neologophilia

Now that Mitt Romney has become the favorite target of Presidential hopefuls, the issue of consistency of belief and policy has come to the fore. While I’m not defender of the erstwhile Governor of Massachusetts, I’m glad I am not called to the same standards of consistency he has been on issues such as the mandate of medical insurance and a woman’s right to choose.  Although I can be skeptical of his reasons for shifting his position, I still feel public office holders should have the right to change their minds.

Changing seats changes perspectives, as anyone can testify from experience. President Reagan ascended to power by decrying big government and then presided over the largest expansion of government in several decades. President George H.W. Bush made the famous “Read my lips!” promise, then managed to “enhance revenue” like a good Democrat in his four years. When I taught high school I was convinced that ability grouping was the only way to manage academic achievement. I also used it to circumscribe the kind of students I taught. As a teacher educator, I now understand that heterogeneous grouping to a large extent allows students to benefit from the same kinds of curriculum and teaching. I also remember that the homogeneous groups I thought I was teaching in high school were not so homogeneous. So new perspectives allow us to think differently.

Somehow the expression “reflective politician” has become an oxymoron. Politicians are very like to consider it spineless to change their minds, and the result is the partisan bickering that has brought a halt to legislative progress in Congress.  The word “compromise,” which does not even imply changing your position, has become anathema to the partisans on the right and left.

This is not to say politicians do not calculate. They consider every option, but they choose the one that makes them look tough and resolute.  I can’t help but believe that John Boehner was prepared to compromise with the President when they first met about curbing the deficit in July, but the resolute politician in him won out over the conciliatory one.  That was a turning point when political sparring took over and collaboration ended. President Obama himself gave up on negotiating with an intractable opponent.

I find it completely credible that Governor Romney had ” a change of heart” on abortion before his first Presidential campaign. I have no insight into his motives, but it is clear that the Mormon part of his psyche was bound to be “pro-life.” The political expedience of his change makes it suspicious, but the moral right to change one’s position should be undisputed.  No one thinks it peculiar that Governor Rick Perry was once a Democrat, but now vies to be the most conservative of the Republicans.

President Obama has proved himself the most reflective of politicians to the jeopardy of his status in his own party.  He came into office with the full credentials of a card-carrying liberal, then proceeded to govern from the center. One could say this was merely the pragmatic requirement for getting things done, and Obama is a pragmatist.  But the President has taken the warnings about the deficit seriously and considered cutting back sacred social programs to bring his budget under control. You can claim this was political expedience, but I prefer to credit the President with a listening ear and a reflective mind.

In fact most of our Presidents have had this gift to listen and reflect, because it was necessary for leadership. It is mysterious that during the Presidential campaign, the ability to reflect and gain new insights has been ridiculed, and  stubbornness and unwillingness to compromise has been praised.  It makes the entire campaign into a performance of a role which will have no significance once the winner is in office.

Vacillation is not what we expect from our leaders, but the ability to reconsider a position and change your course, based on the highest values, should be an important qualification of leadership.

In the recent edition of Education Week (September 21, 2011 ), Paula Stacey describes the many travesties of teaching writing inspired by a decade of standards and textbooks that function like cookbooks.*  Most of these anecdotes are from her personal teaching experience, and they ring with authenticity. Her conclusion is to “Stop Teaching Writing” and merely ask questions and consider the answers.  She does not define the characteristic challenge of teaching writing, which is, to echo the venerable Don Murray, “Teach the Process, Not the Product.”

The problem is that teaching writing is not teaching to the standards or teaching by the book. It is teaching the writer first,  then the writing. A  great writing teacher views the writer as an actor, the writing as the rehearsal, and the standards as the critics, who like to have the last word. In the tentative bursts of language students produce in writing classes, the teacher sees a performer with talents that can be coached. The standards are the afterthought, not the dialogue in the drama. The textbook is the proposal, not the script, for the play.

The teacher seems to be a director in this metaphor. When actors praise directors, they always seem to appreciate their ability to bring out the best in the actor, to understand the capabilities the actor brings to the performance. They never comment on the good reviews they received, because of the director’s savvy anticipation of the critics. Rather they admire the director’s making the most of what they bring to the drama.

Another reason to like this theatrical metaphor is that rehearsals become the focus of growth.  Rarely will anyone pay to see a rehearsal, but if you wanted to see how a play comes alive that would be the place to be. No one expects perfect performance in rehearsals, but what you can observe is the evolution of the actor and character as they perform the same scene over and over again. So it is with writers and writing.

