post also nicely encapsulates the ongoing issue of cheating in the DC area.

Now in the last two weeks, Atlanta has been embroiled in a large-scale cheating scandal and Pennsylvania is apparently not far behind in finding districts that have been cheating on its state tests.

My thoughts echo with Maureen Downey who asked a prominent testing researcher what he thought of recent events. We have made this terrible bed we are lying in. We have convinced ourselves that data and testing are the utmost in education and arts and music and recess are simply not quantifiable enough to allow in a world where children need to read and do math. But the problem is, our children still cannot read and do math. Our scores still indicate we are failing them one by a hundred over and over. In the meanwhile we throw our hands above our heads and run flailing around screaming about tests, curriculum, money, and greedy teachers.

Strangely enough, there is research out there. Research that tells us what really works for school districts. I honestly haven’t heard much reference to that research in the last decade of reform. I am going to save this topic for my next post where we will review what the research says about school district effectiveness. Today I want to explore the two big hot buttons of education: money and assessment. These are the two issues that come up when educational reform, teacher salary, or charter schools are discussed. What kind of money is needed and how will the work be assessed. Here are my thoughts on the two.

Two-fold issue: First up: Money

Shall we get down to the real nature of things? As much as the conservative movement would like you to believe otherwise, money matters in education. I cringe when I hear politicians say that money is wasted on education because “we’ve been throwing money at education for decades and nothing has improved”. My contention has always been, perhaps if you actually tried to throw that money at CLASSROOMS instead of school districts, there might be a difference. None of it actually reaches classrooms and students.

Throughout my life in education (my father and stepmother are retired teachers, I taught for 10 years before becoming a teacher educator) I have never heard a teacher say, “we are so very well supplied, I couldn’t ask for more.” NEVER. Have you? Honestly if you have I would love to hear the story in the comments section. It might do my heart some good to hear something like that.

My interactions with teachers have been that of sharing, need, and want. They want good curriculum and the appropriate supplies with which to teach it. In my experience teachers must choose between the two. There is a budget for the year (very small one) and that covers pencils, paper, markers, and books. Those spelling and handwriting workbooks? Those are called consumables because they are consumed each year by the student using them. Price? at least $20 a pop. I often had a $250 flat budget for everything in the year. Consumables were the first thing cut. Heck, try to outfit a classroom of 20 with $250. You’ll barely make it into November. This is where the sharing comes in. Teachers share and save everything.

Money could make a difference in test scores. Teachers need the tools of their trades to help kids make connections from the material on the desk to the world around them and to make those connections physical and immediate. Many of these tools are expensive because the teacher supply industry and the technology industry are pricey machines. But even basic tools such as newspapers, magazines, internet connections (don’t even try to tell me kids don’t need training in using the internet) can make an enormous difference in what a teacher can offer a classroom and provide worlds of data and avenues for inquiry, the road along which all learning occurs. However, none are free and few are cheap and teachers, despite that which you have heard in the news lately, do not make much money. What they have, they freely share with their students in the form of supplies, books, and ideas.

My point here is that the less teachers are supplied, the more desperate their classroom situation becomes. This desperation can so easily lead to cheating, particularly when those producing high scores are so publicly rewarded for their “achievements”. I won’t say that a well-outfitted and supplied classroom would never cheat, but the impetus might be much less appealing when the tools are there to create a slow gain over time and that time is allowed. This brings us to the next topic of how that gain is measured.

Next up: The Archane Practice of Assessment

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the need for assessment. I’m a special educator and a Speech-Language Pathologist. Assessment allows me as a professional to see where areas of need are for a child and then design what I see as an appropriate theraputic intervention that might help boost those areas of need. This is a very medical way to view education, but most special educators are provided a medical-model training. We assess the issue, identify the disease or disorder based on both physical evidence and behavioral evidence (performance in class, in interview, via observation, interview with parents), and then finally institute a procedure of scientific methods to alleviate the delay, disorder, or non-existent nature of the skill or ability lacking. Assessment is used to identify the bad stuff and insert the good stuff to eliminate the bad stuff.

Only, sometimes it’s not really “bad stuff” as much as it is “different stuff”. Sometimes a kid is slow and perceives something in a different fashion, but if you really look at what he is saying, he’s right. It’s simply a perspective that is not along the “normal road”. The kid is getting there, he just likes the country route as opposed to the highway. We have, as a nation, been on the damn highway for so long, that anyone even thinking about taking the country road *must* be slow, and deficient. Wrong. Flawed. Failed. There are no options to simply be different.

