Assigned reading

Your assigned reading:

Andy Rotherham on "Why Chicago Matters"

 In practice the city gave a lot of ground on key issues to get kids back in school. Sure, in 2014 thirty percent of teachers evaluations will be based on how much students learn. But that’s state law in Illinois! It’s illegal for the contract to do less. Evaluation results will not be especially consequential anyway. Mediocre teachers can keep their jobs year after year and the great teachers in Chicago will not be protected during layoffs, which will still be determined largely based on seniority rather than effectiveness. It’s unclear meanwhile how the city is going to afford the 17 percent raise it committed to – especially at the same time Chicago’s teacher pension fund is nearing insolvency.  The city won on some issues, too, by protecting principal autonomy and maintaining a sensible policy on guaranteed jobs when there are layoffs because of the downsizing everyone can see coming. But, overall it’s hard to see the agreement as anything but a substantial victory for Lewis and one that will resonate far beyond Chicago.

Robert Pondiscio on "Hobson's Choice" 

  It would be ironic to be in the business of education and have little faith in parents’ ability to make an informed choice—or to correct course if that choice proved untenable.  My personal bottom line, speaking only for myself, is that choice is an intrinsic good.  I like exercising school choice for my child and I want you to have the same options.  And let’s face it, education is fundamentally coercive: you have to educate your child.  Some latitude in how you go about it is to be encouraged. 

Dana Goldstein on David Colman as "The Schoolmaster"

But what has proved most controversial is Coleman’s unilateral vision for American students, of college as the goal and a college-prep curriculum as the means. In public education, a new reform is always coming down the pike. Longtime educators develop a healthy cynicism about which grand policy ideas will trickle down to classrooms and which will sputter during implementation or simply go out of fashion. But David Coleman’s ideas are not just another wonkish trend. They have been adopted by almost every state, and over the next few years, they will substantively change what goes on in many American classrooms. Soon, as Coleman steps into his new position as the head of the College Board, they may also affect who applies to college and how applicants are evaluated. David Coleman’s ideas, for better or worse, are transforming American education as we know it. 

Scattered thoughts -- Cowboy Troy faces a retention crisis

Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk makes seven interesting points about the Chicago teachers' strike. This one stood out: 

This is a clash of values.  This Ed Trust statement calls out the teachers union for low-balling expectations for kids. It’s a good illustration of how underneath the posturing and rhetoric and the substantive disagreements Chicago is really about what kind of school system they city is going to have – the old kind, which was a quasi-jobs program or the new type where performance and execution matter most. In that way the strike is an important national moment.

Realizing that for many, many years, public schools were as much about the adults' employment as anything is critical to understanding why we find our system in its current shape. 

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Sara Mead makes a great point about teacher quality within schools:

First, policy conversations about equitable teacher distribution tend to focus almost exclusively on teacher distribution across schools, and how to get more effective teachers working in high-poverty schools. That's important. But research suggests that most of the variation in teacher quality occurs within rather that between schools. There is also evidence that the kids who most need good teachers tend to get the short end of the stick when it comes to within school teacher distribution--exactly the opposite of what we want to have happen. If we're serious about ensuring effective teachers for all students, we need to engage issues of teacher distribution within as well as across schools.

My experience in schools before my current one, especially when I taught in a large, district high school in Philly, backs this up. My class assignments during my rookie year were OK, but many other first-year teachers I knew were given classes with unusually high numbers of repeaters or just students with reputations as difficult to teach. 

Combine this with a salary structure that lowballs younger teachers and one can see why half of all teachers quit in the first five years.  

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Per all of the twittering about MNPS playing chicken with the state, I kept thinking about this one hit wonder:

This isn't a political statement. I just wanted an excuse to post a Cowboy Troy video.

The importance of the mundane

Sorry for the hiatus -- I still haven't mastered this whole "teach, blog, and have a life" thing. Not that I haven't been writing. I just find that many of the things I've written but not published are half-formed ideas or fully-formed duds.

No promises about what I do publish, either.

Anyway, a vignette from today and the realization it inspired:

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I've started directing a play after school with a cast consisting of students from the charter school where I teach and a district school. They've got a stage; I like directing, so it works out. It's a good group of kids. They get along with each other and are committed to doing the amount of work it takes to put on a play. As a director, I can't ask for more.

