“It would have chilled Martin Luther King’s blood to see how the struggle for equality has been narrowed into a race for higher test scores in a society that abandoned Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty.’”
Them’s fightin’ words.
Archive for the 'Education Leadership' Category
On Brittanica Blog, Dan Willingham takes a look at teachers’ wish for greater respect and the role of unions in winning it. He observes that unions perform two important functions that are fundamentally at odds with each other: they protect the rights of individual teachers in personnel matters, and they undertake public relations and other activities in an effort to promote the profession.
On the one hand, if your mission is to protect the members of the profession from unfair termination, you will insist on a rigorous process by which their incompetence must be demonstrated. On the other hand it must be admitted that in any profession employing several million people some are incompetent, and if your job is to protect the reputation and integrity of the profession, you should want those people to leave.
Since the process of determining who is or isn’t a good teacher is far from foolproof, mistakes will be made, Dan notes. So the question becomes what kind of mistake do you prefer: firing someone who is actually a good teacher? Or failing to fire an incompetent teacher? If you’re cautious about not allowing good teachers to be fired, you’ll inevitably allow more poor teachers to remain. If protecting the reputation of the profession is your main concern some good teachers will end up being drummed out of the corps unfairly.
“If your diagnostic is imperfect, you’re going to make errors,” Willingham writes. “All you can do is choose the proportion of error types.” He argues that teachers unions have handled this tradeoff badly, harming the reputation of teaching as a profession.
While Dan’s post is at Brittanica Blog, the debate over it is at Eduwonk. Teachers’ unions “are in a purgatory of their own creation,” opines Andy Rotherham. ”They don’t want to use data to evaluate teachers and they don’t want to use managerial discretion. I guess that leaves the Magic 8-Ball?” After much back and forth about the union’s preferred role Willingham makes an observation that seems unassailable: “The President is talking about getting rid of poor teachers,” he writes. ”It appears likely that something is going to be done, so you may as well try to take control of the situation so it’s something you are doing, rather than something that is done to you.”
Lead, follow, or get out of the way, in other words.
N.B. Dan has a brilliant new book out called Why Students Don’t Like School, which if I had a magic wand would appear on the desk of every teacher in America. Absent that, I’m thrilled to report that Professor Willingham will be taking over the Core Knowledge Blog all of next week to talk about some of the insights from his work and his new book while I take a week off from blogging. Don’t miss it.
The “Obama Effect” sounds good in theory, but it’s going to take a lot more than inspiration to close the achievement gap, says Richard Whitmire. Writing on U.S. News’ blog, the edublogger and president of the National Education Writers Association notes that he’d like nothing more than to jump on the Obama Effect bandwagon.
But as a veteran education reporter who spends a lot of time in classrooms, I see events that indicate the Obama education halo could tarnish early. And if that happens, the letdown will be a lot less fun than the buildup. Inspiration is great, but inspiration needs pathways to success. What I see developing for lower income and minority students are pathways closing up.
Whitmire lists some of the factors needed to make the Obama Effect more than a short-term, feel-good story: enhanced college access, dramatically improved high schools, higher teacher quality and way higher literacy rates. “I want to apologize for being the picnic skunk. Really, I want to believe,” Whitmire concludes. “In the real world, inspirations need well-lit pathways. And I’m just not seeing those pathways opening up for the Obama effect children. I wish I saw this differently, really I do.”
No apologies needed, Richard. If it sounds too good to be true…
Nevada’s public education system is a “disaster” says the state’s university chancellor, and Nevadans have no one to blame but themselves. In a remarkable and scathing “State of the System” speech ostensibly to rail against proposed cuts to the state’s education budget, James Rogers calls Nevada’s parents to account.
The state of K-16 education in Nevada is where the public–that is you out there–has allowed it to sink. Your only relationship with the education system is to ship your unprepared kids to school not with the expectation of success, but with the demand that an education system, inadequately funded, develop and/or repair children that you as a parent did not prepare for school or support while your children attended school. If you want a competent and productive education system, tell your Governor and legislators to fund it. They do what they think you want them to do. That’s why they’re called public servants. It is the public–that means you– that has created this disaster of a public education system.
