Teachers, the New Piñata

A lot of "reforms" center on teacher quality as the critical factor in fixing our education system.  While I think teacher quality is important, I have argued on this blog that teacher quality and success are two different things.   Great teachers may not have the same connection and success with an entirely different class, and thus their success will vary across years.  I have also noted that I don’t think teacher quality is the largest part of why education in America is failing.  That said, it is important, and if we don’t start sending a message that teachers are respected, we risk losing the good ones we have and not being able to replace them.

The Problem

According to nearly every reformist’s model, you would think teachers are the problem with education.  If we just had better teachers, our kids would be fine.  You listen to them and hear about “the evil teacher unions” who favor bad teachers at the expense of children, you hear about the impossibility of firing bad teachers, you hear praise for programs that put 22 year olds with no real qualifications in the classroom, you see teachers being graded publicly for the results of their students’ test scores on one day and having their employment status and pay hanging in the balance.  Does this sound like a desirable job to you?  Yet so many great teachers go in day after day with low pay and decreasing job security. 

To illustrate this differently, imagine you were a foreman on the Ford assembly line.   Imagine that your right to unionize for a safe workplace and reasonable hours was being threatened.  Imagine that far cheaper kids in vocational school were starting to replace other foremen in your plant.  Imagine that your pay was determined by how well your team built cars on one arbitrary day of the year (and imagine that one team mate just got divorced and another’s dad just died and think how productive they might be).  Imagine that your boss did not want you to focus on quality or to innovate, but wanted you to focus on only a few bare-bones basics that were beneath your standards as someone with 25 years experience making quality cars.  That’s what it must feel like to be a teacher.

In summary, teachers are:

n      Unprotected:  Increasingly, teachers unions have come under attack as protecting bad teachers at the expense of student learning.  There are surely corrupt unions and bad teachers, and both are bad things.  That said, this idea that groups that protect teachers are simply unjustifiable is unwarranted.  In Texas, for example, a very powerful conservative group would sit in the back of classrooms and see if a teacher taught anything “controversial.”  Teachers do need protection from arbitrary firing.  Further, they are employed by the government, which means they can be used as a political football.  Given that the ultimate source of power is the government, a union serves to check that power.  Worse, in an era of increased firings and a new evaluation system every year that has real consequences, teachers deserve to have informed representation.  Many great teachers that I know (union affiliated) made the point that it is not in a union’s interest to keep bad teachers: it makes it harder to win gains for all teachers when you harbor a lot of bad teachers and it demoralizes really stellar teachers who may not want to be part of such a union.

n      Losing Job Stability: Because they are paid with taxpayer dollars and almost every level of government is struggling with debt, teachers are at the front-line of those job cuts.  Further, when you look at school leaders making headlines, many have fired teachers immediately upon getting a poor rating on a new evaluation system based largely on tests (Michelle Rhee fired 4% of DC’s teacher force in July 2010, Providence, RI, Mayor Tavares fires nearly 2,000 employees in February 2011, etc.).  Worse, a new trend in closing ineffective schools has teachers fearful that they may not even have a position from year to year, even if they are a great teacher in a bad school.

n      Paid or fired based on things out of their control:  The argument for using tests to judge teachers is that they teach a student, so if a student cannot perform well on a test, it must be the teacher’s fault.  That said, there are so many complications, including the weather and how a student is feeling or how well a student takes tests (not to mention whether the test contains worthwhile knowledge in the first place).  Nevertheless, that one high-stakes day can be used to determine the bulk of a teacher’s rating, their pay, and increasingly their employment status.

n      Denied creativity:  By basing scores on tests, many teachers feel like they run a test-prep program and are increasingly forced to waste time on practice tests and test-taking techniques rather than imparting knowledge or concepts.  Some districts (NYC, San Diego) suffered through the micromanagement of Anthony Alvarado who developed an exact reading curriculum that every teacher had to follow, down to having kids identify what kind of reading they were doing when they read a sentence (it had a mixed effect on scores at certain levels, and it did introduce a system of peer coaches for teachers that would have been good if they were encouraging all-around good teaching, not enforcing a model).  Many teachers have begun to question if they should remain teaching in a system that prioritizes teaching students what to think over how to think.

n      Paid poorly for a tough job: You are likely pretty highly-educated.  You have to work a full day, then go home and grade papers and plan lessons (and any good teacher will tell you that takes longer than delivering the lesson).  You may have to reach out to parents, attend school events, and supervise an extracurricular activity.  On top of that, you have to be accountable for the success of 30 students (some of whom are going through puberty) who change every year and may not be compatible learners to your style of teaching.  Then you have to be accountable to some 60 parents, and the local school board, and your principle, and the board of education.  Then you take home a whopping $40k ($45k if you have a Masters, maybe).  The majority of early childhood educators are not even clearing the poverty line.

n      Denied respect:  A special education teacher who was recently rated as “bad” in New York City (and publicly so at that) based on his special education student’s test scores not matching other students wrote a really hard hitting Op-Ed on the experience.  He notes that by virtue of teaching kids, everything he does from how he dresses to how he teaches is immediately critiqued by his students.  Worse, programs like Teach for America send the signal that any blind ape can teach.  We’re just going to throw these college grads into the worse environments after training for six weeks at a summer camp and let them figure out how to teach for two years before they go to business school.  Sending the message that you are easily replaceable and that your profession is merely a means to an end is a great way to increase people’s job satisfaction, right?  Sadly no: a recent survey of teachers found that in the last couple of years, teacher satisfaction dropped substantially (15 percentage points fewer teachers now feel very satisfied with their job) while the number of teachers that will likely leave the profession nearly doubled to 1/3 of all teachers!

n      Suffering from the pressure: As teachers are forced to pay the price for student outcomes on high-stakes tests or as they are expected to maintain high performance even as class sizes increase or budgets get slashed, it creates a high-stress environment that sets the teacher up for failure, an inability to give personal attention, and very little sleep. As the aforementioned Special-Ed teacher noted, his teaching became secondary to implementing the rather arbitrary requirements of his administrator (who controls his employment).  It isn’t an environment that supports good teaching.  It is an environment that punishes falling short of perfection.

