A Teachable Moment

This posting grows out of the frustration that attends every meeting I go to on Annual Professional Performance Reviews (APPR). My blood boils to think of the things that we could do with the money being spent on this idiotic attempt to reduce the art of teaching to a set of what are called performance indicators and test scores, all in the name of improving student performance. I submit that the millions being spent on this fool’s crusade would have greater impact on student learning if it went to making sure that all children have good nutrition, regular dental and medical visits, a permanent place to live, decent clothes, a chance to attend school with children of varied economic classes, the means to get to school daily, the opportunity to participate in wholesome after-school activities, and above all else, a belief that their world really cared about them. The time, money and effort being expended on this futile attempt at improving student performance is nothing short of scandalous.

It never ceases to amaze me how much education research confirms the obvious, at least what is obvious to teachers. Today we read in the New York Times that a new study shows that up to 15% of America’s school children are chronically absent and that this behavior correlates with poor school performance and failure to graduate from high school. That’s news to teachers. Both the study and the article on it do a public service, however, in drawing attention to how misleading school attendance statistics are that report average daily attendance. Such statistics can hide a small but significant number of children whose very poor school attendance is a threat to their future success. Having spent a significant portion of my teaching career working with chronically absent high school students in my district’s alternate education program, I know first hand the problems these children face and the power of school programs dedicated to helping them come to school more regularly. I hope Education Commission King reads the study and comes to his senses about counting the scores of chronically absent students against their teachers. As the director of the organization that funded this attendance study says, “There are so many efforts at school reform, but what people overlook is that none of them work if the kids don’t show up.”

I was talking with my colleagues Nina Melzer and Judi Alexanderson Thursday morning about the impending school budget vote in New York and how our local media is so many ways appear to stir anti-school budget sentiments. Nina spoke of cable Channel 12 asking its viewers whether teachers should take pay cuts to help their communities during the current fiscally trouble times. That got us talking about how it’s only public employees who ever get asked to make sacrifices. Nina and Judi got on a roll of observations about how no one ever asks the Long Island Power Authority or National Grid to lower their prices to school districts in these difficult times. When was the last time the bus companies that transport our students were asked for a sacrifice? Has anyone gone to the Pearson Company and said, “We love your standardized tests. We can’t get enough of them, but could you help us out in these difficult times?” Why doesn’t Channel 12 ask the public if they favor sacrifices by these suppliers? Members of the public will support any sacrifice as long as it’s not their own.

At a meeting yesterday with some teacher union leaders to discuss various facets of the new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), I was taken aback to find the discussion turn to the Commissioner of Education’s ruling that teacher may neither administer state exams to their own students nor mark them. Elementary teachers present spoke with some passion about their belief that students perform better when their teacher administers a test, they being used to taking directions from some one they have spent hours and hours listening to. To these teachers, this Albany edict is but the latest example of the ignorance of education policy makers about how children react to classroom situations. While I hadn’t thought about this issue before, it was immediately clear to me that my colleagues had a valid point. Simply put, isn’t it obvious that children will perform better in a familiar setting, receiving directions from someone they know and trust than from a stranger? It surely is obvious, or should be, except to those who make policy in a vacuum. If these tests are considered to be so important, shouldn’t children take them under optimal conditions?

Part of every POB Board of Education meeting agenda has Board members making announcements. They routinely talk about visits they have made to the schools, accomplishments of the district’s students and assorted other things that confirm their dedication to being Board members and celebrate the district’s accomplishments. It’s not a part of the meeting that I tend to pay attention to.

Last night, however, Board President Gary Bettan shocked me from my habitual reverie. Announcing that he was speaking only for himself, Bettan read a carefully prepared statement protesting the harmful effects of high stakes state testing. “It is so frustrating that politics and corporate profits are the driving force in NY State’s race to high stakes testing. I’m all for accountability, but if you can’t trust the standardized tests, how can you trust the results?” Bettan went on to say, “These tests are loaded with trick questions and ambiguous passages. I fear that we are testing our kids’ ability to take tests, not their knowledge of what they have learned.”

It was heartening to see a member of the Board of Education take a public stand on what is emerging as the central issue facing New York’s public schools. If we are ever to end the mindless testing that is being passed off as education reform, it is going to take the forming of a grand coalition of teachers, Board of Education members, administrators and parents all standing up for the children of our state and demanding that our political leaders put children ahead of corporate profits and learning ahead of testing. We all need to summon the courage Bettan did last evening.

