A Teachable Moment

The members of my union worked very hard on the first set on what is designed to be a long campaign to pass school budgets that gain over 60 percent of the vote. Our history is that results hover around the 60 percent mark, not strong enough to embolden superintendents and boards of education to put up the budgets we really need. Our efforts paid off sooner than I expected. The 69 percent vote for our budget is the biggest margin in recent memory and had to be due to our efforts and the efforts of others who understand that unless we start creating budgets that adequately fund our schools, our program will erode away, slowly at first but eventually reaching a point where it is becomes impossible to get back to what we once were.

The vote yesterday for the budget and members of the Board of Education has me hopeful this morning. I’m hopeful too that an idea that I have been pushing for over 20 years may finally getting the attention it deserves – that we need to start working on our budget and the strategy for passing it in September instead of waiting until the middle of the school year.

Three simple things we could do obtain better outcomes from our public schools aren’t about to happen anytime soon. We will continue to prefer going down the reform road, even though there decades of evidence that it is headed nowhere.

Step one would be to close down most of the existing teacher education programs in favor of a solid liberal arts education for prospective teachers and an internship or clerkship (We need a better name.) that puts teachers to be in classrooms for increasing periods of time with increasing responsibilities over the four years of their education. They should be mentored by working professionals who would begin their training with observation and discussion and evolve into more and more supervised teaching. By their fourth year, they could even be given an actual teaching assignment with a prorated salary. How much better this would be than the current approach that essentially has prospective teachers doing a few weeks of “student teaching” in their senior year of college.

Harder to do is to once and for all have a real war on poverty. Lyndon Johnson’s worked, but only for the elderly. We used to have millions of impoverished old people. Thanks to Johnson’s war we have many fewer today. It’s time to finish the job with the focus of providing gainful employment to the parents of the 25 percent of America’s children who live in poverty. It is a dope addict’s delusion to believe that we can through education lift children out of the mire of poverty, with all that that means to the growth and development of a child. How many people do you know who are willing to pony up the taxes necessary to accomplish this? How many of our leaders are willing to lead the American people to do the right thing by our children?

Finally, we need to integrate our public schools by bringing all economic classes of children into the same classrooms. If we believe that we want a country based on shared middle class values, economic integration is the only what that will happen. Our current system segregates people by where they live, causing a real knowledge gap between the classes as well as a sizable empathy gap.

There’s the plan in four short paragraphs. It would do wonders for our schools, our economy and the soul of our nation.

If you read one education article in the next year, read this one by Pasi Sahlberg, a leader in making the Finnish school system the envy of the world. Readers of my blog will find Sahlberg supporting many of the things I have advanced, only better. I wish the leaders of our two great national teacher unions would read it and take it to hart. I wish they would get off the absolutely stupid “a great teacher in every classroom” kick that they have adopted from the so-called reformers.

While it is easy to find school board members and central office administrators who talk a good game about being against New York’s obsessive testing, it’s more difficult to find local decision makers willing to be more activist and actually do something to further the cause of educating kids rather than testing them. Thus I’ve had good things to say about the administration in Rockville Centre who made it easy for parents to opt their kids out of the recent barrage of state exams.

Complementary words are in order too for the leaders of the Schoharie School District outside of Albany for the cleaver shot they have taken at the state’s testing scheme. Reaching the mid-point of the academic quarter when progress reports are due to parents, the district informed the community of its inability to accurately express the progress of its students because it had been consumed for weeks with preparation, administration and the marking of the state tests. Here’s a taste of how their action played in the local media.

I’ve spent much of the past two days interviewing high school seniors in Plainview and Syosset for the 2013 Berkowitz Scholarship, an award created in memory of Leonard and Myriam Berkowitz, she a teacher in Syosset and he a psychologist in Plainview. Their estate provided the funding for these awards, leaving it to the union in each district do choose the recipients. This year, we will award three $12500 scholarships, three in each district.

This is all by way of introducing my point which is that those who think America’s schools are failing should have been with me the last two days talking to the outstanding, well-educated young people the Plainview and Syosset school district have turned. Had these children gone to the finest private schools, they would not have been offered broader educational opportunities, better teaching or sounder academic preparation. In fact, in many ways I suspect their preparation has been better than many of their privately educated peers. Let me be quick to point out, I know, if others don’t, that had I visited many of the school districts on Long Island, I would have found similar, bright, well-educated children, ready to pursue whatever further education they desire.

