January 31, 2007

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Don’t Blame Me

Filed under: Education Funding NYC DOE by JColletti @ 10:08 pm

The British historian Antony Beevor, in his history of the Spanish Civil War, The Battle for Spain, 1936-1939, writes about the Communist Popular Front’s attribution of blame for its failure in a fight against the Falangist forces of Francisco Franco:

“The report of the political department of the People’s Army listed numerous causes: the strength of the enemy air force, its combined effect with artillery, the reduced republican strength, their inferiority in weapons, the decline in morale and so on. Nothing was said about the ineptitude of the plan or the incompetence of commanders.”

The need to blame is certainly not the property of any one political, occupational, ethnic or racial group; as humans we just may be genetically wired to attribute blame everywhere except where it belongs or it just may be easier that way. So too, Chancellor Joel Klein, in his recent “Bold, Common-Sense Plan to Create Great Schools for all Children” rolled out a series of usual suspects to blame for low graduation rates, flat test scores and less than praiseworthy data about student achievement in general. But he didn’t mention one person.

(Note: In all fairness, he blamed no one for unsafe schools, hazardous buildings, parent and teacher dissatisfaction with his administration, a disturbing growth in martinet style leadership, large class size, lack of services for students with special needs, the cuts to and elimination of art, music, physical education, foreign language and career and tech programs, etc. etc. etc.)

But who and what are to blame?

There’s the various cultures: The culture of excuses, the culture of compliance (not as in compliance with federal, state and city regulations and mandates, compliance as in “following one-size-fits-all directions from administrators–not his administrators or his one-size-fits-all directions–the other ones) the culture of top-down bureaucracy. (See previous parenthetical comment.)

Then there’s the status quo crowd, the incrementalists (great name for a rock band) the special interests, defenders of the old ways. (Weren’t they in a Star Trek episode?) I wonder who he can mean. Oh, he does get specific about where to place blame. Here are some of the culprits.

Tenure. Enough has been written here and elsewhere about tenure, what it is and what it isn’t. Knowing how to pick his battles so there will be someone else to blame when he looses, Klein focuses on the probationary teachers, many of whom he recruited through programs such as Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows with glitzy ads on the Internet, in the subway and at bus stops. He made promises to them and praised them to the heavens and then left them to find their own positions, often in some of the most challenging or newest schools where mentoring and other forms of support, even if from an experienced teacher-colleague are non-existent. (Many of our most dedicated, experienced and knowledgeable teachers have left rather than deal with the daily insult of “following one-size-fits all directions from administrators, many of whom never spent a day teaching). Now he blames them for the shortcomings of his administration because despite overwhelming odds, those who make it to their third year demonstrate they have what it takes, according to the principals who observe and evaluate them.That can’t be right. But there’s the same disdain for the principals who rate those probationary teachers. He doesn’t trust their judgment either, so he’s preparing to send out teams of retired principals and administrators (so much for a smaller bureaucracy) to second guess the professional judgment of his “empowered principals.” (By the way, does anyone know where that African-American male with the dreads looking determined in Yankee Stadium teaches these days? The ad is about three years old–is he getting tenure in June?)

Tenure Then after three years of formal and informal observations, mentoring, real professional development, support and assistance, (sometimes but don’t bet on it) a degree or two and under-the-belt and under-the-collar day-to-day learning about how to teach in any number of situations (snow flakes outside a window can unsettle any class, K-12) the teacher and millions like him, slips through the cracks and gets a lifetime job guarantee. But that canard has been spoken to on this blog and elsewhere. But it still sounds good if one doesn’t dig too deeply or speak to people who know something about our schools. It sounds as good a place to place blame as

The lack of a fair funding formula. It’s a fair funding formula,as in let’s scatter the scraps fairly, not adequate funding. Much has been written here about the fair funding formula although you may have seen it described as weighted student funding. In true Orwellian fashion the ever diminishing numbers of Tweed bureaucrats have changed it to “fair student funding.” Well there’s little fair about it. And finally,

The lack of accountability. You certainly can’t blame Joel Klein for that, can you? He’s trying to hold someone or something accountable.

