Education and Business
Showtime, D.C.!
Published August 06, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
As it is with every August in the greater Washington, D.C. area, the forecast is a consistent high-80s/low-90s with humidity and a chance of some sort of thunderstorm just about every day, Congress has skipped town for the better part of a month, and anyone still in the city is staring a hole through the tiny little "September" portion of the August page of his calendar. There are things to do, but there's nobody around to help get them done. It's, quite frankly, a hint at what hell might be like on certain days (except Hell doesn't have a Starbucks or a Cosi on every other corner).
In fact, the only people doing much of anything at this point in time are educators. And in the District of Columbia's school system, the prep for the upcoming school year seems to have higher stakes than usual. Chancellor Michelle Rhee has received an enormous amount of attention since arriving a couple of years ago, and her third year might be a "do or die" year in terms of her public image and future success: it's what most teachers consider their "tenure year"; there's a Democrat in the White House with a new Secretary of Education who supposedly has it in him to get things done instead of drafting NCLB II: The NCLBening; and as the Washington Post reported on Sunday, she's hired some contractors to "fix" some of the District's high schools ("A D.C. Schools Awakening," by Bill Turque, 8/2/09).
Those brought in to fix Coolidge, Dunbar, and Anacostia High Schools, referred to as "takeover agents" in the article's subhead, have met with success before in cities such as New York and Los Angeles, taking over schools marred by failing scores under NCLB and turning them around, and the task ahead of them is substantial.:
This summer, Friends of Bedford, which operates a Brooklyn public high school that has become New York City's most successful, has taken control of Coolidge and Dunbar senior high schools. Friendship Public Charter Schools, which serves about 4,000 students on six D.C. campuses, is running Anacostia Senior High School.
Rhee has also started discussions with Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Schools, which operates Locke Senior High School in Los Angeles, one of the city's largest and most troubled schools, about working in the District. Barr recently toured Eastern High School on Capitol Hill, although District officials said discussions are in an extremely preliminary stage.
Anacostia, Coolidge and Dunbar are all stark examples of the challenge [Arne] Duncan describes, places where scholarship and discipline flicker weakly at best. Fewer than a third of students read and write proficiently, according to citywide tests. A 2008 review of Dunbar by District officials said, "Evidence of effective teaching and learning was limited to a few individual teachers." On a single day in November, 19 girls were arrested for fighting.
Today’s “School Reformers” vs Real Change for Education - II
Published July 16, 2009 @ 06:54AM PT
Yesterday I described my ideas for investigating fundamental change in how American schools function, but a big part of this change must come in how we find, recruit, train, and support our teachers.
Teachers are the least respected professionals in America. Oh, lawyers get all the jokes. And doctors - whose professional organization keeps trying to block universal health insurance for the U.S. - are seen as greedy. But George W. Bush's first Secretary of Education called teachers "terrorists," Obama's Secretary of Education lectures teachers on blocking change, and a whole bunch of rich and powerful people think that the teaching profession is so easy that any reasonably smart graduate of college can do it after listening to five weeks of lectures. And then, it sure seems like most of the U.S. population thinks teachers are overpaid and underworked.
I just want to remind everyone that these are the people we have placed in charge of our future. These are the people who change the lives and save the lives of our most vulnerable children.
There's history here. In the years after the American Civil War, as public education spread through the unique U.S. "local pay" system, school boards did not want to pay male salaries to teachers. So teaching switched from a male profession to a female profession at a time when pay for females was deplorably low. Of course, so were rates of female higher education. So teachers, at the beginning of the American system, were disrespected women, paid incredibly poorly, and virtually untrained.
This contrasts, for example, with Europe, where schoolmasters were clergy, and deeply respected members of the community.
As the 19th Century ended, "Normal Schools" (teacher training colleges) were appearing everywhere, and the march toward professionalism had begun. But in the early 20th Century, when doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers - all almost exclusively male - organized themselves as "professional organizations" with real public policy and public relations clout, female teachers were left out.
