Dear Reformers: Teachers Are Neither Heroes Nor Zeroes

poste in TEACHER'S DIARY in the New York Times

April 18, 2012, 3:32 p.m.

By TIM CLIFFORD

As an argumentative writing challenge, I recently paired students and assigned them a fictional text. They were given the task of composing a persuasive letter to their partner about the main character.

Tim Clifford

One student had to stake a claim that the character was a Hero, and the other had to claim that the character was a Zero. Students had not only to prove their own side, but anticipate the counter-arguments of their partners.

The results were gratifying, because most students began to see that things are rarely as clear-cut as they first appear. Heroes sometimes have dirty faces, and even the most nefarious villains may act nobly at times.

I got to thinking about all this after I had read yet another hatchet job on teachers in a newspaper that shall not be named (no, not the one affiliated with this blog).

Every day, some education reform pundit who has never set foot in a classroom decries the state of education, with teachers as the primary whipping boys (and girls). So I decided to take on my own assignment and write the reform folks a letter explaining to them why teachers are not the Zeroes they are making us out to be.

Dear Ed Reformers,

Not all teachers can be life-savers like Cassandra Byrd-Scolaro, who teaches fourth grade at Public School 17 Henry D. Woodworth in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and who recently resuscitated a woman she found lifeless in a bathroom stall during her lunch break.

When revived, the stricken woman, who had apparently overdosed, gave Ms. Byrd-Scolaro the finger. I think most teachers can relate.

If judged solely through media coverage, one would be forced to conclude that teachers are the greatest plague on society today, collectively eroding democracy and leading this country down an inexorable path toward third world status.

To prove our villainy, many news outlets recently chose to risk the public shaming of teachers by publishing highly flawed Teacher Data Reports. Our names (and some teachers’ pictures) were smeared all over the papers as if we’d gotten D.W.I.s rather than T.D.R.s.

In your zeal to “reform” schools, you have, wittingly or not, excoriated teachers. Your mantra has been that the essential step towards building better schools is the ability to fire all of the “bad” teachers out there.

Even President Obama, an alleged union supporter who vowed to don comfortable shoes and march alongside us should collective bargaining rights ever be threatened, applauded the firing of the entire faculty of a school in Rhode Island.

While it is true that some teachers are better than others, and everyone can improve, the myth of the bad teacher is just that — a myth. I’ve taught for more than two decades and I can truthfully assert that I have only seen a handful of teachers who were so awful that they needed to be bounced from the classroom.

Of that handful, many were weeded out in the tenure process, and others were either forced out or exited voluntarily because they couldn’t cut it.

Speaking of tenure, let me remind you that administrators have as many as five years to decide whether teachers deserve tenure. Before that, teachers can be fired for any reason, or no reason at all.

Isn’t five years sufficient? If a teacher makes it that far — no mean feat in itself — doesn’t he or she deserve the right to the fair hearing that tenure affords them prior to termination?

And as for the oft-repeated meme, perpetuated in ed reform hit pieces like the movie “Waiting for Superman,” that once granted tenure, teachers stick their feet up on their desks and read the sports section for the next 20 years, I invite you all to spend even one period in a classroom with your feet up.

You will quickly learn why teaching cannot be performed while sitting on one’s posterior. Good luck combing the spitballs out of your hair.

Some of you reformers out there have even begun blaming teachers for the bad economy. You claim that greedy teachers are wrecking local and state budgets with our “exorbitant” pensions.

In truth, salary and benefits, including pension, are part of our total compensation package which is negotiated with local governments. In other words, we earn them.

Many states, such as New Jersey, were utterly irresponsible in underfunding their pension obligations, but that’s hardly the fault of teachers. And much of the shortfall is due to the near-crash of the stock market brought on by the irresponsible behavior of banks, and yes, even some of the hedge-fund billionaires who are at the heart of the education reform/charter school movement.

So, my dear education reformers, I humbly submit that teachers are not the Zeroes you make us out to be.

Are we Heroes? Well, perhaps not. We rarely confront fire-breathing dragons, but we do face off against hormone-engorged adolescents on a daily basis.