Educators have been more fond of metaphors of teachers as sculptors or master gardeners. Although these analogies ennoble the profession, attributing depths of understanding and skill to teaching, they fail to characterize the student as an agent of learning. Statues and lilies have very little initiative in their growth. They appear more as artifacts fashioned by the skill of the artist. These metaphors miss the point about teaching writing. It is very dependent on the participation of the writer.

When teachers formulate writing, they minimize that participation. Yet every writing teacher is prey to this tendency, because every teacher wants to make learning easier for students.  The good writing teacher will read the results of these formulations and consider why the writing seems lifeless or so uniform throughout the class. The answer will often be traced to the dimensions of the writing assignment or the graphic organizer that choked the writing in its attempt to provide structure.  Teachers with the souls of directors will bring a new approach to the next rehearsal.

Unless directors are not teachers, then writing can be taught.  Like the performance, writing is taught in the rehearsals with the focus on the actor and the actor’s capabilities. The actor is never asked to  be a macho super-hero if he is built slightly with a boyish face. The actress is not required to rely on feminine wiles, if she is tall and muscular. The director teaches to their strengths, while coaching their flexibility.

So, if we are not obsessed with our reviews or expect our performers to excel at their weaknesses, we can teach writing.  It may not look pretty, but that’s what rehearsals are for.

* http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/21/04stacey.h31.html?tkn=LLWFXCotiHDKc1Q1skAZmvCV5dLFk4ogMpLQ&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1

 We’ve done it now. Eleven years we had to educate the public, to
register our protests and do everything in our power to warn people
what was coming, and we blew it. We knew the moment would eventually
come and we hem-hawed, looked at the ground, kicked at the dirt with
our shoes and failed to look the opposition in the eye and face them
down. All of us saw this coming, but very few took a stand and now
we — and our students — are paying the price. We could have been
prophets but failed the test.
http://blogs.ajc.com/get-schooled-blog/2011/08/31/no-child-left-behind-a-conspiracy-against-public-education-that-too-few-called-out/

In a bitter reflection on the consequences of No Child Left Behind (NCLB),  Jim Arnold reprimands educators for standing by while the hurricane of so-called  “educational reform” swept through our classrooms. The dire consequences of blaming the victims, canonizing standardized tests, and allowing schools to be branded and euthanized are well-known to those who have taught for the past decade. But this kind of breast-beating over a massive federal initiative gone wrong oversimplifies what has happened since 2001, the Decade of Standards.

Arnold argues that we saw it coming and stood by and let it happen.  True enough, but what did we see coming? It was not like the hurricane coming up the coast in the sense that we could foresee its path and knew it was an ill-wind that would “blow no good.” Well, we knew that anything that relied on standardized tests as its exclusive measuring stick was ill-fated, but there were some promising high-pressure fronts moving in alongside it.

First of all,  someone in Washington was paying attention to the public schools. The federal funding surge that came with NCLB was a welcome transfusion for schools struggling to hire new teachers and make classrooms smaller.  Public education was a national priority all of a sudden. Unprecedented bipartisanship emerged on this bill, which has never been seen again, unless you want to count the invasion of  Iraq. (You might call that a “fatal bipartisanship”).  Even in the Obama administration Congressional representatives have crossed the aisles to support federal school reform, although even that good will appears to have ended.

Second, education was making headlines daily and becoming a universal concern. The amount of ink and megabytes devoted to education has skyrocketed over the past decade.  Education in the K-12 schools was finally on the public radar, right alongside the economy and political intrigue.  It’s hard to recall that, in earlier decades, public schooling was usually buried in the back pages, if mentioned at all.  As many public relations directors will claim, “All publicity is good publicity,” because being seen in print and heard on the airwaves is half the battle.

Third, accountability was promoted as a tool of reform. Although this should have raised giant red pennants, there is a strong desire for proving performance in public education.  Teachers want to be recognized for their hard work as much as anyone else. The problem is figures lie, and we have struggled for generations to make them tell a true story.  Testing has always been our measuring stick.  Perhaps this time they would show authentic progress.  Perhaps this time it would somehow reflect the hard work we invested in the most disadvantaged children in our classes.

Mark Twain said, “Teaching is the most acute form of optimism,” and probably optimism is also teaching’s fatal flaw.  We believe the conditions of schooling will somehow improve every year and that students will come eager to learn after the long summer break. How else do we psyche ourselves up for another school year? We believe we can make a difference, even when the cards are stacked against us. We even believe that our best efforts in the classroom will be reflected in the next round of test scores.  Or at least we believe someone will recognize our small victories, if the test scores do not.