So today, no matter how much money the friends of Wendy Kopp have, no one like her could get away with suggesting that she could train people to perform surgery with five weeks of summer camp training, or build bridges, or design the new World Trade Center, or even take on a death penalty case in court (she has as much experience with those four skill sets as she has with teaching). But she can put completely untrained young people into life or death control of poor people's children, and can be treated as a national expert on teacher certification and education policy.
A profession, not a temp job
I think many teachers are doing a lousy job. I think much of our teacher training is hopelessly disconnected from the needs of our students. I think students lack a diversity of role models among their educators - African-American males, people with learning and attention "issues" especially.
But I can not imagine that "less training" is the solution - because I understand all which anyone must learn to become good at teaching.
On Twitter one day, a "charter school advocate" wondered why Michigan would not certify Civil War filmmaker Ken Burns to teach history. I asked, "What does Ken Burns know about LD, ADHD, EBD, ELL, AAC, UDL?" Because teaching, as anyone who has attended university and slept through the horrid lectures of an expert knows, is about a great deal more than content knowledge. All "human professions" are - which is why, though I might know much less about the law than many Law School professors, I was probably a better New York City cop than most of them could be.
Like all professions, teaching requires a vast amount of both factual and operational knowledge. It requires a constant update of both of those knowledge bases. And it requires an effective peer mentoring and peer review structure. A teacher needs subject knowledge, needs to know the DSM-IV, needs to know brain research, education research, communications technology research. A teacher needs to be a critical thinker, a creative developer of tools of engagement for a wildly diverse audience, and needs a rather stunning level of observational skills and people skills.
How do we find those people? recruit them? train them? support them? reward them? retain them?
Diversities
I want to find more new teachers from a few under-represented populations. I want more who have done poorly in K-12 schools, more survivors of special education, more from chronically failing groups. I want more who grew up in, who live in and are committed to, impoverished communities. And I want more teachers who arrive later in life, having collected big world experiences.
So step one is creating alternate certification routes which make sense in the building of diversity. This means we stop diverting resources to programs like Teach for America, and invest instead in the following:
Community-based Teacher Certification - A decade ago I ran a project in an inner city school, the kind of place which really struggles to hire teachers - especially at the secondary level. The community was impoverished and the tax base shattered. There were great teachers, but many others had checked out.
But there was a group of adults who held the school together. They were para-pros and bus drivers, cafeteria workers and custodians. They lived in the community. They were committed to the school. They knew the kids, in school and on the street. In many ways they were teachers in every way except content knowledge.
Of course they lacked much of that content knowledge, and they all lacked any kind of post-secondary degree. But I thought then what I think now - I'd rather try to teach community-committed, kid-committed adults the content knowledge they need to teach than try to turn uninterested content experts into teachers.
So let's fund in-community evening teacher-training in all those places which now hire those bright Teach for America corps members. Let's pay community members to get fast-tracked degrees and relevant educational training. And let's create life-long teachers who'll be legitimate role models in their communities.
Second Careers - I'm not interested in finding suddenly unemployed investment bankers who want to hide out in education until Wall Street recovers. But there are a ton of people out there who could make fabulous teachers if they could pause, and train. But America is hard: you quit your job, you lose your health insurance; you go to school, you get charged.
There are alternative certification programs for people like these in certain places, but too many are "district quickies" where the teaching is rote, the curriculum scripted, and the time to grow extremely limited. We need a national program to pay (and insure) these career changers for as long as two years, as they learn about education and spend time every week in schools working directly with students. Only then can they see if this is really the job for them, and only then can "we" see if they've got the people skills to do this complicated job.
The best undergrads - How do we bring our best and brightest to education? And how do we know if those "best and brightest" will be good teachers?
We encourage commitment from freshman year and we insist on time in schools/time with students from the very start.
Now at Michigan State we require time working with "urban" students from the very first education course - at the freshman level. And before our pre-service teachers enter their internship year, they will have probably interacted with more diverse students than a TFA member will during his or her "career" - and so we know who's got the stuff to be a teacher. But we don't have the incentives.