We don’t pull swords from stones, but we do pull thoughtful answers from reluctant learners.

And while the villains we face rarely wear black masks, we do square off against thinly disguised poverty, hunger, discrimination, abuse, bullying and neglect on a regular basis. Sometimes, we even win.

Maybe we’re just heroes with chalky faces. We can’t all be like Ms. Byrd-Scolaro. Still, it would be nice if, after we’re done with our minor acts of classroom heroism for the day, you would refrain from giving us the finger.

Sincerely,
Tim Clifford

Tim Clifford is the author of several education books, as well as children's fiction and non-fiction. He teaches English in Queens.

The One Percent Targets D.C. Schools

Posted by on March 29th by SubterraneanDispatcher

In 2010, Washington D.C. residents ousted the much-maligned former Mayor Adrian Fenty, in what was largely considered to be a referendum against his notorious union-busting Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Fenty’s replacement, Vincent Gray, opposed Rhee’s reforms while Gray served on the City Council.

But as mayor, Gray has done little to reverse the damage that Rhee inflicted on D.C. schools. In fact, the mayor – along with Deputy Mayor for Education De’Shawn Wright and the current Chancellor Kaya Henderson – has mostly continued Rhee’s policies and is now poised to make things much worse.

Last August, Gray commissioned an Illinois financial institution to conduct an analysis on D.C. public schools. The study was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, the charity run by the owners of Wal-Mart. The results were exactly what could be expected from the corporate billionaires who have been at the forefront of union-busting education “reform.”

The Illinois Facilities Fund (IFF) report released in January puts 38 D.C. schools at risk of closure or “turnaround,” sparking an uproar among teachers, students and parents.

Community groups, including Empower DC and Occupy activists, are in the midst of launching a campaign against this latest attack on public education. Protests, mic checks at budget hearings and other actions are being planned for the spring.

And with the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) roiled by internal disputes and a generally aimless leadership, an aggressive community-wide fightback is the only hope for stopping Gray, Wright, and Henderson.

The fingerprints of the politically connected charter school industry are all over the IFF report.

The report was released by Deputy Mayor Wright, who, in his previous job, worked as an education adviser to Newark Mayor Cory Booker in New Jersey. He was also a founding partner of the Newark Charter School Fund, an organization that accepted as much as $22 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

Hosanna Mahaley, D.C.’s State Superintendent of Education, provided the IFF with performance data from 2007 through 2011. Mahaley first cut her teeth as an education reformer while working as chief of staff for Arne Duncan – now U.S. Secretary of Education – when Duncan served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Mahaley managed that city’s Renaissance 2010 campaign, a program that shut down dozens of Chicago schools in mostly Black neighborhoods, and replaced many with charter schools and military academies.

As for the IFF itself, the non-profit chiefly operates as a lender and real estate consultant to charter operators. Since its founding 20 years ago, the group has made over $57 million from loans to charter schools. IFF also provided consulting for Chicago’s Renaissance project.

Given this background, it’s no wonder the IFF’s report on D.C. schools recommends turning over closed schools to charter operators.

With the goal of “increasing the number of performing seats,” the IFF recommendations rely almost exclusively on student test scores to conduct a “supply and demand” analysis of D.C. schools. Its assessment of “performing seats” is measured by proficiency averages in the 2011 D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS) tests.

IFF predicted the proficiency of schools over the next five years by extrapolating from DC-CAS data over the past five years. Schools were then ranked based on the mean of 2011 scores and the projected scores for 2016.

From this arbitrary arithmetic, IFF divides D.C. schools into four tiers. It recommends filling Tier 1 schools, closing or turning around Tier 4 schools, investing in Tier 2 schools and monitoring Tier 3 schools. Not surprisingly, out of 38 Tier 3 and 4 schools threatened with closure or turnaround, 26 are in Wards 7 and 8, the poorest areas of D.C., where more than 90 percent of residents are African American.

