Tag: schools

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Reopening School

What to make of the debate on how to open schools?

On the one hand, we have the president and Betsy DeVos, who seem to be ignoring most of the health information contained in a report, which was marked “For Internal Use Only”, that had more sensible guidance for schools and even urged districts in communities where the virus was spreading more rapidly to have classes conducted entirely online, who are urging all schools to open five days per week with all students in the building.

On the other hand, we have education and health professionals who are urging caution because,well, we are still in the midst of the first wave of a global pandemic and conditions in the United States are getting worse, much worse, by the day.

Every teacher in this country understands that students need to be in school. It is key for a child’s social, educational and emotional development. We all know that. The issue is not that we need to open, but how to open safely and create an environment where every child can learn. The evidence does suggest that younger people are not impacted to the same degree as older people and that they don’t spread it at the same rate. We get that too.

What we also know, though, is that enclosed, poorly-ventilated spaces in which people are talking are prime breeding grounds for the virus. Yes, the guidelines call for students to wear masks, but students do not always do what they are told to do, and since they won’t be mandatory for the children, there’s little a teacher can do if a child refuses to wear one or puts the mask below their nose or chews a hole in it where their mouth is. And parents who need to work might give their feverish child a fever reducer and send them on their way so the parent can go to work. Hallways are crowded places. Teenagers like to hug, and more, in various areas of school buildings.

This is why teachers are pushing back against reopening plans that do not take into account their concerns about workplace safety. Many teachers have complicated health issues or are worried about bringing the virus back to their homes where their children, elderly parents or other adults with health concerns live. Teachers are also concerned that cash-strapped school districts will not be able to fully meet the guidelines that are meant to insure that schools open safely, or to invest in distance-learning software or protocols that will enable all students to thrive whether they are in the classroom or at home. Federal and state governments have been defunding education for decades. We are now seeing a literal struggle over the life and death of schools and their staff.

In short, this is a far more complicated answer than what the president and Secretary DeVos want to hear. The president is concerned about his reelection prospects given that adults can’t go back to work if they have to stay home and take care of children who are on alternate day schedules or have decided that their child will stay home rather than go into schools where the danger is real. Secretary DeVos is supporting the president’s proposal to strip already cash-starved public school districts of federal funds if they don’t fully open, despite the health risks.

America’s public school teachers already know that they are not as valued as they should be, are not paid commensurate with their educational levels and value to society, and are seen as union saps who slavishly toe the NEA/UFT line. The president went so far as saying that history teachers especially seek to propagandize students and teach them to hate America. None of this is in any way accurate
but, there is a sizable chunk of people in this country who believe it.

The difference now is that teachers are being asked to put their health and lives at risk. Even in districts that will have students alternate days or weeks, teachers are expected to be in classrooms every day. The best science we have now says that the virus thrives in poorly ventilated, enclosed rooms where people are exposed to each other for lengthy periods of time while talking, coughing, sneezing, or singing. In short, your child’s classroom. This is the part of the discussion that the president and Secretary DeVos have ignored or minimized. Yes, school is about student learning, but it’s also about teachers who make sure that the classroom is safe and secure.

For all of the planning, my sense is that schools will be shut down again because this virus is not going away. Students will test positive. Teachers will test positive (is this the point at which the lawsuits begin?). Communities will be justifiably angry and scared. Maybe this happens in October or maybe it happens when the flu starts to mingle in around November or December.

We have one chance to get this reopening right. Let’s make sure we do just that.

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Education Higher education

College Is For Everyone… Except for Those It’s Not

Seeing as how I’m an education dinosaur, having taught for the past 32 years, I’ve seen many a fad, meme, phase and reform come and go during my career. Each of these aforesaid events was billed as the new reality and the change that would ignite the staid and conservative field into a dynamo that would catapult American students into the learning stratosphere, nay, outer space, when it came to classroom success and global competition.

It turns out that all of that change resulted in a lot of change which resulted in a lot of public money going to programs that were quickly abandoned for the next change. As for the students, well, SAT scores are up and more students are taking Advanced Placement tests in the suburbs, but poverty has increased and with it so has the attainment and achievement gap in the less wealthy areas of the country. This does not auger well for the latest and, perhaps, greatest new education focus which is, that all students must go to college.