The Implications

These are not all the problems, but even these few have some really devastating implications:

n      High turnover: As more teachers become too stressed, are fired because of a bad testing day, lose faith in the system, or are replaced by Teach for America members that largely leave after 2 years, more money is wasted finding and teaching new teachers.

n      Lost benefits of experience:  A teacher does not continue to become amazing after two to three years of teaching, but if experienced teachers feel unrecognized and leave and the new crops of teachers last (or are expected to teach) only two years, they leave right as they are getting their sea legs.  It is widely known that teachers gain the most in teaching quality in their first two or three years.  That means you have a perpetual crop of teachers stumbling to find their way that leave right as they get good and students are much less likely to benefit from a teacher who is excellent.

n      Lower-level thinking:  If your child’s teacher is teaching to a test (or as is often the case how to take a test), how much is your child learning?  Is it important that your son or daughter select the least bad summary of the topic in a poorly written essay?  That they can calculate the angles of a triangle in 45 seconds?  Some parents and many employers would like a well-rounded student that is able to work in groups, think through problems critically, and be well-rounded.  Very few of life’s problems or workplace tasks come with multiple-choice answers.

n      Exposure to fewer topics:  What is tested is what gets funded and taught, so if your child is not going to grow up to be a calculator, a dictionary or a test designer, they are severely disadvantaged by the push to have teachers teach to the test.

n      Greater inequality:  As the lowest performing students are subject to the whim of random reforms, teachers under fire, and school closures, they suffer from the problems they bring to school and a lack of stability and coherent instruction in the classroom. If they are getting a worse experience, they are more likely to perform poorly, become disengaged, and drop out.  My guess is that this is contributing to the widening inequality we see in our society.

n      Destruction of community:  When school closure based on testing or “poor teaching” is exercised, students lose the bonds they have formed with their peers, their teachers, and their community.  

Act on it!

n      Monitor your child’s homework and see what is being taught.  If you notice that the work is not very enriching and is more test-oriented, speak with the teacher.  If instructions come from higher, speak to the principal or go to a local school council meeting.

n      Don’t fixate on your child’s test scores.  If they do poorly, find out what concepts they find challenging and work with them.  If they are a bad test-taker, they may very well respond to a far different style of teaching and learning.  Worse, you are unnecessarily stressing them in a way that doesn’t encourage improvement.  Tests should extend learning, and these tests don’t.

n      Attend town hall meetings when school administrators want to close schools, punish teachers on untried evaluation systems, or fixate only on test scores.

n      Write to your member of Congress to repeal No Child Left Behind and to reign in Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan’s arbitrary use of discretionary authority to implement similar reforms.

People with the education level of many teachers can take their talents elsewhere.  If we make the profession appear so undesirable, those who might do really well and impact a whole new generation of kids will decide it is not worth it.  I already watched a friend who is amazing with kids, highly educated and organized, and a trained teacher leave the profession because it was too stressful and she was not supported.  I know scores of Teach for America alums who taught two or three years, were probably pretty great by the end, but who have now left the profession.  This doesn't fix our system, and it is unfair to our kids.

 

Speak out!

Tell me about a really great or bad teacher you had.  What made them good or bad?

Some Think Brown v. Board of Education Is A Good Policy, Not a Court Ruling

Previously, I blogged about an article by a Philadelphia man who wrote that poor black kids should be doing more to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  But what if when they reach for their bootstraps, their teachers are more likely to punish them for not paying attention than their white peers?  What if they are more likely to be sent to prison for possibly reaching for drugs or a knife?  What if they are given thinner bootstraps that break more easily?  The metaphor may get old, but it is not far from the reality. Data released by the Department of Education (covering 42 million students in 72,000 public schools) today showed that minority students are more likely to be punished, sent into the correctional system, and to get fewer educational resources than their non-minority peers.

The Problem

According to an article in the New York Times and a post at Education Weekly, the civil rights issues that students face fall into three broad categories:

1. Minorities are punished more.
2. Minorities are referred to law enforcement more.
3. Minorities face fewer resources and lower expectations.

Minorities are punished more

While only 18 percent of the students studied were Black, they represent 35 percent of those suspended one time, 39 percent of those expelled, and 46 percent of those suspended twice or more.  That is to say, Black students were nearly four times more likely to be suspended or expelled than their White counterparts.  Where “Zero Tolerance” policies are in effect, Black and Hispanic students were 56 percent of those suspended or expelled, but only 44 percent of those schools’ student bodies.  In general, the rates of suspension doubled in all K-12 schools from 1973 to 2006 with the rise of Zero Tolerance policies.