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“But don’t ask me - I’m just a teacher”

Filed under: NYC DOE by Edwize Admin @ 9:42 pm

How many of you who are in the classroom or working in other positions in schools have been consulted about the future re-restructuring of our school system? How many of you have been asked about what you need to improve the academic achievement of your students? Who’s asking parents about their aspirations for the educational future of their children? I think Randi Weingarten’s letter that appeared (slightly edited) in the Daily News on Jan. 31, speaks for all of us who have been omitted from the process:
(Un-edited version sent to Daily News)

“It’s no surprise the Daily News and the Department of Education
have the same basic philosophy: Don’t ask - or listen to - teachers.

“If anyone bothered to listen to teachers, they would say they
need smaller classes, increased resources, more respect and greater
professional latitude. If anyone bothered to listen, teachers also would
cite research showing that smaller classes yield higher student achievement - from pre-K through high school.

“And it’s not just teachers. If anyone bothered to listen to
parents, they would name class size their top issue. In Math A for example,
classes in New York City run about 32; in the rest of the state it’s around
21. Ask any parent which class they’d want for their child. Ask any parent
who opts for a charter school their top reason for doing so: They will tell
you it’s smaller classes.

“But don’t ask me - I’m just a teacher.”

Randi Weingarten,
President, United Federation of Teachers–

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Tenure Travails

Filed under: NYC DOE by Leo Casey @ 7:10 pm

One of the issues raised by Chancellor Klein in his permanent structural revolution was the question of tenure. Says Klein, in his speech to the business Partnership for New York City:

[W]e intend to make tenure a well-deserved honor, not a routine right. Today tenure is nearly automatic. About 99% of teachers receive it after three years as a matter of course. Indeed, it is the “default mode.” If no action is taken, a probationary teacher is awarded tenure automatically. We want as many teachers as possible to become tenured, but because that status makes it very difficult to remove a teacher for poor performance, we want to make sure that teachers earn it with good teaching not just the passage of time. Accordingly, principals will receive a new set of supports and tools to ensure that this decision is made in a rigorous, thoughtful, and fact-based manner. We look forward to collaborating with the UFT in this effort.

Because an affirmative decision on tenure affects not only an individual school but the entire system, we will also insist that a principal’s recommendation be reviewed by appropriate personnel outside the school, notably the Community Superintendent. Indeed, so critical is the tenure decision that Mayor Bloomberg will meet annually with each group of newly-tenured teachers to celebrate their accomplishment.

The UFT agrees that teacher tenure should be a “well deserved honor,” and looks forward to the Mayor’s celebration of this accomplishment.

To attain this end, an intellectually honest discussion of the tenure process is necessary. To suggest that 99% of teachers receive tenure, as a matter of course, is extraordinarily misleading. In fact, a little less than two-thirds of all new teachers receive tenure.

How could these numbers be so different? The tenure process is analogous to the awarding of a doctorate. In a properly functioning graduate school, almost all candidates who make it to the final stage, the defense of the disseration, are awarded the degree. Since the degree requires a substantial investment of time and work, the university has a responsibility to counsel out of the program candidates who are clearly incapable of making the grade. Rather than letting a person dedicate a number of years of their lives to a fruitless pursuit, a good graduate program and a conscientious graduate advisor will encourage only those candidates with the capacity to successfully conclude the process. Other candidates drop out of their own volition, as the process convinces them that this is not the career for them. To examine that awarding of degrees only at its final stage, the defense of the dissertation, would give a misleading portrait of an extensive winnowing process which precedes that conclusion.

In the case of the tenure process in K through 12 schools, the responsibility of the supervisor is even greater, since the education of young people, as well as the time and work investment of the candidate, is at stake. A conscientious supervisor works with every novice teacher, making sure that he or she receives the mentoring and the professional development which will allow him or her to master the fundamental skills of the craft. A diligent, caring supervisor does not wait until the conclusion of the three year probationary period to counsel out of the profession or terminate the employment of a novice teacher who, after being provided all of the appropriate supports, is still clearly not going to be successful in the classroom. Indeed, when it is clear that a new teacher will not succeed, it is in the interest of both the teacher and the students to make an earlier decision. Sometimes new teachers themselves recognize that teaching is not their calling, and they make the decision to leave on their own. And sometimes, unfortunately, new teachers who could become great teachers leave out of frustration with a system that fails to provide them with the supports they need.

In New York City, approximately two out of every three new teachers achieve tenure. By the end of the fifth year of teaching, a significant number of the teachers who have achieved tenure leave New York City public schools, as only one in every two new teachers remain. The drop out rate is even greater in the system’s flagship recuitment program, the Teaching Fellows. The critical problem that we face in New York is not unqualified teachers achieving tenure, but the failure to retain qualified, accomplished teachers. With half of New York City public school teachers having five years or less of teaching experience, the retention crisis is paramount.

