The Bill Ayers controversy

Many of us working in education in Chicago are familiar with Bill Ayers through his work as a professor at UIC and his longstanding involvement in education reform efforts here.

Golden Apple Fellow Mark Larson was moved to respond to the flap over Barack Obama’s acquaintance with Ayers:

I do not condone what Bill did 40 years ago. In fact, I find it impossible to defend.

I do celebrate who he is in his many dimensions, today.

This is what I know: When I spend time with Bill, I see our world as a flawed, fascinating and hopeful place that is rife with ironies and potential. Bill’s curiosity about the world and his abiding respect for its people is contagious. He speaks with passion and eloquence about the lives and futures of children in ways that remind us that this is the most important subject of our times.

The full text of Mark’s letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune is here.

Joanne Jacobs presents another point of view.

Has anyone talked about this with their students? I feel like there is an interesting issue here (both regarding Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright) about the grey areas in choosing and defending your friends. Especially for kids who may have friends or relatives who, for instance, are in gangs, use racist or homophobic language, have been involved in bullying or other school violence, etc.

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Reframing the conversation on contracts

On Friday I attended the Education Writers Association annual conference. Among the sessions was one on teacher contracts led by Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project. Some of the basics are not surprising: collectively bargained contracts are somewhat likely to force schools to hire teachers they don’t choose, shuffle poor performing teachers from school to school, and treat new teachers as expendable. Restrictive or confusing contracts also exacerbate the problem of new teachers choosing smaller or suburban districts simply because large urban districts hire so late.

Speaking to a room full of education reporters, he encouraged them to challenge the trope that teachers oppose meaningful contract reform and will live and die on the issue of seniority privileges.  In New York, for example, a new contract basically did away with provisions forcing schools to choose teachers based on seniority and bump new teachers first. And yet 90% of the union membership voted to extend the contract.  The idea that teachers would prefer a system in which neither they nor the schools they work in are able to make intelligent decisions based on personal preferences and talents simply doesn’t make sense.

So where does the idea come from? Daly said that historically the conflict is reported wrong. It’s framed as a labor vs. management issue, but it’s not. In fact, it’s a central office vs. school issue.  School bureaucrats and the unions tend to value a centralized process. It’s easy to manage, black and white, and avoids complicated decisions that can cause grievances to be filed, which is expensive.

Principals and teachers are actually on the same side. They want a process that allows schools and teachers to make good decisions. This is sometimes messy, but the net impact for both teachers and principals is better.

Well, guess who negotiates the contract? Not the teachers or the principals. The contract is negotiated by their central office representatives. Predictable results have been the rule, though recently some major districts have made some big improvements.

Interested in more specifics on various districts? The Fordham Foundation recently released a study of labor agreements in the fifty largest school districts. Chicago earns pretty good marks for its personnel policies, but lags behind in compensation flexibility and work rules. Download the study here.

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Nation at Risk

Twenty-five years ago, the Nation at Risk report was released. On its anniversary, writers and pundits are busy assessing its legacy.

Not surprisingly, I’m not terribly fond of the conclusions George F. Will draws in his op ed on the subject - I don’t, for instance, consider lowering class size to be “shopworn” nor do I think multiculturalism is the reason high school students can’t correctly identify historical events. 

But he does raise one point that, though he wouldn’t be particularly fond of the conclusion I’m going to draw from it, bears further conversation among educators.

Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities—the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.

Also:

[I]n 1966, the Coleman report...concluded that the qualities of the families from which children come to school matter much more than money as predictors of schools’ effectiveness. The crucial common denominator of problems of race and class—fractured families—would have to be faced.

Unlike Will, who seems to be arguing that social context makes school reform irrelevant at best, I think these quotes actually argue for a larger role for teachers in advocating for social justice.

When I wrote about this a year ago, I quoted Pedro Noguera, among others:

If we want to insure that all students have the opportunity to learn, we must insure that their basic needs are met. Students who are hungry should be fed, children who need coats in the winter should receive them and those who have been abused or neglected should have counseling and care. Expanding access to healthcare, preschool and affordable housing, and providing more generous parental leave policies should be included on the education reform agenda.

Not an easy task. But perhaps one that it’s time to focus on.