I want to nationalize that kind of time-in-school teacher education while offering tuition and room and board pay-backs for those who become teachers - with those pay-backs starting from the year an undergraduate student began education courses. In other words, try out teaching from the start, and if it works for you, and you work for it - college is free. If we build great teacher education programs, and we get great students to sample them, we'll find our share of great teachers. And if we find and train great teachers, paying for four years of college is a very small price for a nation committed to its children.
Supporting and Keeping Teachers
Finding great teachers, training great teachers, isn't the end. We need to support great teachers. I won't even discuss "merit pay" now, because it remains a ridiculous idea until we decide what "merits" bonuses. America lacks a reasonable track record on that issue.
But we know that teachers cannot continue to be paid the most for working with the easiest students. Teachers in the Bronx cannot earn less than teachers in Scarsdale. Teachers in Los Angeles cannot earn less than teachers in Beverly Hills. Teachers in Gary, Indiana cannot earn less than teachers in River Forest, Illinois. If they do, America's economic system will bring a different set of teachers to those poor communities. We know that.
And we know that we cannot let teachers continue to try to solve their on-the-job problems in isolation. We need to pay them to attend summer institutes and conferences. We need to increase pay to cover more days of in-service training, and we need to make that training excellent, make it differentiated by teacher need, and make it engaging and relevant.
We need to connect our teachers to the information and communication technologies of our times, so they can be comfortable with them and work with them in the classroom. Basic teacher perks must include anywhere broadband access, new computers, and smartphones - and support to learn what they can do.
But we need to do something more. We need to make the teacher workplace a safe place in every way possible. Physically safe and safe for professional experimentation. Because we cannot have teachers who come to work afraid - of students, of administrators, of parents, of tests scores. Just as with students, we can demand more from teachers only if we create high expectations and the kind of space which allows any human to reach their potential.
The role of teachers
If our schools are to be anything better than they are today, the role of teaching must radically change. Teachers will be "guides" rather than an information delivery system. They will function more like librarians than lecturers, helping students find both information and tools. They will need to operate on a critical thinking/creative plane all the time, if we are to get our students to do the same.
That change is going to be difficult. And we need great people, backed by great training and great resources, if we're going to do it.
- Ira Socol
You can find my blog on education, technology, and "special needs" education at SpeEdChange. You can find my books on Amazon.com
Teachable Moment a critical resource for new kinds of teaching
Pharmer's Market: The Cost of Producing "Successful" Students
Published June 26, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
[A big welcome to William Farren with this first guest-post. Bill has long struck me as one of the most original and piercing critics of education around. You can see his "Did You Ever Wonder?" video in the left sidebar, below, for a taste. Bill writes at the radically sane Education for Well-Being. - Clay]
Not long ago, I finished reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, a book about the high price of cheap food and the disconnected thinking that produces it. It made me think that the way we produce food today--that is, ignoring nature's logic in the quest for efficiency--is very similar to the way we produce "educated" citizens. Ignoring millions of years of evolutionary design has resulted in some interesting (if not disconcerting) similarities between the two camps. Both industrial schooling and industrial agriculture seem to have developed pathological ways of looking at pathology.
Whether in the field, the feed lot, or the classroom, issues of low productivity and dysfunction are commonly attributed to the individual, rarely the larger system that controls it. When a farmer curses a corn plant's inability to repel a particular pest, he does so without reflecting on the fact that the plant has been taken out of its natural environment and placed into a man-made monoculture--a hotbed of disease. Plants grown in isolation lose the defenses and nutrients that neighboring species once freely provided. In homogeneous rows designed for the convenience of machinery, a plant's exquisite defense systems become ineffective. "Corrective measures" in the form of herbicides and pesticides end up coating the plants and sterilizing the soil.
