In New Federal Program to Reward Teachers, Flawed Assumptions
I wrote my latest piece for the New York Times in response to a focus group on the US Department of Education’s proposed Project Respect in which I participated last month. Like far too many education policies, in Project Respect I saw some good ideas poorly implemented:
Project Respect calls for a three-pronged reform of the teaching profession. It envisions a reorganization of schools that would use technology and aides to put more effective teachers in front of more students, coupled with a longer school day to give teachers more time for professional growth.
To find more effective teachers, it calls for an expansion of entry points into the profession, with a higher bar for earning a permanent position. Finally, it calls for increased compensation for career teachers who both stay in the classroom and take on various teacher-leader roles.
That prong shares much with the insightful prescriptions of the book “Teaching 2030,” written by the Center for Teaching Quality’s Barnett Berry and a group of 12 teachers that included my New York colleagues Jose Vilson and Ariel Sacks.
Establishing a variety of advanced teacher roles, with appropriately high compensation, is a necessary move toward professionalizing teaching in America, and I applaud this move.
Giving highly effective teachers more time to serve in roles other than classroom teachers is an important step toward improving our system. However, it is imperative to remember that the qualities that make me a highly effective teacher are not necessarily those that would make me an effective teacher-leader.
Read the piece here, and I hope some people will join in the comments.
Education war officially delcared
More on this later, but for anyone who had any doubt there was a war against public education in this country, so-called reformer Geoffrey Canada makes things explicit:
“someone has to make war.”
This comes from a piece in a really scary NY Times piece by Anna Phillips about the creation of new lobbying group organized to influence NYC’s mayor election and education policy in NY:
On the board are some of the most well-known and polarizing figures in public education, including Ms. Rhee; Mr. Klein, now a News Corporation executive; and Eva S. Moskowitz, the former councilwoman who now runs a chain of charter schools. Also on the board are former Mayor Edward I. Koch; Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone organization, a network of charter schools; and a number of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, who have served as the movement’s financial backers.
This is yet another example of what Joanne Barkan recently showed in Dissent: education “reformers” are now trying to buy political elections.
How NY is Screwing Up the Common Core
Previously, I’ve explained why I like what the Common Core does for Social Studies learning and teaching. My latest piece for the New York Times’ Schoolbook takes on the implementation of the new standards:
Teachers who focus on content and test-prep are sadly doing all that is necessary to prepare students for the exam. A recent study by Gabriel Reich of Virginia Commonwealth University found that the Global Regents Exam does not call for any historical thinking skills, but rather knowledge of history content, basic literacy and “test-wiseness.”
The history Regents exams do not ask students to do anything that meets the overwhelming majority of the new Common Core standards.
It is particularly troubling then to find that the state does not seem to have a concrete plan in place to change the history regents exams.
Please read the whole piece, and add your comments here or there.
The Education of Amani A: Education (Calling)
I’ve never asked this before, but please share this piece with as many people as you can. My students’ poem deserves a wide audience. ~SL
I never lack for reasons why I love my job, but none of them ever supersede the privilege of seeing young women and ment take hold of the views and positions they will carry with them into their adulthood. In rare cases, I get to bear witness to a student who not only attains a mature and nuanced understanding of a complex issue, but finds her voice to share that position with the larger world.
This past Thursday, Amani A., who I am proud to be able to call my student at the Academy for Young Writers, took 3rd place at the annual Knicks Poetry Slam at a sold out Broadway theater. I am hardly an aficionado of performance poetry, so I won’t comment on the quality of the poem nor its performance (though I can only assume she was robbed of first place), but I do want to engage with the content of her poem: the education of young men of color. There is much to admire and love in her message.
Amani starts by juxtaposing the media attention given to acts of violence committed by students against teachers with the lack of attention given to the violent results of abdicating the responsibility for actually educating young men of color. She notes that a Google search for “students hitting teachers” leads one to read, “A student hitting a teacher is a serious incident that merits a serious response.” Yet when searching for “teachers miseducating students” all she found relevant was “Lauryn Hill” (an allusion to Hill’s 1998 modern classic, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill). It is a powerful and attention grabbing opening.