So of course, if assessment isn’t measuring all the different ways kids process, then we are not efficiently assessing a student to discover his/her educational needs. We are merely assessing how well the kid fits into the assessment grid of normalcy.

Because many kids currently do not fit into that mold this country holds dear as “normal” we, as human beings, are going to instinctively find a way to cheat and save our collective butts. We know, deep down, that statistically speaking, NCLB’s requirements are impossible. That statistically speaking, by the time 2013 rolls around over half the country’s schools will start failing because even though they achieved high scores across the board, they did not achieve 100% proficiency. This is to be expected because, statistically speaking, this is impossible. Not just improbable but impossible. So we, expecting failure, will try to change the rules at the last minute in order to slip by.

As a special educator, I know that some of my students may never really be able to crack the reading code. Those students might navigate their lives through sight words and other visual cues because decoding is something that is so mysterious to their wiring, that they cannot puzzle it out. This does not make them less of a productive society member, it just asks them to approach society from a different perspective…that of a symbol user in a world of words. Understanding this does not mean I give up on my student, it means that I can better tailor the survival skills that student requires to meet her needs and bolster those strengths. It does me no good to keep hitting a nail that is too small for the pre-drilled hole. It will never stick.

Unfortunately our state achievement tests are like a large sheet of pre-drilled holes and our kids come in so many shapes and sizes that judging their ability based on how well they fit into those holes is almost insulting. This is why we fail but it is also why we cheat.

Re-thinking what assessment is and looks like could be a start to a true wave of educational reform. This would also cost money and require more attention to classroom curriculum and the supplies teachers require to do the job right. In order to do what we, as a nation tout we intend to do, an entire new paradigm needs to emerge. One that does not hold ALL VALUE in the all-mighty TEST, but that allows for all the differences of humanity to be included, and valued.

Considering our chances of that happening, does the cheating really surprise you?

My post today begins with an innocent news story. One of those heartwarming dittys about companies caring for their employees. You can see it here:

I think it is a beautiful thing that employers are beginning to think about employee happiness again. It was prevalent in the 90′s boom that employees were getting great perks and good benefits in exchange for productivity but in the recession that wasn’t, workers were (and still are) a dime a dozen and employers began rescinding benefits and perks to survive the financial downturn. People were willing to work for less simply to have work.

Education was not at all immune to the downsizing of America. Just when it looked like we were on the verge of a new horizon of electronic adaptation for education, our country began sending a massive war machine overseas. All the money went to the war and our social system began to pay the price for the unfunded monstrous bill that managed to evade being included in any national budget during the Bush administration. Now that we are paying the cost of those “emergency expenditures” it seems the poor, weak, and young are going to take the biggest hit, along with the individuals who make their living attending to them. In his last speech, Hubert Humphrey noted, “…the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped. ” This does not simply apply to how these individuals in need are treated, but also how those who care for them are treated.

This blog post from Shaun Johnson ponders what would happen if we held the medical field accountable in the same way we hold teachers.

The Vista Teachers Association is calling the current situation a State of Emergency and has pictures of teachers’ union reps getting arrested for protesting state budget cuts to education.

Here’s another story about those arrests.

Think this is isolated to California? Here are arrests in Michigan,and Illinois.
Wisconsin teachers were involved in the protests against the governor there as well.
When they were protesting for the right to collectively bargain, they were being portrayed by conservatives as evil and lazy union members.

I include the last link to emphasize a particular attitude that has gained great voice over the last decade, but particularly in the last 3 years (strangely enough even after the Democratic administration took charge). That voice is not simply anti-teacher, it is downright antagonistic against teachers. To hear these people talk, teachers are simply overpaid babysitters who should be grateful to have a job. The de-professionalization of teaching has been a simmering stew since NCLB hit the system, but somehow, now that we are finally almost done with that travesty, all the ills of public education have been laid squarely at the feet of teachers.

For example, check out this blog posting from 2001 concerning blaming teachers for the “failure” of the education system.
Compare that to this Newsweek article discussing the anger that “Waiting for Superman” unleashed at teachers by blaming them and their unions for the state of public education. All while extolling the great virtues of Charter schools. Although some charter schools have risen above the norms, full data for all charter schools has yet to be analyzed. In the meanwhile, the Superman movie has seemed to create more anger and aggravation directed at teachers and teachers’ unions as if they, alone, are to blame for the set of circumstances affecting the education system today.