They often talk about the differences between their respective schools. I note that aside from its use as an adjective, the word "charter" is rarely mentioned. Their focus is on more mundane matters like: 

"The lockers in this (district) school are really big."

"Really?"

"Yeah, we have these little cubbies in our classrooms."

"Like an elementary school?"

"Well, our school used to be one."

"Is your school small?"

"Yeah, kind of. But it's not an elementary school."

That was the end of the analysis of the differences between a charter and a district school.

Just another reminder that on a practical level, kids don't care about too much about these macro ed policy fights. They're more concerned with stuff like who their teachers are, how much work the teachers assign, and if the school offers the extracurricular activity they like. And, oh yes, where they'll put their stuff during the day. On a deeper level, of course kids pick up on academic rigor and school culture, but the average kid will struggle to articulate it. 

This isn't to say the big policy fights don't matter; they do. It's just that it's so easy to lose sight of how children perceive schools. 

It's up to adults, of course, to shape a student's perception. However, all of us in this education game still, in the end, must operate within that perception. 

In other words, the final question of every ed policy decision should be how this impacts students on a day-to-day level. 

*****

On a different note, this is a good time to plug the clip of my dream high school play, courtesy of Rushmore. 

Why, yes, it is on my bucket list to direct a play that requires pyrotechnics and outfitting a student with a flamethrower.

"Also, you'll find a pair of safety glasses and earplugs beneath your seats. Please feel free to use them."

Luck and the purposes of public education

Education reporter Peter Merrow is making a lot of sense: 

Are are we also polarized about the purposes of public education? I am not sure whether we are polarized, indifferent or excluded from the conversation, but we have a real problem. The goal of school is to help grow American citizens. Four key words: help, grow, American, citizen. Think about those words:

Help: Schools are junior partners in education. They are to help families, the principal educators.

Grow: It’s a process, sometimes two steps forward, one back. Education is akin to a family business, not a publicly traded stock company that lives and dies by quarterly reports.

American: E Pluribus Unum. We are Americans, first and foremost.

Citizen: Let’s put some flesh on that term. What do we want our children to be as adults? Good parents and neighbors, thoughtful voters, reliable workers? What else?

Merrow hits a lot of good points in the whole article. You should read the whole thing. I don't disagree with anything he wrote above. That said, I've got some footnotes about the role of luck and what public schools can do about it. 

 On "Help": Schools aren't going to take the place of families. However, we are charged with educating the students we have. These kids -- through no fault of their own -- may come from broken families, from impoverished households, from parents working two or more jobs, from caregivers who value education but were never able to acquire one themselves. As a result, we have two options: 

Option #1: We can shift into blame mode. We can search around for a villain -- poverty, parents, politicians -- and talk about how educators can't really do anything until that villain goes away. 

Option #2: We can do the best we can to compensate. For kids who lack stability at home, school can be an oasis of calm. Teachers can't replace parents, but I see every day the power of a school where each child is known by each adult. I've also worked in schools where that didn't happen. Anonymity is the first step towards falling through the cracks. 

On "Grow": Merrow is exactly right. The only thing I'd add is that we should have multiple measures, subjective and objective, to chart the "two steps forward, one back." As the fifth norm on a poster in my classroom states: "It's OK to make mistakes as long as you learn from them." In my experience, the difference between functional and dysfunctional schools is that the former uses data to pinpoint where the mistakes are, then does something about them. The latter does neither. 

Accountability isn't the enemy. It's the inertia that results in its absence. 

On "Americans": I agree one hundred percent. Our schools are the fuel of our democracy. This is one of many reasons that I agree with both Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch -- teaching should be a top-tier profession in the U.S. and teachers should be compensated as such.

** As Basher in Ocean's 13 asked, "Do you know what Chuck Berry said every night before counting 1, 2, 3, 4?"

 

On "Citizens": My only addition to Merrow's list is that our schools should help each child reach his or her full potential. The tricky thing about teaching is that it's impossible to know what that is. Thank God that my future wasn't based on what I did as a 14-year-old. (The Fifth Amendment excuses me from giving details about this and, hopefully, my parents have forgiven and forgotten. Or at least, forgiven.) 

Now, as a teacher of 14-year-olds, I have to balance holding students to high expectations and being understanding as they inevitably fall short some of those expectations. We teachers can't hold a grudge, even with the kids who require near-constant coaching.