Minorities are referred to law enforcement more

While 18 percent of students studied was Black, over 70 percent of those arrested or referred to law enforcement in school were Black.  Apparently seclusion and mechanical restraints are sometimes used for some students with disabilities.  That said, 21 percent of disabled students were Black, while 44 percent of disabled students put in mechanical restraints were Black.  These punishments go beyond the disabled; however, as 42 percent of non-disabled, Hispanic students were punished with seclusion even though they made up only 21 percent of the non-disabled populations.

Minorities face fewer resources and lower expectations

It turns out, high-minority schools also pay teachers less, an average of $2,251 less per year than their low-minority school peers.  Not surprisingly, given the rise of programs like Teach for America, minority students were twice as likely to have teachers with only one or two years of experience.  Most studies show that teachers make the greatest gains in teaching quality after two to three years of teaching. 

Over half of low-minority schools offered calculus, while only about a quarter of high-minority schools did.  Even for less advanced courses like algebra, a disproportionately low amount of Blacks were enrolled and a disproportionate amount failed compared to their White peers.  Minorities accounted for 44 percent of students studied, though only 26 percent of the population in gifted programs.  Half of Black and Hispanic students did not pass federal reading tests, double the failure rate for Whites.  56 percent of 4^th graders held back were Black, while 49% of 3^rd graders held back were Black.  This meant that Blacks were three times likelier than Whites to be held back (Hispanics twice as likely).  The higher rate of retention of Black students occurs in all grades three through ten (they may not occur later in high school because of higher dropout rates among minorities).  Experts note that retention leads to a higher likelihood that a student will drop out.

Pockets of Problems

It should be noted that all of these three problems are not uniformly distributed across the U.S.  Major cities like New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles suffered from much larger disparities in punishments of minority students and in pay levels for teachers in low-and high-minority schools.  Nearly all of Illinois 3^rd graders that were held back were minorities, as opposed to half nationwide. 

The Implications

n      If minority students spend more time being punished, out of school on punishment, or out of the system from dropping out of being sent to jail, then this obviously reduces the amount of time spent learning and widens gaps between White and Minority performance (which we see in the results).

n      We see that minority students are more likely to have a new, inexperienced, and poorly paid teacher.  This may be a direct result of programs like Teach for America, charter schools, and a more pervasive assault on union rights of teachers.  If schools with high minority populations have less experience and lower pay, it may make them less attractive to the best teachers needed to overcome the gaps between Whites and minorities.

n      If minorities are less likely to be exposed to a diversity of content, the amount of opportunities available to them (and likelihood of finding subjects that they enjoy or excel at) is greatly reduced.  Students also tend to fulfill the expectations you set for them, so setting low expectations may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

n      Greater levels of punishment may make minorities feel less welcome at school and affect performance and student retention rates.

n      The cumulative effects of almost every aspect of the educational experience being tilted away from minority students demonstrate that there are some severe systemic inequalities in the very design of the education system that need to be addressed.  My guess is that many of these design flaws stem from incorrectly dismissing the impact of income, parental education levels, home situation, and discrimination on student achievement.

Some Ideas for the Future

1. At the very least, districts ought to equalize resource levels among high- and low-minority population schools and reassess some of the gaps identified in this post.
2. I reiterate a reform to Teach for America that I made earlier that would place these new teachers in schools with high-performing students and allow high-quality teachers to rotate into schools with greatest need.  This would likely improve teacher retention among TFA alums and would also ensure that those kids who most need help are getting access to experienced, quality teachers.
3. Use charters as they were intended to identify unique solutions to problems in the public school system.  In this case, use charters to identify new models and pedagogy for kids that are more likely to score poorly, be placed on a lower track, be reprimanded, be sent to prison, or be held back a grade.
4. We need to use incentives to get and keep good teachers in the most lacking schools.
5. It would be ideal to find a productive substitute to suspensions and expulsions that pull the most troubled students out of classes and make them fall further behind.  Perhaps we assign them to a community service project or to a special program like the design program I identified in my post on the “hands on classroom.”

Speak out!

1. What are some ways you see that inequality is present in the schools system?  How does it affect students? What solutions do you see to policies that entrench inequality?
2. What alternative programs can you think of to Zero Tolerance policies that might improve student discipline without compromising their learning?

Reverse Robin Hood: Poor Districts Pay More, Get Less

Sometimes there are some really egregious local issues that deserve national attention.  This one comes from Pennsylvania, and I hope some of you will take some action.  There is a convenient narrative that poor districts pay less in taxes, so their schools get less funding.  There is another narrative that per pupil spending on education is too high.  Both can be true, but neither is the whole story.  In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, the story is quite different (Montgomery is right outside Philly, where the author of "If I were a poor black kid" that inspired this post was writing).  According to an article in the Pottsdam Mercury, low income districts are absorbing some of the largest budget cuts. 

The Problem

The article discusses a recent report released by the Education Law Center (ELC) that advocates for low-income students in PA.  The report has analyzed funding, which was cut to the tune of $1.5 billion since 2008.  According to their analysis "school districts with a low income population and high property tax rate, like Pottstown, have absorbed up to 10 times more of the $1.5 billion in cuts to state education funding than wealthier districts."  Worse, more cuts are slated and the most recent budget proposal calls for them to hit districts like Pottstown.  

The ELC analyzed Montgomery because the county is home to some of the best and worst in the state. Half of the ten districts with the smallest cuts and "all but one of the districts faring the best under Corbett’s budget are located in southeast Pennsylvania and read like a who’s who of wealthy locales." Not surprisingly, these districts also are among the lowest in student poverty concentrations in PA. 