Pigs are faulted for biting other pigs' tails as a result of being weaned prematurely and packed together tightly. Animals living in stressful conditions, denied the expression of their once useful behaviors, lose the will to protect themselves in the face of danger. As a consequence, when infection sets in on a chewed tail, pigs are put down. (It's not profitable to nurse them back to health.) Forward thinking hog farmers, in an attempt to stamp out this "vice", noticed that by docking the pigs' tails they could produce a sensitive nub that would force even the most demoralized pig to fight back.
Cows, ruminants which have evolved to eat grasses and fibrous vegetable matter, are today mostly fed a diet of government-subsidized corn. Here again, we ignore nature's design. Not having evolved for such a diet, cattle end up living in a state of permanent illness, propped up and kept in the system by a permanent cocktail of pharmaceuticals. Big Pharma is only too happy to fill in when nature is ignored.
Our education systems, seeking efficiency through standardization and conformity end up creating students who, just like their agricultural counterparts, are no longer well-adapted to their environment. Michael Pollan reminds us that, "Most of the efficiencies in an industrial system are achieved through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over." Like corn planted in a monoculture, removed from the diversity that protects it, or cattle fed an unnatural diet of corn, students today are fed a standardized diet of procedures and reproducible facts. This educational monoculture does nothing to nourish minds that have evolved to seek diversity, novelty and stimulation.
Those numbed by disconnected ideas unrelated to their needs are soon labeled attention-deficient, unmotivated, substandard. Stimulants, antidepressants and impulse inhibitors are used to conform the human mind to a deformed system the same way herbicides, pesticides and antibiotics are used in agriculture's great disconnect. Like the corn-fed cow raised on an unnatural diet of corn, constantly anemic and never well but kept alive through the use of drugs, students raised on disconnected facts, numbing routines, and endless testing often find themselves on the receiving end of a medical prescription. Those who don't have the stomach for such unsatisfying fare, who prefer not to be chemically altered, who'd rather have a more free-range existence, are eventually "counseled out". Simply put: they have not met the required production quotas of a system designed for scalable throughput.
In standardized environments, students with a high tolerance for monotony and the ability to repress their curious gene are deemed the fittest of the bunch. Strangely, curiosity, a trait nature has selected for and which has served us well, seems to be selected against in schools. Blue ribbon students grow their grade point averages en route to graduation and a chance to compete in the "real world". Their farm analogues, purposed for industry, have been selected to tolerate crowding, pesticides, sameness--but most importantly--to be high yielding. The corn farmer with the most bushels per acre is acclaimed for his skill at converting petrochemicals into grain. The feedlot operator's profits depend on how efficiently he can turn grain into meat. The highest ranked schools floss in the knowledge that they can efficiently convert standards and routines into high test scores. Along the way, little thought is given to the soil that is depleted in the field, to the groundwater being spoiled by the feedlot, or to the creativity and innovation being extinguished in the classroom. How productive is all this productivity?
It seems that despite (or maybe because of) our fetish with productivity, many of humanity's most pressing issues seem to be getting worse. The unnatural selection playing out in schools creates what every educational institution's mission statement pledges against: the creation of uncritical, passive, challenge-averse individuals, unwilling and unable to tackle the challenges of the 21st-century. It's simple to blame the students for being unproductive or unmotivated, for lacking curiosity. Indeed, they often are seen as the problem, especially by those who've designed the system. Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, however, reminds us that "the seed of poverty is in the institutions we have made, not in the person." With more effort and an inward gaze we'd see the deeper connections. We'd see students acting rationally in environments that ignore their evolutionary history. We'd understand that avoiding challenges and dropping out are simply logical responses to a system that discourages risk-taking and too often treats curiosity as a challenge to authority.
