I ran into my former colleague, "Joe," a gifted teacher and leader, who transfered to a KIPP charter school this year.  I wrote about him here in the winter, when he was raving about how wonderful it was to teach at KIPP, where everything is so well planned, resourced, organized and implemented.  In particular, I was compelled by his statement that it was much easier to progress as a teacher, to spot and address his weaknesses, which had been too difficult to discern in the chaotic environments of other schools that serve high needs populations.

This time the story was different.  He looked a little vacant as he told me he wouldn't be returning to his school next year.  I got excited for a minute, thinking maybe he'd come work at my school again.  "No," he told me, shrugging. "I'm leaving teaching.  I don't have a plan."  
I was shocked.  "Why?  You're such a wonderful teacher! What happened?"
"It just got to the point that every morning I thought, 'I don't want to go in.'  We start at 7:20 and go til 5pm. I wake up at 4:45 for my commute and some days don't get home til 10. I'd honestly rather work in an office at this point." 
When Joe left my school, it was a huge loss to our students.  But I could understand why he wanted to go somewhere less crazy, more organized, and that serves a similarly needy population.  His current school has one of the highest student achievement rates in NYC.  I don't think Joe's situation is an anomaly, so I'm wondering if this KIPP school sees its teaching staff as expendable.  Perhaps this school has such a great reputation that it can easily replace good teachers who leave with other good teachers.  
The tragic thing is that now, no more students will benefit from Joe's teaching expertise and wonderful ability to connect with students.  But this was the move he had to make or he would lose himself in the deal. 

The policy world and the media are paying far too much attention to the so-called "bad" teachers in the profession, who are relatively small in number.
The real question is what happens to the quality teachers in our schools?  Perhaps many of the "bad" teachers are just people who stay, who do not chose self-preservation as Joe has, but who succumb to the vacant feeling that overtakes them after years of not wanting to go in every morning.  
What is really wrong with our schools that serve high need populations?  Teachers are still expected to be martyrs, or else sink to mediocrity... which may be acceptable in stable middle class schools, like the ones I attended (I had many less-than-great teachers, a few great ones and also a few "bad" ones, but my classmates and I have done alright for ourselves).  In high needs schools, however, where the odds are already stacked against students, mediocre teaching won't get the job done.  It can mean life or death for some students.  

If policy-makers care about the lives of all students in public schools, then they need to think about the lives of their teachers--and invest aggressively.  Otherwise, we'll keep losing the good ones and keeping/creating lousy ones, and all the other investments the government makes in education, (testing, data systems, scripted curriculum programs, opening new schools, etc) will add up to nought. 

[image credit www.signonsandiego.com]

I had an interesting conversation with a teacher who used to
work in my school, whom I will call Joe. 
He was one of our strongest teachers and a leader in our school. After about five years of working in high needs, under-resourced schools, he made the decision
to transfer to a KIPP school, where he could still work with students who come
from poor families, but where the school would provide all the resources and
support he needed. 

Joe said the two jobs are like night and day.  He described a school that is tightly
and thoughtfully organized, highly supportive, and fully resourced.  He works a longer day, but gets paid
for it, rather than arriving early and staying late voluntarily, as most of my
colleagues and I do.  The long
afternoon, he explained, includes a few hours of band for the entire middle school.  During this time, teachers meet and
then pull out small groups of carefully selected students for targeted
interventions. 

Students are indoctrinated into strict behavior standards,
which they almost always meet (all of the students have been at the school
since sixth grade).  This includes
becoming completely silent when the teacher claps two times.  Students are explicitly taught how to
discuss their feelings with their peers and solve problems.  The curriculum for this portion of the
program is provided for teachers. 
Students who consistently do not comply with the behavior standards can
be counseled to leave the school, and attend their neighborhood zoned school.

I was most intrigued when Joe said this: “All the
behavior stuff is basically taken care of for you.  I feel like now, I’ve become such a better teacher than I
ever was. I didn’t fully realize it before, but all the craziness that was constantly
going on around me was clouding my teaching. With all of that gone, I can
identify my weak points and improve on them.”

This was a little hard for me to hear.  I knew exactly what he was talking about
and have felt this clouding effect at times in two very different high needs
schools in New York City.  With the
exception of one student teaching placement at Bank Street’s own School For
Children (a private lab school), I have always taught in an environment that
had some dysfunctional aspects to it. 
In many cases, these dysfunctions are not the fault of anyone at the
school, but rather, are related to the lack of adequate funding of the school’s
resources or the unstable home lives of the students. For example, I may plan a
lesson that involves students researching something on the Internet, only to
find that a good number of the computers on the laptop cart I have signed out
won’t connect or won’t even turn on. We have no technician on staff to maintain
the computers, and we likely never will, because we spend our limited funds on
more pressing things.  I can either
stop using computers completely, which seems like a disservice to my students,
or I can take my chances every time.  In another example of unavoidable dysfunction, I have a few students with chronic attendance problems. The school has made home visits, reported the families to ACS, but the
attendance problems persist in some cases.  When I strategically assign my students to work in
partners for a project, I may find that a student is absent for days with
no explanation, leaving someone without a partner for the duration of the
project, while the absent student misses the entire learning experience.  These are both issues that a fully
resourced school--with the power to make noncompliant students transfer
out---can prevent from happening (for better or for worse).