The problem is that for too many kids, particularly those trying to break out of poverty, the mistakes they make as adolescents haunt them for the rest of their lives. This, to me, is the worst thing about poverty in the United States -- it's life with not much of a safety net. 

To create the citizens we want to have, it's incumbent on us -- especially those of us born into stable families, secure incomes, and a predictable path to an education -- to use those privileges to help others who weren't so lucky. 

Because that's the thing -- luck plays a bigger role than it should in determining whether a child becomes who he or she is capable of being. 

Luck decides who a kid's parents are, but the the idea behind public education -- beyond facilitating the development of "good parents and neighbors, thoughtful voters, reliable workers" -- should be to offer a children an opportunity and a choice to determine who they'll be. 

Public education will never entirely compensate for the advantages and disadvantages of who one's parents are. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't do a much better job than we're doing now.   

Ed Kindall & blaming low-income students

One more thing from that Tennessean article about the state's average ACT scores and the achievement gaps it revealed:

“The gap is there [between black and white students], and there’s never going to be improvement unless we look at the reasons,” said Ed Kindall, outgoing Metro Nashville Public Schools board member . 

Kindall thinks one issue could be motivation. “How do we motivate children to look at education as a way to get out of poverty?” he asked.

(The brackets are mine.)

I don't agree with Kindall on much, but I grant the following:

• He knows what life in segregated Nashville was like. I'm sure he has vivid memories of a time when black children were explicitly told what they could -- and more often, what they couldn't -- do.

• I'm sure he knows all too well what systemic racism has done to the education of generations of minority students.

• Kindall has a deep knowledge and experience of racism in a way that I will never know and cannot viscerally understand. That I am deeply empathetic and have dedicated my professional life to helping take down the barriers erected by decades of discrimination isn't enough; there's no substitute for experience.

So when he says things like this about the achievement gap shown on ACT average scores, I'm not so much angry as confused. Surely Kindall knows the students I teach. He visits their schools, talks to them at church, and sees them at the grocery store. Surely he knows that low-income students lack a lot of things, but a desire to get out of poverty isn't one of them. Surely he doesn't think the 2,880 students who graduated from MNPS in 2011 with ACT scores below 21 did so because of lack of motivation.

I've helped hundreds of low-income students in Nashville prepare to take the ACT. One thing I can say is that they don't lack the desire to do well. What most of the students lacked is the skill level -- not the raw intelligence or potential, mind you, but skill level -- necessary to get the score they wanted. This is the result of a public education system that has systemically failed to develop those skills.

 Contra Kindall, most students know exactly what their ticket out of poverty is. When I taught in an MNPS district high school, I remember counseling my 11th graders when their ACT scores came back. I watched more than few kids cry. Saying that our kids don't want to do well on the ACT is simply false.

And, for the moment, let's put aside the typical "blame the parents" riposte I see so often in these sorts of debates. If you'd like hold kids accountable for a choice they didn't make -- who their parents would be -- then you miss the entire point of public education. Also, you're reading the wrong blog.

Instead, let's focus the significant impact we can make. Namely, the quality of a school (and school district) matters. One proof point: a RAND study showed that Chicago's 5-12 charter schools (which are non-selective) "produce substantial positive effects on ACT scores."

If you're one of those people who reflexively dismiss data showing success in charter schools, here's a district-level example: the Broad Prize-winning Gwinnett County Schools in Georgia (which is very racially diverse, has a 50 percent free/reduced price lunch student population, and is almost twice the size of MNPS) was able to narrow achievement gaps and average a 22.3 on the ACT. The racial breakdowns, while still showing gaps, show much more progress than what we've seen in Nashville: black students - 19.2, Latino students - 20.7, white students - 24.0. While Georgia doesn't require all students to take the ACT, Gwinnett has high participation rates. Also, state-specific tests given to Gwinnett students have shown similar results in increasing achievement and closing gaps.

The point is that the quality of a school and school district can make a difference on college-readiness. What we control as voters, public servants, and educators can make a significant, positive impact on the prospects for low-income and minority students.

Kindall wants to look at the reasons for why there's an achievement gap and why low-income and minority students aren't scoring well on the ACT. But if most of our students do, in fact, have the motivation to do well and other schools and districts have shown success in getting poor and minority students to increase achievement and close gaps, then we must look at other reasons. Of course, all of those other reasons put the responsibility squarely on the adults who set up and run the public education system we have.