I have been more and more distressed at what I see facing teachers and after the Wisconsin protests, and what has happened here in Michigan, I worry about how the public perceives the job of teaching. I have noted certain groups of political protesters have taken to using words such as “lazy” or worse to describe teachers. If anything, after the public policies of the last 10 years, teachers cannot afford to be lazy in any way. 20 years ago teaching was a profession many might have been able to approach. But now, in this climate, and with the expectations placed upon teachers, only the strong, smart, and creative could possibly survive. Yet, why would these people join such a degraded, and spat upon profession such as teaching?

Perhaps you are familiar with the piece making rounds on the internet over the last few years comparing teacher wages to babysitting wages? This made its way around again when the Wisconsin protests were occurring, but to no avail. There are still those who believe (and are very vocal and aggressive about it) that teachers do not deserve good salaries and good wages. But why?

I was heartened by this set of responses to a NYT article about how we pay and treat teachers. But a more realistic perspective would be gained by not only reading this post from the National Review Online, but to peruse the long list of comments left by both sides of this issue.

I could link you out to this stuff all day and at the end of it we would be no closer to a public agreement of how we should view and treat teachers. Some of my great sadness at this debate is the response of late to unionized teachers. That the “fat cat” benefits teachers enjoy are not doled out in the private sector and therefore are what…not fair? How many times have you heard “well I didn’t get full benefits and vacations for my job why should they?” There is where I stop in my tracks.

When did we move away from “do unto others as you would have done to you” and towards “if I don’t get mine, then you can’t have yours”? When did we move towards taking away the limited benefits of hard working, low paid public servants in order to justify the lack of benefits and retirement options offered to what is left of the middle class in this country? In the meanwhile, the people with cash who are pushing the “union panic buttons” are doing so to preserve their own gigantic share of the public money pie. Those people send their children to private schools (along with most state governors and (I would wager) a large percentage of those in Congress and the Administration. They have no real stake in what happens to the children of the poor and the children of the middle class who are primarily served by public education.

So the real question I have is for you in the middle class, and the working class; you who are agreeing with the tea party demonization of public teachers. When did you stop believing in the Golden Rule? OR did the memo come down from a Higher Authority that the GR is no longer in vogue? Has it officially come to “Get what you can and SCREW the other guy?” Have we moved from bake sales and crying for the loss of our schools to hate mail and paying so little that we begin to scrape the bottom of the job pool for our teachers? You think education is a mess now? Continue this aggressive policy towards those who give their energy and intellectual strength to children and we will finally lose any talented individuals who are still left out there willing to sacrifice having a solid middle class life to be a teacher.

In the meanwhile, private companies are getting back on their feet, reassessing their priorities, and beginning to treat their workers with a little more respect. Will this trend reflect in the education sector? Absolutely not.
Is it so hard to believe that happy, respected, well-paid teachers could provide a brilliant, beautiful, quality education for children? Wouldn’t you want that for your kids? Do unto others…

After a long absence, I am returning to this blog.  I took time to finish my dissertation and begin a new job as a professor of special education.  Although my first year was rewarding and eye opening, I have also spent the year  observing our culture becoming ever-increasingly antagonistic towards teachers and the teaching profession.  I cannot remain silent about this.

However, this blog will not only discuss educational policy, special education policy, and the state of teachers in our country.  It will also begin to explore ideas that come from my own learning as a new professor.  My desire to constantly improve and update my courses has resulted in an explosion of new ideas waiting for a forum.  I hope to use this place to bring those thoughts to light.

Thanks for reading…stay tuned.

Today’s tidbit comes from the New York Times, or rather from the comments after an editorial in the NYT.  Here is the editorial, and you can read responses here.

My interest was drawn to the responses because of their overwhelming defense of teachers.  Attention is drawn to the fact that the editorial staff of the NYT has taken on a somewhat antagonistic attitude towards teachers.  I have been describing this general attitude over the last few entries of this blog.  Although my last post was in October, I find myself finally posting again, about the same issue.  Why teachers are not to blame for the state of American education.

I find the trend disturbing.  Not that I believe teachers should be allowed to do what they please, and give kids puzzles.  But I do believe that through NCLB and accountability over the last 10 years, those days of some (few) teachers slacking off are over.  Yet, the current administration seems to feel that somehow, teachers need to take on some of the accountability (read blame) for the failure of NCLB to achieve its objectives.  Race to the Top is only another round of teacher sanctions instead of teacher rewards.