Teacher unions have no interest in unqualified teachers achieving tenure. Rather, our concern is that new teachers receive all of the supports, especially quality mentoring, necessary to achieve success and tenure, and that the process of awarding tenure be a fair and rigorous professional process.

It is in this latter regard that we oppose the substitution of students’ standardized test scores for the professional judgment of an experienced educator supervisor as a standard for awarding tenure. The problem here is not simply that a great many factors go into determining a student’s performance on any standardized test, and that teachers have control only of a relatively limited portion of those inputs. Just as disturbing is the extraordinary disincentive such a standard would create for teachers to take on the most academically needy students and to serve in the lowest academically performing schools, for clearly one would be far more likely to achieve tenure, deserved or not, if one taught students and taught in schools which had consistently high test scores. Given that the highest statistical correlation is between the socio-economic class of students and scores on standardized tests, with students from wealthier backgrounds scoring higher, such a policy would be driving public education in exactly the wrong direction. Instead, we should be figuring out professional and financial incentives to recruit experienced, accomplished teachers to teach the most needy students and to serve in the most needy schools.

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Spitzer’s Billions and the City Schools

Filed under: Class Size Education Funding by Maisie @ 6:08 pm

Wow! Five point four billion clams: We quote:

(from Spitzer’s Education Budget)
“Another $3.2 billion in annual funding for New York City when fully phased in over the next four years. When combined with $2.2 billion in increased annual spending on education by New York City in four years (as reflected in the City’s four-year financial plan), the total amount of increased spending on New York City schools in four years will be $5.4 billion.”

Real money. Far more than CFE required and far more than anyone would have believed possible just a couple of years ago.

But it’s still very abstract. Even aside from the question of whether the Legislature will pass this budget, there is long experience to tell us that billions of dollars can and actually do disappear in the labyrinth of DOE bureaucracy. Until real people do the work of turning the billions into concrete programs, services and improvements that you can see and touch and that make an absolute measureable difference in the lives of students and schools, even five billion dollars is abstract.

What’s good about the Spitzer budget is a renewed emphasis on resources. For years we’ve heard “accountability,” spoken as a threat. Money (and very little of it) was only going to go to people who were “accountable,” meaning that they got the test scores up.

In this budget, the fresh air comes in the form of a large increase in funding for universal pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten, for increased special ed funding and incentives for middle school students to pursue math and science. His accountability measures are expressed as a contract between the state and local districts in which districts are urged to spend the increased funds on things that work, like class size reduction, increased student “time-on-task,” teacher quality, middle and high school restructuring and full-day pre-K.

Even the test score stuff has been humanized, with a commitment from the governor that by 2010 the Regents will have created an accountability system based on measurement of student growth instead of absolute scores alone.

But this fresh air could quickly start to smell funny when it arrives in New York City. The governor’s budget, probably wisely, doesn’t prescribe exactly how districts spend their state education money. BUT here in NYC we know the mayor and chancellor have only the most cursory interest in class size reduction. Their views on improving teacher quality are best revealed in two new initiatives: evaluating teachers for tenure based on their students’ test scores, and a new “fair” funding formula calculated to drive the most experienced teachers out of the system. Their middle schools and high schools restructuring plan is only about structure–changing grade configurations and opening ridiculous numbers of new schools. Nothing on teaching and learning.

It is evident from the Chancellor’s Next Big Thing, the initiative he calls “Fair Student Funding,” that he is focused on driving down labor costs in the schools. He says he’s redistributing teaching talent so poor schools get more of it and rich schools less, but essentially he’s making it too costly for all principals to hire or retain veteran teachers. [More about this in a future post]. It appears that much of the state funding increase that is coming to the city will go to muffle the impact of this teacher redistribution incentive for the next couple of years by increasing funding for all schools. Within a year, though, stable, high-functioning schools will start losing senior teachers and replacing them with cheaper ones. And we’re just one recession away from seeing that happen in all our schools.