Ed Kindall knows exactly how a system can, for decades, deny poor and minority students the opportunities to achieve their potential. He also served on the Nashville school board for more than 20 years. Few people have had more influence on how the modern MNPS educates poor and minority students.

And at the end of his time on the board, he's blaming the kids for not being college-ready?

ACT: What it does (and doesn't) show

Tennessee's ACT average was released a few days ago. From Lisa Fingeroot at The Tennessean: 

Just 16 percent of Tennessee’s 2012 graduating seniors were fully prepared for college, according to a report released today by ACT, the organization that sponsors the college admissions test of the same name.

Tennessee's average was an 19.7, which was improvement from last year's 19.5. (Metro Nashville Public Schools averaged an 18.4, up for last year's 18.1) We also beat Mississippi, thereby causing a passel of Tennessee public officials to once again say, "Thank God for Mississippi."

(Is this a good time to mention I'm a product of Mississippi public education, kindergarten to college?)

A few thoughts on this:

• ACT is the most useful indicator we have for determining if schools, districts, and states are doing their jobs. A 21 average is considered the standard for telling if a student is likely to not only go to college, but graduate. The ACT isn't perfect, (see my analysis of the test below) but it's the best data we have.

• Of all the data we have on the achievement gap, the statistics below best illustrate how stark the gap is, as well as the importance of closing it. From the same article:

The 2012 scores “highlight the necessity for Tennessee to increase college readiness among certain racial minorities,” Huffman said. “Only 3 percent of black students and 9 percent of Hispanic students met college benchmarks in all four core subjects, compared to 18 percent of white students and 31 percent of Asian students.”

•  The ACT is more useful in evaluating an entire district's level of instruction, as opposed to just a high school. It tests skills that started forming years before a students becomes an 11th grader and can't easily be made up in a single year, or even several years. Where this comes in to sharp relief are the timed reading sections -- most high schools aren't set up to provide the remedial reading instruction to truly build a student's ability to blaze through the passages and have a decent understand as to what they read. 

• I've heard this qualification trotted out as an excuse in some quarters:

Tennessee is one of a handful of states where 100 percent of seniors took the ACT last year. The others are Mississippi, Colorado, Kentucky, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, North Dakota and Wyoming.

Making hay out of the fact that in some states, the testing population consists of more self-selected college-bound students, misses the point. First, Tennessee finished second-to-last on the "100-percent" list, too. Second, until we're averaging a 21, we can't say that our system is where it should be. Comparative rankings are interesting, but this is a test where absolute achievement matters. A 21 average is a strong indicator that a school system is doing what it's supposed to do -- prepare the median student for success at the next level. That's why MNPS -- and most other districts -- set a 21 average as the goal. 

• Breaking down the scores, we see some more red flags:

In English, 59 percent of graduating seniors were considered by ACT to be ready for college-level work — up one percentage point from the previous year.
However, the majority of students were not ready for college in the other three subjects tested by the ACT, even though scores improved slightly in each area.
In reading, 43 percent were considered ready for college; in math, 29 percent; and in science, 21 percent.

The number of students who are college-ready in math, especially given that the section is "highly predictive" of collegiate success, is particularly troubling.

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The ACT has its flaws. (As does the SAT, but for the purposes of this post, I'm focusing on the ACT.) My issue with the ACT is that it's a timed test. Not only that, but it's a tightly timed test. A test-taker must answer at a brisk pace to have a shot at giving each question its due.  As someone who did well on the ACT, I never got any sort of advantage from my ability to read quickly in my college and working life. I get the purpose from a test-maker's point of view -- it's testing for a certain kind of intelligence and preparation. I just think those particular types of preparation and intelligence have limited applications beyond college-admission exams. 

There's some scholarly agreement on this, as a National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the Science and Reading subsections "have 'little or no' ability to help colleges predict whether applicants will succeed." The English and Math subsections, however, "are 'highly predictive' of college success."

ACT argues that the test has several purposes beyond predicting college success:

Jon Erickson, interim president of ACT's Education Division, made several points via an e-mail. He noted that the ACT is used "for multiple goals and purposes beyond just admissions or predicting overall student success." For example, it is used in course placement, and he said that the ACT has been "quite accurate" in that function

Not all high-stakes tests have a timed requirement, either. None of Tennessee's high school End of Course exams are timed. (Oddly, the elementary and middle school TCAP tests are timed. You tell me if you understand the logic behind the decision to time kids in middle school, but let them take a full school day, if they want, in high school.)