Now that investigations have revealed teachers complicit in altering the results of standardized tests, perhaps even that optimism is endangered.  But the vast majority of teachers are incurable optimists, and they hoped that accountability for student performance would reflect their hard work and their zeal for the struggling student. Hoped against all reason and experience.

Was  “No Child Left Behind” a malignant conspiracy? Can we accept it as well-intentioned school reform, regardless of the intrigues of testing companies and curriculum publishers and the heavy-handedness of school administrators warping and scripting the curriculum? To read it this way is to understand why more educators did not rise up and shout against it.  It put education in the spotlight and on the national conscience.  It made Washington pay attention as never before. It made private foundations re-deploy their support to education. It made teachers critical to the success of schools. How could that be bad?

Sadly the last two administrations have shown how testing and accountability can destroy schools and optimism, regardless of good intentions and stimulus dollars.  What might have been the decade of the teacher has become the decade of inquisition, of branding and purging failure in the schools.  Arnold’s verdict on the demise of real school reform is tragically fair.

But I don’t accept the reprimand of teachers, the incurably optimistic profession that thrives on the renewal in every school year. Teachers will be fooled over and over again by the craft of Washington and the Council of State School Officers, because they expect better from them as they expect it from their students.  Teachers are near-sighted about education; they see mostly the students in their classrooms and plan how to maximize what the district and Department of Education hand them. Perhaps they need more cynicism about school reform, but would that make them better teachers?

In the decade of NCLB hindsight is 20-20. Teaching is always about the next decade.

The problem in American education is not a lack of standards. The
problem is poverty. Our students from middle-class families who attend
well-funded schools score at the top of the world on international
tests. The US has the highest level of child poverty among all
industrialized countries. If all our children were protected from the
effects of poverty our overall international test scores would be
spectacular. (Steven Krashen, NCTE Forum, 8/19/11)

We can malign the Common Core Standards or the people that formed them, but they only offend in how we read and interpret them. Of themselves, the Standards are fairly innocuous, but when politicians and educators start to use them as weapons in the guise of school reform, they become blunt instruments for sensitive operations.  I agree with Stephen Krashen that the Standards have to be viewed in context of poverty and prosperity, but that does not make them irrelevant.

Performance standards can reveal the inequity between students in privileged and disadvantaged settings almost as effectively as the statistics that indicate poverty and limited resources.  They can show how much growth to expect in a harsh environment where  nutrition, health, and family stability are at risk.  They hardly reflect the quality of teaching going on in these settings, and anyone who implies that they do, understands nothing about public schooling. The problem with Standards begins when schools and teachers are judged by them without consideration of the communities they serve,  and when teachers become the scapegoats for communities without resources.

The worst feature of the teacher quality movement is the sweeping comparisons made between teachers, schools, and districts as test scores are scrutinized.  The notion that student performance in the inner city can be compared with students in the comfortable suburbs is pernicious and elicits defensive statements about SES and overpopulation of special needs students in mainstream classes.   Until these odious comparisons are made, teachers are more apt to consider their students a work in progress, without reference to their unusual needs.  Standards are no threat to teachers, until some administrator or politician suggests that students should be meeting them uniformly without consideration for their environment.

Teachers of the urban and rural poor never divest themselves of responsibility for educating students as they receive them, just as the ninth grade teacher accepts the graduates of eighth grade, regardless of how prepared they are for the rigors of high school.  The only time you hear teachers complain about the ability of the students in their classes is when someone suggests that they are to blame for student performance.  Then you will hear about the poor preparation in the feeder elementary school, about the high percentages of special education students assigned to a class, about the failure of the home environment to provide an English-speaking reinforcement of lessons learned in school.  Then you will hear about poverty in the community, how it stunts learning.

But on a good day or a day when no one has pointed a finger at their school or their class you will not hear teachers writing off their students to poverty or disadvantaged settings.  They identify with the plight of their students and adapt how they teach to the limitations of the students they have.  They work harder to teach the students with language deficits and minimal work habits.  They celebrate every sign of progress, even if it falls short of the Standards they hope their students will meet. Teachers  are rarely heard to say, ” I can’t teach impoverished students.”

My former principal was fond of saying, “They send us the best they have,” particularly if we were griping about the regular resistance we faced in our classrooms.  His homespun philosophy could wear thin over the long school year, but everyone on the faculty knew the truth of this.  We played the hand we were dealt, and everyday tried to learn how to play it better.