Against all modern principles of good budgeting, one wishes the governor would tell Klein exactly how to spend the new money: class size reduction in every grade, hard-to-staff school incentives, generous resources at the school level, professional development and mentoring in collaborative teams that have time to meet and work together during the school day. Well, one wishes for many things…

It is a sad day for the city, this amazing state budget announcement. Because the educators who could make that money really work for kids, and help the schools grow and change, have long since been driven underground, while the ascendent lawyers and consultants at Tweed are devoting themselves to things like the fabulously successful new bus schedule, which will save us $12 million. 12 million snails. Chump change. What it comes down to is that the city schools are going to get $5.4 billion and it could be substantially misspent.

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What’s Poppin’?

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by MsB @ 5:40 pm

I never knew that I could be “poppin’” and “wallin’” all at the same time. I’ve had to learn many new vocabulary words just so I would be able to communicate with my Junior English class. If it’s one thing my juniors have taught me, it is that the world is against teenagers. At the risk of sounding cliché, this class changed my life.

The first day with them, I treated them like every other class. We were going to read The Great Gatsby and have a great time analyzing symbols and the American Dream. However, by the third day into the book, my class went from a size 34 to a size 14! Somewhere in between East and West Egg, I had lost them.

So I did some research. Turns out these kids should have been seniors a year ago. They hadn’t passed the Regents, despite this being the second, third or forth time taking this class. No wonder why the lives of these upper-class white folk didn’t relate to them at all. I knew that I had to take drastic action just to get them to start coming back to class.

I knew they wouldn’t pass the Regents if they didn’t improve their writing. They needed to write everyday. Thanks to the wonderment of Teacher’s Choice, I chose to buy brand-new journals for this class. Once I gave them out, they were shocked that someone had bought them something. They immediately gave me an inch of respect. Now, if only I could take that inch and turn it into a mile.

They began writing, taking pride in their brand-new books. At first, the entries were superficial. They would write about their day at school or about what they watched on TV last night. However, as they grew more comfortable, so did their writing. Soon, the class size was back up to 30. The low-stakes writing everyday had improved their ability to write formal essays. I didn’t believe it. I had won.

We were reading books they had picked and talking about issues that related to them: race, class, sexism, and ageism. I learned so much about their lives. These kids have seen death, murder and injustice. We talked a lot about police brutality, and they began to question if people who have authority tend to abuse their power. I decided the next step would be to bring in a visitor. I thought police officers could shed some light on the questions my students had and talk about quotas and racial profiling. They had questions that I just couldn’t answer — questions about gun laws and weapons training. Still, my students were very apprehensive. Most had bad experiences with these neighborhood cops. Many were absent the day that the officers came, showing me that they still weren’t ready to change. But aside from all of the donut jokes, I thought the kids appreciated the honesty of these cops and got to see them as people, too.

The struggle to get my students in the building and to class and to write is never ending. It will be worth it when they leave school having a better understanding of the world around them. I certainly have a better understanding of the lives of teenagers today growing up in South Brooklyn, but man, this class is wack.

January 30, 2007

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Welcome to Kindergarten

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by No-sleep-till-Brooklyn @ 5:43 pm

The response I received after sharing my news of relocating to New York from Michigan was much the same across the board. “Wow, teaching in New York . . . why?” With expressions muddled with confusion and wonder, my friends and family listened as I explained my motivation for moving to Brooklyn to teach kindergarten. “I need to make a difference – I want to care for children who aren’t receiving much love from home.” That was a lot to ask for, but I had no trouble finding it.

Entering my first year of teaching, I knew that facing challenges and overcoming obstacles were part of the job description. Fitting in with the other teachers and finding a way to overcome my fear of four- and five-year-olds were a few concerns keeping me awake at night. Turns out, I was worried about all the wrong things.

As with any emergency, such as a sinking ship or a house on fire, one reacts with the split second response, “Bail! Bail! Bail! Must get out!” Let’s just say I was in emergency-mode for the entire month of September — 19 days of agony — the details of which are too gruesome to relate here. I came to New York with a bit of teaching experience, but unfortunately my middle-class, well-to-do student body with an organized and happy PTA did not prepare me for what I faced on the first day of school.

I spent my first few months thinking I was doing everything wrong. Why are my children dancing down the hallways? Why are my children leaping over chairs? Why are my children using their middle finger to offend?

I was quick to realize that I had not been prepared to interact with, understand or teach children from Brooklyn. “Hey there little guy, wouldn’t you rather write your name on the paper instead of tearing it to shreds?” Kept shredding. “Do you really think rolling across my floor knocking over chairs is the best idea?” Still rolling. “Tell me what I can do to help you calm down.” Not even a glance.