It’s a blistering Jeremiad. Nevadans once hoped to see their kids go to college, but today are satisfied if their children graduate from eighth grade, Rogers says. And don’t blame educators for the state’s poor schools. The founder and owner of Sunbelt Communications Company, which owns and operates 16 NBC and FOX affiliate television stations in five western states, Rogers says when he became Nevada’s chancellor five years ago he came to the job with a sense that education was “an overweight, lazy, unproductive massive intellect, with no direction and little desire to get there fast.”
Well I have looked at the alleged inefficiencies, not only in higher education but in K through 12. The majority of educators work very hard, are much smarter than their critics, and are far more organized and efficient than their critics. If they have a shortcoming it is that they are for the most part not aggressive, mean-spirited people, but are instead caring, concerned individuals who want to teach, not fight….and the success of your children is more important than their own success.
Neither are school administrators to blame, according to Rogers. “I have looked at the administration of the education system,” he notes. ”I find them no less productive than the administrators of the television stations I own or the banks of which I have served as a board member over the last 28 years.”
The state’s Republican party has fired back saying Rogers “owes every caring parent in the state a public apology. For Chancellor Rogers to blame the failure of the government-run education system on parents is nothing short of outrageous.”
Rogers aired his speech on his Nevada TV stations. You can watch it in two parts on YouTube, Part I here, Part II here.
UFT, that is.
By now you’ve heard the news: Teachers at two KIPP charter schools in the Big Apple have voted to join the United Federation of Teachers. It’s a big deal in the charter school world, since the charter movement, per the New York Times, “has long sold itself as an alternative that is not hamstrung by union contracts and work rules.” Indeed, it was less than a week ago that KIPP’s founders were describing in a Washington Post op-ed the importance of their ability “to hire, fire and reward principals and teachers based on their students’ progress and achievement” and calling for giving “this same power to all public schools.”
“A union contract is actually at odds with a charter school,” Jeanne Allen, executive director of the Center for Education Reform, tells the Times. Tout le blogs are weighing in. Eduwonk parses the word “actually” in Allen’s quote. “’Actually’ is the wrong word there. The more accurate way to say that would be, “could be,’ writes Andy Rotherham. “Why? Well one example is the unionized and highly successful Green Dot Public Schools, another is KIPP Bronx, which has been unionized for some time.” Fordham’s Flypaper says the move is “not a complete surprise.”
This movement away from zero-sum competition toward collaboration is positive, if it is done in a fashion that respects the essential operational freedoms that make charter schools successful, which include liberating schools in such areas as personnel, budget, and curriculum. Additionally, these partnerships need to emerge through a voluntary process based on mutual respect, as opposed to being foisted upon the charter school community by the state. State law should encourage partnerships, but not force them.
CER’s Jeanne Allen is having none of it, going after the UFT/AFT on Edspresso and asking “what campaign was hatched to convince so many KIPPsters that a regulatory environment would be preferable to the freedom they now enjoy.” Says Allen:
The UFT - and its parent, the AFT - has been duplicitous in its support of charters. They often send in loyal teachers to cause dissention, as was the case across the water in New Jersey with successful charters such as the Rutgers-based LEAP more than a year ago. “Don’t you think we work too long for this money?” they ask innocently, and with a tenuous economy and fear in the hearts and minds of anyone who relies on a job for basic sustenance, drinking the union kool-aid may have been a bit easier for the NYC KIPP folks than others might have imagined.
At Edweek’s Teacher Beat, Vaishali Honawar calls it “a fairly big feather in the teachers’ unions’ let’s-organize-charter-schools cap.” Gotham Schools’ Elizabeth Green has the letters the KIPP charter school teachers wrote to their bosses, KIPP colleagues and parents explaining their decision to unionize.
The larger question to be answered is what impact, if any, will this have on the halo effect KIPP enjoys in ed reform circles. Sherman Dorn points out “unionization is usually driven by material and also by other considerations that motivate people to sign pledge cards: wanting to be treated decently on the job, having conditions likely to foster success, etc.” Dana Goldstein at the American Prospect picks up thread.