Noguera and his colleagues at the Forum for Education and Democracy marked the anniversary of Nation at Risk by releasing their own vision of a new education reform agenda in Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Policy in Education.

More coverage on the 25th anniversary of Nation at Risk in this USA Today article, this Christian Science Monitor article, and the EdWeek archive.

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Carnival of Education - High Expectations

In addition to linking to Sam Dyson’s great guest blog post (congrats, Sam!) from a few days ago, this week’s Carnival of Education highlights some of the best education writing on the web this week.

I was particularly interested in this piece from A Voice in the Wilderness.  The author’s friend, severely dyslexic, was incredibly successful in school despite his disability. But, unfortunately, when his master’s degree and other academic accomplishments landed him in jobs requiring lots of writing, he was tragically unsuccessful. This should never have happened argues the author:

The educational community failed my friend. We didn’t want him to feel bad about himself when he was in school, so we gave him a false view of his abilities. We decided that it was better for him to feel good about himself while in school and then be miserable for the rest of his life. We do this all the time.

For some reason, education has completely removed itself from the real world. Researchers and ivory tower professors are dictating what should be happening in schools. All children should study academics, they say. All children should attend college. Apparently, all children are the same. Guess what, they’re not.

This makes me wonder about the idea of having “high expectations for all students.” Can we have high expectations, but not necessarily the same expectations for all our students?  For instance, is it possible to be an excellent high school teacher who does not think all her students should go to college?

A related TEN blog post, referencing this great conversation on the Faculty Room blog.

Unrelated: my other favorite post from this week’s Carnival asks, “should teachers hide their beliefs?”

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Understanding and assessing

Guest blogger and Golden Apple Fellow Sam Dyson is grappling with what it means to understand and what it means to truly try to assess student understanding. 

Any assessment we make of students’ understanding is made indirectly.  As absurd as it may seem, most teachers reveal through their interactions with their students a belief, which I share, that somehow we ought to be able to read our students’ minds.  It’s not for a lack of trying that I have failed to do so.  After all, assessing what a student has understood is regarded as one of our basic responsibilities. It would seem that “mind reading” is exactly what we are called to do.

We also expect a particularly high level of meta-cognition from our students.  We might want to avoid the daily temptation of asking our students, “Do you understand?” unless we have deliberately concentrated on helping students learn to evaluate their own understanding.

Such a question is unlikely to elicit an informed response from the majority of students, yet we ask it all the time. Perhaps we teachers, having realized that we cannot read students’ minds, hope that they will do us the favor of surveying their own understanding to report back to us what they have found. 

Acknowledging that “Do you understand?” is a question that only the most practiced learners can honestly answer, instead of asking it we should offer them the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding by doing something they could only do if they understood.  Designing such activities requires skill and insight, but of all of the implications of what it means to understand, this may be the one we teachers can most frequently put into practice. 

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New achievement gap research

[via Joanne Jacobs] EdWeek summarizes the results of a few research papers presented at the AERA conference a few weeks back, and discovers a new twist for our understanding of the “achievement gap”:

New research into what is commonly called the black-white “achievement gap” suggests that the students who lose the most ground academically in U.S. public schools may be the brightest African-American children.

As black students move through elementary and middle school, these studies show, the test-score gaps that separate them from their better-performing white counterparts grow fastest among the most able students and the most slowly for those who start out with below-average academic skills.

So, the black students who start school with the highest ability levels and readiness to learn tend not to fulfill their potential in their years in school.

This phenomenon is not independent of the fact that most black students attend schools that are predominantly black.  One of the researchers, Sean Reardon, theorized that,

[B]ecause schools with predominantly African-American enrollments tend to have lower average test scores, high-achieving black children may be further from the mean, academically, than is the case for top-scoring white children.

“If instruction is aimed more to the middle of the distribution, then black children are less likely to have cognitively stimulating opportunities.”

Though he adds, “not because anyone is being racist”—still, ouch.

It does make me wonder, though, what kinds of things are we as teachers doing to make sure that we’re nurturing the kids at the top of the class in struggling schools?

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Carnival of Education

This week’s Carnival of Education has another lineup of fascinating posts (including this one from TEN!). In particular, check out:

Putting the Public Back in ‘Public Education’
Renee Moore of the Teacher Leaders Network blog TeachMoore talks about reconnecting the communities to schools.