Why It Matters

What is interesting about this policy is that districts have many low-income students, but some very high property tax rates.  An argument that I hear a lot, "It is not fair for the wealthy to subsidize students in schools their kids can't use," thus doesn't apply here.  Even if you buy into this argument and it applies, these allocations serve to entrench systemic inequalities:

• Low income parents have fewer resources to provide educational opportunities and programing for their kids after school, which leads to decay of previous learning and less overall time spent learning (in and out of school). 
• Low income parents tend to work more hours, be more likely to be single parents, and have less time to allocate to their children's education (as say to putting food on the table or trying to get a table) 
• Low income families tend to have fewer ties to the education system and the benefits of education, thus reducing resources to their schools can send very negative signals.  If you already doubt the value of school and see that your schools are not well funded or effective, then you are more likely to feel like your beliefs have been reaffirmed. 
• Lower budgets cut the amount of time that schools can offer programming and the amount/types of alternative programs they can offer.  That means that poor children are exposed to fewer things, are less likely to find topics that engage them, and are more likely to be routed into an unfilfilling career or track. 

Are these guaranteed outcomes? Absolutely not.  All the same, we should be very concerned as a nation when some of our most disadvantaged students are forced to face even more barriers to success than those that poverty and societal scorn already place upon them.   This is not an argument for higher per pupil expenditures. This is an argument about being fair in how difficult cuts need to be made.  This is an argument for allocating resources and talent in ways that maximize the outcomes at a systemic level.  You can't deny that investing more in students whose parents already provide a lot of support for education and extracurricular programming is somewhat wasteful in a budget-scarce environment.

Act on it!
 

• Write Governor Corbett and ask him to justify and reconsider this regressive policy
• Email: Governor@pa.gov
• Call: 717-787-2500
• Submit an Inquiry Online: http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt?open=514&objID=1072219&parentname=ObjMgr&parentid=11&mode=2.
•  Contact the PA representatives who might change the coming budget:
• Senate Education Committee: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/cteeInfo/cteeInfo.cfm?cde=23&body=S
• Senate Finance Committee: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/cteeInfo/cteeInfo.cfm?cde=25&body=S
• Montgomery County's General Assembly Members: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/findyourlegislator/county_list.cfm?CNTYLIST=MONTGOMERY 
• Write your local school board or legislator or mayor/governor and inquire about how funding is distributed and how they make cuts when they face budgetary scarcity.  I guarantee this is not isolated to Montgomery County, PA. 

Speak Out!

• Post some ideas for letters you might write to these officials to ensure more equitable funding for schools. 
• Have you seen this in other areas in the US? Call them out!  

How do teachers measure up?

The is a big push to improve teacher accountability and rating systems, and with good reason.  Many teachers get almost no feedback, rated either "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory."  Feedback is often not continuous and does not feed continuous improvement: the feedback may occur once a year, it may be sporadic, and it may be reduced in frequency as one becomes a more experienced teacher.  There is often a very limited amount of "data" that goes into evaluations, and there may often be a limited amount of evaluators feeding into the assessment.

Michelle Rhee's The New Teacher Project proposed a new framework for teacher evaluations (pdf) that is largely based upon her very pro-charter, pro-standardized testing agenda.  It has a lot of great points, but it also is based upon some pretty egregious flaws.

The framework is based upon the idea that every teacher should be excellent, that several years of excellent teaching can bridge the gap between poor and wealthy students' performance, and that teachers need to be evaluated in a more rigorous way that focuses most heavily on the improvements made by their students.  On its face, this sounds very reasonable.

The  framework opens by citing a variety of studies that show how important great teachers are, which is certainly true.  Two of the studies she cites, however, paint an incomplete picture:

1. A 2006 study y Gordon, Kane and Staiger found that "having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row could be enough to close the black-white test score gap."
2. A 2002 study by Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain found that "having a high-quality teacher throughout elementary school can substantially offset or even eliminate the disadvantage of low socio-economic background."

These two studies, which are perfectly valid on their face, leave out some important underlying assumptions:

1.  Teacher quality is static - Northwestern University's Helen Ladd (pdf) evaluated teachers (2008) in the highest and lowest quintiles according to student assessments and found that most highly-effective teachers one year were not highly effective the next and many ineffective teachers were no longer ineffective the next.
2. An effective teacher is effective for all groups of students s/he teaches - If you are given a class that is significantly less prepared than the last one you taught, your performance may not improve and even a great teacher might fail to produce the desired gains.
3. Student gains and failures can be universally attached to the performance of a given teacher - Economist Jesse Rothstein surveyed data for 99,000 5th graders in NC and performed a statistical test asking "What effect do fifth grade teachers have on their students' 4th grade performance?"  Obviously, the effect should be 0, as they had yet to teach the kids.  Nevertheless, he tested three different "value added" measures and in all cases found that fifth grade teachers had an enormous impact on their students' test scores before they had even taught them for a day. There is obviously a flaw with the use of such value-added tests if such preposterous results are statistically significant. 
4. That the results of a good teacher can be added as the two studies suggest - Diane Ravitch notes in her The Death and Life of the Great American Education System that "nowhere was there a real-life demonstration in which a district had identified the top quintile of teacher, assigned low-performing students to their classes, and improved the test scores of low-performing students so dramatically in three, four, or five years that the black-white test score gap closed." 
5. Bridging the socio-economic gap is sufficient and means that our students are receiving a quality education:  plenty of white students from higher income backgrounds are doing terribly.  Bridging the achievement gap between rich and poor is a start, but certainly not the "destination" if a quality, world-class system is our goal. 