The thing is, I spend a lot of time teaching my students to slow down, to be patient* with a text. Every day I preach about the virtues of reading an article, story or a poem several times. "How many of you remember the name and face every person you meet the first time you see them?" I ask my ninth graders. No one raises their hands. "Exactly," I say. 

Being patient, learning to take time to think deeply about the meaning of something, is a skill that's useful in both college and real life. It's also a skill that is just as difficult to teach as is teaching a kid to read quickly and identify key parts of a passage. I've never understood why college-admissions tests value the latter at the expense of the former. 

All that said, the ACT is still useful for what it is -- a well-written test taken by tens of thousands of students. It's also among the most researched tests in the world, so even with its limitations and caveats, we get lots of useful data. Finally, until Common Core is fully implemented, it's also the closest thing we have to national standards. It's a worthy measuring stick for students and educators, though, as with all things used for evaluation, it shouldn't be the only tool used. 

As I've told hundreds of nervous high school students over the years, "You don't have to like the game, but you need to learn how to play it."

* Convincing 14-year-olds to be patient and thorough also provides an opportunity for me to teach the kiddos about the meaning of the allusion sisyphean.

One reason Common Core is a good thing

A former student once told me that he'd lived in five states since kindergarten. While that's a high number, he wasn't the only student I've ever known who had done that.

I'll grant that while students who've lived in three or more states are unusual, students going back and forth between states isn't. At least, it's not so unusual that it wouldn't affect academic outcomes for a decent number of students.

It's hard to get data on this specific issue because data tracking students making intra-district moves in a school gets lumped into data tracking students moving state-to-state. Regardless, the general facts on student mobility are sobering. From a 1994 U.S. General Accounting Office study -- and it's a safe assumption that the mobility rate has only increased since then: (Hat tip Hoover Institution)

• About 17 percent of all third graders—more than a half million—have changed schools frequently.
• More than 24 percent of third graders have attended two schools since the first grade.
• Of third graders from low-income families (incomes below $10,000), 30 percent have changed schools frequently, compared with approximately 10 percent from families with incomes of $25,000–$49,000 and 8 percent of children in families with incomes of $50,000 or more
• About 25 percent of third graders in inner-city schools have changed schools frequently, compared with about 15 percent of third graders in rural or suburban schools.

And it damages achievement:

• Overall, third graders who have changed schools frequently are two and a half times as likely to repeat a grade as third graders who have never changed schools (20 versus 8 percent).
• For all income groups, children who have changed schools frequently are more likely to repeat a grade than children who have never changed schools.
• Children who changed schools four or more times by the eighth grade were at least four times more likely to drop out than those who remained in the same school; this is true even after taking into account the socioeconomic status of a child’s family.

Moving from school to school within a district is something that could be addressed by policy. Students moving from state to state is another challenge altogether. It seems to me that the best solution is to make the academic transition as smooth as possible. Hence the need for grade-level expectations to be as consistent as possible from district-to-district and state-to-state. 

Of course, not all agree. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley sees, in the words of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, "a conspiracy theory in search of a conspiracy."

From USA Today:

"Just as we should not relinquish control of education to the Federal government," [Haley] wrote in a letter to a state lawmaker, "neither should we cede it to the consensus of other states."

With an education system ranked dead last in achievement, God forbid that South Carolina learn anything from other states. 

And, of course, if Arne Duncan is in favor of something, then Diane Ravitch opposes it. From the same USA Today article:

Last month, New York University education historian Diane Ravitch, a vocal Duncan critic, blasted the standards, writing in The New York Review of Books that they've never been field-tested. "No one knows whether these standards are good or bad, whether they will improve academic achievement or widen the achievement gap," she said.

A question for Ravitch: How will decreasing the differences between academic expectations state-to-state widen the achievement gap? 

I could see a problem if Common Core standards were less rigorous than the typical set of state standards, but they don't seem to be. I'm spending the year moving from Tennessee English I standards to Common Core. The latter are tougher -- which is a good thing. I'm also familiar with English I standards in Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and Texas** -- Common Core seems to be a step up for all of them. 