“The neighborhoods in which these schools sit are also suffering from a general lack of access to resources, which perpetuates the system which keeps people of color fighting for basic survival,” said Daniel del Pielago, Education Organizer with Empower DC.

The report recommends that city officials “undertake a cost/benefit analysis to determine whether to turn around or close Tier 4 DCPS [D.C. public schools] schools.” It adds, “To retain building capacity, coordinate the closure of DCPS schools with [the Public Charter School Board]. As necessary, authorize a charter school within the same building or in the immediate vicinity before school closure.”

IFF’s analysis was made possible by a $100,000 grant from the Walton Foundation, which was requested by Wright. And it’s not the first time the Waltons have intervened in D.C. schools.

Since 2010, the Walton Foundation has been the financier of merit-pay bonuses under the IMPACT evaluation system introduced by Rhee. Hundreds of teachers have been fired as a result of the $4 million evaluation scheme, which rates teachers using a “value-added” model based on standardized testing and classroom observations. Teachers with high performance ratings under IMPACT have been awarded bonuses as high as $25,000 – complements of the Waltons.

This is exactly the kind of competition in education that the foundation celebrates on its website. And at the same time that the Waltons are pushing their school privatization agenda in D.C., their retail juggernaut is preparing to break ground in the district. Despite widespread community opposition, Wal-Mart is planning to open six stores in the city.

“To me, this shows the disinvestment the city has in mind for the people living in these communities,” said del Pielago. “In many of these neighborhoods we’ve seen the loss of affordable housing and these school closures are another way of forcing people out of neighborhoods where we can very clearly see developers taking over.”

Turning a profit by turning over public schools is at the heart of the so-called school reformers’ agenda. And if D.C. residents are suspicious of the motives behind the IFF report, it’s because the recommendations sound all too familiar to a city that already has the highest concentration of charter schools outside of New Orleans.

As organizations like Empower DC point out, the IFF proposals do not include anything that hasn’t already been attempted in D.C. Dozens of schools were closed by Michelle Rhee to make way for charter takeovers. But the overall quality of education in D.C. has not improved.

And like those that came before it, this new proposal for school closures is, at its core, racist. Not only does it disproportionately target African American neighborhoods, but the low-income communities in the crosshairs of the proposed closings are wondering how they are supposed to transport their children who are relocated to schools outside of their community.

On a more systemic level, D.C. residents are concerned about how young people of color who are shut out of an increasingly apartheid system of education then become fodder for the criminal justice system.

“We are concerned about what happens to folks who don’t have these resources or schools. Many of our young people, especially young Black males, get tracked directly into the prison system,” said del Pielago.

And the IFF report not only serves to further the assault on public education in D.C., but also to expand longstanding gentrification policies designed to push people of color and the poor out of the city.

“We see this as another way our city’s government is forcing longtime D.C. residents out,” the organization says. “In the cases of recently closed schools such as Bruce-Monroe [Elementary School], and River Terrace Elementary which is slated for closure, the main driver is real estate and access to land ripe for development.”

This may be all the more reason for city officials to uproot public schools and the communities they support by forcing teachers and students to follow a business model for learning.

“Let’s be completely candid here,” Wright said when the report was commissioned. “We have to right-size the [school system]…And if that ruffles feathers, then so be it.”

Despite Mayor Gray’s promises that he would break from Fenty and Rhee’s tough talk and listen to the concerns of teachers and the community, education polices under Gray have mirrored the anti-teacher hostility that made Rhee so famous.

One significant reason for this continuity is that Gray retained Kaya Henderson as his chancellor of DCPS. As Rhee’s Deputy Chancellor, Henderson temporarily stepped in as chancellor following Rhee’s resignation in 2010.

Like her predecessor, Henderson came out of Teach for America, the anti-union teacher training program that recruits and molds young educators with little training, pushing more experienced teachers out of schools and producing high turnover rates. Henderson served as executive director for Teach for America in D.C. for several years and, as Rhee’s protégé, she led the development of the IMPACT evaluation system.

While community groups are mobilizing parents and students against the latest round of school closures, the state of the teachers’ union has left many DCPS educators feeling demoralized.