Now, the framework then continues with six key characteristic of a "good evaluation system":

1. All teachers should be evaluated at least annually;
2. Evaluations should be based on clear standards that prioritize student learning;
3. Multiple sources of data should be considered, especially those measuring student's academic growth;
4. Multiple rating levels to better differentiate teacher effectiveness;
5. Rating encourages regular, ongoing, and  constructive feedback; and,
6. Evaluation outcomes must have teeth, that is they should feed into teacher employment, bonuses, and pay.

I agree in general with the first five, though I see some constraints to the sixth characteristic.

All teachers should be evaluated annually

I think the more feedback a teacher can get from different evaluators during different types of lessons over the course of a year, the more useful a tool can be.  This seems like a great basis for an improved evaluation system that all teachers can use to improve.

Base evaluation on clear standards, emphasize student learning
Any evaluation, to be fair, should be based upon very clear standards with limited room for interpretation.  I agree also that they should be based on student learning, but I would urge caution in operationalizing the concept.  I think having impartial master teachers and principles observing or conducting a pop quiz to see if lesson plans are having an effect on a student's learning would get at this a lot better than using standardized tests.  Further, it would give teachers the freedom to teach a diversity of lessons that cover materials that are of extreme import but not necessarily on a standardized test.  The document does identify some opportunities like having a master teacher come in and note how many kids raise their hand or seem to "get" the material presented, though it does express a lot of support for the use of standardized tests.

Multiple sources of data should be used, focused on student growth measures
Diverse data--both in type and person evaluating--is critical to getting a more balanced assessment of a teacher's performance.  The focus on standardized tests is problematic as student performance on tests can vary and these tests may not test material that is all that worthwhile to know (or they may not test many subjects).  There is a further issue: a successful goal, according to the Harvard Business Review, is one that is concrete, that you can identify clearly when you have fulfilled it, and that is not dependent upon others.  Setting a goal for teachers that is dependent upon someone else (their students) is somewhat unfair.  Worse yet, these tests are not designed to test teacher performance.  They do not have the external validity to be misappropriated in this manner.  Create a standardized test for teachers, as that would at least have the validity necessary to make them an appropriate measure.  Additionally, if a test is administered mid-year, are the gains (or lack thereof) attributable to the current teacher or the previous ones? This is not clear. As I noted, I would prefer multiple observations and student and parent feedback.

Multiple Rating levels and on-going feedback
This is indeed preferable because it does improve upon evaluations to make them a tool for teacher encouragement and feedback rather than a narrow filter to remove only the worst teachers.  Further, if the ratings are meaningful and accompanied by concrete feedback, it gives teachers the actual tools to look at how they might improve and for the school to perhaps pair up that teacher with resources to help on their weaknesses. The more regular, the better.

Tie teacher ratings to their pay and employment 
All of the studies that I noted earlier should make us very cautious about this.  If teachers drop in and out of the highly-effective category (and the ineffective category) between years, then you need to be cautious about wantonly firing or punishing someone for doing poorly one year or rewarding someone who anomalously does brilliantly one year.  I think a more appropriate sixth metric would be to use student data and teacher performance data to try to determine what kinds of students a teacher teaches most effectively for future class assignments to try to set up student and teacher alike for success.  I recognize that this may not be realistic or might be logistically quite challenging, but it might be interesting to see what limits there are to this idea in practice.


In the end, my preference is for a rating system that looks a little different:

1. Monthly evaluations by an independent master teacher (15%)
2. Quarterly evaluations by school administrator/principals with experience in the classroom (15%)
3. Semester evaluations by external education evaluation experts (15%)
4. Round robin evaluations in which teachers evaluate their peers (10%)
5. Amount and quality of efforts made by the teacher to improve on areas identified in previous observations (15%)
6. Evaluations of student portfolios that look at growth on the subjects taught (10%)
7. Use of interviews to get randomized student and parent opinions of teacher (10%)
8. Performance on testing that can be attributed to that specific teacher, is included in that school's curriculum for the year, and that is value-added in nature (10%)

The weightings are my personal preference, but I think they reflect the importance of regular, directed feedback being used by a teacher for continuous improvement.  Ultimately consistently bad teachers should be counseled out, but those teachers who have a decent record of doing well should be retained and efforts should be made to match them with students with whom they will succeed (insomuch as is possible while still giving the most difficult to teach students access to quality teaching).

Speak out!

How would you evaluate teachers?

What are some interesting evaluation methodologies or criteria that you have seen/experienced?  

The Hands-On Classroom

My mom was a waitress when I was growing up.  I watched as her hard work, dedication, and skills were undervalued by customers, employers, and society at large.  When I picked up (does it count as picking up on a Kindle?) a copy of the book The Mind at Work by Mike Rose, I felt like it vindicated my mom and people who work as hard as she did with no recognition.  The book takes the reader through a host of blue collar professions (including waiting tables) and identifies all of the different skills and intelligences that these workers use on a daily basis.  It also showed some of the dangers of making the classroom too cerebral, as students lose the ability to execute a project fully, to work in groups, to engage with their environment on a concrete level, and to respect all people around them that contribute to the economy and society.  It also showed how our devaluing of the mental prowess behind some "menial" professions causes us to develop vocational training that is just as mind-numbingly bad as the fact-based education that "more successful" peers receive, stripping it even of the practical value it is supposed to have.