Essentially, RTTT assumes that teachers are not held accountable for what they are teaching over a school year.  NCLB and AYP have not been enough to whip these teachers into shape, so now the government recommends that student state standardized test scores be attached to the teacher as one form of evaluation.  Of course there will be other forms of evaluation such as observation and lesson plan monitoring, but it seems that this idea of tracking teachers through student test scores has really taken off as a way to get rid of all those wayward teachers who are obviously not teaching their students correctly.  Those lazy people who hide behind unions and just show up for a paycheck every day.  That’s right.  They don’t really care…do they?

As a teacher and a teacher educator, I know of no other professionals who are more obsessed with student learning and educational quality than teachers.  The teachers and the future teachers I know are passionate about learning, excited about teaching, and spend countless hours looking for new ways to teach their students on a very limited budget.  School districts are so incredibly strapped for money these days, teachers go without supplies and often books.  Yet NCLB marches on to test the things in the books that are not in the classroom because of district budget cuts.  Teachers work through hardships, building issues, lack of facilities, lack of time to use the facilities, and lack of adequate materials, curriculum, and supplies to appropriately educate their students.  If OSHA were to do a study on teaching, they would find people who often work all day with barely a bathroom break or two.  According to most contracts teachers are allowed a duty-free lunch break. But every teacher knows, those are few and far between.

Teachers work in an enclosed space all day with minimal freedom to leave that space.  They cannot run out for lunch or run errands on their 20 minutes they might have away from students during their lunch break.  They may look like they have so many days off, but most days off for a teacher include trying to catch up on paperwork, lesson planning, data collecting, or grading.  Teachers spend their weekends and evenings they are not working taking classes to improve their teaching skills and learn more about teaching those students who need extra time and assistance.

The working conditions are appalling.  Teachers are expected to accept being hit, hurt, shoved, yelled at, threatened, and sometimes spit upon without becoming upset.  They are often expected to continue to teach their attacker after an assault.  It is not considered assault to be harmed as a teacher.  Can you imagine an office environment where someone gets physically harmed, and nothing happens?  The office must go back to normal operations with attacker and victim pretending it never happened.  This is common in schools.  It’s simply part of the job of a teacher.

All of this is combined with most states now expecting teachers to eventually achieve Master’s degrees, and requiring teachers take professional development classes to maintain certification.  None of these activities are supported by their employers financially, but a Master’s degree does bump a teacher up on the salary scale.

You may think, why the hell would someone want to become a teacher?  After NCLB I am constantly amazed and impressed by the young people who continue to pursue the career, even with its limited choices, limited room for promotion, limited financial compensation, and environment of constant critique and derision.  These future teachers press on.  They want to teach because they want to help young people learn.  They want to be part of the future by educating the creators of our future.  Even when they seem overwhelmed by the logistics of standards and lesson plans and differentiated curriculum, they push through, and find a way to make it all happen, and then come back the next morning for more.

I write this not because I think that there are no bad teachers out there.  There are always self-serving individuals in any profession that will set a bad example so powerful, it outshines the tens of thousands of good acts committed in that same profession.  But I see the American public being fed an erroneous urban myth that most teachers are lazy, uncaring individuals who must be forced into “good teaching” through accountability measures. This is simply untrue.

What if we gave teachers the things they needed to do that job successfully?  What if we paid them as the professionals they are and treated them like human beings?  What if every classroom was fully equipped with curriculum, supplies, and books?  I’m not even talking computers here.  What if we appropriately supplied every classroom with all the curricular materials needed so that every student had a textbook for every subject, each classroom had manipulatives for concept exploration, and the back of every classroom had a well-stocked reading area?  Does that sound like a fair square one starting point?

What might happen?

Tags: blame, NCLB, RTTT, teachers

Today’s brief entry comes from an odd place.  I happened upon this article about a parent protesting the use of BCE and CE instead of BC and AD for time measurements.  These are commonly used time measurements in many areas of science now and they are appearing more frequently in textbooks.  The article touches on a controversy that I see rides the line between the separation of church and state.  This topic itself must be decided on a local level and I will not weigh in on it.