Educators have always had a higher calling than simply to generate a workforce; we were to produce thinking, responsible citizens. However, we were never expected to do it entirely on our own.

English is Yours!
NYC Educator reminds us that our students’ parents are also English Language Learners.

On the way home, she told her husband, “I can speak English. I could say whatever I want. And everyone understood me. Not only that, but they were afraid of me.”

She was delighted. And the next week, when her child had a new and better speech therapist, she was even more delighted.

The First Step is Admitting You Have a Problem
Paul at Scripted Sponteneity makes a confession about his teaching:

But, in reality, I am that guy. I am the self-absorbed “Sage on the Stage” that turns every class period into a one-man stand-up comedy show. I keep their attention by making them laugh. I bestow knowledge and dispel myth from my lofty residence at the front of the room…

You’ll notice that I use the present tense to describe this problem, in a similar way to how a recovering alcoholic will always call himself an alcoholic. I will always be that guy. Now, I just have to begin to become That Teacher.

Visit the Carnival for more!

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Born to teach?

NPR’s Tell Me More program last week interviewed three teachers about why teachers leave, why teachers stay, and how teachers cope with challenging situations.

One of the teachers interviewed, Joanne Wilkerson, is a 30+ year veteran teacher. She made two comments that made me stop the playback.

If you do not see [teaching] as your call, or something you were...almost...born to do, then it can be very difficult and very frustrating.

Later:

As human beings we like immediate gratification, and there are some teaching situations in which you’re not going to get immediate gratification.  It may be ten years later. And another thing is sometimes when you work with children there is so much emotional involvement, especially as you become attached to them, and I think not everyone is cut out to be a teacher.

On the one hand, yes, not everyone is cut out to be a teacher. And teaching is, as I said just the other day, much more than a job.

But, still, something about these comments bothered me.

Somehow it feels like this viewpoint really discounts the impact of effective teacher training, mentoring, and professional development, chalking teachers’ staying power up to a mysterious “it” factor. (You’ve got it or you don’t; you can’t learn it).

I also wonder if teaching, at least the first few years, is sometimes more difficult and frustrating - or at least disappointing - for those teachers who feel called to it. The pressure to succeed at the thing you were born to do is pretty high.

I realize that I am simply not the kind of person who thinks of my life in terms of a “calling.” My argument with Mrs. Wilkerson may be nothing more than a clash of rhetorical style. But I think it’s a clash that’s prevalent in the teaching world. When we think about attracting new people to the profession, people who may want very much to teach without feeling “born to teach,” I think it’s important that we make a place in the rhetoric for them, too.

The full interview (17 min.) is here.
Related post on TEN here.

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Chicago high school transformation: a work in progress

Yesterday I attended the second annual Catalyst High School Summit.

At the event, Washington Post reporter Jay Matthews gave a national perspective, outlining some key elements of high school reform.  He emphasized that school change is a “hiring issue,” that districts need to find principals that will hire and retain teachers who can raise expectations and create a school culture of learning.  Later, CPS High School Transformation Project director Alan Alson agreed, saying that the district needs to be tougher and more systematic about hiring, training, and firing teachers.

Catalyst reporters Sarah Karp and John Myers reported on the CPS transformation project, the subject of a special just-released issue of Catalyst. One key problem CPS high schools face is something Karp and Myers refer to as “enrollment creep.” Their focus school Marshall HS, for example, admitted almost its entire freshman class after the first day of school.  One student Karp shadowed at Marshall arrived on the tenth day of school...but her special education records didn’t appear until the tenth week of school. 

That is the type of chaos that makes it nearly impossible to set clear expectations and establish an effective class culture.  It makes it hard to get to know students and means that every week of the first quarter will be just as unpredictable as the first week of school.

CPS CEO Arne Duncan and Alan Alson both talked about some of the plans CPS has in place for addressing this issue in the next few years.  First and foremost, 8th graders will register for high school in the spring.  In addition, many schools will be implementing a two week freshman orientation period to give 9th graders the time they need to acclimate to high school and get all scheduling and registration issues sorted out before the regular school year begins.