That aside, I suspect that some of the real winners will be these students who have high mobility rates, particularly those who change districts.

After all, does anyone envision a future where families less frequently move from city to city?

**During the past few years, I've spent more time than I'd care to admit perusing different states' standardized tests. It's yet another one of my nerdy hobbies. 

Part 3: Ravitch vs. Rhee -- Who's the real idealist?

Here's the final installment of my critique of Diane Ravitch's CNN article on Michelle Rhee and ed reform in general. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. 

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Ravitch:

Rhee believes in merit pay but she is unaware that merit pay has been tried again and again for nearly a century. It has never worked. It failed recently in New York City, Chicago, and Nashville. In Nashville, teachers were offered a $15,000 bonus to raise test scores. It didn’t make a difference. 

Merit pay comes in a lot of shapes and sizes. In this particular interview, Rhee talked about differentiated merit pay: paying high-performing teachers what they're worth, much in the same what that the best players on pro sports teams command the highest salaries. She -- and I -- think it's absurd that we have a system that treats all teachers the same and rewards seniority rather than competence and willingness to teach the toughest classrooms and most difficult subjects. 

The merit pay studies Ravitch cites were "after the fact" -- like giving an NFL player a bonus for having an excellent season. The differentiated pay Rhee talks about are "before the fact" -- like when a proven star signs a high-dollar free agent contract. 

Merit pay fails, as does evaluation by test scores, because they both compel teachers to teach to the test and ignore whatever is not tested, like the arts and physical education. Such policies harm the quality of education. No elite school—not Andover or Exeter or Sidwell Friends—evaluates its teachers by the scores of their students on standardized tests. Nor do any of the high-performing nations.

Is Ravitch saying that because I teach English I, a tested subject, I'll somehow force my students to neglect art and P.E.? How on earth could I do that? Other teachers teach those subjects. 

Also, Andover, Exeter, and Sidwell Friends don't look at the standardized test scores of their students? Is she joking? What are the SAT and ACT but standardized tests? Those schools examine those scores with a magnifying glass (and promote their results). Their ability to produce graduates who score highly on standardized tests is what keeps those at the top of the heap. There's tremendous pressure on those schools and teachers to teach a rigorous curriculum that translates to high standardized test scores. Does Ravitch somehow believe a rich parent is going to drop $40 grand on tuition and not expect their child to score in the 99th percentile?  

Ravitch:

Merit pay fails because teachers are doing the best they can with or without a bonus. Merit pay destroys teamwork and collaboration in the school. Teachers work together; they are not in an individual sport, trying to be first.

It's absolutely true that teaching is a team sport. It's also true that when another teacher does well, I benefit. I'm not sure why Ravitch believes that because the algebra teacher down the hall gets high test scores, that would somehow destroy my ability to collaborate with her. On the contrary, when students are receiving excellent instruction in all of their other classes, it makes my job easier.  

Ravitch:

Rhee and the corporate reform movement rely on the outdated behaviorist theories of the early 20th century. Modern cognitive psychology recognizes that intrinsic rewards are far more powerful than extrinsic rewards. People do their best when motivated by idealism and by their freedom to exercise their professional judgment.

Again, I'm confused. Why is Ravitch treating intrinsic and extrinsic rewards as mutually exclusive? I teach because it's rewarding to work with kids. I also have to make a living. All things equal, I'd prefer to make more money than less.

Her embrace of idealism here is ironic because Ravitch is among the chief critics of "idealistic" Teach for America teachers like myself (Philly '05!). From her article, "How, and How Not, to Improve the the Schools," published in the New York Review of Books:

Each year,TFA selects several thousand idealistic young people, gives them five weeks of training, and sends them out to teach.

Ravitch seems to believe there are two types of idealism. Her idea of bad idealism seems to be when elite college students join the teaching profession instead of choosing easier and/or higher-paying jobs. Given what she wrote for CNN, I guess her definition of good idealism is when all teachers are treated the same, regardless of competence or track record.

Personally, I lose some idealism when people who've never worked as a classroom teacher -- like Ravitch -- claim to know how teachers work best together.

