A Teachable Moment

I went to the symposium yesterday sponsored by the Long Island Principals’ Association in conjunction with Long Island University’s Post Campus. The principals have my utmost respect for their willingness to try to fight reform efforts that seek to tie student performance on various assessments to teacher evaluations. It’s a completely stupid idea which they, unlike too many in my ranks, have the nerve to label as stupid. I do wish, however, that they had planned a better a program. With an audience of people almost all of whom were completely familiar with the APPR legislation, why most of the time was spent with a group of principals lecturing the audience on the evils of the new APPR, I’m not sure I know. Why they didn’t plan to try to organize the audience of some 3 to 4 hundred people to take some action aimed at building their movement, some action beyond writing to the Regents and legislators, I can’t begin to fathom. Some years ago, when the son of an assistant principal who lived across the street from me was asked what his father did for a living, he replied, He’s a principal.” “And what does a principal do?” he was asked. “He princes and he bulls,” was his insightful reply. That’s as apt a summary of yesterday’s symposium as any.

While I’m aware of the extent to which anti-teacher union propaganda has penetrated the American psyche, I was nevertheless unprepared for my Saturday evening with three old friends, all of whom I know to be liberal political activists. Half way through a plate of wonderful osso bucco, my hostess says to me, “Morty, how do we get rid of all the bad teachers?”

Drawing my friends out, I soon learned that they were convinced that there is an undetermined though large number of teachers whose exit from the professions is almost a matter of national security. It took me some thirty minutes to get them to agree that the subject of teacher quality is substantially more complicated than they had thought. I doubt that I convinced them that it isn’t a serious problem, but I did get them thinking about the alarming childhood poverty in our country and what we know that means for academic performance. I think I got them to agree that before someone has her profession taken away, there should be a fair process to ensure that termination is warranted. I know I got through for at least an instant when I recounted how often in representing a teacher called on the carpet, I find that their employment files are pristine, administration having failed to do its job. But I am absolutely sure that there lingers in each of my friends the strong suspicion that I simply can’t face the fact that there are many incompetent teachers in our schools – that my job as a union leaders blinds me to reality.

How do those of us who know that while there are incompetents in our ranks, they are few – how do we communicate that to the mind-screwed public when I couldn’t begin to communicate it to friends in thirty minutes? How do we expose the myth of the army of incompetent teachers?

“Our kids are able to read fluently; they just are not able to comprehend what they’re reading.” The quote comes from New York City principal Derick T. Spaulding in a New York Times article reporting yet a new approach to the teaching of reading in some of the city’s lower performing middle schools. I strongly suspect the problem is not how reading is taught. The problem is the students do not have the knowledge they need to make sense of the words they easily decode. In many ways these kids are in a situation analogous to my experience as a Peace Corps teacher in Ghana where I was expected to prepare my students for the English General Certificate Examination which at the time was based on what was essentially a United Kingdom curriculum. I vividly remember attempting to teach Dickens and Wordsworth among others English writers to kids who had no knowledge of the world I was asking them to engage. Thus, snow, snuff boxes, moors, daffodils etc. were as foreign to my students as some of the things our schools and state assessments expect children to know about a world to which they have limited exposure. Why is so difficult for education policy makers to understand that one must know stuff to understand what he reads? E.D. Hirsch has been trying to teach them for years. Perhaps these decision makers lack the experiential background to understand.

I’ve gotten considerable reaction from my posts centering on my conversations with my 99 year old Aunt Doris, Dora to her nieces and nephews. . Those conversations came to an end yesterday as she passed away 1 month shy of her 100th birthday. Aunt Doris spent over 40 years as a back-office clerk for Gimbles. She never married. Like many of her era, she was the child who took care of her parents and saw them through the vicissitudes of old age. Having come to America from the ashes of World War I, she and her sisters embraced this country with the passion born of gratitude for the opportunity to live a life unimaginable to Jewish children born in a Polish shtetl. Doris’ earliest memories were of hiding from the Cossacks’ frequent pogroms.

Doris didn’t do much to catch the notice of the world. She had no children, never made much money, and left the world with little tangible evidence of her existence. Yet, when I ask myself how is it that I have now spent over 30 years as a union leader, listening to my aunt talk with pride about her union, listening to the profound respect she had for the man who organized her local, remembering stories of the big strike at Gimbles and Mr. Gimble’s resolve to work with the union to never let that happen again, Aunt Doris played no small part n the development of my union consciousness. For this, as well as all of the Dodger games we shared, and for her unqualified love, I’m deeply grateful. Thank you Aunt Dora, and farewell.

Just when I though we had seen every stupid metric to measure the performance of public school teachers and their schools, along come other in the accountability army seeking to apply meaningless measures to what are essentially abstractions. Education Week reports that several states are in search of a creativity index to determine the extent to which schools “…nurture creativity and innovative thinking among young people.” Should such an index be developed, it would undoubtedly lead to a rubric that rates teachers highly nurturing of creative thinking, nurturing of creative thinking, stifling creative thinking and extinguishing creative thinking. While I suppose there will be those who see in the talk of a creativity index a positive reaction to mania to test students until they perform to our standard of performance, measurement efforts of this kind have a poor history. The book is yet to be written that will do to the testocracy what the late Stephen J. Gould did in The Mismeasure of Man to the biological determinists.