Karp and Myers also mentioned the impact that absenteeism has on Marshall.  Students miss on average 50 days of school per year at Marshall.  In 1992, CPS cut its 153 truant officers to save money.  Schools often contract with outside agencies to help them, but with limited resources, even these workers have caseloads far too large to make a real difference.

The most interesting part of the day was a panel of high school students. Some highlights:

Talking about what motivates her, Tevela, a student at Robeson HS called the feeling “the fierce urgency of now.” She takes heart from her desire to disprove the implicit message of impending failure that kids in tough high schools receive every day. Evelyn, from Gage Park HS, said that some of her friends are discouraged when they see how nice other schools are compared to theirs.

Skyler, a student at North Lawndale College Prep (a charter school) said creating a solid school culture can play a major role in turning a school around.  “[A]t our schools we are the metal detectors.” At her school, on the other hand, Tevela reports that there is so much security (including an actual police office in the building), that many kids simply don’t want to come to school.

Talking about their teachers, the students agreed that not all of them have high expectations. Deon, from Gage Park, suggested that the key is to figure out which teachers do have high expectations and focus on them. Evelyn pointed out that sometimes it feels like you have just too many teachers who don’t care, and that’s when students stop coming to school.

For more, including discussions with teachers and students at Marshall High School and plenty of charts, be sure to check out the new edition of Catalyst.  Also, visit the Eduwonk blog, where this week guest bloggers are talking about how high schools can prepare students for college and sharing an amazing collection of student application essays.

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This week’s Carnival

This week’s Carnival of Education links to some fascinating posts, including one on TEN!

A few Carnival entries I found particularly interesting:

Why Gifted Students Still hate School
At Lorem Ipsum, a blog focusing on homeschooling and gifted education, a scathing post that is really less about gifted students and more about what’s wrong with American ed schools. 

In short, there is a relentless tide of mediocrity in schools of education, one that’s nearly impossible to swim through because only your personal ethic, your sense of wanting to do an outstanding job on whatever meaningless, useless, time-wasting group project you’ve been assigned stands between you and just doing whatEVurrr to get the meaningless grade you were going to get anyway. Going through education classes was like trying to sharpen a knife on a marshmallow - you meet with no substance, no real resistance. You learn to be mediocre. You learn that not to be mediocre — to strive for scholarship, to insist on a level of academic rigor — is either viewed as useless or pretentious, or it’s groupworked and PowerPointed out of existence. Mediocrity is the norm — and that creates an environment that is downright hostile to gifted students.

Classroom Management
At the In Practice blog, teacher Larry Ferlazzo shares nine strategies that helped revitalize the classroom culture of his 9th grade class after five new challenging students joined it at the start of second semester. I highly recommend this for newer teachers who are struggling with getting their classes on track after testing!

I certainly did a number of these things before, but I let behavior issues lead me into a downward spiral of threats and punishment.

The difference in class is like night and day now.  There are regressions...But there is no question that there is a sense of fun and joy in the learning that’s happening on our classroom again.

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Supreme Court limits teachers’ freedom of speech

A fascinating piece in the Teachers College Record outlines a threat to freedom of speech for teachers that was created by a 2006 Supreme Court decision.

Back in 1968, the court ruled in favor of an Illinois teacher who was fired after criticizing the way the local school board spent money on athletics. 

[T]he Court affirmed for the first time that public school teachers do not relinquish their constitutional right to free speech on matters of public concern simply because they work in the public sector (Pickering v. Board of Education, 1968)...In deciding whether a teacher’s First Amendment rights have been violated, a court must weigh the interest of a teacher, as a citizen, to speak out on matters of public concern against the school board’s legitimate interest in maintaining the efficiency of the workplace.

So, for almost forty years, courts applied this standard to cases involving public employees who were fired after speaking out against their employers.

And then in 2006, the court changed its position in a case called Garcetti v. Ceballos.

“We hold,” the Court wrote, “that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline” (126 S. Ct. 1960).

In other words, if you are speaking in your capacity as an employee, your speech is not protected as free speech under the First Amendment.

The NEA, trying to be hopeful, pointed out that the decision itself included language implying that teachers, among public employees, might enjoy a higher level of protection, as in this quote from Justice Kennedy’s opinion:

There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court’s customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.