Back to Ravitch's CNN article: 

The best organizations today recognize the importance of building a strong culture in the workplace—not with carrots and sticks—but with respect and collaboration. Andrea Gabor, the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College in New York City, recently wrote on my blog: “As W. Edwards Deming, a leading management expert and critic of merit pay, once put it: ‘The only reason an organization has dead wood is that management either hired dead wood or it hired live wood and killed it. Merit pay, by dividing and demoralizing employees, is a good way to erode initiative and overall quality.’”

As I wrote above, I'm not sure how other teachers doing well enough to earn a bonus is going negatively affect my morale. This isn't Goldman Sachs; if a teacher earns a bonus because they've done a great job, good for them. 

Speaking of deadwood employees, here's what really divides and demoralizes a teaching staff -- seeing incompetence compensated as well as excellence. I remember my first year in the classroom. One of the worst teachers with whom I worked had a doctorate and earned twice as much as the best teacher I knew, who had just a bachelor's degree. Tolerating teachers who don't do their job is what kills a positive teaching culture, not people who legitimately earn bonuses.

Ravitch:  

Our teachers need our support. Let’s put an end to the war on teachers in general and on experienced teachers in particular. No profession can exist without experienced practitioners. Teachers need tenure so they have academic freedom to teach controversial issues.

I loathe this sort of overstatement. Did Michelle Rhee shoot a teacher? Has she tossed a grenade into a school? No? Then can we please put an end to attaching the phrase "war on..." to every political disagreement we have? 

Of course teachers need to be supported. For me, that means that I've got colleagues who are committed and work hard. It means a principal who makes sure that everyone is focused on the same goal. It means that we work together to make sure students are held to a consistent expectation every moment they are in the school building. It means schools are properly equipped so teachers can focus on delivering the best lessons we can. 

As for tenure protecting teachers' ability to address controversial issues...well, when I taught in a district school in Philly, academic freedom wasn't the worry; it was having the freedom to teach in a school that wasn't in utter chaos. Tenure isn't necessary to keeping me in the classroom; it's working in a functional school that makes me want to stay. The ironic thing is that the best schools in which I've worked had no tenured teachers. 

I'm not sure how strong of a correlation there is between not having tenure and achievement. (Nearly no public schools in my home state of Mississippi have tenure, yet they aren't exactly celebrated for excellence.) It is logical, though, to expect some people to not consistently give their best when they know it's practically impossible for them to lose their jobs. It reminds me of a euphemism for a teacher who runs a classroom that's out of control: a "consequence-free environment." 

Ravitch seems to think that's a good way to run a school, though.

Ravitch:

Parents must be involved in helping their kids succeed. Research is clear that what parents do matters even more than what teachers do.  Parents affect their children’s attitudes, behavior, and willingness to study and learn.

I totally agree with this -- the problem is that kids don't choose their parents and there's little teachers can do to help parents be better caregivers. (The parents who need the most help are also the ones least likely to ask for it.) 

What teachers can do is make sure that a child gets a great education. For me, that means involving parents whenever possible and making do when I can't. This is the reality of teaching children who live in poverty. Education, though, the only hope if the cycle of poverty is going to be broken. Therefore, schools who serve children in poverty must answer the challenge. We must be advocates for the children who have no others. 

Ravitch: 

Our students and families and communities need support too. If reformers really cared about children, they would build a health clinic in every school. That would do more to improve test scores than all the teacher evaluation schemes and merit pay plans that the reformers are now imposing, without a shred of evidence.

I'd love to have a health clinic in every school and wish we had universal health care in this country. However, I'm not a doctor or a nurse. Metro Nashville Public Schools has no say over the funding of health care in this country. All I can do is do the best job I can teaching the children in my classroom each day and working with my colleagues to run a safe, supportive, academically-focused school. 

Addressing a different point, Tennessee implemented a revised teacher evaluation system that included student achievement scores as a part of the overall evaluation. While no one thinks the system is perfect and doesn't need some fixes, student proficiency levels rose in 23 out of 24 categories. This would constitute "a shred of evidence" that having meaningful evaluations for teachers would, in fact, improve test scores.

Ravitch, in conclusion:

We can improve our schools. We can improve our society. We must work on both at the same time.

I agree. Rhee and I just think our schools will be the agent that changes our society. Given Ravitch's proposed solutions, she seems to believe the opposite. 

Ravitch criticizes people like Rhee and me as "idealistic", but I think our plan is more pragmatic than defending the status quo in schools while wishing the symptoms of poverty away. 