In public education we accept our students as “the best they have.”  We never speak of inferior raw materials  or substandard products, because we are working with human beings.  We take them as we find them and bring them along as far as we can. Many teachers miraculously engage unmotivated students, but may only creep slowly toward the Standards. The assessments that measure such improvement are crude instruments. We can read progress in many ways, standardized tests the least of them.

When we read the Standards and how our students fail to achieve them in a timely fashion, we should interpret them as the failing of our society to provide the basic physical needs and the language-rich environment in every neighborhood and community. If we choose to read them as product controls and our students as manufactured goods, we will read poorly. But if we read them with enlightened minds, the Common Core Standards could represent national, local, and neighborhood goals, goals that drive our social conscience as well as our curriculum.

Nobody likes taxes, but everybody believes in the common good. If we believed that our taxes paid for the common good, we would pay our fair share. They do pay for the common good. They pay for the public schools. Yet a minority of Americans has chosen to believe a contrary mythology, the Myth of the Tax-fed Bureaucrat.

It goes like this: when the powerful business-owner has more money to spend, it benefits all the hard-working citizens of this land, but if anyone serving the public has more money, for example, the public schools, it is wasted on bureaucracy and pension funds. Taxes only feed bureaucrats. This is the shameless myth behind the budget-cutting strategy of Congressional Republicans.

Taxes pay for the common good. While we’re remorselessly cutting our deficits, let’s also cut to the chase on taxes. Taxes support our schools, not big business. Taxes support long-term school reform, not the short-term stimuli that private foundations generously provide.  Taxes buy the time during and after the school day that teachers need to collaborate and develop their curriculum and craft. And yes, taxes allow teachers with thirty or forty years of unbroken service to retire and allow younger teachers with fresh energy and ideas to take their place.

When the prosperous refuse to pay taxes, they are undermining our public education system. The revenue they are hoarding for a sunny day is sucked out of the budgets of local schools, as surely as if they tapped the bank accounts of every public school employee. Permanent school funding comes from nowhere else, the Gates and Broad Foundations notwithstanding.

Every dollar that oil executives and hedge-fund managers refuse to contribute to overcome our national deficit is depleting our educational capital.  Every dollar that the wealthiest two per cent of our nation continues to hoard is depleting our intellectual infrastructure.  The notion that taxes only benefit the Washington fat-cats is a myth concocted by the wealthy. Taxes pay for the modest public school systems we have. Even school superintendents are paid on the cheap, compared with the massive bonuses of CEO’s.

The citizens of this country whose children attend public schools constitute a majority. If they accepted the cold reality that budget-cutting without additional revenue will sacrifice their children’s education to benefit the wealthy, they would rise up in unison and say “No!” No, you may not lay-off the next generation of teachers. No, you may not close neighborhood schools. No, you may not pack our classes with forty students or more. No, you may not expel our programs of music and art. No, you may not charge participation fees for athletics.

All of these things will come to pass in every public school, not just the blighted urban ones, if ruthless deficit-cutting is not softened by additional revenue.  Public funds must pay for schools or the public will pay an intellectual and emotional toll.  As surely as night follows day, our schools will pay. Our teachers will pay. Our children will pay.

Waste will be cut. We are talking about trillions of dollars of waste. But taxes pay for our schools, and schools waste very little by comparison with larger bureaucracy.

Public schools rely on public funds.  Citizens of public schools, don’t let Congress suck the money out of our schools. Don’t let massive tax breaks that drain our public resources fill the coffers of the wealthy at the expense of the actual tax-payers.  Don’t succumb to the myth of the Tax-fed Bureaucrat. Believe in the gospel of the Common Good.  Believe that taxes pay for the common good, the common school. Let everyone pay for these schools and pay what they can afford.

The public school majority said, Amen!

Like the editors of Re-thinking Schools, I am “not waiting for Superman.”  Last fall when the documentary “Waiting for Superman” made its debut, public school teachers across the nation imagined a bulls-eye on their backs, as the film portrayed charter schools and their exceptional teachers as the solution to mediocre public education. As Stan Karp, on the web site “Not Waiting for Superman,” indignantly commented,

Despite a lot of empty rhetoric about the importance of “great teachers,” the disrespect the film displays to real teachers working on the ground in public schools today is stunning. Not one has a voice in the film. There are no public school parents working together to improve the schools their children attend. There are no engaged communities. There is no serious discussion of funding, poverty, race, testing or the long and sorry history of top-down bureaucratic reform failure. [http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org/Articles/20100920-RSEditorsNotWaiting]

I am “not waiting for Superman,” because I have spent seventeen days listening to, and delighting in,  sixteen amazing teachers of writing, who gave up four weeks of their summer to become better teachers of writing. And I know, from experience, that there are 200 more sites of the National Writing Project completing very similar summer institutes as I write this.  That makes about 3,200 teachers of writing becoming better writers and teachers by concentrating on their craft for six hours a day, while many of their detractors assume they are traveling or lying by the pool.