But in 2007 the Fifth Circuit court used the Garcetti decison to rule against a Dallas teacher who was fired--much like in the original Pickering case--after writing memos to his principal detailing perceived problems in the way athletic funds were being spent.

The TC Record piece concludes,

In years to come, we will probably see more federal courts apply the Supreme Court’s Garcetti analysis to cases in which school employees claim they were retaliated against for reporting wrongdoing in the public workplace. In most instances, school employees are going to lose these cases and possibly their jobs. For those who believe that school employees should be encouraged to report workplace wrongdoing—not discouraged, Garcetti is indeed unfortunate.

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On being a teacher

David Cohen, a California teacher, writes in Teacher Magazine that he was afraid to go to his 20th high school reunion.

The problem is, I am a high school teacher. Somehow, meeting my classmates at various events over the years, I found it hard to make my career sound as interesting or important as everything they had done...Over the years, in my occasional encounters with the class hot shots, I’d been subjected to stories of commercial and corporate ascendancy that left me feeling professionally inadequate…

Why should I subject myself to more career-one-upsmanship when I’m just a high school teacher? Whatever we teachers tell ourselves and others about the importance of our profession, it can be hard to steel ourselves repeatedly against the perceived cultural biases against teachers.

But he did attend, and was surprised to find that his classmates didn’t look down on him and were interested in his career, and that he no longer felt insecure about their career choices and successes.  He concludes:

Perhaps there’s a lesson here to be applied professionally. Maybe we teachers might move past our professional insecurity by interacting more with our community—socially, professionally, and politically—comfortable in the knowledge that our work and our perspectives do matter. We can put that knowledge to work for a greater good, asserting ourselves and acting upon the status we hold, rather than slowing ourselves down with worry, replaying the past in the vain hope we might fix it.

I’ve had a strange inversion of this experience.  One of the things that was hardest for me about leaving the classroom was no longer being able to say “I’m a teacher.” I loved having a career that people could understand, and I found, like Cohen, that people tended to be more supportive than I had expected.

Teaching was a state of being, not just a job.  I miss that about it.

I’m interested in the experiences of TEN members. How do you feel when you tell people you’re a teacher? If you have had another career, how does talking about being a teacher compare to talking about whatever you did before or after?

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Fight back against cynicism

An anti-union group is offering to pay ten terrible teachers $10,000 each to leave the profession forever.  They’re actually taking nominations. Big money is going into this publicity stunt, with a New York Times ad, a TV spot, and a billboard in Times Square. It’s creepy and cynical.

Fortunately, this week’s Carnival of Education has a few antidotes to the negativity. 

Eduwonkette is taking nominations of a different kind: Cool teachers you should know. 

We hear so much about “bad” teachers that it’s easy to forget about the many superstars we have teaching in American public schools.

Since I started writing this blog, I’ve been profiling “cool people you should know” - cool people who do research on education. Beginning this week, I’ll start profiling a “cool teacher you should know” every week- someone who colleagues, parents, or students recognize as a master teacher, and who adds something special to your school. (If I get lots of nominations, I’ll profile teachers more frequently.)

Email me their name, grade level or subject, school, and location, as well a few tidbits about them - something about how they teach, what they’re like as a colleague, especially great lessons, how they affected you, etc. Send me an email at which I can contact them (you can remain anonymous as the nominator if you wish). If you have a picture, send it along, too. If the teacher has a DonorsChoose profile, I’ll link to that as well.

Send nominations to eduwonkette (at) gmail (dot) com.

New York blogger Jose Vilson calls us to act against the forces putting teachers down and tearing them apart:

But of course, it’s easy to try and pit teachers against the world. In a time when teachers get treated like heroes but paid like villians, told to act like professionals but talked down to like children, and overwhelmed with the many roles we take on but humiliated in the national media depending on how close contract negotiations are, we need to find a way to come together, really.

In another post, he continues:

[W]e need to come to some common ground on these battles, just like we’d expect the kids to do whenever we see them getting into fights. Let’s have honest dialogue about the prejudices we hold against each other. Let’s acknowledge how younger teachers and veteran teachers can learn a lot from each other, no matter what walk of life. Let’s look at each other as teachers, understanding each other’s backgrounds, but helping each other understand how large this world is.

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