Part 2: Ravitch vs. Rhee -- To change the poverty rate, you're going to have to change education

Here's part 2 of breaking down Diane Ravitch's CNN article on Michelle Rhee. Part 1 is here. Part 3 will come tomorrow.

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Ravitch:

Why are our international rankings low? Our test scores are dragged down by poverty. On the latest international test, called PISA, our schools with low poverty had scores higher than those of Japan, Finland, and other high-scoring nations. American schools in which as many as 25% of the students are poor had scores equivalent to the top-scoring nations.  As the poverty level in the school rises, the scores fall.

Rhee ignores the one statistic where the United States is number one. We have the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation in the world. Nearly 25% of our children live in poverty.

This is a scandal. Family poverty is the most reliable predictor of low test scores. How can we compare ourselves to nations like Finland where less than 5% of the children live in poverty?

Rhee and her fellow reformers say that poverty is just an excuse, but it is not. 

Poverty is a harsh fact of life.

No doubt -- Poverty is a harsh fact of life. The poverty rate -- and the child poverty rate in particular -- in the U.S. is unconscionable and unacceptable.

OK, so what do we do about it?  

The problem is that Ravitch offers no solution to educating low-income children. Her ideas, stated further down in her article, deal with parents being better caregivers (outside of a teacher's sphere of influence) and opening a health clinic in each school (outside of a typical school budget's sphere of influence). Nothing about actually, you know, teaching them -- unless you believe that continuing to do what we've always done will result in change.

Decreasing poverty would help a lot; the problem is how best to do it. Declaring in an article that it would sure be great to have less poverty doesn't do much, though.  

Rhee (and I) believe public schools offer the most effective and sustainable solution to America's deplorable child poverty rate: closing the educational achievement gap. Rhee is quite specific: attract the most talented people in to education, pay the highest performers like they're game-changers, offer parents choice as to the best school for their children, and better use the resources we have to focus on results.  

Ravitch:

Children who are homeless, who have asthma, who have vision problems or hearing problems will have trouble concentrating on their studies. Children who have a toothache may not do well on testing day. Children who don’t see a doctor when they are sick will not be able to perform well on tests. Children who live in squalor will be distracted from their schoolwork.

Individually, these are true statements, but this misrepresents the reality of teaching low-income students. She makes it seem as if teachers like me are practicing our craft in a M*A*S*H unit. I have, indeed, taught students with health and/or home problems. I'm not minimizing their challenges or the unfairness of it all. 

However, most students who have health and/or home problems that prevent them from fully participating in class don't want their English teacher to make excuses for them -- they want me to teach! I never cease to be amazed at what kids are willing to do when they have a genuine learning opportunity.  

What I've learned is that most kids are quite resilient, especially since they know that an education is what's going to get them out of a troubled home. This is why educators simply must have the belief that all students can learn and achieve at high levels. If we don't believe that our students will be successful, who will?  

The teachers who have that belief and live it out can help students achieve significant academic gains. What Ravitch never explains is how the same student can score years below grade level for one year, then spend a year with an outstanding teacher and grow several years in skill level. The reason the student didn't score well one year isn't because he or she lived in squalor -- it's because he or she wasn't taught well.

I've spent seven years teaching low-income kids. The biggest influence on their ability to perform well on tests is the expectations placed on them. If they are treated and taught like they're capable students, they'll usually perform as such.

Ravitch: 

Of course, we should have great teachers in every classroom, but the negative rhetoric that now comes from Rhee and every media outlet and movies like “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ” are demoralizing teachers and causing many excellent teachers to leave the profession.

Ravitch has a misguided sense for when the phrase "negative rhetoric" is applicable. Rhee says over and over again in the CNN interview that excellent teachers should be paid much more and given the freedom to educate kids in the best way they know how. Among other things, Waiting for Superman celebrates many schools that are offering kids a great education. I'm just one public school teacher here, but those are things that make me want to stay in the profession.  

What Rhee and Waiting for Superman reserve their "negative rhetoric" for are public school systems that regularly deny opportunities for low-income kids to go to a great school. 

Ravitch, on the other hand, saves her "negative rhetoric" for those who are trying to do something to fundamentally change those failing systems. 

I'm curious as to what she would say to those students directly affected by the status quo in those same systems.

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The final part will be up tomorrow.