WTU president Nathan Saunders called the IFF report “an assault on public education and a serious threat to the thousands of public school teachers that shoulder the responsibility of educating children every day in the District of Columbia.”

But by and large, D.C. teachers feel betrayed by the man who campaigned fiercely against former union president George Parker for not standing up against Rhee’s attacks.

“It seems like Nathan Saunders is content making a new website, getting a new building and perhaps testifying about the [IFF] issue, but there is no organizing, no real meetings, no reaching out to the base, and no real attempt to fight back against Kaya Henderson,” said Laura Fuchs, who teaches social studies at H.D. Woodson Senior High School.

Not only has Saunders – who once cast himself as a reform candidate – continued WTU’s tepid response to anti-teacher policies, he has also resorted to similar attacks that his predecessor used against him to silence opposition within the union.

Saunders served as vice president of the union under the previous administration until Parker suspended him from his full-time union position in 2010. But as president, Saunders did essentially the same thing to his vice president, Candi Peterson, last summer. Peterson has been a relentless opponent of the corporate school reform agenda in D.C. for years. She helped Saunders campaign to replace Parker, only to find herself abruptly suspended after a dispute with Saunders, whom she contends collaborated with Chancellor Henderson to get rid of her.

In this context, with their union weak and ineffective, many teachers feel disempowered in the face of the latest school closures.

For its part, Empower DC and other groups have been holding meetings with parents and other community members in order to strategize and fight back.

On February 11, Empower DC supporters attended Mayor Gray’s One City Summit to raise concerns about the school closings and talk to other residents about how these policy recommendations are part of an equation for the displacement of low-income students in the district.

They were threatened with arrest for attempting to distribute information at the event, but not before they delivered this message to Gray: “We hold you accountable to save our schools and communities. We reject the flawed findings of the IFF report and its recommendations to close or turn around DC’s public schools. We demand a moratorium on school closures until a valid community-led process is developed for evaluating our schools.”

More than 40 people gathered on March 10 for a meeting organized by Empower DC and, in addition to petitions and letter-signing, the group is planning to testify and hold protests at upcoming budget hearings.

Sequnely Gray, an organizer with Empower DC who fought for years against the closure of Bruce-Monroe, said that it was time to stop playing nice with Mayor Gray and the chancellor. She argued that it was time for the community to be more aggressive.

Others at the meeting echoed this sentiment, taking inspiration from the struggle happening in other cities. They specifically referred to the example of parents in Chicago who occupied Piccolo elementary school, which that city wants to shut down. Activists in D.C. are looking to team up with Occupy and other groups to build a widespread campaign against the city’s latest plot against public schools.

But the question of how to pressure the WTU to take a more combative stance remains, at best, a challenge.

“We need to speak out. We need to hit back at Gray and the council and elections. We need to crash these [budget] meetings and we need to get angry and get Henderson out,” said Fuchs.

Ultimately, stopping anti-teacher and anti-poor school “reforms” in D.C. will require a sustained movement – one that brings together parents, teachers and students in a militant struggle to defend public education.

Heather Kangas contributed to this dispatch.

Montgomery Superintendent Joshua Starr sharpens critique of national reforms

wow....I have a new hero.

Posted in The washington Post at 02:16 PM ET, 04/18/2012

By Michael Alison Chandler

Montgomery schools superintendent Joshua Starr congratulated the school board Tuesday on standing firm against some of the turbulent reform efforts being embraced around the country.

He called their political posture, including the past decision not to support the state’s application for a federal Race to the Top Grant, “one of the reasons I was so thrilled to come here.”

Starr’s comments, which came during a board briefing on the roll-out
Montgomery Superintendent Joshua Starr. (Katherine Frey - THE WASHINGTON POST) of some key state and federal initiatives, bolstered his emerging role as a vocal and prominent critic of national policy trends.

He criticized what he called a reversion to an “industrial model” of public education. A hyper reliance on measurement and an embrace of quick, cure-all solutions means systems will be destined to repeat past failures, he said.