We read this morning that the Connecticut Education Association and the state legislature have reached agreement on a new teacher evaluation system that ties teacher ratings to student performance on state assessments. Judged by the rubric of state and national teacher leaders, this will be seen as a good deal.

I completely understand why these deals are struck. When representatives of the testocracy start out demanding a majority of a teacher’s evaluation be based on tests, it seems a significant achievement when the final deal gets it down to 45% as happened in Connecticut. The unappreciated consequence of such deals, however, is that the union becomes a defender of the essentially indefensible and is perceived by many members as being remote from the needs and interests of people actually in classrooms. How have we let ourselves become the defenders of a system of teacher evaluation that we know to be ludicrous? We all know the tests have not been designed to evaluate teachers. We even know that they probably don’t evaluate students very well. When this system falls apart, do we accept our share of the blame? What can we say to members whose employment has been terminated or prejudiced by this process?

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.
President Barack Obma, 2012 State of the Union Address

Stop teaching to the test? Mr. President, The No Child Left Behind Act started us teaching to tests. Your Race to the Top program made it almost suicidal for teachers not focus their instruction on the state assessments which will be used to judge their performance. Yes, Mr. President, we need the bashing to stop, but it won’t so long as you and especially Commissioner Duncan persist in propagating the falsehood that bad teachers are largely responsible for the poor performance of too many of our students. While teachers would appreciate the flexibility to practice their craft, what we really need is for leaders like you to talk directly to the American people, asking them to face squarely the fact that unless and until we solve the problems of children raised in poverty, the performance of our lowest functioning students will not change appreciably. Yes, so-called reformers will always be able to point to children here and there who have with the help of some special teachers and circumstances conquered the debilitating effects of poverty, but we need you to tell the American people that such examples are not indicators that if only we had more great teachers, the children who are daily scarred by poverty could be made whole.

I suggest you go back and read Lyndon Johnson’s speeches in support of his War on Poverty. While we have largely won the battle against the impoverishment of our senior citizens, to our everlasting shame, we gave up on the war to save millions of our nation’s children. We need a leader to fight and win this war once and for all. If not you, Mr. President, who?

As a follow-up on my comments yesterday on American employers’ fading loyalty to their workers, I highly recommend Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s thoughts on the subject from a different angle – globalization.

In recent days, I’ve taken a couple of shots at Long Island school superintendents for their lack of loyalty to their employees as evidenced by their support of legislation that would both worsen the benefits their employees enjoy and cheapen their work. For people who enjoy generous benefit packages way beyond anything enjoyed by their employees strikes me as traitorous disloyalty to the people superintendents must depend on to do the central work of their school districts. Perhaps, though, they’re just doing things the modern American way.

It was through the lens of my anger at the superintendents that I read with “How The U.S. Lost Out On I-Phone Work,” a New York Times article by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher that seeks to explain why it is that so much American manufacturing has moved to Asia. The answer is much more than the cost of labor. Companies like Apple have moved their manufacturing China and other Asian countries to exploit labor conditions that are tantamount to slavery. Faced with a need to change the glass on its newest edition of the I-Phone, the workers in the factory that assembles it were roused from their beds in the dormitory they live in, given a cup of tea and something to eat and put to immediate work for twelve hours. That sure sounds like slavery to me. Is that what we want to drive American workers to do. Here’s the kicker though. Apple could manufacture the phone here and still make a substantial profit. But they do not sense any responsibility to our country or its workers. As one of their executives is quoted as saying, “We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” If I ever need a heart transplant, I want his. It’s completely unused.

In the same edition of the Times was another piece on the battle over a proposed right to work law being pushed by Governor Mitch Daniels and the Republican dominated legislature. Like the governors of Ohio and Wisconsin, Daniels is determined to weaken the unions in Indiana in the name of making the state more competitive. More competitive than whom? Can’t we just see the governor salivating at the conditions at the Apple plant in China?

Left to themselves, corporate elites and their supporters in Congress and state legislatures have gotten us in a race to the bottom. No one owes the American worker anything any more. Not his boss, not his company, not his governme

On January 13, I wrote about the disloyalty of the Suffolk County school superintendents to staff who work for them in that they are actively supporting legislative changes that are inimical to the welfare of public education workers. I have since learned that the Nassau County superintendents have endorsed the same legislative agenda. No surprise, I suppose.

I hope my colleagues across the Island will ask their superintendents to reconsider their positions, finding ways to pay them back for their disloyalty if they refuse. These people are paid to be leaders. Instead they are traitors to all who labor in our public schools.

All students can and should make progress in school. But the painful reality is that some students, despite the best effort of the very best teachers, will not meet the expectations ignorant adults set for the. The pernicious notion that all students can learn the same things in the same time span has all sorts of consequences, some of which I saw first hand this morning on a visit to the staff of Plainview’s Stratford Road School, a school which for purely economic reasons houses all of the district’s elementary self-contained special education students. It is a school the state education bureaucrats have dubbed a school in need of improvement. Never mind that if you disaggregate the scores of these special needs students from those in the mainstream, the school does well. Out of blatant, bureaucratic stupidity, the staff of the Stratford Road School, and others like it, are needlessly, but thoroughly demoralized, believing that the state labeling them as a SIN (School in Need) has the community wondering why they are paying such high taxes to maintain a “slum school” staffed with ineffective teachers. How many would want to go to work each day to a SIN school. What parent wants to send her kids to a SIN school? Nothing good happens in a SIN school. It turns out there is a lot in a name!