charter schools

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Short-Timers

When I taught high school, I was allowed into a Friday afternoon club called “the short-timers,” so named because these men (sic) who frequented local taverns together at the end of the work week, were within 2-3 years of retirement.  I was an honorary member, since I had no more than eight years of teaching behind me, while these gentlemen had taught at least 25 years apiece.  They were slightly jaded, but every one of them cared about the students they taught, even in a brusque way.

I continued my high school teaching career for a total of twenty years, during which I earned my Ph.D. and went on to teach teachers at a public university.  Twenty years later I am still learning to teach by teaching teachers. It is a profession that rewards a lifetime of practice and study.

I am disturbed by the article in the New York Times (Tuesday, August 28) “At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice” by Mokoto Rich, because it implies that the new trajectory for a teaching career is 5-7 years. From my experience that upper limit represents the flowering of a teacher’s skills, so such “short-timers” would  be leaving the profession at the height of their development. To say, as KIPP director Wendy Kopp  claims, that “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years ” is to severely limit what it means to teach.  In 1-2 years you can learn about as much as an accomplished substitute teacher: how to engage students’ attention, how to manage discipline, how to execute a lesson plan, how to assess a unit, and how to talk to parents.  This is not to underestimate what an experienced substitute teacher can become, should he or she remain for the long haul, but KIPP and Teach for America are only interested in the short haul.

If you think teaching amounts to mastering a few routines, you do not  understand the depth of teaching.  Only after the first two years  of teaching do you really learn how one student differs from another in needs and capability, how to bring disengaged students back into the class, how to deal with chronically absent students, how to uncover hidden strengths, how to nurture independence and group inter-dependence, how and what to re-teach, how to challenge your own stereotypes and so on.  Those who claim to have mastered these skills in two years are deluding themselves about the complexity teaching.

Instilling the “habits of mind”  is another late-developing skill.  Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” strategies in their pre-service classes, there is only so much about these habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them.  To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is usually a late-developing awareness for both teachers and students.  To be honest, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English.  I knew the importance of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize how much they enabled or disabled students until then. I was admittedly a late-bloomer in teaching.

When teaching is compacted into the mechanics of selling a prefabricated curriculum and grading the products, it may be mastered in 1-2 years, but this is not what we once considered a “master teacher.”  Masterful teaching is about building trust and grading on successive approximation.  It is about dealing with resistance of all kinds, in students, in colleagues, in administrators.  It is about negotiating with principals and parents about what may be taught in your class and who may be given an alternative book to read or assigned a writing consultant to increase feedback.  It is about relationships, fragile and durable.  You can teach for thirty years and not understand it all.

We are making a virtue of necessity by claiming that teaching is a technical profession and teachers are easily replaced.  Today teachers are burning out early from the unwieldy size of classes, from the pressure to raise test scores, from micro-managed, scripted and lockstep curricula, from the reduction of services to students with learning, language and behavioral constraints.  Because teachers are treated like replaceable parts, they feel utterly dispensable.  They lose hope during the second and third years, just when they should be developing more confidence, so they pass through a revolving door among disillusioned novices.

Will we ever again see “short-timers” like my erstwhile colleagues, who made a career of nurturing the full diversity of students? Teachers who could reflectively read a new class through the eyes of experience? Teachers who saw behind the bluster or feigned helplessness to the latent ability? Teachers who recognized the difference between arrogance and aptitude?  Teachers like my veteran colleagues who had faced up to a succession of challenging students their whole lives?

No, the vintage teacher is becoming the freeze-dried technician.  The whole profession is now regarded as an entry-level experience for young intellectuals with a higher calling, either in school administration or a more “respectable” career.  The recognition of partial learning and the flexibility of alternative strategies are being lost to one-size-fits-all linear instruction.  What can be learned in the latter half of a decade of teaching is being lost to the ages.

In the future when we refer to the “short-timers,”  we will know the depth, as well as the length, of their careers.

 

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Not Waiting For Superman (II)

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 twenty days listening to, and delighting in,  twelve 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 3,000 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.

 

They labored over their teaching and writing portfolios, which they have shared with each other, as they have shared all the products of their labor. And they appreciated each others’ work and worth and celebrated 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, eleven 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 3,000 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

 

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Voodoo Educational Reform

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.

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Schooling on the Ground

“Keep the school open with existing teachers and principal and provide comprehensive outside support.” This is what 54% of poll respondents said when asked how to address a poorly performing local school this past June. In a poll conducted by Phi Delta Kappan and Gallup,  one thousand Americans responded to this question as they have in the past: preserve the school and reform it.

Paradoxically U.S. citizens always defend their local schools in polling, and at the same time object to national trends and policies in public education.  This is the perennial sky view vs. ground view of public schools. Schools viewed as test scores and dropout rates are called dysfunctional and permissive. Schools viewed as diverse and overcrowded communities are called under-funded and inclusive.

The prevailing view comes from Washington, where Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has sanctioned the sacking of dysfunctional schools and the re-invention of education from the ground up by charter schools and private ventures.  While extreme cases call for extreme measures, the reinvention of schooling is not as simple as the Secretary imagines it to be.

Parents and local stakeholders in the public schools understand this. They know that principals and teachers develop to meet the needs of their communities.  A principal has to learn how to get parents into the building, how get them involved in their children’s education, how to balance academic subjects with athletics. A teacher has to understand the demands on the students, the language barriers, the baby-sitting demands, the neighborhood conflicts that interfere with schooling. None of this can be taught in schools of education. They are adaptations that good teachers make to serve their schools.

When a school is demolished, much of this lore dies with it.  You can build a new school around excellent faculty, but they will have to adapt to their community in the same way that the previous faculty did.  Perhaps they will even be better teachers than their predecessors in three or four or five years, if they stay that long. But if they are recruited by Teach for America or KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) they probably will not stay that long. They will be exhausted by the rigors of school-building and leave after their obligated service. The sky-view reformers should think twice before closing a school.

This is the season when thousands of schools decide how to reinvigorate their programs, their faculty, their curriculum, their disciplinary codes.  They have their work cut out for them. But they should remember that the majority of the parents and stakeholders in their community are pulling for them. They appreciate school reform from the ground view and want it to succeed.  They know that the quality of life in school buildings matters more than the test scores headlined in the media.  They know that schools offer a sanctuary for kids who otherwise learn in the streets.

Here’s to those who choose to transform, rather than demolish, schools in need.