Education has run into this “all” problem before. Presidents Bush, Clinton and Bush proposed education programs that required that all students become proficient in their subjects and that all students pass either state or national tests to prove their learning. Of course, this is impossible; not all students can pass all tests and not all students can become proficient in every subject as measured by a test. So we know that, at least in statistics, all three of these president were substandard. All students can certainly learn, but not all students can achieve at the level they need in order to succeed in higher education. And the dirty little secret is that they should not be forced into doing so.

One of the consequences of this race to college is playing out across the country, and is laid bare in this article about the West Windsor-Plainsboro school district in New Jersey. The problem there is endemic to other suburban, wealthier school districts where the focus is on competition, grades, extracurricular activities and building a resume for college. I can say from first hand experience that this is the norm in many of these districts. It is also the norm that many students feel too much pressure to succeed, to earn high grades consistently, and to be busy at all hours of the day doing homework. Not all schools follow this norm however, as some districts including West Windsor have adopted a modified no-homework policy, playing sports – which has become a major conduit for girls to get scholarships for college – performing community service, or taking part in the arts, dance and theater programs (and no, they are not Broadway quality. Sorry).

The problem is that schools are now starting to abandon their roles as educational institutions and are quietly becoming warehouses where students spend a less-than-engaging part of their day being unproductive until they can get to the fun stuff. The issue is that the school day places enormous pressure on the students to do things that do not come naturally, such as analyzing data and writing, manipulating ideas, and creating new knowledge out of disparate theories. They also need to, here goes, fail. That’s right. If you truly want to learn, you need to fail a few times before you can master ideas. It’s necessary to fail, but failure – goodness, even a C – is not an option. So parents put pressure on children. The school puts pressure on children. Children put pressure on themselves, and society says that if you don’t go to college your life will be ruined.

Thus, the problem described in the article.

I do not agree with relaxing standards or enacting less or no-homework policies (another fad), but I do think that we need to rethink the college part. It’s not an admission of failure if your child does not go to college right away or ever if that’s truly in their best interests. Not all students are academically inclined, and that’s what higher education is all about. Colleges and universities are not job factories or technical-training institutions, they are laboratories for academic and theoretical research. They do provide internships and work experiences, but very few students who graduate with a BA or BS are well qualified or ready to actually work. That’s another step in the process that all adults need to master.

Students who do well in college are proficient readers and can organize their time. They can sit for long periods and can absorb sophisticated and often contradictory ideas. They can navigate the social structure of an institution that might be radically different in scope, size and demographics from the community in which they lived, grew up and were educated. Does that sound like everyone? No, it does not. It’s no wonder that 35% of adults in this country have a college degree. It’s not for everyone and it wasn’t meant to be for everyone.

Our challenge is not to shoehorn (dinosaur term) all students into an experience that is not meant for them but rather to find experiences in which they can succeed, enjoy and challenge themselves. Many parents want colleges to be those kinds of institutions, and that’s why colleges are fighting back and saying that their purpose lies in other areas. We would do far better as a nation if we recognized that there are, or at least should be, other avenues for students who can be productive citizens without academic work. Then we can reduce some of the pressures that students feel and address the problems associated with outrageous and unnecessary expectations.

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Politics

Wyoming Republicans Pass Legislation to Allow guns in Schools

I have no clue why guns should be allowed in schools. We all know they’re not going to learn anything, but Republicans obviously think guns will benefit somehow if they’re allowed in schools. Or maybe it’s the NRA that benefits.

The bill, supported by leaders of the Republican-led House, would repeal “gun-free zones” carved out around elementary and secondary schools, as well as colleges and universities.

Passed on a 42-17 vote, the measure also would grant concealed-carry permit holders the right to take their guns into meetings of the state Legislature and local government meetings.

The bill must clear the Republican-controlled state Senate before it can be submitted to Governor Matt Mead, also a Republican, for his signature or veto. Mead has in recent years sought to welcome firearms-related companies to Wyoming by promoting it as a gun-friendly state

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CNN Domestic Policies Education News Politics teacher evaluation

The Education Reform Silly Season

It might be summer, but the education know-nothings are clearly not at the beach. The latest case-in-point is former CNN correspondent Campbell Brown’s incredibly uninformed comments on teacher tenure that, unfortunately, millions of people saw and didn’t stick around for the fact-checking. Her musings come on the heels of a California decision in which a judge ruled that tenure is unconstitutional because it deprives some students of a quality education. There is another case against tenure in New York States and I will assume that many other states will soon join in. It is true that there are some teachers who should not be in classrooms because they are ineffective or burned out, but depriving teachers of a due process right and subjecting them to firing because of issues unrelated to their job performance is the height of irresponsibility.

