Teachers, through groups such as Teachers Letters to Obama and the various meetings and conversations hosted by the Department of Education, and other channels have been trying for months to get the Administration to seriously re-think some of its positions on education reform as outlined in the ESEA Blueprint and the Race for the Top. For the most part, our concerns were dismissed, almost paternalistically, as already being addressed in the Blueprint. At times it appeared we were not making much headway in moving towards a serious consideration of these issues, but we persisted for the sake of our students and what we know is right.

Thankfully, some other influential voices are now being raised and real discussion of these points can no longer be avoided. A coalition of major civil rights organizations has issued a report titled, "Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn Through Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act." As I read the document, I am encouraged that many of the concerns I have had about the proposals put forward by Secretary Duncan are also being flagged by other thoughtful stakeholders. Like the authors of the Framework, I applaud the Obama Administration for wanting to move our educational system forward. To do that, however, we need to take a much closer look at what has been proposed, and where it not only falls short, but could actually do more harm to already suffering children and communities.

Here are my thoughts on some of the ideas in the Framework:

1. Equitable Opportunities

"We believe the age of establishing outcome standards without making input investments to achieve these outcomes must end."

1A. I support the call for Common Opportunity Standards and the proposal for "independent audits of state and district education expenditures…whenever historically disadvantaged subgroups persistently fail…."

1B. I also wholeheartedly agree with the criticism of putting most of the new federal dollars into competitive grants. As the report states, "If education is a civil right, children in 'winning' states should not be the only ones who have opportunity to learn in high quality environments." They correctly point out that such policies would roll us back to pre-civil rights days in many places.

2B. Paul Vallas, Superintendent of New Orleans, stated in a PBS report that he sees nothing wrong with having a teaching force of 50% short-term staff from programs such as Teach for America, and 50% veteran or career teachers. He thinks that's a great balance. On our TLN Teacher Solutions 2030 team we also envision in the very near future that teaching will be a much more fluid and vibrant profession with people entering and leaving at different points, as well as much more movement within the profession in the form of hybrid roles. The problem, as the Civil Rights groups note, is and will be the distribution of those teachers. Currently, minority and high needs schools are more likely to get the short-term or less qualified staff; and experience much higher teacher turnover rates than higher performing schools. Those two facts are not unrelated. High teacher or administrator turnover destabilizes a school and its community. A better strategy is to establish a critical mass of stable, highly accomplished teachers who serve as mentors and anchors for the more transient staff. This gives the schools both the flexibility and the stability to maintain consistent educational quality.

2D. I have questioned the Administration's limited support of Promise Neighborhoods in the absence of correcting some other inequities already mentioned. If basic school funding inequities and distribution of teachers and resources is addressed, then the idea of comprehensive schools with wraparound services becomes not only logical but possible.

2E. The groups' caution about school closure as a turnaround strategy needs should be seriously heeded by the Administration. Some of the same political forces that have perpetuated resource and other inequities for the schools that serve poor and minority children have also used closure and consolidation to further harm our most vulnerable populations.

3. The need for more public and civic engagement on the front-end of education decisions is long overdue. It is ironic that while some deride poor parents for their seeming lack of concern over their children's education, the policies which were supposed to ensure and encourage their involvement have been underfunded and unenforced. Case in point: Parents at many Title I schools have had their expressed wishes and even votes for how Title funds should be used in their schools ignored or invalidated. As a parent and as an educator I have been among those effectively disenfranchised by policies and maneuvers that meet the letter of the law, but clearly gut its intent.

4. I also support the Framework for urging the federal government to do more to ensure safe learning environments in many of our schools. There is a correlation between the overuse of exclusionary discipline policies and low academic performance. I'm not saying that those who are a physical danger to peers or teachers should be allowed to remain in school. However, there is overwhelming evidence that these policies are used with much greater frequency and severity towards Black and Hispanic students, especially males, than they are for white students, even those who have committed identical offenses.