Amani then goes on to describe the young men she has observed throughout her education, who “think fists are words” and that “they have to play God to make change.” This is the most powerful and effective stanza of the work. She rebukes the young men for their reliance on violence as she simultaneously calls to question society’s failed attempts to promote role models in the guise of Great Men (King, Malcolm X, WEB DuBois, Booker T. Washington, etc) who are taught typically as saints, or naturally gifted, or the product of remarkable circumstances, but nonetheless, as people who are far greater than you or I ever could hope to be.
Later in the poem, Amani attacks the classroom culture of criticizing mistakes. This leads young men to build up “tension in his body” when condescended because of a wrong answer (something I hope I rarely do when it comes to my content, but must plead guilty to the crime when it comes to lack of math skills in my students), or worse, leaving the anger “caught in their throat.” This leads them to “package the silent treatment into their fists/ [to] make sure they’re heard.” One could easily extrapolate that experience to apply to binary standardized tests that tell students they are wrong or lacking in skills. Good teachers know that mistakes are wonderful, because they are the most powerful opportunities for learning and growth. It’s disheartening to see that Amani has witnessed something different throughout her education.
My lone criticism of the poem is that the solution it posits is slightly simplistic; her diagnosis is far more sophisticated than her prescription. Amani calls her audience to “Call these boys / Call their voice / Tell them its time / Tell them we’re listening.” Giving students more voice in and outside of classrooms is an important step, but it is only one of the panacea of steps that are necessary to actually improve the four hundred year history of individual and structural racism in this country, let alone the educational component of it.
The full text of the poem is below, which Amani generously shared with me to publish, but this is a poem meant to be seen and heard, so please watch the video, and share with others you know.
Updated: My Blood, My Sweat, My Test Scores
After two years of court battles, it seems that the release of NYC Teacher Data Reports will happen any moment now. For the life of me, I cannot understand the journalistic justification of publishing individual teachers’ results. I would like to applaud Gotham School schools for choosing not to do so, and express my disappointment that the New York Times seems prepared to. I would further ask the Times why they are choosing to publish teacher’s scores when they have not published principal’s ratings in the past. I do not expect integrity from the Daily News or the Post. (In the interest of full disclosure, I serve on an advisory board for Gotham Schools, though was not consulted on this decision. I also write for the Time’s Schoolbook site.)
I wrote the following piece over a year ago when the DOE first announced they would share the results, and stand by it today. I would be willing to update results, but I do not have access to my students scores from 2011 (I believe about 60% of my students passed the Global exam. This was extremely disappointing to me, though the results can partially be explained by having to teach the two year Global curriculum in one year). This past semester, I worked with seniors who had failed one or both of the history exams. Of the twelve students I worked with on US History, six passed; for Global History, eight out of eight passed.
From October 20, 2010:
As you might know, this week the NYC DOE said it would release 12,000 teachers’ names and their students’ test scores on State ELA and math tests in grades 3-8. I teach high school, so I am not directly affected, but here are my students’ Regents test scores from my four years teaching in NYC, anyway. I put them out there in solidarity with my brothers and sisters who are about to be put under the microscope.
You can have the scores, just please remember they are almost meaningless. They tell you about 5% of what I do. Here’s what they don’t tell you:
- They don’t tell you that last year I taught 100% of our juniors who are special education students and/or English Language Learners, even though I only taught 50% of our juniors. They also don’t tell you I requested these most challenging students.
- They don’t tell you that last year I taught our 15 seniors most in danger of not graduating for two periods. In that time, I prepped them for English, Global, and US Regents, as well as helping them earn credits in a wide variety of areas.
On the beating of a former student of mine by the NYPD…
If you’re in New York, you’ve undoubtedly heard by now about two cases of police brutality in the Bronx in the past couple weeks. In one incident, an 18 year old was shot while unarmed in his home. The other, is captured in the video below:
The young man that was savagely beaten by four Bronx cops was a student of mine for three years, and my advisee last year. The student who was killed also attended my old school, but I did not know him.
I’ve been trying to come up with something thoughtful or intelligent to say about this for a week now, and I just have nothing coherent to offer, probably because I’m of many minds here. The remaining parts of this writing are somewhat disconnected:
