Hotspot Schools

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Mike

I want to make something clear: I do not agree with the Reformist’s premise that American Public Education is broken beyond repair and must be reinvented from the ground up, nor do I agree with their methods for “fixing” it, or, too often, their vision for what they want public education to become. There are problems that must be addressed. I just don’t agree with the Reformists what the problems are or what constitutes “solutions.”

I have said previously that I believe that Public Education is this nation’s crown jewel. Public Education is not an outmoded, discredited concept, but is, as a whole, reasonably healthy and does serve the nation well. Most schools do their job and serve most students pretty well. A few are truly exemplary. And some are indeed “broken”: so bad that they do not do anybody much good, students or teachers. But Waiting for Superman notwithstanding, I do not believe that worst cases represent public education as a whole. I am sure that if you were to evaluate schools on any reasonable criteria and plot the results, you would have something pretty close to a bell curve.

A few schools are doing just fine and should just continue doing what they are doing, because it obviously works. Most schools should pretty much continue what they are doing, but do it more and better; most schools have room for improvement and no doubt some pressing problems that need to be fixed. It is the schools on the bell curve’s back slope that are “broken” and require serious, urgent, but thoughtful attention.

I read in the January 24, 2011 New Yorker an article by Atul Gawande: “The Hot Spotters.”  http://www.camdenhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Gawande-Camden-Annals_17.pdf Jeffrey Brenner, a young Camden New Jersey physician, was asked to serve on a police reform commission. The commission undertook to study patterns of crime in the city by mapping assaults. Neither the police department nor the police union would cooperate with the mapping by making data available, and eventually the commission disbanded. But Brenner now had an idea.

He undertook to create his own maps by studying hospital records for emergency room admissions for assault. This led to making maps of health care costs around Camden, and the most expensive areas were designated “hot spots.” Next, the most expensive patients were identified, as well as what it was that made them expensive, both their individual medical ailments and the “system” that treated them. The idea then was to enlist the cooperation of doctors and social workers to work with the most expensive individual patients and, for example, to replace a reliance on expensive hospitalizations and emergency room visits with more pro-active primary care. To summarize, this initiative actually made more than a trivial difference in health care costs in Camden.

Now all this was very interesting because, if nothing else, it has great implications for containing Medicaid costs, while improving health care. But the real interest to me is the implications of this approach for school “reform” that will address real problems. Think of Brenner’s cost map of hospitals as an achievement map of schools. Think of that achievement map in medical terms – epidemiology.

I noted that Brenner did not proclaim American health care to be broken beyond repair, that more hospitals should be closed or doctors fired, rather that problems should be analyzed and addressed.

It got me to wondering if all the worst schools have really been identified. Basing identification on one or two tests may be misleading. Have the total programs been examined? Even the worst schools may be doing some good, for some students. A test score does not a program make. It indicates that problems exist, but it says relatively little about the nature of the problems (diagnostics), their causes (etiology), or effective remedies. The Reformists wave the bloody shirt of test scores, but they cite a limited body of research. They do not look very deeply. Their “reforms,” besides being heavy-handed will ultimately result in little actual improvement.

Find and identify the worst schools, especially the ones that seem to have been resistant to previous efforts to “improve” them. Start with them and really concentrate on them. Consider them public education’s “hot spots.” We will certainly learn things that will have applications elsewhere. But there is an important caveat.

According to Tolstoy, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” When it comes to schools, Tolstoy had it half right: schools, both good and bad, are not all alike.  What good schools do that works for them may not translate directly to other schools, just as a medication may not be effective or even safe for all patients. The failures of bad schools may not be universal. Just as it is with patients in Camden, each is an individual with its own culture and its own complex of problems. No competent physician would utilize the same treatment with all patients, especially if the treatment addressed one symptom. Yet, most Politicians’ approach to Reform does essentially that.

How much do we really know about bad schools, both in general and particular bad schools?

How is a bad school bad? Yes, it has low test scores, like the patient has a fever. The fever is a symptom of an infection, but by itself, it can’t tell us much about that infection. We must look past that for what the real problems are. Has anyone really studied a bad school in depth? Really diagnosed it? Administration? Policies? Organization? Philosophy? Has philosophy ever been discussed, deliberated upon, eventually agreed upon, and set down on paper? What does the school think it is doing and why is it doing that? What should it be doing and why? The “is” and the “should be” are separate questions, but if they are widely divergent, that is both a problem and a starting point toward solutions. Faculty – collectively and individually, department by department? What mechanisms for change already exist, whether they are being utilized or not? How do teachers work and plan and brainstorm together? Are teachers even included in curriculum formulation? Do they have a voice in policy? What are individual teachers’ ideas about problems and possible improvements? What is the faculty culture? The student culture?

Study the school, for that matter, as a community. A class becomes a community after a while. The student body is a community, or an assemblage of interrelated communities, and the faculty is a community, or an assemblage of interrelated communities, for better or for worse, functional or dysfunctional.

Has anyone ever done a thorough, multi-part, multi-layered ethnographic study of a school, both good schools and bad? It would be quite the ambitious project. It would also be instructive. In the 1990s, Bruce Robbins and Driek Zirinsky of Boise State University did such a study of Nampa High School’s Language Arts Department (“Growing Into Leadership: Profiles from a ‘Good’ Department,” The English Journal, September 1996 http://www.jstor.org/pss/820706). The report was mostly laudatory, but the point is, it took a close look at how a school, or a department therein, actually works, in this case for better, in another case perhaps for worse.

Jeffrey Brenner could have been satisfied to lament that these “hot-spot” hospitals were inefficiently run and that “those people” “over-consume” health care.   The problem was more complex, and instead he chose to study it in a systematic manner, and on his findings base not just the treatment of individual patients, but the structure within which medical care is provided. The result, in Camden at least, seems promising. Costs for disrupting these patterns were more than offset by reductions in health-care costs in the areas studied. This seems counter-intuitive in the sense that we have all been taught “you can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it.” That is probably true if throwing money is the end, not the means, and if no attention is paid to targeting the money or evaluating the results. But it is also true that in too many cases, if no money is spent, nothing changes. No doubt there were many ways money could have been thoughtlessly spent in Camden without making one bit of difference. But relatively modest well thought out expenditures saved money in the end.

If we would identify the educational “hot spots” and the “sickest” students, if we would take care to diagnose the problems and distinguish the symptoms from the causes, if we would take the care to distinguish between healthy and diseased tissue (to continue the medical analogy), the results might well be better education for all, and more cost-effective education as well.

Posted in Education Reform, School Program | Leave a comment

Bad Systems, Bad Teachers

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Mike

You all have probably gathered by now from my rants that the world of school is not easily walked away from. You have probably gathered that I have little use for the school “reform” movement, which, in the cynicism of geezerhood, I consider to be misguided at best, and at worst, deliberately malicious. I hope you have also gathered that I believe, with equal ardor, in Progress, in the continuous improvement of our schools, their institutions and practices, and I am concerned when I read of dysfunctional and deteriorating schools that do not do right by their students. I hope that over the years I did my bit, both in the classroom and out of it, to contribute to the improvement my school in particular and American Public Education in general.

So it is that when I read something that makes sense, amidst all the hoopla and hype, I feel compelled to pass it on. In a letter to the editor of the Statesman, no less, I came across this website:  One Nation Supporting Education. I recommend it if you have the least interest in such issues.

Be aware that this site has links, and the links have links. As far as I have followed them, all are good reading, all seem sound and sensible, advocating a much more reasoned approach to the actual improvement of our public schools than the propaganda propagated by the Reformists – you know, those usual suspects, the Politicians, Pundits, Polemicists, and all too many Professors Who Really Know Better.

I have written at some length about bad teachers.  We usually think of bad teachers as those who are characterized by malfeasance, misfeasance, and/or nonfeasance: that is, wrongdoing, incompetence, and/or dereliction. But how do bad teachers become bad? No doubt some should never have gone into the profession in the first place. The time to identify these is the first two or three or four years (depending on state law), a probationary period, when it is relatively simple to tell such a person “this isn’t working out” and show him the door.

Sad cases are the bad teachers who started out with the best of intentions and perhaps even with lofty ideals, but are bad because their system sets them up to fail. How often are incompetent, indifferent, or downright hostile administrators at the root of the problem? With a “toxic” principal who undercuts her teachers at every opportunity, there is no way this school or anyone in it could succeed.  How often do such administrators take their cues from the District Office? How often were they hired expressly to punish the teachers in bad schools?

I recently read an essay, “Confessions of a Bad Teacher” by John Owens.   Owens left a lucrative career in publishing because he wanted to teach. He found himself in front of a classroom for the first time at the age of 55 in one of a number of small public high schools started by the Bloomberg administration in the past decade, the 350-student Latinate [not its real name] … housed in a former elementary school. In this regard, he was very much like Ruben Jackson, but his experience was far different.

This is why getting rid of Continuing Contract (calling it “tenure” is a deliberate and malicious lie) is a really bad idea. Just think, what if a controlling, punitive, unsupportive Principal like Ms. P. could strut down the hall and bellow ‘You’re fired!” at whomever she pleased. On the other hand, I fault that union for not negotiating a better evaluation instrument and fair rules for its implementation. I fault the union for not supporting teachers like Owens by filing grievances on their behalf. That’s what you pay your dues for.

Owens was lucky. He had another (more lucrative) line of work that he could go back to. But consider someone who started out to be a career teacher, who invested four to six years and much treasure on his degree and certification. Consider that in the world of work, teaching experience is not very portable to other jobs. He is sort of stuck isn’t he? Think about being stuck in this system year after year, with nowhere else to go. Who wouldn’t become jaded and cynical, one of those burned-out cases, a sour old fart who just goes through the motions and keeps his ass covered, and spends the next thirty years counting down the years to retirement?

Why do I suspect that Mr. Owens replaced “Mr. K.,” a quiet fellow with aspirations to writing, who phoned in sick one morning, said the kids bugged him, and never came back. He would have been part of a 50% annual teacher turnover at that school. Owens describes what sounds like a successful year, given that his students were not an easy bunch. He got most of them on board and actually taught them English, even if he took liberties with the prescribed curriculum. I have been there and can think of no better way he could have done things. But no good deed goes unpunished, and his performance evaluations were consistently negative – he was a bad teacher – and before the end of the year, he had a chance to return to his old job, and he too left.

With all due (dis)respect to Mayor Bloomberg and Bill Gates and Superintendents Luna and Rhee and all the other Reformists who sing the same tune, a lot of “bad teachers” are made by the systems in which they work.  Owens describes it thus:

Little did I know I was entering a system where all teachers are considered bad until proven otherwise. Also, from what I saw, each school’s principal has so much leeway that it’s easy for good management and honest evaluation to be crushed under the weight of Crazy Boss Syndrome. And, in my experience, the much-vaunted “data” and other measurements of student progress and teacher efficacy are far more arbitrary and manipulated than taxpayers and parents have been led to believe.

http://www.peavinequarter.com/thoughts-on-bad-teachers/

http://supportingpubliceducation.yolasite.com/

http://www.salon.com/2011/08/29/confessions_of_a_bad_teacher/

http://www.vpr.net/episode/52210/burlington-teacher-profiled-on-story/

Posted in Education Reform, Memoir, Teacher Accountability | Leave a comment

Bill Gates on Teacher Evaluations

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Mike

I have been critical of “Reformists” with their mantras of greater teacher accountability, putting greater pressure on teachers in order to make them shape up, and firing some as an example to the rest. And I still am critical of this approach. They always seem to come down to the conclusion that the single, intractable problem with American education today is the teachers. Solutions, proposed and implemented, are usually punitive in tone and brutal in degree. For example, the Los Angeles Times used school district test results to identify the “worst” teachers and publish their names and pictures in the paper. This has always seemed to me to have little to do with “reform” or “accountability,” and everything to do with Terror: “See what we can do to you, and there will be absolutely nothing you will be able to do to help yourself!”  This kind of intimidation may have its political uses, cowing a faculty, for example, but it is not going to be much of a positive motivator.  It is unfortunate but not surprising that teachers and their union, witnessing such gratuitous cruelty, see “evaluation,” like “reform,” as an enemy.

And I have been critical of Bill Gates as another Billionaire Bearing Gifts, a Reformist who uses his wealth and influence to mould the nation’s schools to serve his own social, political, ideological, and ultimately financial agendas.

So it is that I was a bit surprised that some of the things Gates said actually make sense. He feels that a recent New York Court of Appeals decision that teacher evaluations may be made public is a mistake. The idea is to help teachers be better, and making personnel records public is not conducive to frank and open discussion; it is not constructive criticism.

A supposed benefit is to inform parents which teachers are good, which are bad, and whose classes to get their kids into, and which to avoid. Which families will be accommodated and which will not? But having parents competing against each other for slots in the “best” teacher’s classes is a “zero-sum game,” Gates says. It works against the kind of honest feedback that will improve teachers’ capability.

Gates is also critical of the primary emphasis on test scores in evaluation. For one thing, test scores are poor diagnostic instruments: they do not tell a teacher what part of what he is doing is/is not working. Actual observation of teacher practice is much more useful. Student feedback has potential as well.  He says that we need to get serious about all aspects of teacher evaluation. The idea is to help teachers improve their practice.

I think that Reformists’ fixation on test scores as the primary if not sole evaluator is a result of the Streetlight Fallacy. It is easy and seems obvious. But if we really want to find ways to improve instruction, we need to figure out how to look in the shadows back down in the middle of the block where the lost keys actually are.

Nobody benefits more from well-conceived, well-executed teacher evaluation than teachers themselves. Accomplished teachers get validation. Less-accomplished teachers get constructive guidance. Anyone who has been on either end of the evaluation transaction realizes neither the conception nor the execution is simple because teaching is a complex endeavor, more so than most Reformists seem willing to acknowledge. Gates says that he had an excellent education. What did it consist of that may/may not have been different from somewhere else? How was it delivered that may/may not have been differently than might have been done somewhere else? What made Bill Gates’ education better than Jimmy Stiles’ across town? Besides the big, obvious things, what are the myriad less-obvious variables that may or may not make a difference? Complex.

As with most complex undertakings, the devil is in the details. What do we evaluate? How do we evaluate it? Who does the evaluating? What are the criteria and who defines them? How often? What is done with the results? How much time can we devote to Evaluation before it starts to interfere with actual instruction becomes otherwise counter-productive? What is the relationship between evaluating students’ learning and evaluating teachers’ instruction? You know, details.  Unlike most Reformists, Politicians or otherwise, Bill Gates seems at least to have a clue.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/04/07/150158412/bill-gates-making-teacher-evaluations-public-not-conducive-to-openness

Posted in Education Reform, Teacher Accountability | Leave a comment

Pilot Programs

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Mike

The Idaho Statesman, 3-23-2012, reported on the “technological revolution” at Eagle Elementary in the Meridian, Idaho, school district. The district used federal funds to purchase 43 iPads and 130 iPod Touches. Parent groups raised money for another 17 iPads. Each 4th and 5th grade classroom has six iPads, and each classroom from K-3 has ten iPod Touches. For the past three years, boosters have come up with $2400 annually for Discovery Streaming, on on-line content provider; this year the state is picking up the tab.

“‘We are all doing it, and we are all doing it at a high level,’ said [Principal Carla] Karnes. ‘Our engagement is 100 percent – students, teachers and staff.’”

“‘This is school at Star Elementary,’ said Meridian Superintendent Lynda Clark. ‘They are really leading the way at building those classrooms of the 21st Century.’”

The story goes on to outline some of the ways this technology is being used in instruction: students are able to plot their musical instruments as chart and graphs; they can move from one format to another, and they are able to turn their assignments in electronically.  They are able to record themselves reading aloud, and when they are satisfied, they turn their best “take” in electronically for grading. Math apps work like games.

There are trade-offs. Apps are cheaper than textbooks, but they need to be updated much more frequently, and electronic devices require much more maintenance than textbooks.

Star Elementary is not an affluent school, with 45% of its students at or below the poverty line.

State Superintendent Tom Luna approves, enthusiastically. He says “Technology is the key to leveling the playing field… What we see in every classroom is that every student is engaged, even though they are functioning at different academic levels, and teachers that are focusing on individualized learning for each child.”

What’s not to like? Nothing, really. Everything sounds copacetic. The one puzzling element is that this sounds so much at variance with the debate surrounding Students Come First last year, with substantial numbers of teachers, students, and parents finding plenty not to like. What’s the difference? Part may be in the different tone of discourse. This seems to be a local initiative pushed by teachers and parents, not a bunch of Politicians saying “We can make you do this, and if you don’t like it… Well, that’s the idea, isn’t it now?  And, by the way, we are going to get rid of 700 of you, into the bargain.” Superintendent Luna now says “What we are seeing here is that no teachers have been replaced with technology,” a far different tune from a year ago. Boys and girls, can you say “disingenuous?”

According to NPRs Here and Now, Burlington High School in Massachusetts went over to one iPad per student in the fall. Host Robin Young interviewed Principal Patrick Larkin.

Larkin acknowledged the cost, for the devices, for software, for training, for maintenance. The change cost about $500,000 up front. Some of this was defrayed by not having to buy new textbooks, some by closing out existing computer labs – now, every classroom can be a computer lab. There is no mention of teachers being laid off.

A fair bit of the discussion concerned textbooks. In the brave new world of digital learning, there are some ambivalent attitudes toward the traditional textbook and its digital counterpart.

At one point, Larkin said, “We won’t be buying any more textbooks. Textbooks are relics.”

Host Robin Young posed a recurring question: “But textbooks are carefully designed. So now who will frame the coursework?”  Traditionally, the textbook has, for all practical purposes, in many schools, been the curriculum. And, Ms. Young went on to say, “Aren’t textbooks based on what Texas wants?” For better or for worse, there is some truth here. The Texas State Department of Education makes textbook adoptions that are binding on the whole state. If, for example, the state adopts Magruder’s American Government, then that is the sole American Government textbook for the state, and it will largely determine the American Government curriculum across the state.

But Larkin says, “These computers are more than just textbooks.” Textbooks are guides to help us cover some of the curriculum. I don’t think there is a textbook that covers everything in the curriculum. Textbook publishers don’t send people out to ask our teachers what they think should be covered. Textbooks are not curriculum, says Larkin.

Todd Whitman, chair of history dept. explains (if not in these exact words, then to this effect), we’ve been doing it (no textbooks, no e-books), and I like it. It’s not like we have thrown out the curriculum. It’s the same curriculum, different stuff. Instead of saying “For tomorrow, read these pages,” and then tomorrow, we go over that material, it’s more like Group A, look for material on this, Group B, look for that, and Group C, look for the other thing, focusing on leadership, for example. Then, the next day, (if I were doing it), each group pools their findings and works up a presentation, which they deliver to the rest of the class.

According to Larkin, The learners should have a role in this. Why shouldn’t students be able to go off and find materials for themselves that are relevant to the curriculum objectives? This is a valuable skill, not just finding material, but evaluating its relevance and reliability – how do you know whether to trust this source? The teacher’s job then becomes pointing them in the right direction.

We’re not ordering e-textbooks either. That’s not a cost-saving proposition. They cost nearly as much, and you can’t pass them along from year to year like you can a paper textbook.

There are some lessons here with profound import for education “reform” (I would prefer to use words like “improvement” or “evolution,” although “true-believer” Reformists sneer at these words and scoff at them as impermissible concepts. In both places, we have local initiatives, not state or federal mandates. There is a high level of buy-in by students, teachers, and parents because all are involved. What a revolutionary concept: the stakeholders are acknowledged as such and are actually involved. Teachers not only have great latitude to choose the materials that will flesh out the curriculum, but it is necessary that they do so. Students, too, become active participants in learning, not passive receptacles waiting to be filled with textbook information, measured out in bite-sized dollops by the teacher. If there is not tax-payer money enough to finance the enterprise, parents seem willing to get behind it with fund-raisers. Everyone “has skin in the game.” As the delivery of knowledge is decentralized, individual students and individual teachers assume greater responsibility for the process of education and their roles come to the fore.

Does it matter? Yes, insofar as “the medium is the message,” how we learn is part and parcel of what we learn. Marshall McLuhan must be smiling down from where ever it is that all good media mavens go. Yes, he must be saying, it does indeed “take a global village to raise a child!”

Notice, that not only are these schools moving beyond exclusive reliance on textbooks, they are bypassing e-textbooks (which are textbooks that just happen to be paperless, after all), and exclusive contracts with “approved” vendors of instructional materials, which seem to me not so different from the “Texas way.” Both anchor “reform” to old ways of doing business. So, which will it be? Evolution? Continuous improvement, W. Edwards Deming style? Or will we “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past?”

It depends on who really owns American education. But that is another topic for another day.

Eagle Elementary:

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/03/23/2047106/star-home-to-the-itools-school.html

Burlington MA HS:

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2012/03/23/schools-textbooks-ipad

http://www.patrickmlarkin.com/p/ipad-pickup-registration.html

Posted in Curriculum, Education Reform, Technology | Leave a comment

Math and Science

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Mike

I am listening to NPR’s Science Friday. The panel of experts is discussing and bemoaning how few of today’s youth pursue science in high school, college, and beyond.

This is nothing new. The experts were discussing and bemoaning the same thing in 1957. How well I remember! The more things change…

I’m no expert (on much of anything, let alone science), but I think I know the reason(s).

  • Science is poorly taught in grade school. Most teachers at this level have little background in science or how to teach it. I am sure many are terrified of it. It would be surprising if such attitudes were not transmitted to the kids. And, increasingly, due to fiscal difficulties, it is not taught at all in the grades. It is better in junior high and high school. More science teachers, if not all, have at least some preparation. But this may be too late; the seeds of science apathy and sciencephobia have been planted.
  • The farther you move up the science ladder, the more math-intensive it becomes. This seems to be truer than it used to be. At my little school, Physics must be taken following or in conjunction with Calculus. In high school, yet! The experts never seem to get it: much of the problem is primarily a math gap and only secondarily a science gap. As we move from one math course to another, a de-selection takes place. Therefore, science becomes less and less accessible. Perhaps this is inevitable, the iron law of the bell curve. I have heard math teachers say straight out that not everyone has the mental horsepower to do math.

This brings us to a fundamental philosophical question that educational policymakers keep dancing around and Politicians are probably blissfully unaware of. Do we make it our priority to teach more math to more kids, push as many kids as we can as high as we can up the mathematical hierarchy? Calculus (and physics) for the hoi polloi?  Being one of the h-p, my stomach does flip-flops and my head hurts at the very idea. But would this be feasible, and if so, would it be desirable? Or, do we select out the brightest and best, the elite, and concentrate on them?

The latter would certainly seem the more efficient, especially in this time of dwindling resources. Play to your strength. Triage. Identify your first-string team, and don’t worry overmuch about the bench-warmers. It was certainly the prevailing paradigm in the post-Sputnik era, the best strategy for competing in the space race. Perhaps it is the best for the technology race. Does your school track? If so, it’s easy to tell their philosophy in this matter.

But the former has its political and practical points. What does it matter whether we unwashed know much science? Too many Americans (perhaps including our Politicians) know little science and care less. Isn’t science just another opinion, no better or worse than any other? Too many Americans (perhaps including our Politicians) are not just indifferent toward science, but are actually fearful of it and hostile toward scientists. Egg-headed elitists, you know. But these are the people who vote for the Politicians, and you can bet that Politicians are quick to pick up on the attitudes and prejudices of their electorate and play to them. And these Politicians vote on science-related bills. Guess how they will vote.

Perhaps science and the requisite math are not just for the cream of the class after all. In Payette, come time to register for next year’s classes, I did a little counseling without a license. I particularly remember John, who I had in one class or another all four years. One year, it was “I don’t see you signed up for Geometry.” “Why should I? I’m not going to college; I’m going to be a welder.” The next year, Chemistry; same answer. And then Physics; same answer yet again. The year after he graduated, he enrolled at the local community college to study welding, what else? He stopped by my room one day after school to visit me. I inquired about how he was doing at TVCC. “God! It’s so hard! The first quarter we didn’t even get into the shop; it was all classroom theory. Plans and set-ups.”  (Geometry, I thought.) “Oxidation and reduction and metallurgy.” (Chemistry.) “Electricity and heat transfer.” (Physics.) He blamed the school for not teaching him what he needed to know, and perhaps rightly so. Perhaps our education system is broken, although not in the way our critics would like you to believe.

You can lead a horse to water. The hard part is getting him to drink.

Posted in Curriculum, Education Reform, School Program, Technology | Leave a comment

Revealing Truths about Our Nation’s Schools

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Mike

A few days ago, I observed in an e-mail to a friend

I heard about this [The Office for Civil Rights’ report, Reveling New Truths About the Nation’s Schools] on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today, so I looked it up. This is perhaps old stuff to you, but I find it most interesting and revelatory. Granted that these are big city schools far removed from us, still, I wonder if some of these patterns do not exist in Idaho, to a lesser degree and with different demographics, of course. We are constantly blamed for how poorly prepared our students are for college, but notice the number of schools who even offer Algebra II (passing it is another matter) and beyond; many also do not even offer Chemistry. Pp 6-10.  The data on teacher equity in both pay and assignments is also interesting. But “this touches not us,” no doubt. http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/crdc-2012-data-summary.pdf

He replied

Sue and I were amazed, when we were living in Maryland, when one of the local high schools attained accreditation, apparently for the first time in a while.  Last time I was aware, in Idaho, there was hell to pay in the press if the high school did not receive high marks in accreditation.

Of course, when I went to high school American Falls had the reputation of being the richest school district in the state.

The foregoing is prologue. I would imagine that in Maryland, Montgomery County schools such as Chevy-Chase High School or Montgomery Blair High School have little problem with accreditation.http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/schools/04406.pdf Herein lies a little problem the Reformists or the media who report them do not seem quick to acknowledge.

In Idaho, even the not-so-affluent districts generally get their accreditation. There will be some who will be “advised.”  A few will be “warned.” Evidently the problems get fixed. I can’t remember when I last heard of an Idaho school district losing its accreditation. But even in the smallest, humblest district there are enough parents who would raise bloody Hell if their school lost its accreditation. Patrons may not feel as deeply about the accreditation of the academic programs as they do about the football team, but it would certainly raise concern enough that patrons would demand answers and solutions.  But in a really large district, especially if the schools are very large, and if some of those schools draw from  less prosperous neighborhoods, it may well be that this sense of community ownership is not so strong if  it exists at all.

This is even more pernicious if there is a wide gap in income and class between schools. Income and class have become the “new race,” and with this comes  an us-them mentality. Usually and predictably, board members (or whatever governing body) come from the “better” neighborhoods. It is not surprising if they are more solicitous of “their” schools than the “others.” This was brought home forcefully to me several years ago in one of the classes I had to take for my administrator’s certificate. In an after-class discussion, one Boise teacher wondered why school A seemed to get preferential funding and more “goodies” than school B. Another Boise teacher replied, “Why, because you have a better class of kid at School A, of course.” I have never forgotten that.

Some years later, but still several years ago, I was at an NHPO (a parent organization for Nampa High School) meeting. The English department had recently un-tracked itself for reasons that still seem legitimate. As part of this untracking, AP was dropped. (It has since come back, but the “remedial” classes have not, and good riddance). One angry father, red-faced, indignantly sputtered, “But… But that means my daughter will have to be in classes with all those other kids!” I have never forgotten that. I think that one reason Shirley Vendrell lost her job as principal was that she bucked the district leadership and campaigned long and hard against the district leadership and its idea that the new high school should be the academic high school, and NHS would the “vocational” school. In other words, rich-poor; white-brown.

As long as the “good” schools are doing well and have no trouble being accredited, no one much cares about the “bad” ones.

Furthermore, not all districts are created equal. Some have much better tax bases than others. Rich districts – poor districts. This is most apparent in declining urban districts. (http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2011/02/07/captured-the-ruins-of-detroi) The middle class flees to the suburbs (white flight), taking the tax base with them. Jonathan Kozol discusses this at length in Savage Inequalities (1992)

The Civil Rights Data Collection report, referred to earlier, points this up.  Page 10 shows that more novice (cheaper) teachers are assigned to the schools with the most African-American and Hispanic students. Likewise, at those schools, teachers in general earn less, perhaps because, in general, they are less experienced and therefore are farther down on the salary schedule. We gather from this that less experienced teachers are less capable in managing kids’ behavior, and probably academically as well. After all, this study was originally about discipline. I know, the Reformists say that there is absolutely no link between teacher experience and teacher effectiveness (I have never seen any statistical evidence to this effect), but I don’t believe it. I am sure that when I retired, I was a much better teacher than I had been 40 years earlier, or even 10 years earlier. I certainly had fewer behavior problems in my classes.In fact, remembering my first few years is sort of embarrassing. For most of a half-century, I have heard education Policy-Makers enthuse about young blood and new ideas to justify preferring to hire less experienced (cheaper) teachers.

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Sleepers

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Mike

I read Walden many summers ago, and much of it has left me. One passage. however, has always stayed:

Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain.If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again. (Italics mine)

Anyone who has read Walden, or has read excerpts in the anthologies that are used in school, or who has even read about Walden, knows that Thoreau took a dim view of the industrial revolution  and saw the railroad in particular as being emblematic of its values.

It is the five italicized sentences that arrested my attention when I first read Walden and have persisted in my memory. Over the years, I have always assumed that this passage, especially the italicized sentences, are figurative, not literal. Now I am not so sure. Over the past few years I have come across references in the news of unmarked graves, some of them mass graves, along railroad rights of way in that part of the country, enough to lead us to think that such burials were not uncommon. After all, railroad work was hard, and dangerous, and poorly paid. Railroad laborers came from the lowest tier of society: the poor, recent immigrants, particularly the  Irish at that time. They were probably considered expendable. (Please excuse the italics in this paragraph. WordPress put them there and seems reluctant to let me get rid of them.)

Most recently, five bodies were discovered at a place called Duffy’s Cut in Pennsylvania. They had been there a long time, along the railroad right of way. They are thought to have belonged to a crew of 57 contract laborers, recently arrived from Ireland. They all disappeared and were never heard from again. It has been assumed that they all perished in the cholera epidemic of 1832. After all, living conditions in the labor camps were crowded and substandard, even for the day, the kind of places where disease spreads rapidly. This latest group show signs of having died violently, however. Were they killed by vigilantes fearful of the spread of of their disease, a sort of extreme quarantine? Who knows? Perhaps we never will know. After all, for over 150 years, we didn’t much care.

But it makes me wonder if, when Thoreau said, “Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man,” he wasn’t speaking literally of a specific incident or practice that prevailed then, the memory of which has since been banished from our national historical consciousness.

http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/55-irish-immigrants-re-1378444.html


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College for All? (2)

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Mike

In “Making It in America,” Adam Davidson explores the problems of American manufacturing, using two young people as his vehicle. Maddie has no education beyond high school and no specialized skills. Luke has a good math background, three years of technical school, and the skills necessary run the most sophisticated machines. Maddie is a production line worker. Luke is a skilled tradesman. Luke has a bright future. Maddie can expect only more of the same or less.

Those of us who teach have seen lots of Maddies and Lukes pass through our rooms. Sometimes we can make shrewd guesses who will be which. Sometimes it is just a matter of “Time and Chance happen to all.” All told, Davidson’s picture of two young workers in today’s manufacturing economy rings true.

Then, near the end of the article, Davidson takes what seems to be the obligatory swipe at public schools: “a broken educational system.” It is true that some schools do a much better job of preparing their students for life beyond high school, but why that is, and its implications for America are another topic for another day, because Davidson does not make the case that the educational system is broken beyond “common knowledge.”  Nor does he indicate that either of these young people are victims of “a broken educational system.” It seems to have served Luke quite well, and Maddie’s problems are not the result of anything the schools did or did not do, but of an ill-timed pregnancy. Luke’s family seems to have had the resources to keep him afloat while he went to school, whereas Maddie’s did not. Maddie was an honor roll student. She had seemed college-bound, and surely could have met entry requirements of any reasonably likely school, but having the grades and having the money are two different things. I taught mostly seniors, poised to jump off into the Wild Blue, and as I talk to these students of the recent past, this fact of life is borne home to me again and again.

“Those with the right ability and circumstances will, most likely, make the right adjustments, get the right skills, and eventually thrive. But I fear that those who are challenged now will only fall further behind.” (Italics mine) Those pesky circumstances! In this regard, our system is indeed broken.

Teen pregnancy, drug use, racial discrimination, and all the other slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that our young people are heir to? We can only try to remediate these, to mitigate their impacts on what our students are able to bring to our door. That we must do, but we cannot solve them. Perhaps our Policy Makers can. Perhaps our Politicians need to get serious about taking on these challenges. Whether they will depends, ultimately, on America’s attitudes toward the role of education in our culture, relative to our values concerning our social, economic and political structures.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/3/

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College for All?

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Mike

In election season, politicians love to attribute unfortunate quotes to opposing politicians, either out of context or just plain contrary to fact. The following comes from an article in Tampa Bay Times Politifact *, a column syndicated in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and a number of other papers, quoting from a speech by candidate Rick Santorum:

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college,” Santorum said. “What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test [sic]that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor that (tries) to indoctrinate them.”
Politifact then quotes Obama’s response in a speech delivered to the National Governors Association:

“… The jobs of the future are increasingly going to those with more than a high school degree. And I have to make a point here. When I speak about higher education, we’re not just talking about a four-year degree. We’re talking about somebody going to a community college and getting trained for that manufacturing job that now is requiring somebody walking through the door, handling a million-dollar piece of equipment. And they can’t go in there unless they’ve got some basic training beyond what they received in high school. We all want Americans getting those jobs of the future. So we’re going to have to make sure that they’re getting the education that they need.”

I bring this up not to involve myself in the ‘tis-‘tain’t of who said what and what they meant by it, but because it made me think of an article I recently read in the January-February Atlantic, Adam Davidson’s “Making It in America.” * * The article is about the state of manufacturing in America, much of which is beside my point. Davidson focuses on one factory, Standard Motor Products’ fuel injector line in Greenville, South Carolina, which is representative of the kind of manufacturing that has a future in America. For those of you who are still stuck in the age of carburetors, automotive fuel delivery systems today are very sophisticated, very high-tech, and the injectors themselves are made to extremely close tolerances that would probably make the mechanism of your watch seem primitive by comparison.

This has profound implications not just for the companies, but for those who will be the workers of tomorrow. Davidson narrows his focus to two workers in that factory, Maddie and Luke. Maddie is an assembler in the clean room. Luke runs a half-million dollar Gildemeister 7-axis turning machine, not just a lathe, but a complete and complex computerized system that performs a number of operations and must be constantly watched, tested, and ministered to if it is to remain within specifications. In other words, Maddie is a machine operator, a semi-skilled line worker, and Luke is a machinist, a skilled tradesman, and the two have completely different futures.

Maddie is smart and hard working and was an honor student in high school. Unfortunately, she was pregnant by the time she graduated. The complexities of being a single parent, the cost of day-care alone, precluded further schooling. She needed a job, so she went to work, first for a temp agency, later for Standard. But without further training, she will not move up to a better job, one with a future. Because her job requires little training, she is easily replaceable. She is stuck.

Luke, on the other hand, started out at a four-year college as a pre-dental student. He soon decided it was not for him. He transferred to a two-year college where he eventually found his way into the Machine Tool Technology. In the next three years, besides lots of hours in the shop learning to cut metal, he studied lots of math (which he admits comes easily to him) and lots of computer programming. Thus, when he got a factory job, he was able, after five years,  to work his way up to running the most sophisticated machines.

So, we have two bright, hard-working young people, one with a future in rapidly changing American manufacturing, the other with no future, nor any way to get one. Both did well in high school, but one had access to post-secondary education and the other did not. We can fault Maddie for some poor youthful decisions, but Luke spent a few years bouncing from one course of study to another until he found one that suited him, so he probably had resources that enabled him to do that. Maddie, on the other hand, is unlikely to be able to quit work long enough for further school or training. The important thing is that their bottom lines are very different.

This brings us back to what Obama said and what Santorum made of it. The question is not whether one should go to college (the answer, candidate Santorum notwithstanding is yes), but who should get to go – who should have access. Obama, remember, is not necessarily talking in terms of a four-year degree, but in terms of various degrees and flavors of technical education and training for today’s specialized jobs.

If these case histories reflect reality, ability is not the determining factor; both young people seem to have been academically capable. Both come across as hard working, with good attitudes. We gather that their high schools were of at least adequate quality. Both have virtu. It is in fortuna that they differ.

We are always told that American industry is hamstrung because it cannot find workers with the skills needed to do the jobs. That is why jobs must be off-shored – to find an adequately skilled workforce, we are told.  Yet here we have a young lady who would no doubt improve herself if she could see a clear way to do so. And I feel, as a result of watching decades of high school seniors pass through my classroom, that she may be all too typical. That is certainly the main thrust of  Davidson’s article.

Once upon a time, a bright young factory worker could move up in his workplace, from the production floor to a supervisory or even executive position. The company and/or the union would provide the training necessary, he would provide the time and effort. He could earn and learn. This created for many a path to upward mobility. But such things are disappearing from the manufacturing sector and are seldom done today. Even as there are fewer and fewer jobs available for unskilled and semi-skilled workers, there are more and more young people who cannot access the training they need.

WWFD?  What would Finland do, this little country in the north woods that is held up to us as bettering us educationally?  Publicly supported education (there are few private schools or universities in Finland and no for-profit ones) is pre-K through post-secondary. Young people who do not qualify for University have numerous opportunities for publicly subsidized education. Most take advantage of these opportunities. Of course, we wouldn’t do that because it smacks of socialism, which we find distasteful. Still, it would solve what will be an increasingly knotty conundrum in years to come.

It has been frequently noted that America is developing an income inequality greater than any since the 1920s. Those at the top are prospering as never before, those at the bottom are losing ground and are worse off than they were. It is troubling to think that we might become a nation of haves and have not. The causes, I am sure, are many and complex, as are the implications for the future. We have long believed in education a key driver of upward mobility. But along with this growing income gap, we seem to be developing an education gap, the former driving the latter. ***

We see this at work in Davidson’s article. Luke has education and specialized training that Maddie does not. Barring unforeseen disaster, Luke has a middle class future that Maddie does not. The middle and upper classes have better access to the education that might help them rise or stay in place. The less fortunate do not. Intentionally or not, the so-called income gap seems to be self-reinforcing.

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Attract and Retain the Best Teachers

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Mike

The proclaimed purpose of teacher pay scales is to attract and retain the best teachers. Like so many things in the world of public education, this is not quite as simple as it at first sounds. Attracting and retaining are not the same. In fact, they are separate goals for two different teacher demographics and can often be at odds. The traditional salary schedule, in its purest form is biased toward retention; it usually tops out, after many years of experience and further education to the master’s degree and beyond. It may top out thirty or forty percent or more higher than the base, which is the entry for most. On the other hand, the current trend seems to favor biasing the schedule toward attraction with more money at the entry-level base and less at the top. Teachers themselves may be biased toward one or the other depending on where they are in their careers. What is needed, of course, is a reasonable balance. But what is that?

If it is most important to attract the “brightest and best” of new degree-holders (never mind that the conventional Reformist wisdom seems to be that teachers in general are the dumbest and worst) it would make sense to pump up the starting pay – make them offers they can’t refuse. It is certainly a step in the right direction, but far from a complete solution to the compensation conundrum.

It is a necessary step, not because “if you pay them they will come.” People don’t go into teaching for the money. Money is more a matter of making it affordable to teach. According to my former district’s master contract, starting pay is $31,750. Granted, there are lots of jobs that pay less, few of which require a 4-year degree and certification. Consider that by the time a teacher sets foot in the classroom, he has invested at least four years of his time and tens of thousands of dollars of treasure in preparation. College tuition and fees continue year after year to rise at a rate exceeding inflation. Graduates often face a mountain of debt to pay off at the same time that they are trying to start families and establish households. Yes, starting pay does matter to teachers early in their careers.

Incidentally, base pay is not always what it appears. The Nampa School District typifies a situation that is perhaps unique to Idaho*. The Legislature mandates a base of $30,000 to make us “competitive” with other states. This is the so-called “phony corner” of the schedule. The real base, the one that the rest of the schedule is calculated on is thousands of dollars less. For example, a first year teacher must have at least an MA+48 to receive more than $31,750. A new teacher with a BA + 12 remains frozen at $31,750 for 5 years; a BA+24 for three years; a BA +12 for 5 years; and with a BA only, he will stay in the first column, frozen at $31,750. If he completes the minimum mandatory (state law) 6 credit hours for every 5-year certificate renewal cycle, he can move over to the second column only after 6 years, however.

In my years as a Building Representative and/or negotiator, I did not hear new teachers complain about low starting pay half so much as they complained about not moving up in pay at all for several years and feeling stuck at their entry pay.

Most new teachers seem not as concerned with starting pay as with the long-term career prospects: if I stick with it and do a good job and continue my education, where will I be in 10 years, or 20, or by the time I retire?  Sure, there are some who see teaching as a temporary stop until they get into law school, or until the kids are in school, or until they inherit the farm. I particularly remember a young lady who came to teaching from the private sector, following a divorce. As Building Rep, I was polling her on something to do with the retirement plan. She said “I don’t give a **** about your silly retirement plan. Do you honestly think I am going to hang around this ******* ****- hole until I retire? God, I hope not!” The next year, she went back to the private sector, where she had been making and made again much more money. But this is the exception. Most new teachers come in with career aspirations, and if they feel, after a few years, that they have the necessary temperament and skills, they consider themselves to be in for the long haul.

If you see teaching not as a job, but as a career, those experience steps, those credit-and-degree columns, that state retirement plan, all become very important. “If I stay in the game, and if I do a good job, and if I get my MA plus, where will I end up?”

This is where the Retain part of attract-and-retain comes in. There have to be long-term goals, and they have to be stable ones. They have to lead somewhere in a predictable manner: the term I heard repeatedly at a CPRE conference a few years ago was “line of sight.” Another term was “transparency.”  Please notice that I am avoiding such threadbare terms as motivate, incentive, incentivize. I am skeptical of alternative compensation schemes that monetize every little thing; they remind me of B. F. Skinner’s Operant Conditioning: “Give the pigeon a peanut and watch him perform!” They can actually have a negative influence in motivation.

A teacher can look at a traditional salary schedule and see his career laid out before him. He can read the rest of the contract and see the terms he will have to meet. Perhaps some of the much- touted alternative compensation can do this better, but I am not convinced. They may make some difference in attracting young teachers, but in retaining them? I think not.

*Nampa School District Master Contract, p 4 http://www1.nsd131.org/web0/Master%20Contract/2011-2012%20Master%20Contract.pdf

Posted in Career, Education Reform, Teacher Compensation | Leave a comment