This morning, however, I found myself wondering how long it will be before we no longer do the wonderful job we’re doing. All over the state and nation, school budgets are being pared down, courses eliminated, teachers excessed and educational opportunities curtailed. Even richer districts like my own are starting to cut back. They tell the public that their kids are getting as good a program as ever, but anyone who thinks for a moment knows that’s untrue.

The simple fact of the matter is America feigns a deep concern for children. In most places, we resent having to pay for quality schools, convincing ourselves that public schools are bottomless waste pits. Our politicians thrive on that claptrap. They all want to brag about cutting taxes. In New York our pompous ass of a governor brags about bringing us a property tax can, a cap which in its short existence has clobbered the ability of public schools to deliver in many places even a basic education. We love our children, but we allow almost a quarter of them to live in poverty, voting for leaders who seek to cut the already meager programs that provide relief to these families.

Yesterday, I was reminded of what we are capable of doing for our children. Today, the world of budget cuts and unmet needs came crashing down on my momentary elation.

If we are serious about ending the blight obsessive high stakes testing has inflicted on public education, we must cease lending the results of those tests any credibility. We need to stop having Board of Education meetings at which the Assistant Superintendent for Instruction spends a half hour inflicting upon the audience various charts and graphs of our students’ test scores which essentially have nothing to say about the quality of our academic program. We have to cease focusing people’s attention on statistically meaningless blips in scores, suggesting as was done last night that they are evidence of work that is needed. More often than not, they are evidence of nothing. In short, we need to talk about education, not scores. To do otherwise is to confront the testocracy on their terms, not ours. Every time we point to student scores as evidence of our success, we empower the enemies of public education

I’ll be in Syosset today, interviewing students who have been nominated for the Leonard and Miriam Berkowitz Scholarship, an award created from the Berkowitz estate to honor children from two school districts in which the Berkowitzes spent their professional careers, she an elementary school teacher and he a psychologist at our high school in Plainview. The award in Syosset is to outstanding students who express an interest in becoming teachers.

I know I will meet at least some of the children of teachers who wish to follow in their parents’ footsteps. But, sadly, that can’t be done anymore, although I doubt that these children understand that. These children will not have the marvelous career I had to teach young people essentially as I saw fit, having earned the trust of the people who hired me. Only once did a principal ask me about my Regents grades in a particular class, observing that I had a 50% failure. With complete impunity, I laughed in his face, pointing out to the fool that this was not a Regents class, but a group of kids identified as potential drop-outs who I had encouraged to take the exam that no one thought any of them would pass. Little did I realize at the time that the fool’s mindless use of test data would become, after a time, the policy of the State of New York.

Spending my days listening to the grievances of teachers, watching them attempt to implement the reform program du jour, I feel that I want to ask the Berkowitz candidates, “What the hell is wrong with you? Why do you want a job that is becoming increasingly routinized and mechanized, where you have almost no say in what you teach and how you teach it, where the public has been led to believe that you are over-paid and under-worked, a job which every person who has been to school feels competent to tell you how to do.. What is it about this work that attracts you?

Most will answer with statements like, “I love to work with children.” How do I tell them that that’s not enough? How do I explain that they have years of struggle ahead to fight for and demand the respect and dignity that previous generations struggled through their unions to achieve. I suspect my eye will be on the candidates who show an aptitude for that struggle.

I spent about three hours yesterday sitting in the faculty lunch room of our high school talking to teachers. It’s the way I keep in touch with our membership. There’s something about the relaxed atmosphere of the lunch room that always gives me a keener insight into the thoughts of the membership than I get from attending more formal union meetings.

To say that the morale of the staff is at an all-time low is to understate the mood I found. A music teacher expresses his frustration with one of the more absurd aspects of the Common Core Standards as he talks about a student for whom music has been a welcome relief from his academic struggles but who now has to do written music assignments – one more thing to expose his weaknesses – one more thing to worry about.
Two foreign language teachers (I refuse to use the expression languages other than English – LOTE) speak impassionedly about the stupidity of requiring them to teach two different levels of language in the same classroom because cuts made to next year’s budget.
But my lasting impression of the day came from a teacher who asked, “Morty, do you think things will turn around in public education? I have nine more years before I can retire, and I can’t stand what’s happening.”