If schools like KIPP produce teacher burnout with their long days and high demands, then maybe that isn’t such a problem, the thinking goes. Maybe teaching is a profession for whip-smart folks in their twenties without families, not for tired middle-aged people who need flex-time. But what happened in Brooklyn is that the very young teachers in question disagreed. They said they were concerned about high turnover and thought it was hurting students. They want their profession to be sustainable and see unionization as a way to get there.
“But whatever happens, this is an important testing ground for the idea that the dueling corners of the education reform debate will accomplish most if they work together,” Goldstein concludes.
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher set tongues in motion last week with his piece about Broad Acres Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, a high-poverty school, which has reversed its performance in the last few years by raising expectations and cooperating with its teachers union. In a promised follow up column, Fisher looks in on Truesdell Educational Center, a Washington, DC school demographically similar to Broad Acres. “Could a similar turnaround happen in a D.C. school,” Fisher asks, “and does Rhee’s more confrontational approach make that kind of change more or less likely?”
As at Broad Acres, Truesdell principal Brearn Wright believes half the battle is persuading teachers that kids from dysfunctional backgrounds must be held to high standards, Fisher notes. “He screened inspirational scenes from the movie ‘Miracle,’ about the 1980 U.S. Olympic ice hockey team. But when Wright asked teachers to mark down what percentage of Truesdell kids should be making the proficient grade in reading, only a few dared to write 100. Most wrote numbers such as 55, 65, 68 or 69,” Fisher reports.
In the classrooms, in stark contrast to many D.C. schools, students seem engaged and eager to progress. The atmosphere is still colder and more militaristic than in more successful schools; a teacher wins quiet by announcing, “Work harder,” to which the children respond, in Pavlovian fashion, “Get smarter.” But there are creative projects in nearly every room. In the third-floor hallway, two fifth-grade boys take notes on a clipboard; they are finding fractions — a door half-open, a coffee cup four-fifths empty, and so on.
“Test scores aren’t in yet, and no one expects miracles,” Fisher concludes. ”‘We’re not there,’ Wright says, ‘but we’re getting there. Kids are learning.’ At Truesdell, in part because of the chancellor’s confrontational ways and in part in spite of them, it feels like a revolution is brewing.”
Fisher’s original column drew both praise and scorn around the blogs, and started an interesting thread of discussion on the optimal unit of currency — the school or the district — in reversing low achievement. “Single schools like Broad Acres really can be saved,” commented 30-year veteran teacher-blogger Nancy Flanagan, “because tools like professional development, better curriculum, more time and community-building commitment actually can work at that level, where people area not anonymous cogs and individual kids’ progress can be carefully tracked.”
My own sense is that enthusiasm for change (which equals fidelity of implementation) is enormously important. Lack of staff buy-in for any program, curriculum or flavor of reform is almost certainly its death knell, which is why leadership is so important. I hope Fisher revisits these schools and reports back from time to time.
Are conflict and confrontation necessary ingredients in a school turnaround? Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher files a provocative column about a Maryland school that is succeeding without the kind of bare knuckle brawls that are drawing national media attention to Michelle Rhee and the nearby Washington, DC school system.
Fisher goes to Broad Acres Elementary School in Silver Spring where scores were so low eight years ago that a state takeover loomed. Montgomery County Superintendent Jerry Weast and Principal Jody Leleck negotiated with the teachers union to add extra hours to the work week for extra pay. “Teachers would offer no more excuses about poor kids from dysfunctional families; expectations would soar. About a third of the faculty left; Leleck hired 27 veteran teachers that first summer” he reports.
Rhee’s faceoff with the Washington Teachers’ Union creates a dynamic different from the cooperation between Weast and Montgomery County Education Association President Bonnie Cullison. She said she hears Rhee telling teachers, ” ‘You’re not doing the job,’ as opposed to ‘Let’s work together.’ You cannot make it happen in a district where you set up conflict”…Weast won’t criticize his D.C. counterpart, but he will say that narrowing the achievement gap is about expecting all children to work hard and love learning. “You can do it anyplace if you treat people like you want to be treated,” he says.
Today, 81 percent meet reading proficiency standards this year, up from 47 percent in 2003. “Broad Acres did this without Rhee’s reform tactics,” Fisher points out. ”No young recruits from Teach for America, no cash for students who come to class, no linkage of teacher pay to test scores.” And what’s happening inside the classrooms?