In their quest for efficiency and value, consumers have failed to notice the creation of false economies. We are now using more energy (in the form of oil and gas) to produce a calorie of food than we ever have in our history. What nature used to do for free through biodiversity and solar power, now requires pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and pharmaceuticals. In the bargain, our industrial agriculture is destroying our two most important environments: our bodies and our planet. Cheap food has led to obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease. Meat marinated in medicine and the effects it has on people (never mind the animals) never seems to make it into the cost-benefit analysis. Polluted air, toxic water and soil depletion are not billed at the supermarket register. Taxpayers, subsidizing the food that malnourishes them, complain little. Taxpayers, supporting educational systems that miseducate them, complain little. What's the true cost of an educational system which "through simplification: doing lots of the same thing over and over", causes mind and spirit to atrophy, suffocating students' natural desire to know? Maybe the biggest loss comes from the creation of generation after generation who cannot tell the difference between a bargain and a heist.
Michael Pollan writes, "Our food system depends on consumers' not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing." Education today requires the same relationship. Educational policies seem to display a meager understanding about the importance of curiosity, awareness, or how we fit into larger systems. Education's checkout scanner--tuition and taxes--provide only a partial accounting of its true costs. Similar to industrial farming, industrial education produces no bargains while diminishing itself in the process. The price of producing a "successful" student may be higher than we think.
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William Farren: Interested in making education an instrument of well-being. Believes that schools, as the most important shapers of mental models, need to seriously retool in an effort to address the problems caused by dysfunctional economic models, biophobia, “nature-deficit disorder” and an immense lack of planetary situational awareness.
Keeps asking himself, "How is preparing students to enter a system that is at war with itself, preparing them for the future?"
More Evidence: Anti-Charter Bias is Reality-Based
Published June 26, 2009 @ 01:04AM PT
In his June 25 Huffington Post column, Gerald Bracey makes a really important point about the argument that charter schools don't drain public schools of funds because "charters are public schools." Responding to EdSec Arne Duncan's recent claim on Democracy Now! (video above) that "opponents often say that charters take money away from public schools. And we all know that's absolutely misleading," Bracey writes:
No, Arne, we don't all know that because it's not true. Some, and Arne appears to be one of them, contend that since charter schools are public schools, then Q.E.D., they don't take money away from the publics. The more usual argument is that the money going to charters is offset by reduced costs at the remaining public schools. But this is not the case. It might be true if all the kids going to the charter left from Mrs. Smith's class in P. S. 101. Then we could fire Mrs. Smith. Even so, the school operating costs, transportation costs, administrative costs, etc., would remain the same. But, in fact, maybe only 3 kids leave from Mrs. Smith's class. Because money is allocated on a per-pupil basis, that's three fewer allocations. Costs are not lowered but resources are reduced. And if the three kids return to the pubic school, as happens in many cases, the money does not come back with them.
As important is Bracey's straight talk about the recent report from Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), funded by many pro-charter camps, that found a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters, according to lead author Margaret E. Raymond, and according to its press release "reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well as their traditional public school counterparts."
Duncan has already committed himself to charters as a major pillar of his ed reform package in his speeches and, worse, in what amounts to his extortion to states to either lift their caps on charters or else disqualify themselves from his $5 billion "Race to the Top" fund. (It must be cool to have Bill Gates' ed reform clout by being given $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to push the Gates and Business Roundtable agenda.) So this study surely makes all his missionary zeal for charters a bit embarrassing. Duncan addressed it by saying,
The CREDO report last week was absolutely a wake-up call, even if you dispute some of its conclusions or its language. The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and even third-rate schools to continue to exist.
Bracey's response:
Wake up call? Arne, was living in Chicago like living in China? Did Daley preclude you from hearing news from the outside world? Charter schools have been found to be underperforming for over a decade.
Moreover, if the CREDO results are true, Arne, why are you blackmailing states with threats to withhold stimulus money unless they permit charters or lift charter caps? The logic here is astonishing. Suppose I invent a medicine and find it helps 17% of people, doesn't do anything for 46% and hurts 37%. Would the FDA approve and tout my medicine? CREDO is a Stanford University-based think tank and its findings were that kids in charters did better than matched peers in publics in 17% of the cases, worse in 37% and neither better nor worse 46% of the time. As I closed my chapter on charters in Setting the Record Straight (second edition), "Charter schools were born of perceived failures in public schools. So, if the charters are doing worse than the publics, where is the outrage about them?" Where indeed, Arne?