Here’s the short version of my response, a response that spread out over three lunch periods with and ever changing audience.
I think we can win the battle to save public education. Despite money advantage of the so-called reformers, the public appears to be waking up and is joining with the educators in their communities to demand education instead of testing, age appropriate curricula instead of the untested Common Core and schools that do not overburden kids with pressures to compete and succeed. We are clearly on the road to gaining these victories, even though it doesn’t seem so some days. Parents are opting their kids out of the tests in greater numbers. Coalitions are forming to oppose the Common Core Standards. Teacher union, albeit late to the party, have embraced the battle against obsessive testing, and while they can’t quite get themselves to say screw the Common Core are at least focused on the inane way in which it is being implemented.

What I’m not so sanguine about is the future of the art of teaching. A notion has taken hold that technology offers the possibility of ensuring that each student at each level receives the same instruction and that that is a desirable outcome. Wherever I go, people are talking programs, programs that invariably mean that what a teacher does in her classroom is prescribed by corporate made materials, increasingly of a digital variety. Corporate designed programs followed up with corporate designed tests. Good teachers following the programs getting good results on the tests. What the students are getting no one seems to care as long as they are college or career ready, ready to take their place as cogs in the corporate controlled world. I routinely meet teachers who are completely nonplussed when their smart boards fail, having built few skills to engage learners other than media of one kind or another. This is the battle that too few are fighting. Unless more of us take this on, teaching is headed to becoming a low skilled job of leading children through exercises and activities designed by others, a job almost anyone can do. Why then will we pay professional salaries to those who do it? What satisfaction will come from doing it? May Day is a good time to think about such things.

From Atlanta to Long Island, the corrupting, corrosive influence of high stakes testing has expressed itself in outright cheating. As more and more states make student test results part of teachers’ annual performance reviews, the fear of being adjudged ineffective for things beyond one’s control is driving people cheat.

Students are feeling the challenge to their integrity too. The experience of one of our teachers during the recent math examinations in New York is illustrative of the impact of making testing the focus of education rather than learning.
While proctoring the math exam, our teacher was called over by one of her students who proceeded to engage her plaintively.
“Can’t you help me with this test?”

“No I can’t. Just do the best you can,” the teacher replied.

“But no one will know. Please help me.”

Why does a child think his result on test is important enough to move him to ask his teacher to help him cheat? Why have we allowed the degradation of elementary schooling to the point where a teacher writes to her union president about how the children in her class “…are so defeated that they are asking us to cheat for the”?

A colleague of mine has a kindergartener, a perceptive, verbal child who comes home from school to announce to her parent, “I hate school.” We call that raising standards?

I’m going to ask the executive board of my union to support our district’s school budget.

But it’s time to put the heat on boards of education to end the budget cutting and build coalitions to support piercing the property tax cap. It’s time to stop trying to fool the public into thinking that we can continue to have the same quality education as programs are cut.

Unless those of us who believe in public education take a stand against this cutting, it won’t be long before the cuts in many school districts will be so deep that they will never be replaced because to do so will require such a huge jump in the tax levy as to make restoration impossible. It‘s simple. Go three or four years with budgets that are two to three percent below what they should be to really maintain the status quo, and you are suddenly looking at nine or ten percent increases to put back what has been lost. That’s almost impossible to do!

Pro-public education citizens reflexively support school budget, even regressive ones. They do so out of a loyalty to an institution for which they have an abiding respect. Yet it is objectively not respectful of the institution to support budgets that starve it and limit its ability to fulfill its mission. We’ve got to rethink reflexive budget support. To do otherwise is to suggest that we are satisfied with the status quo.

It is days like today that have me wishing I were still teaching. What an opportunity teachers have to close the doors to their classrooms, forget about state tests and Common Core and talk about constitutional rights and justice. To the extent that their students watched TV or engaged social media like Facebook, they were bombarded as I was with cries for vengeance against the surviving Boston Marathon bomber. “Try him as an enemy combatant,” even though he’s an American citizen. “If we treat him as an enemy combatant, we can question him better,” better a euphemism for torture him. “Forget about Miranda rights,” even though he’s an American citizen with hopefully the same right to justice as you and I.

Were I in class this morning, I’m sure the majority sentiment would be that the perpetrator of this dastardly act is not deserving of the protections of the Constitution. My challenge would be to get my students to understand that their rights as Americans are inextricably tied to the extent to which while our emotions lead us to want to rend the perpetrator literally limb from limb we must provide him with the justice provided for by the Constitution. To do otherwise is to threaten our own freedom. We don’t suspend a person’s right to justice because his crimes are heinous.

Teachers! This is your teachable moment. Grab it!