Governor Cuomo is clearly not finished with his war on the people who work in public education in our state. The other day he made good on his inaugural promise to appoint an education commission to make recommendations on to how to improve the state’s schools. Here’s the list of appointees, with Dick Parsons, the former head of Citigroup as the chair:
Richard (Dick) Parsons, Retired Chairman, Citigroup, Chair of the New NY Education Reform Commission
Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
Geoffrey Canada, Founder & CEO, Harlem Children’s Zone
Irma Zardoya, President & CEO, NYC Leadership Academy
Elizabeth Dickey, President, Bank Street College of Education
Mary Anne Schmitt-Carey, President, Say Yes to Education
Lisa Belzberg, Founder & Chair Emeritus, PENCIL
Michael Rebell, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Campaign for Educational Equity
Karen Hawley Miles, President & Executive Director, Education Resource Strategies
José Luis Rodríguez, Founder & CEO, Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network, Inc.
Sara Mead, Associate Partner, Bellwether Education Partners
Eduardo Martí, Vice Chancellor of Community Colleges, CUNY
Thomas Kane, Professor of Education & Economics, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Jean Desravines, CEO, New Leaders for New Schools
Michael Horn, Executive Director & Co-Founder, InnoSight Institute
Chancellor Nancy Zimpher, Chancellor, SUNY
Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, Chancellor, CUNY
John B. King, Jr., Commissioner, New York State Education Department
Senator John Flanagan, Chair, Senate Education Committee
Assembly Member Cathy Nolan, Chair, Assembly Education Committee

There isn’t even any pretense of the inclusion of the voices of teachers on this commission. If AFT President Randi Weingarten has any sense, she will decline the “opportunity” to be the token voice of teachers on the panel. We surely don’t need the appearance of her concurrance with some of the really bad stuff that’s bound to come from this group. There is not a soul there who has any real idea of what the teachers and students of this state are going through in the name of reform. Reform to them looks and is more like chaos. Doubt me? Google some of these people for yourself!

I’m increasingly perplexed by the language of the school reformers, finding it more and more difficult to understand what they are talking about. Here in New York, educators are engaged in discussions of “the dosage” students get of a particular subject by a particular teacher. This is said to be necessary to ascribe growth scores to teachers as part of their yearly evaluations. It seems to me that the words people choose give us some insight to the way in which their minds work. The State Ed bureaucrat who coined this term analogizes the act of receiving instruction to taking a dose of medicine when one is ill. Shouldn’t that cause us to wonder why such an obviously ignorant person is engaged in making education policy?

It may surprise some of my readers to learn that public school administrators are being trained at great expense to look for “artifacts” to the value teachers ad to their students. (Hum! Value added. There’s another peculiar term to talk about education.) I always thought I knew what artifact meant and was therefore nonplussed at what that term could possibly have to do with the evaluation of teachers. It can’t be that administrators will now be looking for creations of earlier peoples or civilizations. That wouldn’t make any sense. It can’t be that the reformers are talking about the accidental effect of something which causes incorrect results, as in, The results of the standardized test were skewed owing to an artifact in its administration. Or could it be? Probably not.

How about the state’s Office of Great Teachers and Leaders? Just what the hell might that be? It has something to do with The Race to the Top, yet another completely meaningless expression. The top of what? Why is education a race? My imagination conjures up a picture of a group of self-appointed jackasses who sit around a huge conference table in our august State Ed building in Albany telling each other what great teachers they were and lamenting how few, if any, measure up to their greatness. That’s probably not so though, but it can’t be that we have an office in Albany staffed with people who believe that they can make great teachers by issuing some rules or regulations. A more appropriate name for this outfit might better be be Office of Great Fools. Such an office in our State Ed department would be understood by every teacher in this state.

If as I believe the recent Pineapple and the Hare fiasco is representative of a state education department run amuck and a commissioner clueless about the needs of the schools in New York, what if every teacher in the state sent Dr. King a pineapple as an indicator of their contempt for his management of State Ed. That would be a protest worth of Saul Alinsky.

So you’ve been thinking I’ve been going off the deep end with my criticism
of standardized testing and data driven teacher accountability. Yesterday’s 8th grade ELA exam subjected students to series of reading comprehension questions based on a thoroughly senseless story The Pineapple and the Hare. I ask you to take a few minutes and follow this link to the story. If I summarized it, you would think me guilty of rhetorical excess.

