Month: September 2010

by

Recalling Dr. Szach

It’s been seventeen years since I taught at Brockton High School, the mega-school applauded on the front page of the New York Times today (September 28), but I remember something about Sue Szachowicz not mentioned in the article. She loved the city of Brockton. She was born there, educated there, took her first and only teaching job there, and never stopped thinking about how to make the high school better. In my experience she never saw the high school as a project, but as a part of herself that needed prompting now and then.  To me, this is what set her apart as a school administrator.

The article remarks that she fired very few teachers, but adopted the slogan, ” Let me help you,” when teachers complained that teaching reading and writing was more than their time or expertise could bear. It mentions that she followed the teachers’ contract to the letter, and she courted the respect of the union. And it mentions how she restored pride to the school by celebrating its achievements with banners and encouragement.  The teachers would often start sentences with “When you go to college . . .”

This is the kind of motivation we expect from parents, not “turnaround” specialists.  And that is what the present Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, could learn from Sue Szachowicz. School reform is not an operation performed on a dying patient, it is a shared commitment of a community working together. And that is probably the most amazing achievement of Brockton High School. This enormous comprehensive high school, conceived in the archaic vision of the 1960’s, took shape as a community and committed itself to teaching reading and writing across the curriculum. I never saw it coming.

And yet I recall Sue Szachowicz, her energy, her pride in the community and even in the athletic teams she had to rein in. She participated in everything Brockton,  the history, the immigrant cultures, the musicals, the exhibitions. She was never an outsider, a consultant with a two-year or a three-year plan.  She lived for the city and the Boxers, Brockton High School.

That’s a rather superficial view of school reform, because, of course she was a good administrator and all that entails. Yet there are hundreds of successful school administrators who don’t know how to turn around a school.  They are rotated around the school district to make sure they don’t become too friendly with the faculty, so they keep their cutting edge.  They need distance from the faculty they lead in order to prod them to be better.

Sue Szachowicz proves the opposite can be true.  Sue was an exemplary teacher and learner. She never asked more of her students than she asked of herself.  You can expect more of your friends and your family, if only because you want the best for them. You can work beside them and not over them. You can teach for long-term gains, not for the dramatic short-term.

It’s a rather sentimental reflection on an administrator I haven’t known for seventeen years, but there’s nothing in this article suggesting Sue has fundamentally changed. And there’s nothing in this article that credits her devotion, her compassion, her commitment to a community that raised her to teach.  So I thought it should be said. . . .

by

Stopwatch on Educational Reform

The defeat of Adrian Fenty in the mayoral primary in Washington, D.C. has inspired speculation that his school superintendent, Michell Rhee, will be the next victim of the revolving door of politics. Probably many of Washington’s teachers will welcome this change.

But the consequences of changing superintendents are not all good. The truth is that the work of a superintendent should not be summatively evaluated in less than five years. Educational reform does not conform to the election cycle, and that is why urban superintendents are either shy or reckless about change. Their life cycle is about half the cycle of reform.

Superintendent Rhee proclaimed that she could not let a day pass where a child could be victim of poor teaching, and thus she took the cleaver approach to school reform now favored by our Secretary of Education.  As much as I would like to honor her motives, I believe superintendents are also motivated by the stopwatch that regulates their tenure in their position.  The superintendent knew she had to make a considerable difference in 2-3 years or her job was on the line.

Whether I approve of Rhee’s  approach to school reform or not, I would, on principle accept her right to serve and be evaluated over five years. Given more time, a superintendent could think about how to support and instruct teachers who seemed unprepared for the students they were teaching. Rhee could have invested more money and time in professional development which brings changes slowly but surely. Instead of a small and brief spike in test scores, she might see gradual, but consistent improvement. At the end of five years, she could point to steady improvement, but also the retention of teachers committed to the schools that nurtured them.

I don’t know enough about the climate for teaching Washington, D.C. to say this definitively, but I would guess the district would be better off keeping the superintendent under a new mayor than dismissing this one and starting from scratch. Just as a class might fare better with the same, struggling, but improving teacher over a year’s time, the public schools in Washington might fare better with a mayor and superintendent trying to find  middle ground for school reform and sustaining a system that could work, given the time.

Education is not product development and marketing. It is not about appointing leaders based on short-term promises. Education is about developing successful and critical communities, where the students, teachers, parents and administrators are respectful and want to see each other succeed. The product development cycle and the election cycle are not good analogies to this process.  We can not fire or discontinue our students or parents. We have to work with them.