5. While I agree with most of the points made in the section on Diverse Learning Environments, the insistence on Right to Transfer provisions has always been problematic for rural communities. Sending our children to another town or county should not be the best or only way for taxpayers to obtain our educational civil rights. The groups actually make this point under Section 6.

6. It is necessary to take very deliberate steps to ensure the protection of hard-won civil rights for all of America's schoolchildren. While the report is right to condemn the awarding of federal education grants to states (or districts for that matter) where inequity has been established, we should also remember the lessons of the "massive resistance" movement that followed the Brown decision. During that period, some state and local bodies chose to deliberately violate the civil rights of Black citizens precisely so that federal funding would not reach those same citizens. Thorough monitoring and listening to the voices of parents and the community will help distinguish where there might be procedural but not substantive accountability.

I'm not sure we need a summit, a panel, and another commission as called for at the end of the Framework to get these things done; perhaps we do. It is a big job and a big country. I am sure that these points needed to be raised and addressed if our country is going to keep its promise to all of its citizens. For that I thank these organizations for once again standing up for what is right.

Picking up on my theme from the last post, here's an extended quote from a new article by George Wood:

Somebody Explain This to Me | The Forum for Education and Democracy.

For the past eighteen years I have worked as a high school/middle school principal along side a dedicated staff and a committed community to improving a school. In that time we have increased graduation and college going rates, engaged our students in more internships and college courses, created an advisory system that keeps tabs on all of our students, and developed the highest graduation standards in the state (including a Senior Project and Graduation Portfolio).

But reading the popular press, and listening to the chatter from Washington, I have just found out that we are not part of the movement to ‘reform’ schools.

You see we did not do all the stuff that the new ‘reformers’ think is vital to improve our schools. We did not fire the staff, eliminate tenure, or go to pay based on test scores. We did not become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year short-term teachers.

Nope, we did not do any of these things. Because we knew they would not work.

Wood goes on to suggest, and I wholeheartedly agree, that the key to helping improve the quality of all schools is to look at and listen to those who have actually been successful at doing what we claim we want to accomplish.

And here's a tip: Some of the best educators in the country can be found inside some of the most dysfunctional or statistically low performing schools. Another reason to resist the lure of reconstituting a school  or mass firing of teachers and staff without an honest evaluation of the expertise that often exists stifled within it. 

    Going through some of my personal teaching journals, I came across this piece I wrote back in 2003 describing pre and post assessments that I had designed and used in my high school English classes from the mid-90s, through about 2004, until other, less effective assessment practices were forced upon my classroom by policy changes. I offer it to you as seed for thoughts about how effective assessment of student learning could look if it were designed and implemented by teachers at the classroom level. What place (if any) do assessments such as these have in our current atmosphere of increased accountability and equity for the learning of all students? Would love to hear your questions or comments:

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September 2003. What if high school English were a place of wondrous discoveries and meaningful accomplishments? While that vision is nothing like what I experienced in high school, it is exactly the image I want shimmering in my students' memories long after they have left my classroom.

    I believe in highly individualized instruction within structured, cooperative settings. Each student develops his or her communication skills while pursuing the questions, topics, or mediums s/he finds most compelling (or challenging). This is no small task for a high school teacher considering there have been years when I've taught 150 students per day. Still, every year I strive for the goal of giving each student a very personalized education, while creating a true community of learners who feel a sense of collective responsibility for one another's success.

    The first step towards this goal begins with the first two weeks of school. I set the tone the first day a student arrives in my class with a discussion about my classroom standards which must be upheld by everyone who enters our room, including me. Along with the obligatory list of consequences for student violators, are the steps students may take if I fail to come to class prepared or show disrespect towards anyone, up to a conference with the principal. Each student also gives me the name and contact information of a significant adult; someone the student respects who is genuinely concerned about the student's academic success. I contact this person and invite him/or her to act as the student's mentor for the school year.

For the next several days, we will work our way through a series of self-explorations that I use to help me (and the students) learn about their relative strengths and weaknesses as communicators. I have designed and re-designed these activities to cover every aspect of the language arts (reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, thinking), as well as probing their control of vocabulary, language conventions, and researching skills.