The truth is, students always smell new blood — they certainly picked me out right away. I was trampled, I was trodden and they saw right through my inconsistent behavior management plan (plan? what plan?) and my structured activities. “You want structure, you want control?” they seemed to mock. “Then come and get it.” These children of lower economic status from unstable home lives quickly inspired me, or rather, forced me to teach differently then I ever could have anticipated.

Coming from Michigan, I had stored up teaching methods and techniques from teachers with whom I had observed and taught. Giving students choices, asking instead of demanding, using a calm and polite voice . . . no no no. That may have worked in Michigan but certainly not in Brooklyn. The first hour of my first day of class promptly showed me that I had no idea what I was up against. My students were whizzing around the room, stealing drinks of water and trips to the bathroom without my permission.

“Five-year-olds,” my friends laughed. “Really, how bad can they be?” They had no idea. I was trying to create and enforce routines and make sure the children knew limits, but I struggled to know how to make them believe me and respect what I had to say. They were simply impossible.

I talked with other teachers (more like pleaded), I observed, and I was quite like a sponge, soaking up each new technique I came across so I could squeeze it out on my class. I learned very quickly to be firm in my word. In fact, I picked up a completely new tone of voice (stern, quite scary). I learned how to give tough love. “Glue your bottom to that chair and start writing.” “You can put those tears away; they’re not impressing anyone today.” What sounded like verbal abuse to me was what finally got my students’ attention.

The children I taught were not accustomed to polite voices, and they were not accustomed to the choices I was so graciously trying to offer them. With a change in tolerance, I was finally able to get through a lesson without a fight, a temper tantrum or some child running laps around my room, hurdling up and over chairs. I was in control, but not commando. I felt horrible in the beginning, but soon realized that my children were more responsive than ever, learning without the distraction of students steamrolling over tables or throwing chairs across the room. Being firm was key.

All of this is not to say that I have these students figured out. My five-year-olds still swear, punch, snatch, give cold stares and refuse to comply, but now I know where they’re coming from. What they have already witnessed is more than I could have imagined at their age and the best thing for me to do is to continue to learn about them in order to help me teach them. Had I walked into my job knowing that I was in for quite a surprise, I could have saved myself a lot of self blame and suffering, but I believe I have become a stronger person because of that. Either that or I’m still making up excuses to justify the nightmare that was my first few months of teaching.

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A Surreal Altercation

Filed under: Labor by Leo Casey @ 10:14 am

Eric Alterman has published a surreal response to this post. He writes that he was a target of “character assassination” when we noted that he had adopted a “lefter than thou” attitude toward the electoral strategy of teacher unions, with specific reference to the UFT’s practice of endorsing any incumbent, regardless of party, when they had supported positions on education, labor and human rights issues important to us. His objections to teacher unions, he now says, “has nothing whatever to do with political policies.” Rather, he says, it rests with “the union’s frequent inflexibility and resistance toward what looks to my admittedly non-expert eyes to be common-sense reforms.” The record tells a different story.

We have been able to find one prior published comment of Alterman that touches on criticisms of teacher unions in over nearly a decade of voluminous published writing. These results follow a number of different Google searches, as well as an examination of Alterman’s Nation columns, the portions of his Altercation blog still published on the Internet [here and here], and his posts on the Huffington blog. This blog post condemned the New York Times, SEIU 1199 and the “teachers’ union” for endorsing the incumbent Republican Governor, George Pataki, in his 2002 re-election campaign. [Personal disclosure: Alterman and I had an exchange in the comments section of his blog on the issue of the UFT's endorsement of Pataki.]

This blog post in which Alterman criticizes teacher unions, as well as the exchange between Alterman and myself, are no longer available at the original MSNBC.COM site, as they sent Alterman and his blog packing last fall. However, there still are contemporaneous references to the post available on the Internet, at least one of which quotes a passage which specifically singles out the “teachers’ union” for criticism. There are many more references in Alterman’s published writings to the New York Times endorsement of Pataki, often citing Pataki’s failure to resolve the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. At one point, Alterman himself describes the Pataki endorsement as “kind of an obsession of mine.”