Too often, schools desperate to boost test scores become grim factories in which children are force-fed rote skills. But at Broad Acres, teachers coach each other to keep kids engaged in rich material for its own sake. In Andrea Sutton’s fifth-grade class, 16 kids sit on the floor, jumping up to explain to one another the roots of the American colonists’ grievances with the British. The teacher’s voice never rises above a stage whisper as she plies the class with questions that would fit nicely in a high school course. With all the pressure from No Child Left Behind, it’s so easy to cut out history and science,” Bayewitz says. “But these kids are going to need those complex skills in high school and college. And these kids are going to college.”
Claus von Zastrow at Public School Insights observes that Fisher’s piece reminds us “that school improvement does not necessarily require a death-match between high-profile ‘reformers’ and the education ‘establishment.’” Fisher is promising a follow-up column Sunday on ”a D.C. school that matches Broad Acre’s population, put presumably not its methods. Stay tuned.
To whom much is given, much is expected. And Washington DC’s Chancellor Michelle Rhee has been given quite a bit: control of one of the lowest-performing school systems in the country, a broad mandate for sweeping reform, and the unequivocal support of her boss, Washington mayor Adrian Fenty. She’s also been given an inexhaustible work ethic, a hardcore “no excuses” management style, and an apparent immunity to criticism or the opinion of others.
Now, much is expected. Everything, in fact.
She is, in the apt description of The Atlantic, “the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide.” Her rise in the last 18 months from relative obscurity to the cover of Time Magazine earned her the top spot in our poll to determine the most influential person in education in 2008. It wasn’t a close contest.
Jay Mathews of the Washington Post was one of many of our panel of observers to put Rhee at the top of his list of the year’s most influential people in education, citing her status as “the most visible educator of the year, pushing the discussion toward rewarding teachers and ending tenure.” The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation likewise placed Rhee atop their ballots. Bill Jackson, founder and president of GreatSchools.net, cited Rhee’s “radical new way of thinking about the teaching profession, including tenure and compensation.”
“Love her or hate her, she is redefining the very definition of an urban superintendent,” said Patrick Riccards, author of the blog Eduflack. ”She has changed the way teachers, families, the community, and businesses think about DC Public Schools. For the first time in a long time, people have hope for schools in the District.”
Rhee’s paradigm shattering proposal for DC teachers–way higher pay in exchange for giving up seniority and tenure-has pushed her to the forefront of the national dialogue about teacher quality and compensation. In the process she has become, perhaps inevitably, the most polarizing figure in education. Her brand of education reform strikes a nerve-and a chord. She has clearly tapped into the energy and idealism of younger teachers who are often mystified by union politics and fiercely committed to closing the achievement gap. Rhee’s proposal is not intimidating, but welcome to many of the “Rhee-volutionaries” she’s attracting to the nation’s capitol. Perform or perish? Bring it on. ”If I worked my butt off, did everything I could, and got fired by an administration like Rhee’s who deemed my teaching ineffective, I would tip my hat, sigh of relief, and find a new career or job,” a first-year Teach for America corps member commented on this blog in response to the Time Magazine cover story about Rhee. A Newsweek profile, one of dozens of national news stories about the Chancellor in 2008, noted “Rhee doesn’t quite come out and say it, but she and her fellow reformers are trying to change the teaching profession, at least in the inner city, from an 8 a.m.-to-3 p.m. job with summers off, to something that bears more resemblance to joining the Green Berets.”
KIPP schools score well because teachers work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Saturday, and carry cell phones so their students can reach them any time. Summer vacation lasts only about a month. There are teachers who can maintain this pace for decades (just as there are some older Special Forces operatives in the military), but in Rhee’s world many teachers may find themselves working hard, burning out and moving on.
A fight over the teachers’ contract looms in 2009. The Washington Teachers’ Union has brought in the American Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten to address the stalled negotiations. The stakes and the rhetoric are high. “I consider this proposal to be an IQ test as to whether teachers are willing to slit their own throats,” union vice-president Nathan Saunders told Newsweek. “I believe this contract is going to pass. And I believe it is going to have a huge impact,” said Rhee. “Even if it didn’t, it would not stop me.”
