When I was in junior high school in Detroit (long before its current meltdown), my classmates and I were taken to a wealthy suburban public high school for an “exchange visit.” We were stunned to see carpeted, well-stocked libraries; working restrooms with warm water and hand towels; real science laboratories; and a gym building with indoor track and swimming pool. We were never told what the purpose of the trip was, but its net effect on our young minds was to confirm that we were worth—less than rich people’s children.
My hard-working, middle-class parents, like millions of American families, depended on their neighborhood public schools to provide quality education for their children, and rightfully so. Certainly, all parents in the U.S. should be able to choose the educational option that works best for them and their children. Most important, in this nation, every family in every community should have access to good schools. The only difference among schools should be perhaps each having a different focus. No parent anywhere in these United States should have to move or risk arrest in order to secure quality education for her/his child(ren).
How is it then, that millions of American children live in neighborhoods with schools chronically neglected by the same political/educational system that now wants to condemn them as "failing"? In such settings, it is hypocritical and cruel to use the illusion of "choice" and "free-market competition" to justify closing or taking even more resources from those same schools; sending parents scurrying for scarce or non-existent schooling options.
In a widely read New York Times op-ed last December, a black, middle-class mother from D.C. described "Why School Choice Fails."
"But I’ve come to realize that this brand of school reform is a great deal only if you live in a wealthy neighborhood. You buy a house, and access to a good school comes with it. Whether you choose to enroll there or not, the public investment in neighborhood schools only helps your property values.
For the rest of us, it’s a cynical game. There aren’t enough slots in the best neighborhood and charter schools. So even for those of us lucky ones with cars and school-data spreadsheets, our options are mediocre at best.
Today, I live in and my own chldren matriculated through a school district that is still dragging its feet about ending the inequities of segregation ("Justice Department Files Motion.." May 2011). Most of those with whom I have taught here in the Mississippi Delta have done amazing work, sometimes under disgraceful conditions, helping many of our students go on to productice lives. I often wonder how much more those children could have achieved, and how many more we could have helped, if all schools had the resources and support of our better situated colleagues? Real school choice should start with making every public school worthy of choosing.
The supposition behind publicly sponsored school choice plans is that the way to improve schools is by generating competition that would force schools to either get better or close. In reality, as Cheryl Williams correctly notes that, "to the extent we rely on competition to improve some schools, others will be left behind. In that situation the losers are always children, and ultimately the rest of us as well." What such plans promote is abandonment of schools in the neediest communities, and the students whose parents for whom moving/transferring is not an option. It is a simplistic to suggest, as some voucher proponents do, that we just "let the money follow the students." The already insufficient resources at many of these schools cannot be easily or adequately sliced off on a per student basis without causing multiplied damage to those left behind.
Shouldn’t ending such longstanding inequities be a higher priority than funding faulty school choice schemes?
Cross-posted at National Journal.com, Education Experts
Want to know what some of the best teachers in America told the NEA it needed to do to really advance the teaching profession?
Here's a sampling of the recommendations from the Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching to the NEA:
The Commission (of which I was a member) didn't have advice just for the NEA; we also made some very thoughtful and bold recommendations to school districts, state education agencies, and our fellow teachers. Our ideas stunned some education reform leaders, including some who consider themselves advocates for the teaching profession. Read the full report and share your reactions.
Maybe some of our teacher education programs aren't producing enough high quality teachers because they're too busy trying to meet the over 400 reporting requirements demanded by the Federal government? Working out the newest version of those reporting duties and deciding what counts as proof of a high quality teacher education program is being thrashed out now by a federal panel.
As with other aspects of ESEA, it is the establishment and implementation of these Federal rules and regulations where the law actually touches the life and work of schools, students, and teachers. More on this little-known, but critical component at this piece from Inside Higher Education (hat tip to my friends at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching). Also detailed coverage of the two-day meeting over at EdWeek.
On the one hand, some teacher prep programs have come under increasing (some would argue, burdening) regulation, while most alternative, quick-fix programs receive almost no oversight. These double standards and mixed messages have contributed to the educational inequality in this country. I'd advise those genuinely interested in professional preparation of teachers to watch these rules developments closely.
By way of my colleague, Anthony Cody's Living in Dialogue blog over at Teacher Magazine, is one of the best things I've read on why teachers and the teaching profession are so disrespected and targeted in this country. Guest blogger Kelly Flynn, a 20-year teaching veteran and now a journalist tells us the uncomfortable truth: Our biggest problem is us.
"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---"
So wrote Emily Dickinson, who could have been foreseeing the current debate around the legacy of NCLB on the occasion of its 10th anniversary.
I was among several people invited over at Education Week to share my thoughts on what ten years of life under NCLB has meant. As I read the responses and the discussions in other media, I found one constantly repeated point to be particularly irritating, resulting in my posting an angry tweet:
@askgeorge I am SO tired of folk claiming we didn't know 'bout ed inequality until NCLB. Shows how much Blk tchrs & parents were ignored. (@TeachMoore Jan 6)
Supposedly, NCLB's one highly positive attribute is that, as Rep. Miller put it, "It turned the lights on in our schools." He and others credit NCLB with uncovering what was supposedly a deeply hidden secret: That some groups of children in our country, particularly, Black, Hispanic, and special needs children, were generally getting far lower quality of education than their peers. That is the truth, but here's the slant: It was not a secret. In fact, these inequalities are the results of long-standing, deliberate, systemic practices in American education. What's more, parents and teachers, particularly minority parents, students, and teachers, had been complaining loudly and bitterly about those problems for a long, long, time. Perhaps it was policymakers who needed the evidence from NCLB, as Rep. Miller claims, to be "convinced that all children can learn and succeed."
Miller and others argue that "we" didn't have data on how each group of students was performing, and without that information, "no one felt the urgency to fix the problem." Truthfully, what's being preferred as data wasn't that scarce; we have elementary school standardized test scores and college admission scores going back decades. The lack of urgency (again, on whose part?) was because of whose children were being affected. NCLB supporters insist that the law provided impetus, in the form of real penalties, to correct these problems. In most cases, however, those pressures have been applied, not to the designers or perpetrators of the inequities, but more often to those who had been trying for so long to shine the light on these problems: students and teachers.
As I've shared before, many of the schools we currently label as failing, are in fact too successful at doing exactly what they were designed to do: under-serve specific groups of children. How can we hold every child and every school accountable for the same standards, while we simultaneously and deliberately give some students inferior resources, underprepared teachers, inadequate facilities, and put other unnecessary obstacles in their already difficult paths? It did not take ten years of humiliation and frustration of millions of children to learn what we already knew.
Real education reform starts with truth and equity.
Cross-posted at National Journal.com
Recently USA Today featured an editorial co-authored by NEA President Dennis Van Roekel and TFA founder Wendy Kopp that addressed changes needed in teacher preparation.
While some of the article's content is clearly problematic; taken in a larger context--it could be a signal of an interesting and much-needed shift in the educational landscape.
Kopp and the TFA leadership may finally be ready to address one of the strongest criticisms of their program model: It's insufficient preparation of willing, young candidates for the challenges into which they are being sent. Hopefully, Kopp, Van Roekel, and other educational leaders are getting ready to act on recommendations such as those submitted by the Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching (CETT)--made up of outstanding classroom teachers--that outline both the need and real steps for better teacher preparation. (I'd suggest reading that thoroughly then consider revising your editorial).
The CETT (of which I was a part) was firm on this point: All teacher preparation programs need to be held to the same level of quality, whether a university-based teacher education program or one of the hundreds of alternative route programs around the country, of which TFA is the most well-known.
Even more radical is our notion that those responsible for training new teachers should themselves be highly effective, high quality teachers, and every new teacher should be trained by those experts in real learning sites (brick-and-mortar, hybrid, or virtual).
The fact is there probably will be more people who do not enter teaching as a lifetime career commitment for a variety of reasons, and more people who will be entering teaching from other careers.
But picture this:
A team of six to eight teachers of varying expertise and experience (and with different career intentions) might work with 150-175 students over a number of years. Among the team might be several highly accomplished teachers who will supervise and work with a selection of novice teachers...supported by teacher assistants, content specialists, virtual mentors, community experts...Instead of continuing to pursue the impossible dream of finding a single, seasoned teacher expert for every classroom in every school, district-college-community compacts would focus on cultivating these close-knit teacher teams....As co-author Shannon C'de Baca notes: The work of 21st century teaching is too much to fall on the back of any one teacher. We need a fluid profesison that allows different types of teachers, all well-prepared, in scaffolding a career lattice to focus collectively on the needs of students. (Teaching 2030, 108, 111).
Re-designing every aspect of the teacher profession around the needs of the students we serve; that's the future.
Few days ago, I was listening to the national news, and had this thought which I shared with my Twitter friends:
Taught for 21 yrs; earn <$50K; would take 20 more yrs to earn $1M. Tell me again why we can't raise taxes on folks making $1M/yr?
That in turn, led to some other thoughts in my stream of consciousness, such as:
Why should Head Start programs have to compete for operating funds?
Why should educational programs with proven track records of success such as National Writing Project and National Board for Professional Teaching Standards have to compete with each other for funding?
Didn't President Obama just end the war in Iraq, bringing home the majority of the troops? What does Congress plan to do with that money next year?
Does the Beltway bunch think the rest of us are so preoccupied that we won't think about what they're doing (and not doing), or do they just think we're stupid? (Well, we did elect them, so that might be a more reasonable assumption than it first appears.)
Things to think about as we turn into a new year...