In Campbell Brown’s case, she quotes the popular half-truth that the teacher is far and away the most important factor in a child’s success, and that if all classrooms had effective teachers, then all students would learn. I suppose we could read this as a compliment for great teachers, but I also read it for the folly of what it implies.

What she and other education know-nothings are essentially saying here is that an effective teacher can overcome poverty, child abuse, hunger, malnutrition, unemployment, dysfunctional and nonfunctional families, drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, developmental disabilities, ADHD, the autism spectrum, lack of sleep, entitled parents and students, and general ennui and make productive citizens out of every child. This is what teachers see in their classrooms and every one of these factors, or a combination of many of them, is a distraction or an impediment to learning. If effective teachers could negate them and educate children in spite of them, then we also need to elect teachers to Congress and the Presidency because the country clearly needs them.

The truth is that teachers do overcome these obstacles, but not at the pace that society needs in order to help all students. What then happens, and the education know-nothings are quick with the response, the teachers, whose students do not perform well on the latest misuse of data, the teacher evaluation metrics, are labeled incompetent and worthy of firing. Since tenure is in the way, getting rid of it is the know-nothing’s illogical retort.

The proper response would be for those with microphones and cameras to focus their attention on providing living conditions in all communities that allow for jobs with livable wages, responsive public services, adequate public health care, affordable housing, enrichment opportunities for the children, and safe neighborhoods. Those teachers who work in such communities know why their students are more prepared than others. It’s not rocket science, but it is science; and we know how the right wing feels about science.

To further the folly of their arguments, though, the know-nothings have managed to institute teacher evaluation systems throughout the land that will do everything except provide for a valid measure of an effective teacher. They’ve made testing the default activity in schools when there is little research to support a system based on such testing. And for those teachers who don’t teach a testable subject, there’s the SGO, or Student Growth Objective. But now those measures are under review because, surprise, SGOs don’t provide for a valid measure either.

In New Jersey, teachers who have questioned the testing/SGO folly are finally being heard. Tests, which were going to count for 30% of a teacher’s evaluation, will now only count as 10% for the coming school year, and SGO’s will be under scrutiny for how they are used for evaluation. Neither measure has been shown to predict or confirm a teacher’s effectiveness, and putting them under a microscope should confirm that. Of course, with Governor Christie now running for president, the chances of further reform are nonexistent, but perhaps in a few years things will change. Still, many otherwise qualified teachers will be affected by the evaluation system. That’s the shame of it all.

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Featured Wayne LaPierre

Whose Name Should Be First On Any National Database For Mental Health?

Besides Rush Limbaugh, this other guy is a total basket case.

He is the same one who said that bringing more guns on school grounds would reduce the amount of kids murdered. He is also the same guy who said today on Meet The Press that reducing the amount of clips in a gun would do nothing to reduce the amount of damage presently done by high-capacity clips.

Categories
Politics teachers

Education Reform: Baseball Bats to Bad Data

Remember when Joe Clark was the face of educational reform? The former Principal of Eastside High School in Paterson, NJ patrolled the hallways of his out-of-control institution in the 1980s with only a bullhorn and a baseball bat, fighting poverty, gangs, crime and under-performing students as the face of urban education. His tactics were crude and anti-education, but the fact that he was a hero to many spoke volumes about the way in which people saw the problems in our schools.

Today, the people with the bullhorns and the weapons are politicians and business owners who believe that the best way to cure the ills of public schools that have educated the freest, most productive people who’ve ever lived on this planet, is to make our schools just like the entities that led the way towards job outsourcing, unconscionable home loan processes, and a laser-like focus on stock prices that have almost bankrupted the economy.

Joe Clark’s sounding mighty effective right now.

I can understand how many politicians view the public schools. When your political ideology glorifies competition above cooperation and the bottom economic line over investment in the future, you’re going to behave this way.  Of course, it’s easier if you have little contact with the public schools, either becuase you didn’t attend or you’ve decided that even in the great neighborhood that you live, a private school is better. Even the progressive Clintons sent their daughter to a private school. Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter were the last White House residents to put their money where their mouths were. Just so you don’t think I’m contradicting myself too much, I do believe firmly in the right of parents to make decisions in the best interest of their children. Those choices, though, have consequences when you are an elected official with direct influence on public schools.

The main point, though, is that the people pushing for changes in schools now have little, if any, experience working in education and are deliberately excluding those who do.