Montgomery County Public Schools was one of two districts out of 24 in Maryland that passed on federal funding by refusing to sign on to thestate’s Race to the Top grant application in 2010.

School officials said they held out because of the competitive nature of the reform approach and, in particular, its provisions for a new teacher evaluation program that would challenge its existing, successful system.

During Tuesday’s meeting, school employees talked, in some times bewildered tones, about the uncertain status of current overhauls to state and federal policies. They highlighted the roll out of new common core standards, expected to be in place by 2014-2015, which still lack standardized tests or dedicated funding streams for implementation.

They reviewed the pending request for a waiver to be held harmless from some existing sanctions of the current federal accountability system as the new system is being developed. (Starr argued that there should be a “three-year moratorium on standardized tests while we figure all this out.”)

And they talked about the status of state reforms tied to Race to the Top, focusing on the emerging teacher evaluation system that is already being piloted in some districts, including Prince George’s County, and that is expected to link teacher pay or evaluations more closely to students’ performance on tests and other measures.

Starr critiqued the growth models and rubrics being developed as contradicting research on what motivates teachers. He said Montgomery’s current system, which mentors struggling teachers for a year before decisions about termination are made, is a “hill to die on.”

And he said that singling out teachers as the culprit for education failures and shaming them is the most “pernicious part of the national reform movement.”

Accountability for student success should rightly extend to “you, me, and the entire community,” he said.

But in the midst of all the flux and change, he struck a hopeful chord. He said the transition could give Montgomery a chance to carve a distinct path.

“As No Child Left Behind is dying its slow death, it’s an incredible opportunity to fill that void with what we believe we should do for kids,” he said

Get Rid of Teachers or Encourage them To Stay -- What is Best for our Schools?

from Living in Dialogue by Anthony Cody posted at Ed Week Blogs- click to go there

Guest post by Mark Simon.

After over a decade of "corporate reform" strategies in many places, we have a chance to compare the results of two drastically different approaches to improving public schools. In some places, such as Washington, DC, we have seen teacher turnover skyrocket, in line with the belief that lagging student performance is due to inferior teachers. In Montgomery County, Maryland, the teachers' union and District have been following a different path for the last fifteen years, and are seeing dramatic results.

"Corporate reform" is the moniker earned by the dominant paradigm in school turnarounds, the one promoted by the US Department of Education and championed by foundations established by successful corporate titans Bill Gates and Eli Broad. According to this approach, if students aren't performing, start by getting rid of the adults who must be, by definition, responsible. This blame, fire, and hire strategy is imported from the corporate world where Jack Welsh and Donald Trump are the archetypal heroes. The problem is that after over thirteen years of this approach there's little success to point to on a national scale. Cleaning house, what we used to call "reconstitution," has, at best, a mixed track record.

It seems that corporate reformers and reformers who actually work in schools instinctively disagree on the best first step to improve a low performing school. Now there's an excellent new study by Matthew Ronfeldt, Susanna Loeb, and Jim Wyckoff, "How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement," which correlates high teacher turnover with lower student achievement. It's sad that we need a study by economists to give us permission to assert what to educators is self-evident. But it's time to look more closely at examples of where each approach is working, or isn't. Two districts next door to each other provide a contrast in approaches with lessons about what works, and what doesn't.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, the teachers union and the district have spent fifteen years building a collaborative approach to improving the quality of teaching and learning. In 2000, we decided to intervene, collaboratively, at Broad Acres Elementary, the school system's lowest performing, highest-poverty elementary school. The first decade of the intervention has been written up as a case study. The case study makes clear that all has not been smooth sailing. There were many missteps. But the key was working with the existing teaching staff and the collaboration between district and union. The first thing we did was to meet with the teachers to let them know that we wanted all of them to stay if they chose to. The union's vice president was assigned to meet with every teacher, individually, to get their ideas. The catch was that any teacher who chose to stay would have to remain at the school for at least three years. If we were going to invest in training and support we wanted the teachers we invested in to stick around. We knew that one of the problems at high poverty schools was teacher turnover and the last thing such a school needed was to get rid of the adults. About one third of the teachers were allowed to transfer out, but two thirds signed on to what they knew would be a hard but intensely rewarding effort.