That’s precisely the kind of don’t-mess-with-me rhetorical flourish that divides Rhee fans from her detractors. “Such administrators are the reason so many good teachers believe they still need unions, and need them badly,” notes columnist Julia Steiny. ”Hyper-authoritarian administrators storm the beaches, guns blazing, not much caring what dies in the crossfire. Schools may improve, but at the cost of human misery. And miserable teachers cannot foster a love of learning.”
In the final analysis, Michelle Rhee is, as The Atlantic correctly concluded, carrying the very viability of education reform on her shoulders:
Rhee is confronting the great divide over American public-education reform-not between left and right but between two philosophies about education. To Rhee and her fellow reformers, schools can, by themselves, produce successful students. To her opponents (and they include liberals and conservatives), schools are not enough, however “successful” their students. They are an important, but hardly the only, means with which children are inculcated with the skills and mores of their community. The divide means that Rhee’s challenge is not just to reform one of the worst school systems in the country and, in effect, prove whether or not inner-city schools can be revived at all.”
Note: Thanks to our panel of education observers and pundits for their time and help in making the Education Person of the Year series possible: Sol Stern, Jay Mathews, Bill Jackson, Andy Rotherham, Diane Ravitch, Mike Petrilli, Jay Greene Michael Shaughnessy, Nancy Flanagan, Patrick Riccards, Corey Bunje Bower and Dan Brown.
Once upon a time there was an unassuming guy from Kansas named Bill James. Big baseball fan. Great with statistics. Uncanny knack for seeing things in the stats others didn’t. Scary smart. Through pure statistical analysis, James was able to show what factors led to teams scoring runs and winning games, and how the efforts of individual players contributed to wins. He was often able to show with hard, empirical data, why many time-honored “truths” about the game were simply not borne out by statistics—why RBIs matter less than on-base percentage, for example. Or why stolen base attempts tend to hurt a team’s offense. He didn’t have a lot of luck getting his observations about baseball published, so he ended up self-publishing an annual book called The Bill James Baseball Abstract. It started out as a cult item with a certain kind of geeky, fanboy appeal. But 25 years later, what James discovered about baseball ended up transforming the way we look at the game and even how some major league clubs put their teams together. It’s probably no coincidence that two years after hiring Bill James in 2002, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since the end of the war. World War, that is. The first one.
Before Bill James, baseball was all batting averages, bromides and intangibles-more than a century of baseball men who knew what they knew based on experience and instinct. They didn’t need numbers. They knew the game. Then teams like the Oakland A’s, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball, started putting Bill James-style statistical analysis to work and found they were frequently able to compete effectively with large-market, big-budget teams like the Yankees. In effect, they used data to close the baseball equivalent of the achievement gap.
Education may have found its Bill James. Her name is Jennifer Jennings, but she’s better known as Eduwonkette. She made a name for herself in 2008 by demystifying the process of using statistical evidence to make rational decisions in education. More to the point, she used her extraordinary, Jamesian grasp of data to call out those who claimed they were using statistical evidence to make rational decisions. Sol Stern puts it bluntly, calling Jennings “the best bullshit detector on the web.” Diane Ravitch, another fan, put Eduwonkette at the top of her ballot naming this year’s most influential people in education. At her best, Jennings implicitly challenges education policymakers to be objective, to pay attention to what the data is telling us about education rather than what they want to believe-or want us to believe. And much like James, she makes the potentially dry world of statistical analysis not merely digestible, but fun. She wields a livelier pen than most professional education journalists, and on data she’s simply without peer.
“The amazing thing about Eduwonkette is the fact that pretty much everyone in the EdBlog world either loves her or deeply respects her work, or both,” says teacher-blogger Nancy Flanagan. “Her commenters are free to argue with her-and she will acknowledge her arguments’ shortcomings with grace and smarts. She makes statistics sing. Her occasional snarkiness is buttressed by scholarship and a finely-tuned sense of humor.”