Here in New Jersey, the person in charge of the program to ensure teacher quality has not one minute of experience in the classroom. Is classroom experience absolutely necessary in order for someone to create a program that will assess teachers? I would say yes. Everyone who works in schools or education should have at least 5 years of teaching experience and preferably even more. How else will you know the pressures and challenges that teachers face on a day-to-day basis? How will you know how to evaluate teachers of students with varying learning styles, academic strengths and weaknesses, and social problems? How will you see the effects that more testing has on the curriculum? Reading articles and interviewing stakeholders (well, most of them) is fine, but there’s something about direct experience that warms the souls of those who will be evaluated. Maybe it’s that we’ll see you as one of us. With some credibility. On education.

That won’t happen. And that’s the point. Without experience, all someone can do is apply the research on teacher evaluation, which is certainly not conclusive, and make assumptions. Governor Christie has not consulted public school teachers about his proposed plans not because he has legitimate differences with the teacher’s union, NJEA, over curricular matters, but because he wants to destroy the union. He isn’t interested in what public school teachers have to say about the issues because they might bring in valid but contradictory evidence that he would be responsible for addressing. His is a political argument, not an educational one. That’s why most teacher oppose them, and him.

But what about merit pay, you say? Don’t teachers want more money? In Washington, D.C., some teachers are earning up to $20,000 extra per year because they’ve been labeled “highly effective” by their supervisors. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a similar system of merit pay for the city’s teachers. So why do many teachers oppose it (listen to the podcast)?

There are many reasons.

Competition, while a highly prized skill in business, works against the interests of schools. teachers need to cooperate with each other in order to educate students. They share lesson plans, teaching strategies and materials. If you force them to compete for money, or tell them that they are competing against other 4th grade teachers for a bonus, it destroys the trust that’s built up between those educators.

It also begs the question of where this extra money is going to come from. Budgets are already tight and spending is capped at 2% in New Jersey. If more teachers earn bonuses than the district has budgeted for, then what happens? Are raises for other teachers sacrificed?

There is also no reliable evidence that shows merit pay for teachers results in better teaching, even if you use the false argument that teachers can be evaluated based on student standardized test scores.

Merit pay is not the only issue that will harm public schools. Among the other reforms, promoting Charter schools is probably the most prominent. Charter schools do have their place as laboratories for innovative programs, but there is no reliable evidence to show that Charters perform better than public schools. They might also be harmful to a district because charters are also publicly funded and take money away from local schools. In the New Jersey suburbs, the blow-back has already begun.

The governor’s educational reform program is on hiatus at this point, but he is going to make it a priority for this year, starting with today’s State of the State Address. If he is serious about making our schools better, he’s going to have to include teachers in the conversation.

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Categories
Collective bargaining Politics Teacher teacher tenure

Bold Ideas Lead to Great Schools: The Future of Education Reform

This article originally appeared on my blog at: anjfarmer.blogspot.com

Sometimes an idea, or set of ideas, comes along that’s so clear and sensible, it makes you stop and wonder why we haven’t implemented it. Then again, some ideas are so ineffective, it’s a wonder they haven’t been buried in an avalanche of criticism

Such is the state of public education reform in the United States at this moment. Governors throughout the country have tried, and in some cases succeeded, in forcing their versions of school reform in their states with little or misguided thought and a jaundiced eye towards the teachers who will need to carry it out. They eschew collaboration for rigidity, cooperation for coarseness, and conversation for calumny. Theirs is a corporate model based on competition, but that’s not necessarily how schools work. So far, this top-down approach has done little for education, but has done a great deal to sour relations between the adults who need to carry out the changes and the politicians who want votes.

The key to real, lasting, effective reform in this country lies in a partnership between the state governments and teachers, parents and students, and the most effective reforms will focus their energies on people working together. That’s why the ideas in the article, Taking Teacher Quality Seriously: A Collaborative Approach to Teacher Evaluation by Stan Karp of Rethinking Schools Blog, are so vital. Those ideas are aimed at improving education and student performance without sacrificing the rights and concerns of teachers. As Karp says:

One promising model is the Montgomery County, Maryland Professional Growth System (PGS), which has taken a collaborative approach to improving teacher quality for more than a decade. Several defining features make the Montgomery model very different than the test-based “value-added” or “student growth” approaches. The Montgomery Co. professional growth system:

  • was negotiated through collective bargaining rather than imposed by state or federal mandate.
  • is based on a clear, common vision of high quality professional teaching practice.
  • includes test scores as one of many indicators of student progress and teacher performance without rigidly weighted formulas.
  • includes a strong PAR (peer assistance and review) component for all novice and under-performing teachers, including those with tenure.
  • takes a broad, qualitative approach to promoting individual and system-wide teacher quality and continuous professional growth.