However…read through the article and then look at the first comment.  Come back and see me…

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/columnists.nsf/keepthefaith/story/69A5B307BBB343478625766E000870B9?OpenDocument

Particularly the comment…

“For those who pay taxes and work in the real world, remember this: Those who can – do; those who can’t – teach. The schools should be teaching students the skills to survive in the private sector and leave the PC crap for those who choose to waste their time and money on social science degrees in college.”

I do understand that the author of this comment has a theocratic bone to pick with the system.  But I have watched with horror over the last year as this country has turned vicious and nasty over theocratic differences.

My concern with statements like that above is that the writer is denigrating teachers on mass as a population of people who cannot do anything, so they teach.  It makes the attempt of placing teachers in a lower social strata than the “hard working” people of the “real world”.  This has the effect of placing the writer in a higher social strata and thus allowing him the right to control the actions of those below him.  Since he works hard, and teachers do not, he should have more of a say in what happens in the classrooms.  Especially since he believes that the teachers are in the process of “indoctrinating” his children.

My first thought after reading this was…do people still believe that teachers do not work hard?  Did they not read my last entry?

My great sadness is that this perception of teachers not as hard working professionals but that of glorified babysitters persists in the age of Highly Qualified Teachers and National Board Certification.  I am even sadder at the thought that this misperception would engender anger and agression towards these hard working professionals.

To those who feel their rights are being violated by the government, please do not take this anger out on your child’s teacher.  She/he is a dedicated person teaching what the school district has asked her/him to teach.  These teachers go home and work hard every night on lesson plans and tracking charts.  They often have families and children of their own to raise.  They are not the enemy.  They are the hope for your child’s future and need your support.

Also, because of the new standards for teachers, most teachers will have at the minimum a BA and many now have their Masters’.  The young students I have seen come into my classrooms have been dedicated, passionate individuals with the desire to lead young minds to discovery and growth.  They enter the workforce as highly trained professionals who spend at least 2 years in a specifically designed teacher education program.  Depending on the grade level they will teach, pre-service teachers study a range of methods for teaching math, language arts, science, and/or social studies.

When was the last time you had to explain long division with fractions to someone who did not understand it?  Do you know what to do when a student is consistently having trouble including the first sound of unknown words when decoding a new sentence?  What should first graders know and understand about electricity?

Teachers can answer those questions and many more. They balance pedagogy (how to teach) and content knowledge (what to teach) with the individual strengths and needs of their students in a particular classroom for every moment of every day in school.  They present their lesson plans in detail to school administrators for scrutiny and create personal professional growth plans to maintain certification.  Teachers are amazing, multitasking, caring people who do good 25-30 kids at a time on an annual basis.  Can those who “Do” claim such a contribution to society?

Props to teachers who can and DO teach.

This morning, the Dallas Morning News described a recently released study noting the failure of a Texas teacher merit pay experiment.  It is interesting to note that the results did not necessarily say merit pay was a failure.  It noted that the design of the system set up in Texas was seriously flawed and did not establish the incentive atmosphere intended.  It seems well performing schools…wait for it…have the highest performing teachers, and that some schools, instead of giving larger sums to “high performing teachers”, split the money among many teachers in a building.

Can you imagine being the teacher who doesn’t get a bonus?  I’m not sure how that necessarily provides an incentive.   I do think there must be ways we can reward teachers who are stellar and encourage those teachers who are hanging in there, and address the issues of teachers who are spinning downward.  It is similar to a student who has lost motivation.  Taking away something loses all meaning when the punishee doesn’t care about what was taken.

I work with teachers and people who are learning to become teachers.  I believe that most  are dedicated professionals who devote an inordinate amount of time to their work for much less pay than others who spend 60+ hours on the job.  Overtime is not a celebrated task (meaning extra money for the bills), but an expected job responsibility. And before you begin to tell me how much time teachers have off in a year, think about the math…

An average individual working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year will put in 2,080 hours if that person does not take a vacation, sick day, or time off.  For argument’s sake, we take two weeks off of that total for an average amount of time an American takes off each year as 2000 hours (I imagine the number is far greater).

Teachers are in class with students for a minimum of 180 days a year in most states.  Divide that by 5 (for a school week) and you get 36 weeks of contact time with students.  Add to this 2-3 weeks before school starts (the first two to get the classroom and curriculum pulled together and the third is the week of inservice the district provides before the first day of school).  Also add to this a week over the winter holidays and the week of spring break.  For argument’s sake, I will reduce the number of hours for these weeks because, although teachers do work at home on their vacation weeks, they do not generally put in 40 hours.