At Broad Acres, 90% of the students are on free-and-reduced lunch, almost all are students of color, and the mobility and non-English speaking rates are high. We didn't blame the teachers. We knew that poverty and low test scores are highly correlated and that breaking that connection would take an unusual effort. The existing teaching staff re-focused the curriculum, met for long hours in grade level teams and vertical articulation teams, visited homes, and took responsibility for meeting the needs of their students. Principal Jody Leleck believed that the teachers should lead the reform. The partnership with the union was natural.

The intervention at Broad Acres was an undisputed success and has continued now for 12 years. For the first time, in 2003, Broad Acres made AYP. In fact, they were the most improved school in the county for several years in a row. More broadly than this one school, Montgomery County is one of the few districts in the nation that has actually closed the student achievement gap significantly by race and class across the entire district.

We have done it not by focusing on standardized tests, but by putting resources in the neediest schools and by valuing high quality teaching. We refused to make student test scores a factor in teacher evaluations, refusing to sign on to the state's Race to the Top application. We respectfully disagree with the strategies those efforts represent.

By contrast, just across the district line from Montgomery County in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee, who had never run a school, never mind a district, was handed control of the D.C. Public Schools by the Mayor in 2008. She set about to fire and hire her way to reform and her comment "collaboration is overrated" became a slogan. Her energies went into empowering principals to get rid of teachers. She herself famously invited a PBS camera crew to record a private meeting in which she intended to fire a principal. A local blog has tracked the Rhee/Henderson record.

Anyone who has followed reform efforts in DC knows that student achievement over the past five years, as measured by test scores, has been unimpressive under strategies begun by Rhee and continued by her successor, Kaya Henderson. There have been slight ups and downs in test scores, but little that's statistically significant. The achievement gap based on race and poverty has actually widened significantly. Additionally, a system-wide cheating scandal in 2009 under Rhee, that has yet to be investigated, has thrown a pall on all the data.

In DC, however, what has been stunning and undisputed is the change in the teacher turnover rate. For a district that used to have a relatively low turnover rate compared with the national average, now 50% of teachers don't make it beyond two years, 80% don't make it beyond 6 years. For principals, approximately 25% lose their jobs every year. It's not unusual for schools to have a new principal every year. So in the name of "reform," we now have churn. It can be said that teaching is no longer a career in DC. What has been accomplished as a result of the conscious policies of the current and immediate past chancellor is the creation of a teaching force of short timers. Gordon MacInnes summarized Rhee mistakes for the Century foundation here.

A recent Washington Post article about the rift between Democratic mayors and teachers' unions pointed to Montgomery County's teachers union as the exception, nationwide. The Post was half right. The union's shoulder to the wheel, collaboration with the district to make schools better has been exemplary. But this is not exceptional. There are lots of examples of attempts at that kind of collaboration all across the country. What makes Montgomery County an exception is that the politicians and school administration have not blindly adopted the corporate reform ideology. They haven't adopted mayoral control. They don't worship at the altar of student test scores. They recognize that reform led by educators will be more likely to succeed. The union is made a partner. Teacher longevity and commitment to the school and its community is valued. And respecting the complexity of the craft of teaching is considered a better approach than trying to improve education by making war on educators.

What do you think? Does Montgomery County offer a viable strategy for improving schools?

Mark Simon has had a bird's eye view of Montgomery County, where he worked professionally for 28 years and DC Public Schools where he has served as a parent representative at the elementary, middle and high school levels. His daughter is about to graduate from high school after 14 years in DCPS. Mark was a high school teacher for 16 years and then for 12 years the elected president of the Montgomery County Education Association (NEA). As president between 1985 and 2003 he helped create MCEA's progressive union vision in place today. He is now the national coordinator of the Tom Mooney Institute for Teacher and Union Leadership and an education policy analyst at theEconomic Policy Institute.