As I have argued before, there is a strong reason to have more practical, hands-on elements to all students' education.  For me, this includes a variety of things from languages to the arts to computing to vocational education.  As I noted, they improve test scores and higher order thinking (problem solving, creativity, etc.) and strengthen teamwork and community service.  In fact, my lack of a shop class left me restless for work to do with my hands, and I am really excited to begin wood-working classes this year to fill this gap in my education.  That said, I am excited by two different models that attempt to integrate the vocational with the "intellectual" and at the same time pull student learning outside of the school and into the community.

The first model (video) comes from Emily Pilloton, a designer who relocated to Bertie County, NC, with her husband and was inspired to add new skills and new life to her new community by teaching her craft.  Initially, Ms. Pilloton saw the community as a place ripe for her practice, lacking architects and designers.  She redesigned spaces within the school (like the computer lab) to make them more dynamic spaces in which the students interacted with one another rather than mindlessly receiving a brain dump.  Then she decided to share her talents by creating a unique, hands-on design course in which students learned how to identify a need in their community, practice developing the idea, design a prototype to see if it was viable, and then build something for their community. They were hired using private funds to carry out their projects.  The community became the classroom, kids were learning practical skills and earning money, and community members could see the concrete results of what the class was doing.  Their first project is reclaiming an abandoned property to create a farmers market.  The next two projects are a bus station and a care facility for the elderly.  It is nothing short of inspiring, and kids that are not as engaged by classroom learning have really taken to the program.

The second model (pdf) is called the Studio School Trust (html), a form of charters in Great Britain that takes the same concept (video) but makes it the entire educational experience for kids age 14 to 19.  Studio schools recognized that so many children don't learn well in an artificial setting and noticed a widening gap between the labor market and education system.   The model thus makes a school that operates in concert with local business, teaching children using projects.  The schools get kids knee-deep in their learning and teach them CREATE skills (Communication, Relating to people, Enterprise, Applied learning, Thinking, and Emotional intelligence).  The schools are committed to making children ready to work without sacrificing their ability to go on to university, should they so desire (something Ms. Pilloton also highlighted about skills in her classes). 

Many people may be quite surprised to see me advocating for a class and school system that are effectively charters, given my previous critique of charter schools.  I obviously argued very passionately that I think that applying charters on a systemic level is largely unproven to bear fruit and has the effect of segregating kids so that the worst performers and most challenged students are ghettoized.  I further find the whole concept uselessly duplicative: why create a parallel, supposedly-better school system when you could just fix the one that already exists?  That said, my problem largely comes from how charter advocates have forgotten why charters exist: charters were supposed to be monitored laboratories that generated unique models that could be applied in the public school system (not to create a private system that would destroy public and high-performing private education like Catholic schools).  I think these models have it right because they identify a specific set of the population that doesn't do well in traditional schools and offer a program that is tailored to their needs without giving up on their success.  Further, success in these models is well-rounded in a way that most vocational schools are not designed to be. 

To update my previous opinion: charters are not the problem, policy-makers that have mistaken the bottle for the Robitussin are the problem.  It's not the new bottle that makes you better, it is the different type of medicine that suits your particular cold that does.  Charters have enormous potential, and I LOVE how they bring the community and big tranches of private money into educating kids who really need our support.  That said, they are not systems, and they are not an alternative to reforming the schools that already exist.  They should, however, inform how we educate a diverse child population with its diverse educational needs.  I think these particular models highlight that the death of shop classes and truly vocational education (not remedial "you are going to fail at life" education) have pioneered something that can be scaled for some kids and that might improve our whole system by adding some hands-on components to more traditional curricula. 

As Marge Piercy says in her poem "To Be of Use," "The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real."  Our children aren't pitchers to be filled endlessly with facts, isn't it time we gave them work that is real?

It Ain't Easy Being Upwardly Mobile and Poor

As you may recall, I grew up poor and ended up going to college.  Surely, that’s success, right?  My investment in education and motivation behind this blog stem from the belief that by writing about these issues we can craft a better system that ensures that more people go from poor to more.  I have to say, though, that I read a rather disappointing article in Jezebel that highlights a Cornell study.  The study shows  that poor people who go to college are less likely to marry than rich people who go to college or poor people who don't get advanced degrees.  Especially guys (oh boy...is it stuffy in here or is that just my college degree laughing at me?).  This post will be less study-based and a bit more of a personal reflection on some of the largely unconsidered barriers to poor people succeeding.  It is no small task providing the ideal system that promotes equitable advancement through education, but even if you did that, it is no guarantee that people will (or perhaps should) jump to take advantage of it. 

There are a lot of impediments to a poor person that make you really give pause as you move up the educational ladder.  One of the big ones is that a lot of the information you learn has no relation to your background.  As my European History teacher said, “this class is the story of DWG” (dead white guys).  One of my favorite poems "Prière d'un petit enfant nègre" (Prayer of a little black boy) from Haiti provides the thoughts of a young Haitian boy who laments going to the French schools that talk about history from places he will never know and that take him from walking under the mangroves with his dad.  If you are not wealthy and white, it is really hard to connect.  It’s not that you can’t relate to or learn from people that are unlike you, but when everyone you learn about is remarkably similar to each other but completely different from you…well, it sends a signal.  It says that history doesn’t remember your kind.  School reinforcing your smallness while you are trying to escape it is not the greatest encouragement that you are going to go far.