There are many strengths to the PGS, as outlined above and in the rest of the article. It allows for collective bargaining, so it’s less antagonizing than the Wisconsin model that took away that right from teachers, and it has a component for peer assistance (PAR), where experienced teachers can share their expertise with newer educators.

But perhaps the best part of the system is that it’s not SDOT (Shoved Down Our Throats) by politicians who have little, if any knowledge of what works best in classrooms. It’s teacher-centered; and that’s the correct approach because teachers are the ones best qualified to carry it out.

The PGS also addresses another concern that the public has about education, and that’s teacher quality. As Karp notes: 

In 11 years, the PAR process has led to some 500 teachers being removed from the classroom in a countywide system of about 150,000 students with approximately 10,000 teachers and 200 schools. Over the same period, nearly 5,000 teachers have successfully completed the PAR process.[ii]

But PAR is only part of a professional growth system designed to improve teacher capacity throughout the system, not just identify and remove ineffective teachers. It’s a qualitative approach growing out of a shared vision of high quality professional practice. The PGS begins with “six clear standards for teacher performance, based on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards” and includes “performance criteria for how the standards are to be met and descriptive examples of observable teaching behaviors.”

You can read the standards in the article. It’s refreshing to see that every one of them begins with the word, “Teachers.”

There’s more to like in the explanation of the process that teachers and administrators use to evaluate the program and each other. Teachers and principals are equally represented on a panel that determines if a teacher is effective. There’s an appeals process if a teacher is given a negative recommendation, and the system is based on documentation at every level of evaluation and appeal. This is a far cry from what happens at many public schools, especially here in New Jersey, where many teachers are observed once or twice per year and documentation is cursory, general or incomplete.

In the end, it’s the words the participants use to describe the process that show how effective the program can be. Here are some examples:

“It wouldn’t work without the level of trust we have here,” MCEA president Doug Prouty told the NY Times.

“(G)ood teaching is nurtured in a school and in a school system culture that values constant feedback, analysis, and refinement of the quality of teaching.”

While the system is spelled out in detail, what really makes it possible is the level of trust and cooperation that grew out of years of developing a collaborative approach to issues of teacher quality.

In Maryland, they seem to be on the right track.

In New Jersey, we might be moving in that direction.

On December 1, State Senator Barbara Buono introduced two education bills. The first would establish a teacher residency program to replace the present student teaching requirement.

Under the bill, all fourth-year students would be placed in a school district five days per week for a full-semester under the supervision of a district mentor teacher. The students would also take a seminar course during this period that provides a collaborative learning experience and peer discussion with other residency students and with faculty.

The bill would also create teacher mentor positions in each school district. These master teachers would then serve to introduce the teacher residents into the profession over the course of the full semester. It would be a collaborative program and would recognize excellent teachers.

The second bill would require each school district to develop a set of standards by which all teachers would be evaluated, by both peers and principals, based on district curriculum standards. They would be observed four times per year and be required to submit a portfolio of their work. There is no mention of standardized tests, and this process would be determined through collective bargaining. Those are good things. The bill also mentions collaboration and cooperation. Senator Buono’s bills will not be the final word on these issues, but they are a welcome addition to the debate.

The current reform models that rely on threats and stare-downs might make for exciting videos, but they are terrible public policy. If more Governors and Commissioners of Education would commit to the cooperative, collaborative ethic, they would find that educators would more readily commit to implementing bold reforms enthusiastically.

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Newt Gingrich Politics

Newt Gingrich – Fire Janitors, Hire Kids Instead

We normally allow idiotic statements from Republican presidential candidates to fall by the way side. Not every foolish phrase they make needs coverage. Take for example; Michele Bachmann. If we covered every silly statement Bachmann made, EzKool would single-handedly reduce the unemployment rate due to all the extra help we’d need. So we’ll pick and chose what Republican nonsense we cover.

Like the latest from Newt Gingrich.

He’s been on a rampage lately, trying to out-do himself on the turnip truck that is the Republican party. At a Harvard event Friday night, Gingrich spoke about poverty and how labor laws are keeping kids entrapped. So what was the Republican’s solution? Let your kids become Janitors.

“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model,” he said. “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

He added, “You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars.”

 

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