What they are doing is writing relentlessly, listening to demonstrations on teaching writing, offering feedback on the demonstrations, and setting a research agenda to investigate writing in their own classrooms.

As I write this, they are laboring over their teaching and writing portfolios, which they will share with each other, as they have shared all the products of their labor. And they will appreciate each others’ work and worth and celebrate their personal and shared accomplishments. When I read their writing and witness their teaching, I wish the “Superman” film-makers were here to celebrate, too.

When these teachers return to their classrooms in the fall, they will be full of hope for their students and their schools, because nothing is so energizing as dedicated teachers working together. What will they find? Admiration? Respect? Curiosity? Structural or material support? Maybe not. As we often warn them, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country.”

Because their colleagues and principals are also “not waiting for Superman.” They don’t need heroes. They are a little out of patience with “born again” teachers and apostles of the “next great thing.”  But they do want help. They know teaching is a collaborative sport, even though schools treat it as a competitive one. They know they are stretched beyond what a single teacher can accomplish.  However, they will not do “better with less,” as Education Secretary Arne Duncan has exhorted them.

Do Writing Project teachers know anything that could benefit their colleagues? Yes, they know that teachers CAN collaborate with immense success and rejuvenation, given time and the inclination to listen to each other.  These teachers have listened and reflected and offered words of encouragement that made them each feel like Superman,  even if for a moment.  Every time a teacher shared a practice or a successful lesson, fifteen others were taking notes furiously, sorting the best from the valuable from the problematic.  They not only offered each teacher collegial feedback, they learned from the shape and impact of each demonstration how their demonstration could be improved.  The demonstrations gathered new elements as the summer proceeded and the kinds of response and interaction multiplied.  A group understanding of excellent teaching practice grew .

They will return to their schools in the fall, because 97% of institute participants stay in their classrooms for over seventeen years (Inverness Associates).  They will not arrive as Superman, but as a colleague with a new excitement about teaching. My prayer is that the three thousand schools that receive them will respect them as equals with the same hopes and goals for the success of their students.  They will remember that teachers need each other and provide every opportunity for teachers to work together, to share professional experience and to give desperately-needed encouragement.

Superman will not be gracing our schools in September. But I know 3,200 teachers who will reach out to their colleagues and share their dreams and practices for better instruction.  There could be collegiality, instead of superstars and rivalries.  There could be a teaching community.  We are not waiting for Superman.

Summer Institute Daily Log, June 30, 2011

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

They must have the flexibility, concentration, and fluency to produce high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline and the capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing over multiple drafts when circumstances encourage or require it. (“College and Career Anchor Standards for Writing” 63)

Reading the Common Core State Standards, teachers of writing come away with a mixed message. Writing is described as rich in thought and content, but sometimes it is quick and dirty and sometimes it is careful and reconsidered. Both are true, but  it leaves open  the question of how to teach writing.

The above passages, from the  CCSS sidebar titled “Range and content of student writing,” illustrate how our national standards for writing are torn between the deliberate and the driven. In the first sentence, the words “careful consideration” and “deliberately” stand out.  This emphasizes that writing is a process. In the second sentence, the key words seem to be “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline,”  which suggests the need for a “quick and dirty” approach.  However this is followed by a disclaimer which urges the “capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing.”  Then,  lest we become too leisurely in the process of writing, the final phrase cautions “when circumstances encourage or require it.”

The beauty of these contradictions about “range and content of student writing” is that they are probably all true. Writing is both deliberate and driven, according to the purpose and occasion. It would be petty to insist that the standards for writing be unwavering and consistent, because writing is not like that.

What does annoy me is that we assess only the “driven” side of writing, the world of desperation and deadlines. The language about “high-quality first draft text” is an obvious rationale for the impromptu essay, written in thirty minutes or less and unapologetically assessed as “first-draft writing.” This how the ACT, the College Board, and most state assessments evaluate writing.   The question is “Of what social or professional value is first draft writing?” Or “Why be driven?”

Some professional roles dictate a “high-quality first draft text under a tight deadline.” Newspaper reporters come to mind.  Office scribes — secretaries, document drafters, those who write for their bosses — may be required to write under short deadlines.  For some reason, this remarkable skill is often uncompensated and yet under-girds the other forms of writing that allow newspapers to publish and businesses to function.  It is a valuable skill, but not always valued.