    For these pre-assessments, I select inspirational or motivational materials to plant the seeds of success and high expectations. However, the most energizing part of the process comes when I meet privately with each student to review his or her preliminary activities, and together, we develop a Personal English Plan. The plan, designed on a grid, is part analysis, part wish list. I try to help each student strike a balance between course requirements and personal goals. In our discussions, I usually pose the question: "By the end of another full year in English, what do you want to know or be able to do that you don't know or don't do very well now?" Once we agree upon skills to be learned or perfected, we begin to identify topics or questions of special interest to each student. These Personal English Plans guide our work for the rest of the year with checkpoints and updates at the end of each grading period.

    With the exception of large group discussions, which are conducted in a large circle in the center of the room, students are free to move about the room to accomplish the learning tasks on which they are focusing each day. Some may be peer editing a classmate's work in a small group, while others may be at the computers. Some are reading, while others may be working with study partners. I am moving around the room, clipboard in hand, as I conference with students, check on progress, encourage fresh thinking, or suggest resources.

All this energy culminates at the end of the school year with their presentations of their individual Communications Skills Portfolios to the class, mentors, and other invited guests. Then, final individual conferences (posttest) with me as we use their portfolios to determine how many of the original goals of the Personal English Plan have been met and how to translate those accomplishments into a final grade based on the district requirements.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~P.S.  Be sure to check out the Teachers Letters to Obama group's first Virtual Teach-in: "Testing, Testing, Too Much Testing" featuring panelists Dr. Young Zhao, Monty Neill, and Doug Christensen, Monday, June 14th, 8:30 - 10:30 p.m. EDT. To register click HERE.

Some people are disturbed by the seeming pattern of earthquakes across the Western Hemisphere recently. I am disturbed by seismic activity of a different sort, shattering the lives of some of our most vulnerable teachers and students across the country.

In Greenville, MS, formerly the Queen City of the once cotton-rich Delta, parents were recently informed that every teacher and administrator has been "non-renewed" for the next school year, due to the district's consistently poor student test scores. Shortly after the teachers learned of their fate, came reports that the district leadership was in New York to recruit new teachers. This year's state tests are about to be given; and the individual performance evaluation of teachers have not yet been conducted. Teachers were non-renewed en masse, but some may be rehired based on the actual quality of their work (imagine that). By that time, I'm sure some of these quality teachers, may have taken the hint and left in search of a more respectful and appreciative employer. Meanwhile, who will be here to teach the Delta's children?

Alone, this situation would be sad enough, but it comes on the heels of the equally misguided tactics used on a historic black school in Georgia (read the moving profile by Susan Graham over at Teacher Magazine). Collective bargaining is illegal in Mississippi, as it is in Georgia, and there is no such thing as teacher tenure; consequently, every educator must sign a new contract every year. The Greenville district has had a string of superintendents and administrative changes over the past decade. Each new leadership has brought new priorities, new programs, new directives for teachers and principals. For the most part, teachers have done exactly what they were told to do; until they were told to do something else; then something else. They've been through multiple curriculum changes and consultants, all with sets of instructions on what to do, what not to do, how, and when.

And for their obedience, they have been dismissed.

Underperformance in Mississippi Delta schools is not a recent phenomena. We have at least twenty years of various types of data showing how the predominantly Black and poor schools of the Delta have consistently lagged behind the rest of the state. The state itself is consistently near the bottom on nationwide comparisons, due in large part to the poor performance of Delta schools. Notably, this entire section of the state has also been a chronic teacher shortage area for at least twenty years. A disproportionate number of the classrooms here have been staffed by underprepared, temporary, or out-of-field personnel. Ironically, it is also relatively easy to remove an incompetent teacher in Mississippi, yet it almost never happens; only here there is no union contract or tenure system on which to hang the blame.