Most every school superintendent knows this, and he or she should be given the necessary lease to enact reform on this principle.  If we want to throw the politicians out of office, that’s our prerogative, but let’s show some patience with the teachers and leaders who truly care about our students.

by

School Reform: the Popular Narrative

Education reform has made a lot good copy this year, but the narrative continues to be driven by politicians with the highest visibility and philanthropists with the largest bank accounts.  Seldom has the media so willingly yielded its independent voice and become no more than an amplifier for powerful and prosperous voices.

Time Magazine’s sensational spread on “What Makes a School Great” (September 20, 2010) pumps up the current narrative of  eliminating bad teachers through analysis of student test scores and bringing the teachers’ unions to their collective knees.

The popular narrative goes like this: Student test performances are the best evidence we have of bad teaching. Teachers and teacher unions should cooperate in the firing of teachers whose students are not performing well on these tests.  Teachers who are willing to work hard make the difference in student performance. Energetic, young teachers should be hired without the time-consuming process of certification.

There’s commonsense in this narrative, but it lacks the perspective of professional educators, those who have witnessed multiple cycles of reform.  Because politicians live and die on the election cycle, reform usually ebbs and flows like the tides of the elected and the rejected. Bureaucrats and entrepreneurs lack the patience that serious educational reform requires.

For example, alternative certification proposed under No Child Left Behind was supposed to by-pass the prolonged course of certification that supplied the schools with mediocre teachers.  In the most blighted urban settings, programs such as Teach for America brought young, energetic teachers into charter schools and under-served public schools.  Studies in 2005-06 in New York and Houston showed the students of TFA trachers did not compare favorably with the students of teachers who had taken a full-preparation for teaching.   In a follow-up to this study, the alternatively certified teachers registered significant gains in their students’ scores in mathematics after two years of teaching and completed certification.  However, 80% of the Teach for America recruits had left teaching by year four. Only 30% of the traditionally prepared teachers had left teaching in the fourth year.

This is an excellent example of the short-term gains of so-called reform that lack sustainability.  The TFA teachers were leaving teaching at the time many of them were hitting their stride as teachers. The schools they had revived were left with the predicament of hiring novice teachers again after three years. As Linda Darling-Hammond has observed, this is a severe drain on the financial and human resources of these schools.

To consider a philanthropic example:  beginning in 2000 the Gates Foundation sponsored restructuring for smaller high schools.  Although these projects had mixed results, change brought disharmony in many of these high schools and the test data in Denver, Chicago and New York did not definitively show that the reforms were working.  Rather than trying to improve the model or respond to teacher concerns, the Foundation reallocated its funds toward advocacy in 2005, according Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Think-tanks such as Achieve, the Council of Chief State School Officers and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute received over $57 million from the Foundation in 2005.

The smaller high school idea had great merit, but it would take teacher-buy-in and a willingness to adapt the model for individual contexts to make such radical reform work. Philanthropic foundations are more inclined to impose their will on their beneficiaries and demand a quick pay-off for their investment. School reform does not move at that pace.

The mass media has not bothered to look closely at these examples of reform or given voice to the reformers who critique the validity of the standardized tests used to gauge student and teacher progress.  Credit should go to John Church for his article “How to Recruit Better Teachers” in the current Time Magazine spread, a notable exception to the superficial gaze. Church actually bothered to take a test that was designed to identify promising teachers. “The test has been given to tens of thousands of hopefuls,” noted Church. ” But when I took it recently, I found some questions so vague that no correct answer seemed possible.”

A teacher who has students working in cooperative teams believes that:

A. a good classroom must have some noise

B. students can learn from each other

C. Students must learn to work independently

“Surely all three are true. But Haberman told me that B is the right answer because it is the one given most often by proven teachers. The logic seemed a little circular to me, and the test made me question the whole concept of alternative hiring.” (50)

Kudos to Mr. Church for actually examining a test, instead of placing implicit faith in its authority. Isn’t that what journalists are supposed to do?

I have relied on Time Magazine for its insight into international politics and its features on cultural heroes, but I am dismayed by its half-hearted attempt at analysis of school reform.  There’s a point at which journalism becomes an echo-chamber for the powers that be, and that point has been reached on the topic of education.  The media has become complicit in the popular narrative, and by recycling it for mass consumption, given credence to soundbites and half-truths.