Every other kind of writing falls under the “capacity to revisit and make improvements,” and it is the kind of writing most respected in journalism and commerce.  Feature articles, Op-ed articles, Topical columns, Investigative articles. Project or marketing proposals, contracts, human resources documents, end-user documents, public relations documents.  No one writes these in one draft or under unreasonable time constraints. Oh yes, deadlines will sometimes be sudden and arbitrary, but no one considers high pressure the formula for good writing. And writing in journalism, law and business is incurably collaborative. Numerous pairs of eyes must examine work in progress and editors may insist on putting their mark on it, even a controversial comma.

In the “real world” the writing process is alive and well and respected. Only in school is it considered a sideline, producing the kind of writing pored over by teachers, but rarely high stakes, rarely a standard for “success.”  The writing that counts is “driven” writing.  It is the kind of writing most students claim they are good at.  Why? Because that is the kind of writing we assess for success.  To many students the quickwrite is the money genre, the one that counts.  Students who claim they can write well, but need time, seem to be asking for special consideration. They are somehow deficient because their writing process is an actual process.

To be college and career ready writers, students must take task, purpose and audience into careful consideration, choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

Deliberation. To me that describes what writers really do.  It comes from a Middle English word meaning to “balance or weigh.” Writers balance “task, purpose and audience . . . words, information, structures and formats.” That’s a lot of balancing, and it will not be easily executed in thirty minutes. It will be executed  . . . deliberately.  Writing teachers’ message to their students is to “trust the process.” The message of our standardized assessments is “Get ‘er done.”

. . . choosing words, information, structures and formats deliberately.

It is comforting to see deliberation validated in the Common Core State Standards. It gives dignity to writing and the teaching of writing.  Now if it would only be reinforced by the Common Core State Assessments. The Deliberate . . . not the Driven.

George I, our forty-first President, separated himself from his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, by declaring that the “trickle-down” theory of stimulating the economy was “voodoo economics.” By that he meant that the trickle-down theory assumed an outcome of prosperity from lowering income taxes or deregulating commerce: a cause and effect that were not directly connected. Like sticking a pin in a doll of your enemy was supposed to harm your enemy.

In the Twenty-first century all the happy talk of voodoo economics has spilled over to public education.  Down with restrictions and up with schools that will thrive in their absence, the charter schools, the parochial schools, the experimental schools with suspended teachers’ contracts.  Free schools mean innovation, and innovation means better schools.

Well, we have seen the results of free markets over the past decade, both in the economy and education, and reviews are mixed, to say the least.  There are pockets of success, like computer and wireless technology, like the KIPP schools which mentor new teachers in a high-pressure learning environment. But the overall health of the economy and the nation’s schools continues to falter, while the mantra of deregulation of business and unshackling of school administrators persists, with its dogged faith in freedom producing prosperity.  The triumph of hope over experience, someone once said.

Now comes Tom Watkins, former State Superintendent of Michigan’s schools with more voodoo predictions, now directed at teacher education.

What if our colleges of education did not have an exclusive franchise on preparing future teachers? What if we opened the teacher preparation business up to educational entrepreneurs who could demonstrate through scientific research that their methods actually produce more effective teachers? [http://www.thecenterformichigan.net/guest-column-taking-the-charter-school-to-college/]

In a commentary, ominously titled “Taking the Charter School to College,” Watkins suggests that the monopoly of teacher preparation institutions is stifling the growth and innovation of teacher preparation. Clearly the colleges and universities that prepare teachers are not interested in reform or applying scientific research to their methods.  This is like saying that a “small market” sports team is not interested in winning.  A mediocre record in professional sports must be an indication of lack of effort or seriousness from the mediocre team.

Anyone who has followed baseball or basketball in Cleveland knows that even when the spirit is willing, the resources may be weak. The free market has not been kind to these franchises.  Perhaps the management can be blamed, but ultimately the available resources can dictate the quality of the team.

So throwing the market open to genius and experimentation does not guarantee a better product, in baseball, basketball or pre-service education. There is no invisible current of innovation waiting to burst the dams of certification law and collective bargaining.  It is not as simple as converting potential energy to kinetic energy. Would that it were, Tom Watkins.

The research on teacher preparation cited by Linda Darling-Hammond emphasizes the collaboration of schools of education with exemplary K-12 schools in creating an environment where excellent teaching is modeled with students from culturally disadvantaged backgrounds.