In spite of all that, Delta schools also have some of the most outstanding teachers, anywhere. Teachers who are devoted to their students; teachers who help those students make incredible academic progress each year against staggering odds; teachers who chose to live and work in the Delta when they could have gone elsewhere. These are attributes teachers in poor rural areas, such as the Delta, share with our beleaguered colleagues working at many inner city schools.

In their book The Teaching Gap, James Stigler and James Hiebert back in 1999 showed us that the U.S. did not need a wholesale replacement of its teaching force; we needed to support and fully develop our professionally trained educators. That sage advice, based on careful comparisons to education systems in competitive nations has gone largely unheeded. By most estimates, school districts, even the more affluent ones, spend less than 5% of their budget on professional development of teachers. This continues even though we now have a growing body of evidence on the impact of teacher quality on student learning.

This is one reason I am disappointed that in its Blueprint for the Reauthorization of ESEA, the U.S. Department of Education has sanctioned only four "turnaround" strategies for struggling or failing schools. Three of those involve the removal of teachers; only one addresses (though not directly enough) building on the strengths of existing staff. How can we justify such a waste of human resources, of human beings? Yet, the same document calls for an elevation of the teaching profession and greater efforts to retain teachers. I am hard-pressed to understand how increasing the job insecurity of teachers in the schools where we need them most will help make the profession more attractive to potential teacher candidates? The Blueprint also suggests that more of the power to make these momentous decisions, as well as even greater control over funding, will be given to those entities at the state and district level responsible for creating (or at least perpetuating) the inequities and gaps the Administration says it hopes to close.

Like my some of the TLN colleagues*, I was left disappointed when I was unable to get some of these answers at the recent USDOE/NBPTS sponsored webinar event inviting NBCTs from around the country to discuss the Blueprint. While I applaud NBPTS for helping to make the event happen, what could have been a great opportunity to interject significant teacher perspective into the crafting of this very important legislation, was more of a DOE sales presentation. A few questions (including one of mine) were answered to varying degrees of satisfaction, but many hundreds more remained. [BTW, heads up to DOE representatives: It is not a good idea to come before a group of America's top teachers and admit that you don't have your copy of the Blueprint in front of you, while assuming that we haven't studied the copies you sent us.]

I am a teacher of writing, and I teach my students the value of drafting, revising, getting feedback, and more revising as steps in successful writing. I view the Administration's ESEA Blueprint as a work-in-progress. I sincerely hope that the NBCT webinar was the first of many more substantive discussions between teachers and policymakers, and that very soon the issue of how best to "turnaround" failing schools will be addressed more thoughtfully, more realistically, and more humanely.    

*For more discussion on this topic visit:

David Cohen - InterACT

Mary Tedrow - Walking to School

Nancy Flanagan - Teacher in a Strange Land

I’ve been trying to wait until the spin dust from the State
of the Union message settled, before I did my own end-of-the-year
evaluation of the Administration’s work thus far on education issues.

In all fairness, the President has had quite a few major
issues to juggle in his freshman year, and I, for one, did not expect education
to race to the top of that list. I did hope to see signs that groundwork for
some meaningful and significant change would be forthcoming.

Craig A. Cunningham at the Education
Policy Blog approached this assessment with a thoughtful and open
reflection on his Dec. 2008 predictions on then Education Secretary-in-Waiting,
Arne Duncan. Sort of a pre-and post-test. 
In it, Cunningham reaches a somber conclusion about the person charged
with leading change public education: “The primary group that Arne does not
appear to be listening to (much) are education professionals.”  Sounds distressingly like most of Duncan’s
recent predecessors.  Craig also notes,
as I have, that “Duncan’s closest advisors are also not education professionals.” 
Not spelling
relief, so far (pun absolutely intended). 
Some of my teacher colleagues distress over this continuing
marginalization of teacher voice at the federal level led to a public letter
writing campaign to the President spearheaded by  fellow TLN member Anthony Cody.