[As I noted in the comments section of the original post here at Edwize, the UFT endorsed Pataki in the 2002 campaign, after supporting his opponents in previous races, because he had personally intervened to obtain state funds to increase teacher salaries by 16% in the 2000 contract -- the start of a process which concluded, in the most recent contract, by closing the gap between the salaries of suburban and city teachers. Achieving that benchmark was important not only for city teachers, but also for city schools and city students, because it eliminated a major cause of the hemorrhaging of experienced and accomplished teachers from New York City. In order to retain political credibility with elected officials of all political hues, the UFT endorses an incumbent who supports our issues in such a major way.]

Among the few times Alterman discusses unionism in print, there are a number of instances where he criticized other unions, such as when he objected to a Nation article that criticized Yale University faculty who were seeking to undermine the organizing of GESO, the Yale graduate student employees union, and when he criticized all of the New York City municipal unions for refusing to accept a Bloomberg proposal to diminish their health care insurance. But nowhere could we find another published criticism targeting teacher unions.

When an author as prolific at Alterman publishes nothing on what he now tells us are his criticisms of teacher unions, when his published criticism of teacher unions focuses on an electoral endorsement which is a self-avowed “obsession,” and when he then offers one line comments that “I don’t like teacher unions,” it would seem more than reasonable to conclude that his longstanding objections were to our electoral strategy. But reasonable does not seem the operative word in this exchange. When citing the published record becomes “character assassination,” we have entered into the world of Alice and the Looking Glass.

Now that Alterman has “come out” as someone who “agrees more with the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council, the original home of Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham) than with the union,” and someone who believes that teacher unions are “frequently inflexible and resistant toward what looks to my admittedly non-expert eyes to be common-sense reforms,” perhaps he might share with us exactly which “common-sense reforms” bring himself and the DLC/Rotherham together. We understand that the market politics of “branding” considers the substantive issues unimportant, that the whole purpose of such politics is to issue sweeping generalizations and one line putdowns without offering substantive critiques. But enquiring education reformers need to know. Does Alterman fault teacher unions for being “inflexible and resistant” when we oppose “common-sense reforms” [see here, here, here, and here] advocated by Rotherham and this thinktank, Ed Sector, to raise class sizes? To lower the salaries of experienced teachers? To raid teacher pensions? To diminish teacher health care insurance? To have chronically underfunded urban schools, such as those in NYC, make do with their current funding? [On the last point, was there some point between Pataki's refusal to resolve the CFE case and Rotherham's current revelation that public schools can not expect more funding, but need to make do with what they now receive, that this became a "common sense reform?"]

We won’t even ask for an explanation on how any of these “reforms” will help schools.

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Getting through September

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by C.E. Miles @ 8:00 am

September was finally over. I had made it through my first month as a teacher in a New York City public school. I had been in shock for the entire four weeks. Children were fighting in the halls and in the classrooms. They were coming back from lunch with black eyes! A lot of the stuff that I had bought with my credit card for my classroom had been “misappropriated.” I hadn’t even paid for the stuff yet and it was gone. My students were mean to me. They also couldn’t read or tell time. Many of them, I thought, were far too old for the third grade. None of my well-meaning and creative behavior systems had worked. The ladies in the main office were horrible. I had been punched in the arm by a crazed student and threatened by his mother. My voice was hoarse and I felt numb, but I was alive. Oh yes, I had survived my first month with very little support from the administration and a whole lot of after-school tears. If I had had the energy, I think I would have been proud of myself.

I walked into the main office on the first day of October. I moved my card to the “In” side, picked up my attendance folder, and was sneered at by the payroll secretary—a pretty typical morning routine. I checked my mailbox and found an envelope with my name on it. It looked official. There was something inside that made it appear bulky. The payroll secretary muttered something under her breath so I headed upstairs to my classroom. The letter inside the envelope read:

”Dear Valued Faculty Member,

Your perfect attendance this month enhanced, strengthened, and demonstrated to students the importance of consistency, promptness, and regularity as we focus on achieving higher academic standards………”

I pulled out the Snickers bar that had been tucked inside. The whole month of September flashed before my eyes, with its classroom brawls, failed attempts at behavior modification, and salty tears of hopelessness and despair. And then there was this Snickers bar. I thought about it some more. Although peanuts, chocolate, and nougat could hardly make up for the hell I had been through in those past thirty or so days, all I could do was smile. The sheer irony of it all was better than nothing. I took a deep breath and let October through my classroom door.