One thing that is clear from current studies of strong programs is that learning to practice in practice, with expert guidance, is essential to becoming a great teacher of students with a wide range of needs.  To improve preparation, states and accreditors should require a full year of clinical training for prospective teachers, ideally undertaken in professional development schools (PDS) that, like teaching hospitals, offer yearlong residencies under the guidance of expert teachers.  These PDS sites develop state-of-the-art practice and train novices in the classrooms of expert teachers while they are completing coursework that helps them teach diverse learners well (The Flat World and Education 316-17)

The professional development school is not a vision, but a declining institution of twenty years’ experimentation.  In most cases both the university and its partner school are hobbled by the expense of paying full-time teaching supervisors and for the released time or stipends of mentor teachers.  Schools have to find the space and time to sustain professional education alongside the education of K-12 students. It is a model that hospitals have successfully maintained for medical interns, but the public schools have too often been overwhelmed by time and expense of nurturing novice teachers.

Instead the dominant model of teacher preparation in the United States is a ten-week highly controlled practicum experience, followed by certification, followed by throwing the novice in the deep end of the pool.  New teachers inevitably acquire the classes the veteran teachers are trying to avoid, are saddled with the extra-curricular activities that older teachers have jettisoned from exhaustion, and receive the closest scrutiny, based on the expectation that they will fail. The expected tightening of requirements for evaluation and tenure will only exacerbate these conditions.

The current dogma that increasing the funding of education does not improve the quality of education has led us to the ill-considered conclusion that multiplying options for education will yield better quality by driving inferior services out of the marketplace.  We subscribe to indirect means of improving education (voodoo reform) instead of direct means (infusion of material and professional resources). Rather than considering that our tax dollars might be more wisely spent, we assume that tax dollars are never wisely spent.  Hence our renewed and desperate faith in the marketplace to improve what indiscriminate funding did not.

Professional development schools could transform teacher education, but they will need financing–federal or private, it doesn’t matter. But it will be a direct infusion of resources at the point of need.  Not a magical spell cast on the educational marketplace that releases the pent-up genius of innovation.  Voodoo had its chance in the first decade of the Twenty-first century. Let’s put our money where our best institutions are and put our faith in committed professionals.

Performance evaluation of teachers could count toward tenure, if we would take performance evaluation half as seriously as the National Football League does. As it stands, performance evaluation of teachers is a crude, untested mechanism languishing in the past, compared to the sophisticated multi-dimensional assessments of professional football teams.

In the months leading up  to the NFL Draft I was struck by the innumerable dimensions used to evaluate football talent– size, speed, quickness, strength, vertical leap, intelligence,  work ethic, “coach-ability”– these are only a sampling of criteria.  Draft prognosticators have learned to qualify the individual traits to make a complete assessment, such as “He’s only 4.7 in the 50-yard dash, but he’s quick off the ball.”   You could learn something about evaluation by listening to the media talent scouts who devote their entire year to preparing for three days in April, when the football draft ends the mind-numbing speculation.

Here are some insights I filed under “evaluation of complex skills,” based on the evaluation of football prospects.

1) No single trait outweighs the sum of the traits;

2) No statistic has more significance than the so-called “character” variables;

3) The context of the performance (weak opponent vs. a Major Bowl game) matters more than the performance itself;

4) The trajectory of a player’s development is more revealing than the performance of a single year.

Every professional football coach and director of player personnel takes these principles for granted. Why don’t they matter when we evaluate teachers?

Well, of course we don’t evaluate every teacher to the extent that we evaluate two hundred athletes with consummate physical and mental skills, but can’t we learn something about evaluation from the experts here?

Foremost, should the test scores of a teacher’s students sum up the talents of a teacher without considering:

• The context
• The trajectory
• The complementary data
• The “work ethic”?

Of course not, no more than the time of the fifty-yard dash overrules the many other parameters of football talent.

Second, should our coaching and intervention strategies be focused on a student’s success on a two-hour test once a year? Hmm, would a linebacker’s skill be multiplied if we got his 50-yard dash down to 4.5 from 4.7? That’s not what I hear from football coaches, whose jobs depend on successful evaluation of the whole player.

Third, should we just hire enough excellent teachers to manage 40-student classrooms, instead of hiring more teachers of heterogeneous ability to manage 25-student classrooms?  Maybe you could explain to Bill Belichek why two healthy players at each position is enough to keep his team competitive through a sixteen-game season. Depth turns out to be more essential than selectivity in hard-knocks football, and a deep, collaborative faculty also make a viable school.