What might happen if we asked a group of teachers who have consistently demonstrated themselves to be highly effective to “craft a new vision of a teaching profession that is led by teachers and ensures teacher and teaching effectiveness”?
As the NEA recently discovered, you might get the unexpected.
After much examination and debate, the Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching (CETT) put forward several recommendations, ideas, and challenges, some specifically to the NEA, but also to teacher preparation programs, school districts, state and federal education agencies, lawmakers, and teachers ourselves.
One of the most significant of these recommendations is the call for a National Council for the Teaching Profession to establish a consistent system of preparation, licensure, and certification of all teachers and teacher educators.
According to our report, this “NCTP will work to ensure that each state’s teaching standards are no less rigorous than the national standards. Alignment among state standards will facilitate teacher quality and mobility from state to state” (7).
Few people realize how difficult it is for teachers who are licensed in one state to move and teach in another. In our increasingly mobile society, that is not just an economic inconvenience, it also makes it unnecessarily difficult for schools and districts to recruit and retain teachers their students desperately need. A coordinated system would end the confusing patchwork of teacher preparation programs and dissonant licensure rules across the country.
The uneven quality of teaching in America is directly proportional to our chaotic and archaic approaches to teacher preparation, certification, and evaluation. My Teacher Leader colleagues and I, in our book, Teaching 2030, summarized the sad state of affairs at that point:
The CETT calls for a coordinated effort, building on work done by other groups and stakeholders in teacher preparation, accreditation, licensure, and standards to weave this disparate but overlapping work into one coherent system that is “consistent, efficient, and cost effective” (7). In our vision of such a system, teacher licensure would have a multi-tiered system: initial licensure, awarded by individual states; then one or more additional tiers of fully portable national licenses that “certify accomplished preparation and practice” (7).
An important part of our recommendations on this point was the idea that those who hold leadership (administrative) positions in education and those who work in teacher preparation programs, should be effective teachers and have earned these same certifications. In fact, this entire national certification process should be led by effective teachers.
Do you agree with us that teaching should begin to function like a true profession?
Great piece in New York Times on how schools on America's military bases are closing the achievement gap. Here's a slice:
It has become fashionable for American educators to fly off to Helsinki to investigate how schools there produce such high-achieving Finns. But for just $69.95 a night, they can stay at the Days Inn in Jacksonville, N.C., and investigate how the schools here on the Camp Lejeune Marine base produce such high-achieving Americans — both black and white.
They would find that the schools on base are not subject to former President George W. Bush’s signature education program, No Child Left Behind, or to President Obama’s Race to the Top. They would find that standardized tests do not dominate and are not used to rate teachers, principals or schools.
Exactly one year ago, I was repeatedly approached about serving on a commission being pulled together by NEA around effective teaching, and I initially said, “No, thanks!"
Part of my reticence was the timing. Already involved with several large projects and looking at what I already knew was going to be an extremely full teaching year, I was not enthusiastic about spending precious time on yet another education commission.
There has been no shortage of committees, panels, commissions, reports, books, and mandates on what needs to be done to improve American public education, but disgustingly few of them have been done by the people who are the true education experts: successful classroom teachers. So, on the one hand I was encouraged—at least by the composition of the proposed Commission on Effective Teaching and Teachers.
Twenty-one teachers representing all parts of the country; sixteen of us National Board Certified, each with a string of accomplishments in and out of the classroom; one National Teacher of the Year; one state education CEO, and one of the most outspoken and effective national education leaders of our time. I knew this would be a passionate, vocal, and highly knowledgeable group for whom education reform was not just some intellectual exercise, but rather something we and our students live out daily in our classrooms.
Still, I was hesitant. Although I was assured that the Commission would be independent, I had my concerns about what that would mean in practice. One NEA official finally pleaded with me, “Renee, we need some people who are willing to tell us what we might not want to hear.”
They were not disappointed on that point.
In our deliberations, we asked some very tough questions, examined troves of data, and made some disturbing revelations. We found ourselves at odds with the NEA staff on some things, and even disagreeing with the very distinguished advisory committee that we had invited to give us feedback on some aspects of our work.
Ultimately, it was each Commissioner’s commitment to our three guiding principles, our respect for each other, and our desire as teachers to refocus the national conversation around education reform back to what really matters, that kept us together and working on this project.
Now, as I review our published report, Transforming Teaching, I am grateful to have been part of the Commission. Some of the ideas we put forward, as our chair, Maddie Fennel noted, are not entirely new, but they are radical because they come from teachers, and not just the teachers on the Commission itself. During the year we engaged and drew upon the insights of thousands of classroom teachers, from veterans through novices, to those still in teacher preparation programs.
More than anything, I am struck by the growing consensus I am hearing from teachers and teacher leaders around the country that point us toward a new vision of public education and of the entire teaching profession.
More on this and the report contents in my next blog.