January 29, 2007

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A teacher’s many roles

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by perseverance2 @ 4:53 pm

I have always dreamed of becoming a teacher, and I always knew that my career as a teacher would change my life. What I did not know is in addition to teaching, I would soon become a classroom counselor and psychologist, and I feel like a mother to my 5th-grade students as well.

Yes, in undergrad and graduate courses you take psychology and you hear about situations that you may come across. You get into groups and discuss how the teacher should and should not react to certain situations. Of course, it all sounds realistic and manageable in school, but the reality isn’t so easy.

I walked into my fifth-grade classroom the first week of school to teach a lesson on division and within minutes I realized that the students who were sitting in front of me had not yet mastered multiplication. I quickly re-evaluated and switched over to a multiplication mini-lesson. Two more minutes later, I realized some students had not yet mastered addition. Yes, everyone knows that teachers need to be flexible, but all that was going through my mind in that moment was, “How the heck did these students pass into fifth grade?”

Every single day when I go home, I re-evaluate the day and think about how I can make tomorrow better. How can I help these students? My goal is to bring the students as close to grade level as possible. (Out of 16 students, I have only three or four who are on grade level.)
I modify each lesson that I teach and differentiate to each child’s needs. This is one thing you always hear about that teachers should do, but sometimes no matter how much I modify the lesson, there are times when it doesn’t seem good enough.

On most days, I don’t make it through all of the lessons that I plan. It takes me so long to get through the directions, that sometimes the lesson only goes as far as the introduction. Sometimes, I cannot complete the lesson because of the difficult concepts. Other times I can’t complete it because of behavior issues:

  • Who is tapping and humming on the desk to annoy the other students?
  • Who is getting up to sharpen a pencil?
  • Who is talking?
  • Who is putting his/her head down?
  • Who is calling out or yelling?
  • Who is kicking a chair?
  • Who is fighting?

It took me about two days in this classroom to recognize the fact that my students have many other challenges to deal with besides passing fifth grade. I am constantly resolving arguments, breaking up fights, and problem solving. As a result, I have incorporated conflict/resolution and anger-management lessons into the curriculum. These students face troubles, and when they come to school, learning is not the first thing on their mind. A good-hearted teacher will help the students make it through the school year, but a teacher that also acts as a mother, counselor, and psychologist will lead the students to a better life.

The students that I teach are fun to be around. I want them to be able to experience life the way many children do; go outside to play, go out to dinner, or go to an amusement park. For the holidays, I had each student make a wish list of three items that they need. The company that I am presently working for in addition to teaching adopted my class and granted each wish. The students opened jackets, sneakers, pants, shirts, and other winter apparel. Honestly, it was the best holiday that I have ever experienced, and I think that the students felt the same way.

I love to see my students happy and be able to succeed; it makes me so proud. I see the students who in the beginning of the year would punch another student are now beginning to walk away to gain self-control. I see students who could not spell Friday spelling words like knowledge and equipment. I see some students who did not speak or smile enjoying group work and playing with other students.

Are all of the problems solved? Of course not. I still have to interrupt my lessons to break up fights and repeat discussions about rules and respect. I feel like some of these problems will never vanish, however, I like to focus on the positive aspects in order to keep myself motivated to teach. Observing the progress is the part of teaching that makes me want to travel through the grades with these students. I know they can make it, and I want to be there when they do.

January 27, 2007

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Outsourcing Public Education: Things Fall Apart With The Incremental Privatization of NYC Public Schools

Filed under: NYC DOE Privatization by Leo Casey @ 1:19 pm

Edwize has obtained a copy of the RFP [Request for Proposal] for “Partnership School Support” that the New York City Department of Education has hidden from the general public in a remote precinct of its website accessible only to private vendors with passwords. In it one finds the details of one of the central components of the latest structural reorganization Chancellor Klein want to impose on New York City public schools.

What is remarkable about the RFP is the general plan to outsource to these private ‘partnership’ entities virtually all of the educational support functions traditionally fulfilled, for better or for worse, by the DOE. Instructional program, professional development, special education: all of these and more will now be organized and supported by the Partnerships. And in contrast to the current intermediaries such as New Visions and Urban Assembly, this RFP invites ‘for profit’ EMOs [Educational Maintenance Organizations, modeled after Health Maintenance Organizations or HMOs] like Edison Schools and Victory Schools to become Partnerships.