So,

36 weeks at 60 hours a week: 2,160

Approximately 5-6 weeks at 25 hours a week: 125-150 extra

Going total: 2,285 hours per year.

And I believe that to be a low end estimate.  If you doubt that teachers work 60 hours a week during the school year, go to your teacher friends and ask them.  See what their number is.  I can guarantee 90% of them will tell you it is more than 40 when you include grading, data collection, lesson planning, lesson preparation, training, meetings, parent contacts, testing, test prep, and all the various other minutia that make up the day/week of a teacher.

So, we have 2,285 vs 2,000 (heck, I’ll even throw that 80 back in for you workaholics that don’t take days off).

Still, there is a difference here.  This also does not really include the after school activities and weekend fund raisers that teachers are often required to attend or conduct.

Acknowledgment #1: Teachers work hard and they work for a long time.

Back to the Dallas story: the perspective behind incentive pay for teachers assumes that teachers need some kind of incentive to do their jobs well.  The story, and the investigation into the program, state that the pay involved in the program was not enough to motivate teachers to do more.  To me, this insinuates that teachers are simply getting by and that is why students are failing.  Teachers are slackers who don’t want to do their best at their chosen profession so we need to bribe them to be better.  AND not only that, but the measurement of this bribe will be the state standardized test scores that are now attached to your teacher identification number.  NOTHING ELSE…just the test scores.

I talk to my teacher friends and I hear more of the same thing: they have more paperwork to fill out, more extensive lesson plans to turn in, more frequent testing dates to prepare for and more expectations as to what types of lessons are planned, written out, and executed.  All of this must be done with more students, less administrative support (most buildings run with one administrator these days), and less classroom supply money, not to mention a reduction in or lack of  curriculum supplies.  We want them to do more with less and then do even more with even less.

I hear my partner talk about the teachers of his high school days.  The teachers who did not care and who read the paper while kids napped in the classroom.  I try to tell him that I do not believe those teachers exist any more.  But I do not know that for sure.  I still see kids sleeping when I walk by classrooms (especially in high schools).

The teachers I know work hard and are being expected to work harder. I do not have issue with high expectations.  This is critical to educational excellence.  I do have issue with a lack of respect for the hard work that is already occurring around the country.  I have issue with the general vilification of the teacher as the bad guy in our education drama.

There are multiple, complex factors that come into play for education.  Even now, as state budgets are being passed, cuts are coming deeper to public education and yet the expectations of AYP success are still high.  Teachers face larger classrooms with fewer supplies and textbooks.  Some teachers (and this is not an exaggeration) must even bring their own toilet paper and cleaning supplies from home to work. They also face students from challenging circumstances who come to school hungry, tired, and worried.  According to Maslow, kids who don’t know where their next meal is coming from will have a very difficult time relegating brain power to multiplication tables.  Teachers need to find a way to make their classrooms safe, welcoming places where those base needs are met, in order to establish an environment of learning.

I believe we need to hold teachers to high standards.  But those must be measured in the classroom, not on a test.  That test is not only measuring what a kid might have learned last year with a particular teacher, it also measures whether she ate on a regular basis last year, how many homes did she live in over the course of the school year, how much parental support there is at home to promote student learning, or simply to provide a safe home, and how effective every teacher before this teacher has been in educating this child.  We don’t even mention whether the school district has the funding to provide consistent and fully supported curriculum throughout the grades for the students moving through from teacher to teacher.  So many complex experiences come together for one test.  Should that test make or break a teacher’s career?

I am hesitant to endorse merit pay because so much of it rides on an inaccurate measure of teacher quality.  If only there were another way to identify excellence and encourage growth in this demanding profession.  The National Board Certification program moves towards identifying master teachers, but it does nothing to address the needs of teachers who are struggling in the classroom.  How can we bring everyone up and give teachers realistic and motivational goals to achieve in order to make their teaching more effective and successful.

Perhaps if we put that funding towards simply paying teachers more for their 2,285 hours a year, or better yet, put it towards classroom supplies and curriculum, we would eventually see those gains we are seeking.  Maybe if we acknowledged the time and energy of teachers instead of treating them like human resources, it would help motivate and encourage growth and enthusiasm.

NCLB and the Highly Qualified Teacher requirements have already had an effect on what happens in public school classrooms.  Teacher certification standards have become more complex over the last decade, and the teaching force will be undergoing an experience change over the next decade as many teachers retire.  I noted in my previous post, seeing gains from reform will take time. We need to stop, and sit a moment to see where the painting is, before continuing to brush on the colors of a new bandwagon.