Even if you, as I and many others have, get past your historical absence from textbooks, you then have to deal with a feeling of extreme guilt.  Every time you mess up, it is wasting all the sacrifice of your family.  When I went to Stanford, I was suddenly in an upper-middle class environment that I wasn’t paying for.  Even as I lived relatively frugally, I’d get to go on ridiculous things like ski trips and wine tasting that I wasn’t paying for.  It is hard to not feel guilty when you are skiing in Tahoe (and trying not to mow down defter six year olds on the slopes) while your single mom is heading to work at the crack of dawn to make ends meet.  Guilt is a powerful impediment to enjoying your success and to even viewing it as success.

There is also the intense separation of points of views that creates big tension between your past and future relationships.  As you get more educated, people start to resent you for being condescending or “thinking you are better.”  It is funny because they encourage you to get an education, but once you try to encourage them, it sounds like meddling or judgment.  To have friends or relatives think you are some out-of-touch, paternalistic know-it-all is a strong disincentive.  In minority communities, this can manifest itself as “being too white.” Meanwhile, you start to resent them for their stubbornness, for refusing to acknowledge that studies have shown that “x” will make their lives so much better.  In this, you and the person who once encouraged you both start to question the wisdom behind upward mobility.

The separation is not just the tension of your differing educational levels, but also of your changing interests.  Typically, you are educated outside of your community if you are an upwardly-mobile poor person (my high school was 12 miles from home in Chicago, my grammar school about 6).  My education got me excited about languages and foreign countries, and conscientious travel is not all that big where I come from.  I really care about buying local.  My mom and I have constant spats about it because she’s very right when she says, “It’s nice that you can afford to buy at small places, but I need to go to Target.”  Likewise, I’m right when I say, “Yes, but places like Walmart are shown to kill jobs in Chicago and you are hurting people just like you.”  It’s an awful catch-22, and it’s an impediment.  What the hell do you talk about at Thanksgiving that won’t provoke a fight?  I thought that was the job of a drunk uncle, anyway.

It is also really hard when people you knew can’t understand what you are doing with your life.  You are an “international something or other” major who wrote a very long paper on “something to do with Arabs.” “Yes, I did write my honors thesis in International Relations on Iraqi refugees.”  “Right, and what is this diplomat thing again? I know you’ve told me, but I can’t remember.”  Then try explaining to people “I work on promoting the labor provisions of free trade agreements.” (blank stares abound).  The thing is that people suspect you are successful, but all the people you really want to impress can’t understand well enough to be fully proud because they get what you’ve accomplished.  It's even worse because they expect you to be knowledgeable about EVERYTHING, and you suddenly get questions like "The doctor says I should get a biopsy, but I don't know...what do you think?"   Try responding, "Ask me about the Democratic Peace Theory, not medicine."

What’s worse is that in the end, you are changed but you don’t fit into your new life so well either.  Your middle class friends talk uninformedly about how to help the poor—your people, what YOU yourself once were—or what poor people need.  People laugh at you when you say that you were on welfare as a kid and were attacked by gangs on the way to school because “what? You went to Stanford, give me a break!”  Worst of all is that gnawing feeling that you’ve changed.  You know you can’t go back, but you can’t fully buy into your new class.  You will buy expensive coffee and think with disgust, “damn, when did I become such a bougie tool?” And when you don’t fit in, that means it is harder to find someone to relate to where you are coming from or where you are heading to, and that is why the Jezebel article notes the upwardly-mobile poor have such a hard time marrying.  

So, to be poor and then successful, you need to overcome leaving your neighborhood, inviting a widening gap between you and everyone you knew, learning new things that you can’t use to help those who once encouraged you, feeling perpetually out of place, and constantly questioning yourself.  Put that way, it doesn’t feel like success.  Plus, if it is success, then why do those who encouraged you have such a hard time with so much of it?   If you are just changing to fit society’s model of success, are you not just a pawn like all the other poor people who feel they lack any control in their government or society?  

These questions don’t get raised in policy circles because poor people rarely get that entry and because these are frankly hard emotions to just put out there.  Class makes people very uncomfortable, so they also don’t often want to hear these kinds of things.  Worse yet, because you escaped and so many others did not, you may not be the best voice for those other poor…maybe you too are different?  

So the next time you offer a voucher to a parent who doesn’t take it, the next time you hear about high drop out rates in charter schools with great results, kids who reject scholarships to stay close to home or not go to college…maybe you’ll understand why.  Maybe you will also get why the battle to improve our education system is not just logistical, political, and systemic…it’s also psychological.

Electives aren’t Elective for Artists and Diplomats

As funding gets tighter and tighter, more and more schools are inclined to cut funding for music, the arts, foreign languages and a whole host of other courses that are “nice” but “not necessary.  It makes practical sense, the argument goes.  Kids surely need to measure a triangle or identify adverbs before they learn another language or how to paint, right?  As you may have guessed, I believe that this reflects a value judgment more than a universal truth. 

As standardized testing increases and only makes schools accountable for Reading and Math scores, everything else (including science, history, shop, gym, and other more traditional “staple” courses) goes out the window.   But what about things you can’t test? What about kids with a special aptitude that we are not fostering that are instead written off as failures because they don’t know the Pythagorean theorem?  What about the classes that reinforce or deepen core skills? What about the classes that teach practical skill over theory?  It’s not all fluff, and the treatment of electives as superfluous should be of grave concern.  This post will look at (but not exhaustively) some benefits from these elective courses, look at how they might be incorporated into other courses when budget shortfalls and shortsighted policymakers combine forces to cut these courses, and will hopefully start a conversation about how to rethink how we approach electives for the sake of our kids.