Fourth, should we assign new teachers the most challenging classes and hold them to same standards as the veteran teachers with their college-prep schedule of classes?  Right, and we also expect the rookie quarterback to run the entire offensive playbook in his first game as a professional football player. And we break him in against the defending league champions, right? And we compare him to the retired previous  quarterback, who will probably get into the Hall of Fame.  Professional football coaches are far too shrewd to spoil young talent.

Sounds pretty stupid when we compare school policies to professional football, doesn’t it? Is this an unfair comparison or should we take a few pages out of the NFL playbook? Can we learn something from the most sophisticated machinery of talent evaluation in the civilized world? Can we consider the evaluation of the teachers of our children as important as the evaluation of our entertainment gods?

When the evaluation of teachers rises to a comparable level to the evaluation of professional athletes, public education will find status and peace. Then we can consider performance evaluation as integral to the tenure system in education.

There is an insidious whisper throughout the land, “There must be more money! There must be more money!” I heard the voice in my own house growing up in the 1960’s, I heard it during the 1970’s when inflation was devouring our hard-earned salaries, and during the 1990’s when the Japanese seemed to be sucking the profits out of the world market. The words reverberate today as populists equate the stagnation of the U.S. economy with the size of the federal government.

D. H. Lawrence had it right when he said the words “There must be more money” are never uttered out loud, but “The whisper was everywhere and therefore no one ever spoke it.” In his classic fable of modern materialism “The Rocking Horse Winner,” Lawrence described a British family that was once wealthy, but now had only property and servants. The mother despaired that they “had no luck.

Paul, the young son, was beset by the voices and devised a plan to silence them. He learned to pick winners in the horse races and found adults who would place bets for him. He rode his rocking horse furiously until the names of the winning horses came to him, as by revelation. The money he won was delivered to his mother anonymously, and, just as magically, silenced the voices.
When I read this story in high school, I saw myself as Paul, and I vowed I would grow up to found a family where those voices would be mute. I have been fortunate enough to keep the clamor at bay, but the whispering sometimes returns with the strangulation of the national economy. And today the national whispering is incessant and, oddly enough, it comes from those who already have money. Apparently having money is not the cure for wanting money.
Because the Lawrence fable is not about the rescuing of the family by the genius of a young boy. It is about how, when the money was spent, the whispering returned with even more urgency, driving Paul back to his rocking horse again and again, until he died from the exhaustion of “trying to find luck.” His uncle’s grief-stricken words end the story: “But poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking horse to find a winner.”
The struggling middle class of the 21st century is Paul. They are making more money and gaining less satisfaction from it than ever in our history. Much of the money pays for necessary medical care, much for tuition for the required college education, much for a retirement that recedes later and later in the life cycle. None of this is optional, but it maintains a quality of life that our grandparents did not enjoy. We have relative prosperity, but we are struggling to maintain it.
Paul’s mother represents those for whom medical care, college tuition, and retirement pensions are not a concern. Oh yes, we all share these concerns, but some have investments, not loans, to pay for them. Some don’t have mortgages and some pay for their cars and their children’s cars with cash. And still “There must be more money!”
The truth of “The Rocking Horse Winner” is that both the rich and the poor are beset by the voices. We all want more and work relentlessly to get it. There is no such thing as “enough.” The recent excesses of Wall Street prove that there are no limits to “enough.” We are always poor, always riding to “find luck.”
But there is no denying that some play the part of Paul and some play his mother, who inadvertently kills him. That is the tragedy of the story. The mother loved her son, and never wished him harm, but she was driven by the voices.
What constitutes “enough”? It can never be the same for every family. Even $250,000 may not be a fair dividing line between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” But it is true that some of us are on the rocking horse and some are driving the rest of us to oblivion by our relentless pursuit of “luck.” The sly scape-goating of the spending of the federal government can not obscure the truth that some are benefiting from the subsistence living of others.

By the world’s standards, the vast majority of Americans are not poor or struggling to survive, but many are on the rocking horse of debt and diminished dreams.  They work hard or pursue honest labor without gratification. Meanwhile their labor supports the industries, which enrich those who administer them.

Programs that benefit the “rocking horse winners” of society should not be cut back in the name of “fiscal responsibility.” “Fiscal responsibility” is code for “Holding onto our wealth.”  Those who benefit disproportionately by the free market, such as oil producers and drug manufacturers, insist they are entitled to their winnings.  Whereas those on the rocking horse are not “entitled,” they are a drain on our federal budget.

Inadvertently or not Paul’s mother is driving Paul to his death. So it is for those who live on cash against those who live on loans.  We must shut down the frantic demand, “There must be more money,” and let the working and unemployed poor get off the rocking horse.