It's too soon to tell, but I think it's a safe bet that Duncan will tout the brand name charters - KIPP, Green Dot, and such - as the "good charters," and promote them, and brand independent and local charters as the "second-rate and even third-rate" "bad" charters. Which means those public funds will be drained from public schools into fewer and fewer - and happier and happier - Charter Management Organizations.
Isn't it funny how the Obama administration is pushing for a public health care plan against HMO's, while he's pushing against public schools for CMO's and private charters? If the HMO's wanted a good argument against the government's faith in its ability to provide good social services, it should just point to the Department of Education.
In any case, check out Bracey's article on HuffPo. He grades a few more parts of Duncan's speech that I don't mention here.
Curriculum Watch: Abstinence-Only and Clean Coal Ideologues in Your Classroom?
Published June 24, 2009 @ 05:41PM PT
Just a couple of alerts about ideologues trying to sell their schtick to your children under "re-branded" packages:
1.The National Abstinence Education Association (source):
At an April 29 Capitol Hill briefing, Huber told the room that abstinence-only education is "not a 'just say no' message." "This is not abstinence only, this is a holistic message that prepares and gives students all of the information they need to make healthy decisions," Huber said. In fact, the NAEA isn't even calling its programs "abstinence only" anymore -- now they're "abstinence centered."
Similarly, WhyKnow -- a major provider of abstinence-only education curriculums -- recently changed its name to On Point, its tag line to "Direction for Life" and hired PR company Maycreate Idea Group to help recast its image. Lesley Scearce, executive director of On Point, said in an article for the Chattanoogan that the organization is trying to "get teens involved in new, positive directions that lead to a healthier, more fulfilling life. Without a re-naming, re-branding and re-positioning, this new direction wouldn't have been possible...."
Huber...assured her audience that "abstinence education talks about STDs and the medically accurate information regarding that" and that "abstinence education talks about contraception." But of course, the only time abstinence-only classes will talk about contraception is when they discuss failure rates -- often exaggerating those rates or spreading misinformation about the dangers of contraception. In the past, this tactic has been taken to extremes. In Montana's Bozeman High School, for example, teens in 2005 were taught that condoms cause cancer.
2. The American Coal Foundation (source):
An elementary school curriculum designed by the American Coal Foundation suggests that students learn about the costs and benefits of coal mining by using toothpicks and paper clips to "mine" chocolate chips out of cookies. They also go about "reclaiming" the "land" damaged in the process by tracing the cookies’ outline on graph paper. Costs are to be calculated by the amount of time spent per chip and the expanse of graph paper that needs to be reclaimed.
One of the discussion questions to follow the lesson is: "What do you think are some of the costs associated with mining coal?" (Read the rest...)
Things to keep an eye on....
More Duncanisms
Published June 17, 2009 @ 07:53AM PT
Do I like reading and writing about our Secretary of Education's words and performance? Depressingly, for this once-hopeful Obamaniac, no. I don't. Here's another example of why:
In a recent interview, Secretary Duncan discussed how he went about assembling his team, targeting people like Ms. Melendez who came from modest backgrounds, had a passion for the work, and showed an entrepreneurial spirit—and were willing to take what was likely a big pay cut to work in a federal job. No education policy or district superstars with big egos were welcome, he said.
“If they’re scared off because they won’t make more money ... or if they wanted a certain job title, ... that’s not the kind of person we want,” Mr. Duncan said. “We want people for whom this is a real passion. This is mission-driven work. Everyone is taking pay cuts.”
Ms. Melendez, by the way, is Duncan's appointee for K-12 chief. Her experience?
She got her superintendent’s job, in California’s 30,000-student Pomona Unified School District, through a nontraditional route: She spent a year and a half at a private education foundation before winning a spot in the 2006 Broad Superintendents Academy, which trains emerging district leaders.