Tags: teacher measurement, teacher merit, teacher policy, teachers

My thoughts for this new blog post marking my return are inspired by this story run about a month ago.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/child-left-overhaul-sights-obama-administration/Story?id=8663957&page=1

This isn’t the only story that has caught my eye in the last few weeks.  This story discusses research showing how “failing” districts using Supplemental Service funds do not appear to improve after utilizing those supplemental service and this lovely evaluation from the CATO Institute is a cautionary tale about using NAEP scores to determine the success or failure of a particular reform in the last thirty years.  It beautifully demonstrates how reformers from multiple perspectives can utilize the same national scores to support their particular reform.

Over the last 6 years I have watched the NCLB train with a mixture of curiosity and horror.  From my time as a teacher, I know that student assessment is vital to appropriate pedagogical planning.  How do you know what your students need unless you evaluate where they are developmentally and within the curriculum?  How do you know that your instruction is effective unless you find some way of discovering whether your students “got it?”  My curiosity of NCLB lies in this assessment question and in how effective it is to place centralized goals, regulations, and measurements upon a largely decentralized system.  My horror lies in the thought that the centralized regulations are designed so that by 2013, nearly every school in the country will be failing.  No matter how much progress they have made, the final goals are so unreachable, that no victories will be visible, except for a rare few schools.

So why is the current administration considering keeping NCLB?  Schools have made progress during the last few years and much good has come of the reform.  Some students from groups historically ignored by school systems, are receiving new attention from administrators and teachers.  My research has noted a change in school administrators’ thinking towards placing students with disabilities into general education classrooms.  In short, there is a move to provide real curriculum to all students and that cannot be understated or lost in the move to change what the old administration left behind.  Most policy analysts will tell you, it takes years, or decades to fully comprehend the effects of a full-scale policy implementation such as NCLB.  School administrators are just now fully internalizing the regulations of IDEA, a thirty-plus year old policy, it will take time for the good intentions of NCLB to show demonstrable and sustainable gains.

That being said, NCLB can be negotiated without being decimated.  The bathwater can be changed without the baby going out the window.  That first negotiation should concern the unreasonable AYP goals and deadlines.  Every school system has a unique set of challenges, and as long as those challenges are being addressed responsibly, that system should not be punished.  It is impossible to raise scores when districts cannot afford to fully fund a math or reading curriculum (ie: buying some books and none of the supplementary materials).  Assessment is tricky and states are spending millions of dollars to test and score and report.  Where else could that money go?  How can we hold teachers and schools and STUDENTS responsible without ripping away a month from the school year to “measure” how much students have learned?

Also, there needs to be some type of direct funding unit that feeds to school buildings and classrooms.  Politicians say they have spent record amounts on public education and the money seems to make no difference.  If that is true, I see no evidence of it when I walk through the buildings of my local city school district.  I see distress, crumbling infrastructures, recycling of everything, and much doing without.  Meanwhile, many districts with huge budget deficits, seem to boast the highest spending on superintendent salaries.  One would think that a person with a conscience would decline an obscene six figure salary while teachers and assistants are losing jobs. I am not so naive to believe that cutting administrative salaries would solve the education funding issue.  I am, however, confused as to why the money never seems to make it into the classroom, especially for large, poor districts.

Change can be good.  But, change for the sake of changing in a decade that has been nothing but change may not be the best answer.  There are many things wrong with NCLB, but there are some things that have gone right.  The Department of Education needs to ascertain what is working and make sure those pieces are preserved.  Perhaps we could model the changes for what is going wrong, after the things that are going right.  Maybe states have some ideas about how that could happen.  Have we, as a nation, taken time to listen to the people implementing this policy on the ground level?  I imagine that they would have pertinent suggestions as to how the ideas of NCLB could work and be useful to everyone, including students.

I try not to worry.  But with the current economic conditions and the further destruction of public education funding, I wonder how much can American public education take before completely falling down?  What happens if all children (going to public schools) are left behind?

Tags: administrative policy, change, NCLB

Sorry for the lack of posting lately.  The blog is on a brief haitus until summer so I can focus entirely on finishing my dissertation (examining administrator perspective on least restrictive environment.)

If something grabs me, I’ll always be up for a post.  Otherwise, have a fabulous spring!  See you soon.