So far, the most noticeable change in education policy has
been to remove Bush’s NCLB nameplate from ESEA, and to distill some of the
worst aspects of it into a high-profiled sprint for desperately needed funding,
Race-to-the Top.  One of the concerns
here, is that RttT gives budget-axe wielding state authorities more incentive
to close struggling schools, than to do the work of correcting why they were
low-performing in the first place. This poses a special threat to poor
rural students for whom multiple school options do not exist. But this
Administration has a decidedly urban tilt. Still, it’s curious why Duncan
appears to be putting more stock in the policies that produced only
questionable results in Chicago’s public schools, as opposed to pushing for a
wider range of options, including one of the few truly effective turnaround
strategies in the country also found in Chicago, the Strategic
Learning Initiative.  In this interview with Public School Insights, John Simmons shares this tasty bit of
advice:

[School improvement] is like baking a cake. If you include
all of the essential supports, you get a great cake. But if you leave out one
ingredient, like the salt or the eggs, you are not going to get anything that
tastes like a cake. That is what we found as we put together the best
strategies from education research and the best strategies from high-performance
systems research. So now we have a systemic approach to school improvement. But
it is not a silver bullet.

Unfortunately, silver bullets still appear to be Washington’s tool of choice for school reform. There is growing concern that NCLB reliance on flawed standardized testing and weak data systems
will become even more entrenched through RttT criteria and incentives.  Among those wondering about the potential for
misuse of test data is Chester
Finn of the Fordham Institute who recently told EdWeek:

He worries that the Obama administration’s ambitious goals
for the assessment funding—which include generating information about both
school and student performance as well as data about teacher
effectiveness—could prove to be irreconcilable. “If all the glitterati…remains
in the grant competition, anyone that wants to win the competition is going to
have to pretend they can do all those things….but since we know that they can’t
all be done by the same assessment, in the same period of time at a finite
price, something will get left in the dust.

That same Edweek article also revisits the ongoing concerns
about the inaccuracies and inadequacies of current standardized tests,
especially the flawed attempts to make them more authentic raised by people
like former testing industry insider, Todd Farley, which he also shared via Edutopia. Farley
supports, as I do, that assessment, particularly high-stakes, is better handled
by classroom teachers. I also agree with 
CyberEnglish
teacher, Ted Nellen, that “fixing"
the tests is the very least we could do if we are going to continue to use them
or expand their use for high stakes decisions. Better, as Nellen and others
suggest, is to reduce our dependence on them in favor of more comprehensive
evaluations of student growth and performance. But both these options presume
we actually care more about the students than those who are profiting from the
tests.

Of course, there are
those, like Andy Rotherham, who think NCLB deserves credit for “making
school performance more transparent.” 
More transparent, I suppose, to those who actually didn’t know that
minority students have consistently received an inferior quality of education.
Those would be the same people who for years have refused to listen to the
parents or teachers of poor and minority students as we have complained loud
and long trying to get Federal policymakers to end inequities in allocation of
resources, assignment of teachers, and application of policies by state and
local officials (and that’s not just here in Mississippi).  Incredibly, Rotherham wants to see NCLB
strengthened by among other things “giving [more] political cover to state and
local elected officials…”

Still, the optimist
in me would like to think that there is yet time for the President and his
team to rethink some of these issues, and to engage us all in more thoughtful
discussion before and during the reauthorization of ESEA (formerly known as
NCLB).  I thank another TLN friend, Mary Tedrow, for reminding us that so often learning is a messy and recursive
process, not a linear one.  She suggests
that the raucous and revealing debate around healthcare reform may be a preview
and a omen of what the ESEA process may hold. When a healthcare bill finally
arrives on Mr. Obama’s desk, I’m waiting to see how closely he will hold the
lawmakers and himself to the promises he made about what such a bill would and
would not contain. Yet, I respect him for allowing the democratic process to
run its course (unseemly as it may have been along the way).

If he and the
Secretary do as much with ESEA and other education issues, then I’ll be ready
to pull out my own scoring criteria from just before the election and give them
a passing grade.