Launched in late 2007 as an anonymous blog featuring a masked superheroine icon, Eduwonkette quickly won plenty of attention in the edusphere for what seemed like a nonstop stream of posts questioning the gains claimed by New York City’s Department of Education. The blog was accurately described by the New York Sun as “a stubborn thorn in the Bloomberg administration’s side.” But Jennings is no one-trick pony, having spilled varnish remover on Teach for America, Washington think-tanks, proponents of pay-for-grades schemes and dozens of others who seek to use data to promote their programs or points of view. Recently she offered one of the first analyses of incoming Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s record running the Chicago school system. “Have gaps separating white/black and white/Hispanic students in Chicago shrunk in the last 5-6 years?” she asked rhetorically. “Nah.” Note to Mr. Duncan’s future press secretary: You’ve been warned.
“Rather than merely toiling away in the vineyards of the American Educational Research Association, writing papers for fellow academics, [Eduwonkette] recently overtook Eduwonk as the top education policy blogger,” Mike Petrilli wrote in the most recent issue of Education Next, “even though her competitor is a former Clinton White House aide and cofounder of a major Washington education think tank. It’s clichéd to say that the Internet evens the playing field and makes the traditional trappings of power and influence obsolete, but so it is.”
What makes Eduwonkette particularly effective is Jennings’ relative lack of ego or apparent agenda. Guessing Eduwonkette’s identity became a favorite parlor game and gave early buzz to the blog. Her voluntary unmasking (done out of concern that incorrect suspects were being fingered with consequences for their academic work) was even covered by New York Magazine. But coming out has arguably given Jennings even more clout. Where critics were once able to speculate that she had “skin in the game” those whose ox she gores now have to grapple with what she writes, rather than attempt to discredit her with speculations about her affiliations and motivation.
Describing his role with the Red Sox, Bill James told the Wall Street Journal, “I see it as being my job to ensure as much as I can that we act on the basis of actual evidence.” That’s also a pretty fair description of Jennifer Jennings’ job in education. Indeed, if I were a savvy charter school operator, or even an urban schools chancellor, I might be tempted to ring up the talented Ms. Jennings and offer her a job. If Bill James could help the Red Sox break the Curse of the Bambino, who knows what Jennings might accomplish as an insider. It took over 20 years for Bill James to leave his mark on the game of baseball. It wasn’t until Michael Lewis’ book came out that “Moneyball” became a household word. Today, some education wonks are fond of invoking Moneyball as a paradigm for public education. “Bill was an outsider, self-publishing invisible truths about baseball while the Establishment ignored him,” Red Sox owner John Henry said in a piece about Bill James in Time Magazine. “Now 25 years later, his ideas have become part of the foundation of baseball strategy.”
A prediction: In the above quote, change ”baseball” to “education,” and “Bill” to “Jennifer.” Fast forward 25 years.
You heard it here first.
Gone are the days when educators dismissed data as having only a limited utility for improving schools and school systems. What’s taken its place, argues Rick Hess, is “The New Stupid” — where data-based decision making and research-based practice “stand in for careful thought, serve as dressed-up rationales for the same old fads, or [are] used to justify incoherent proposals.”
In an article in Education Leadership, Hess describes first encountering the tendency to “energetically misuse data” during a presentation to a group of aspiring superintendents.
The group had recently read a research brief high-lighting the effect of teachers on student achievement as well as the inequitable distribution of teachers within districts, with higher-income, higher-performing schools getting the pick of the litter. The aspirants were fired up and ready to put this knowledge to use. To a roomful of nods, one declared, “Day one, we’re going to start identifying those high value-added teachers and moving them to the schools that aren’t making AYP.”
Now, although I was generally sympathetic to the premise, the certainty of the stance provoked me to ask a series of questions: Can we be confident that teachers who are effective in their current classrooms would be equally effective elsewhere? What effect would shifting teachers to different schools have on the likelihood that teachers would remain in the district? Are the measures in question good proxies for teacher quality? What steps might either encourage teachers to accept reassignment or improve recruiting for underserved schools?
My concern was not that the would-be superintendents lacked firm answers to these questions,” Hess recalls. “It was that they seemingly regarded such questions as distractions.”
The key is not to retreat from data, Hess counsels, ”but to truly embrace the data by asking hard questions, considering organizational realities, and contemplating unintended consequences. Absent sensible restraint, it is not difficult to envision a raft of poor judgments governing staffing, operations, and instruction—all in the name of ‘data-driven decision making.’”
This is smart, even heroic stuff.
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