Electives Reap Large Reawards

The most obvious benefits of electives are for people who are not entering a field directly tied to math or reading, and these are not all starving artist careers.  If your child wants to be a diplomat, foreign language should be a centerpiece of their education (sorry Madeline Albright).  If your child wants to be a physicist, well, a good start would probably be a physics class.  If your child wants to be a product designer, architect, medical researcher, lab technician, etc., they’d benefit from science classes in a lab or drafting classes in a studio.  If your child wants to be a chef or baker, perhaps home economics classes would shine at the forefront.  If your child wants to be a carpenter, mechanic, plumber, electrician, furniture maker or construction worker, shop classes would be key (right along side some science and geometry).  If your child wants to be the next Yo Yo Ma, a healthy dose of musical instruction will be key.  

That said, the benefits of elective courses goes above and beyond the obvious exceptions to students that don’t fit the school-college-knowledge worker path.  All students can benefit from elective courses. Here’s how:

Studying a Foreign Language

·      Carolyn Taylor-Ward’s Ph. D. dissertation found that students who had learned a foreign language in the third grade consistently outperformed their peers who had not on standardized tests, including on the English reading/writing portion. 

·      A Stanford University study found that high schools with a higher proportion of students enrolled in foreign language classes tended to have higher levels of annual performance (except in the case of schools with the highest incidence of poverty or English-language learners).

·      A Canadian study noted that students of foreign language tend to acquire and remember all information faster than their peers and tend to perform better in tasks requiring critical thinking. This holds true even for kids with cognitive disabilities.

·      Given the need to reach a global audience (or a more diverse American audience), when competing for a job, a candidate with a foreign language will—all other skills equal—be more likely to get the job and to help a company or agency reach a broader array of stakeholders.

Studying Art and Music

·      The American Youth Policy Forum just completed two studies that found that students, particularly poor students, that study the arts tend to do better on standardized tests.  Further, they found that 80% of students in schools with arts programs get all As and Bs while this is only true of about 65% of students with no arts education. 

·      Students of the arts may be more likely to go to a good college because as the amount of time a child studies art in high school increases so do BOTH their SAT Mat hand Verbal Scores. 

·      A Georgetown University Masters thesis found that children who take arts classes stay in school longer and are less likely to drop out of school.

·      Children in Tucson schools have proven far more engaged and focused when taking music and dance classes, and they also are using their whole bodies, which is of critical importance as diabetes and childhood obesity burgeon across the U.S.

Studying Shop and Home Economics

·      A recent Education.com article highlights several benefits of shop classes, which teach kids to focus, to carry out a project, to develop a concrete skill that can be directly used as a job, and to work in teams.  Additionally, these classes reinforce “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) course content.

·      Retooled shop classes like those mentioned above in Tucson have actually involved 21^st century processes and provide direct training for a high-tech manufacturing sector that is expected to add some 110,000 jobs in the next five years.

This is just a sampling of some of the electives we are watching go out the window, but their potential to improve the critical thinking, career prospects, practical skills, and EVEN standardized test performance, grades, student retention, and college readiness of our children should give you pause before allowing such classes to be cut.  That many are directly tied to greater improvements for the poorest students is of critical importance to closing the so-called “achievement gap” between white and minority students.

Electivizing the Core: Solutions in a Budget-Scarce Scenario (Act on it!)

The benefits above suggest that schools rich in these elective programs create students that master other subjects better, are more job-ready, are better able to think creatively and work in teams, and have a stronger love of learning.  I think the best solution is to do what Tucson did and directly increase the use of such programs from the top down and from the bottom up.  That said, for schools or districts that find increasing funding to such programs politically or economically impossible, there are some possible solutions that increase use of electives without touching the core curriculum:

1.     Use foreign languages to teach all subjects.  Children will learn English at home or around their town, so if they are taught every subject except possibly English or another foreign language in say Spanish or Arabic from a young age, that child will be much more likely to be bilingual and to master their course content at the same time.

2.     Use public-private partnerships to have companies sponsor high-tech shop programs.  These programs could occur afterschool or during holidays and could be tied to internships that more directly bridge the gap between the education system and job market and that need not be “remedial” or “fluff” courses.

3.     Encourage and support teachers in using elective-based lesson plans:

a.     A colleague of mine had her understanding of Africa’s changing map and history awakened when her father made her draw maps of Africa annually and she SAW the geopolitical changes that were occurring and was inspired to understand why what she was drawing had changed.

b.     Use shop, drafting or art lessons to illustrate principles of geometry.

c.      My Sophomore British Literature teacher had us act out scenes from literature or make newspapers or songs to illustrate a particular work or concept.

d.     My 1^st Grade teacher taught geography by asking us to learn key phrases in the languages of different countries, preparing or sampling food from those countries, dancing or celebrating holidays in those countries, etc. through a unit called “Tommy’s Travels.” Our mythical peer Tommy traveled around the world, and we’d reenact what he might have encountered.

4.     Use volunteer organizations like Habitat for Humanity or KaBOOM! to build these kinds of hard skills in students while improving their community and strengthening their ability to carry out a project, 

5.     Invite programs like Junior Achievement or Future Problem Solvers (both of which I did and found incredibly rewarding and helpful for engaging in teamwork and creative thinking) into Social science, science, or English courses.

Speak out!

Can you share a personal experience from a “non-core” or “elective” class that shaped your life?

What kinds of lessons have you used, experienced or heard of that creatively integrate arts, language, shop, problem-solving or other alternative classes into other subjects or parts of the school day in a creative way?