Teachers report that the following were two of the questions 8th graders were asked to answer:

Why did the animals eat the pineapple?
a. they were annoyed
b. they were amused
c. they were hungry
d. they wanted to

Who was the wisest animal?
a. the hare
b. the moose
c. The crow
d. The owl

This is but one example of the kind of stupidity being inflicted on our children in the name of raising academic standards and accountability. This year, the teachers of these children will be evaluated in part on the results of their students on exams like this. Both are being victimized by the enemies of public education and their corporate testmaker friends who are bent on destroying public education as we have known it.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire (1694-1778)

As I sat yesterday listening to three school central office administrators, I found my mind turning to this quotation. I was listening to them talk about the training they are receiving under the new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) law which they claim will have administrators’ roles in supervision changing dramatically. Where once they watched teachers teach through the lens of a developed professional judgment, polished with considerable years of teaching experience, that judgment is to now be suspended, they maintained, in favor of the collection of evidence that the teacher being observed does all of the things called for in the performance rubric being used. So students may be thoroughly engaged in the lesson, there may be serious academic content present, but should there not be evidence of the use of technology, or a failure to differentiate instruction, or a perceived lack of participation by one or more students, or some other evidence of some irrelevant detail, it is altogether possible that the teacher will be seen as ineffective. When I suggested that given that observers no longer are required to exercise any professional judgment it would be only proper for their pay to be reduces since they will be performing a clerical chore, they looked at me astounded. When I inquired how they could possibly participate in such an absurdity, they claimed they had no choice. That’s what they are required to do. They were clearly angry when I suggest that they were employing the Nuremburg defense, where Nazi leaders maintained that they were simply following orders.

Experiences like the one I had yesterday increasingly lead me to the conclusion that most of our schools districts are led by morally bankrupt individuals who know what they are being asked to do is absurd and even harmful but do it nevertheless. They simply follow orders.

In a column this week in the Washington Post, Pasi Sahlberg, author of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?, focuses on why we can’t simply copy the Finnish education model with any real hope of success. His idea is simple, but its political ramifications are profound. The Finnish educational system is a vital component of their welfare state that provides child care, preschool, medical care, dental care and public education, all free through the university level. The driving idea behind their system is equity. The same amount of public funding stands behind every Finnish student. In short the Finns have a whole social infrastructure supporting the efforts of their schools and teachers. Sadly, we have nothing even approaching that anywhere in our country. There is no discussion of building an enlightened welfare state here. Our political parties battle over the right amount of funding to cut from social programs. Give Sahlberg’s article a read. You won’t be disappointed.

No death is perhaps as unsettling as that of a young person. Like few events, the passing of the young makes us feel our fragility in the marrow of our bones. Such deaths are often doubly unsettling to the young themselves, causing them to face their own mortality for the first time. Bereavement is in the air of our Plainview-Old Bethpage school community. Spencer Reis, a student at our Kennedy High School and Joseph Sadowski a Mattlin Middle School student both succumbed to cancer last week after protracted medical battles. Our thoughts are with their families.

Although grieving for their friend, students at Mattlin will, nevertheless, be asked to begin taking their state examinations today. Beyond any question, many will not perform optimally. How could they? That won’t matter a jot to the data driven drones in Albany who will have their data on the Mattlin Middle school and its teachers. No one there will know or care about the story behind the data.

The Wall Street Journal reports that at a private fundraising event in Florida, Mitt Romney, the apparent Republican nominee for President, vowed to shrink the size of the U.S. Department of Education and stand up to the teachers unions, inventing, as he so often does, a straw man to be knocked down. “The unions will put in hundreds of millions of dollars,” Mr. Romney said. “There’s nothing like it on our side.”

First of all almost no one has any trouble standing up to the teacher unions these days. Across the country, at the state, local and national levels, all public sector unions are being rolled over by Democratic and Republican politicians who have found in them a convenient and docile blame-catchers for the nation’s economic problems. Then, the notion that our unions will be raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the Obama campaign is just typical of Romney’s ability to utter the most outrageous falsehoods. For the past week he’s been trying to convince women that Republicans would be better friends, falsely alleging that they have borne a disproportionate share of the job losses in our economic crisis. Now it’s the hundreds of millions of dollars teacher unions will arise against him. Would that we could raise those kinds of dollars to crush disreputable liars like Romney.

If we needed further evidence of the drive of the one percent crowd to push their corporate style education reforms and diminish or destroy the teacher unions, a report in Tuesday’s New York Times gives us the latest example of what defenders of public education are up against. Frightened that the end of Michael Bloomberg’s term may give the UFT, the New York City teachers union, an opportunity to gain some political traction and reverse some of the lunacy that’s been inflicted on the city’s schools by Joel Klein and his successor, a New York City branch of Students First, Michelle Rhee’s cash cow, is being formed with the goal of raising 10 million dollars a year for the next five years to wage their warfare on public education and union teachers. We’ve seen first hand how cities like New York and Washington D.C. have served as the incubators of ideas that have weakened public education, robbed teaching of any semblance of professionalism and made the goal of education test passing rather than learning. We dare not think that this will be a problem only for City teachers. These people want us all gone. There is no working with them.

I will resume blogging on April 16. Happy holidays to all my readers.