So she takes a "pay cut" in the "entrepreneurial spirit" - can we start a wiki of Duncanisms? - via her shortcut to the top on the tuxedo coattails of billionaire AIG crony and ed meddler Eli Broad. Call me crazy, but you'd think people who were "education policy superstars," who spent their lives in classrooms and later in research, would qualify as "passionate" more than the "missionaries" with an "entrepreneurial spirit." People like, you know, Linda Darling-Hammond, who's devoted her life to knowing through research how to improve education, rather than taking a left turn from entrepreneurialism out of some "money + passion = change you can believe in" zeal.
[Update: Tom Hoffman comments that Melendez has decades of classroom experience before her stint as a superintendent, and suggests she deserves a chance. We wish her well. The point I was trying to make here is that Duncan's rhetoric smacks of a sort of anti-intellectualism and pro-entrepreneurialism, and his staff picks reflect that as well. His DoE staffers are overwhelmingly connected more to Eli Broad and Bill Gates than to universities and classrooms.]
In light of all of this, it's no surprise that the new national standards in the works for math and reading are being written not by teachers, not by academics, but by
Achieve, a Washington-based group made up of state policymakers and business leaders; act Inc., the Iowa City, Iowa-based nonprofit organization that runs the college-entrance exam of the same name; and the College Board, the New York City-based sponsor of the sat admissions exam and the Advanced Placement program.
--ed businesses all. Achieve* is run by politicians and businesspeople; Iowa City and the College Board need no introduction, as we've all filled bubbles for them in our careers to show our learning. You can bet none of these entrepreneurs are thinking pay cuts in the long term. Think of the new tests possible with national standards.
Secretary Duncan, if you want "passion" and "mission-driven," why are you excluding the exemplars of those qualities - the people who've devoted their lives to the work, and never had much room in their salaries for pay cuts because it was never about the money for them? They offer value-added qualities that your entrepreneurs don't: life-long experience, knowledge, and dedication.
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*A previous error has been corrected here, which mistook Achieve for a different Achieve. "Achieve" is a popular name for folks in the education business.
Against Teacher Technophobes, and Teacher Messiahs
Published June 12, 2009 @ 02:38PM PT
Patrick Higgins writes an open letter to teachers who hate technology that hits all the notes just so. Share it with those who need it. A taste:
Rather than do what most readers of this letter are expecting me to do and refute your claims, I have to admit that I concur–I hate it too. Yes, I must admit, that comes as surprise, I am sure, but something tells me that our reasons for this shared loathing will not be the same. Let me share mine with you and then we can have an informed discussion to compare and contrast.
First, I cannot stand that I have had to give up hours of painstakingly annotating papers with carefully crafted comments and editing marks. I’ll miss that fullness of self when I return the essays and research papers back to the students and they scurrilously thumb to the last page, jettisoning any comment or edit I made, to find out their total score on the paper.
Secondly, the fact that there will be conversations about topics in my class that occur UNABATED and not in my presence is inconceivable and incorrigible. Thoughts about the content of my class that do not occur during the sanctity of my 50 minute class period belong either as one-on-one conversations with me in the hallway, clearly stated on their homework papers, or held onto in the working memory of the student until the next class period or hallway conversation with me. (Read the rest...)
Chris Lehmann takes on the "work them 'til they drop" model of "good teaching" that is all the rage in the KIPP/Teach for America circles:
We have to come up with a better model of urban school reform than the messianic workaholic model. It is unsustainable and it requires Faustian bargains that no one should have to make. The danger of KIPP... the danger of Dangerous Minds and Stand And Deliver and all the newspaper articles that talk about the unmarried / childless teacher / principal who makes their school their entire life is that it excuses us -- as a society -- from envisioning a healthier model of school.
If we expect teachers to have an ethic of care about our students, we have to have an ethic of care toward our educators. Asking them to sacrifice their lives to teach doesn't get us there. And it certainly doesn't get us toward systemic reform. (Read the rest...)