Corporate outsourcing operates generally on the theory that an organization should focus on its core mission, and turn over ancillary functions which are not central to its work to other institutions to run. Applied to education, such a theory would have an entity like the Department of Education outsourcing functions like transportation, food services and facilities, in order to focus on what is central to its mission, teaching and learning. One could argue that the DOE need not have top of the line luxury buses moving children or serve the most nutritious, most appealing food in its school cafeterias, and so could afford to outsource such services, but that it needs to provide world class, quality education in its classrooms.

But what the DOE proposes to do here is the inverse of this corporate model of outsourcing. They are taking the core mission of the Department of Education — the promotion of excellent teaching and learning which is at the center of any education worthy of that name — and are outsourcing it. Such a move is a tacit admission that those who make the decisions at Tweed are themselves incapable of providing educational leadership. They lack the most elemental understanding of how the world of instruction works, and so propose structural change upon structural change, with every one avoiding the substance of teaching and learning like it were the plague. If anything, they fear educational expertise, for it exposes their own lack of knowledge and leadership: just look at an organizational strategy which has systematically purged professional educators from the top echelons of the Department of Education. With this week’s retirement of Rose DePinto, in part a reaction to yet another structural revolution bringing more institutional chaos and instability, there remains in the inner councils of Tweed literally a single educator who knows what it takes to teach real classes and lead real schools — Eric Nadelstern, the last of the educational Mohicans. There is a sort of perverse logic to turning over to private entities what the current leadership at Tweed is so clearly incapable of doing itself, as a result of its own design.

The permanent revolution of endless structural reorganizations brought to us by Chancellor Klein has been bereft, from day one, of any educational vision and any instructional strategy for New York City schools. Instead, an obsession with structure — at its root, an obsession with power as an end in itself — has been the motivating spirit. The logic of this structure driven quest is the devolution not of educational decision making power and authority, but of accountability. The goal is to divest the Chancellor and the Department of Education of responsibility for what goes on in its own schools. Five years in charge, longer than any other Chancellor in two plus decades, and Joel Klein still blames everyone but himself for the shortcomings of New York City public schools. Now he wants to organize the entire school system around that political strategy of accountability and responsibility avoidance. A proper name for these perpetual organizational revolution and obsession with structure would be “Classroom Last.”

In this regard the details of the RFP are telling. Schools do not get to choose their partnerships — they can simply state their preferences, and the DOE makes the choices. Just as importantly, schools do not get to drop their partnerships if they find them useless or worse — only the DOE can do that. There is no system of accountability for the partnerships, no metrics by which their performance will be measured, no responsibility for their actual work in their schools — the best one can find is some vague language of how the DOE will canvas the schools to obtain their opinion on the quality of services provided. Most significantly, there is no responsibility and accountability for the Department of Education in Klein’s brave, new world. It turns over all of its educational support functions to the partnerships, and leaves for itself only the training of principals [the Leadership Academy], the setting of standards, the operation of the accountability system and actual decision making authority. All responsibility, all accountability rests with the schools.

This educational dystopia, one which Klein promoted in the recent Tough Choices, Tough Talks report, would remake public education in the image of what the Bush administration and the Louisiana Governor have done to the post-Katrina New Orleans public schools. The results in New Orleans should give anyone who cares about the education of children – and especially, children living in poverty who are at most risk for academic failure – serious pause about conducting more experiments in this vein. Make no mistake about it: we are clear that the management of our public schools needs to be reformed, and that real decision making power needs to be devolved to the schools, in the hands of school leaders, teachers, and parents. We need real empowerment of schools, not rhetorical empowerment smokescreens. We need public schools accountable to the public, not outsourced to private entities in a perpetual deferral of accountability by its top leadership. Klein’s “Classroom Last” will not accomplish these ends, but only make matters worse. It — and the New Orleans public schools — is a world perhaps best captured in the title of Chinua Achebe’s novel of post-colonial Africa, borrowed from a William Butler Yeats’ poem: The center can not hold. Things fall apart.

The way forward for New York City public schools is not putting up for sale the leadership of teaching and learning in New York City public schools. Rather, it is the replacement of a Chancellor of New York City public schools incapable of providing educational leadership with a Chancellor who can do precisely that. Since you can’t lead us in teaching and learning, Joel Klein, step aside for someone who can, someone who will accept responsibility and embrace accountability for himself and his administration, someone who will set about restoring the professional educational talent you have driven from the management of New York City public schools, someone who will empower New York City public schools to do their best.

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