Teachers at schools like mine get used the multitude of x
factors.  In fact, we stop
expecting everything to be “just so” and start going out of our way to plan for
all of the unexpected things that might happen.  Does this make us less effective?  Maybe it does, in a way. 
It is harder to address problems quickly and effectively, when new
problems present themselves simultaneously.  But is it fair to call us less effective?  Is it actually fair to measure my
effectiveness in the same way my former colleague’s teaching is now measured,
when the playing field is not level? 
Is the job of teaching in these very disparate environments even the
same? 

If the quality of my teaching is measured by my students’
scores on the same test that Joe’s students also take, and soon, I am
compensated based on this same determination, then tell me—why should I keep on
working at a school that can’t provide me everything I need to reach my full
potential as a teacher? 

If I can choose to be “more effective” in a “better” school,
then what is really being measured?

[image credit:  commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Image:Clouds.JPG]

This week the New York Times published an article about Bloomberg’s attempt to run for a third term as mayor and the question this brings up about mayoral control of NYC public schools, which he has controlled since 2002. Many people were quoted on the issue in the article, including Geoffrey Canada, chief executive of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which runs its own charter school. Strangely, there was not one comment from an actual teacher (or anyone from the NYC Department of Education) in the article.

Instead, Randi Weingarten, president of the UFT, spoke on behalf of teachers with regards to Bloomberg’s appointed Chancellor Joel Klein: “There are some very deep negative feelings about the chancellor from teachers,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They don’t feel like he is on their side. So they see all of this in that lens. They are very concerned about not feeling any kind of respect from him again.”

I love my union for protecting my contractual rights as a teacher, but I must say I feel misrepresented by this quote. I feel neither respected nor disrespected by Joel Klein, because I have never met him, and therefore I do not see “all of this” in that lens. That lens sounds all too personal to me and not sufficiently professional. The debate over whether or not Bloomberg should get to run for a third term as mayor, or—more to the point—whether he and Klein should remain in control of city schools has little to do with whether or not, deep inside, either one respects teachers (though that could be an interesting conversation, some other time).

Joel Klein should not remain Chancellor of education, and Bloomberg should not remain in control of schools, however, and here’s why. While I believe that both Klein and Bloomberg honestly have sought to improve the city’s schools, neither is or has ever been an educator. Each man profoundly misunderstands the nature of teaching and learning, and this is evident in the policies that have come to define New York City’s public schools over the last six years. These policies all reflect one basic, failed, premise: if you test kids more, and hold kids, teacher and principals accountable for the results, then kids will learn more, and all schools will become quality schools. If only it were that easy.

Klein and Bloomberg have put taxpayer money into these policies, which employ companies to create high-stakes tests, practice/predictive tests, and test prep books; pay for the scoring of tests; fund data systems and people to analyze and present these to the public; pay children, their families, and their teachers bonuses for good test scores; and grade schools and hire and fire principals based on a variety of performance categories on the same standardized tests. Sadly, all of this does not amount to increased student learning. It amounts to teachers feeling pressured from all sides to narrow the curriculum so as to prepare students to take outdated tests that measure only those things that are easy to standardize—this means critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration are not measured, and therefore not valued.

There is little emphasis on quality instruction under this system. In fact, in the Empowerment Zone, where most schools elected to be after the mayor did away with regional supervision of schools, as far as I can tell the only requirement of schools in terms of instruction is to demonstrate improved test scores. Instead of consulting with educators or researchers who have dedicated their lives to education about how to improve schools, Bloomberg and Klein jumped quickly and whole-heartedly on the NCLB bandwagon of high stakes testing for all—and nothing more. To achieve their desired results, they’ve employed a business productivity model based on punishment and incentives. But children don’t learn like bankers bank.

In addition to the damage done by arranging our entire school system around high stakes testing, Bloomberg and Klein have failed to do many positive things for our schools. They have done nothing to improve class sizes in classrooms across the city, for which teachers and parents have advocated for decades. They’ve not supported or improved after school education, arts education, social studies and science education (which are practically nonexistent in many elementary schools), physical education, nutrition in schools, integration of technology into k-12 education, or the improvement of school building facilities. They have not created policies to support new teachers, improve teacher retention rates in high needs schools, or improve teachers’ access to resources needed for teaching. With impending budget cuts to city schools, because of the corrupt collapse of Wall Street, entire school communities are likely to feel even more strapped in all of these areas.

Klein and Bloomberg should move on—not because they're not on the side of teachers, whatever that means, but because their oversight of New York City’s schools has been misguided and wholly inadequate. Perhaps their swift systems of accountability should be put to good use on Wall Street.

[Image credit: www.casita.us/images/ bloomberg-Klein-605.jpg]

A teacher I work with is caught in the frustrating and nerve-wracking situation of being denied certification from the State of New York for no good reason. In her second year at a high-needs city public school, she is one of the best teachers I know: extremely committed to her students and to teaching as a professional career, highly knowledgeable in her subject area and in a range of pedagogical techniques, and she’s just earned a full masters degree from Bank Street College in middle school education. She teaches middle school social studies and already passed the grueling New York State Social Studies content area exam.

So what’s the problem? Many of her undergraduate history courses—taken at a top-notch liberal arts college—focused on Latin American and Caribbean history. The state does not want to honor these course credits toward her certification as a social studies teacher. This is a glaring example of our profession and the bureaucracy that runs it being completely out of touch with what matters in the classroom!

The seventh and eighth grade social studies curriculum in New York focuses exclusively on American history, from pre-Columbian times to the Civil Rights Movement. My friend has taken her share of American history courses, so that’s not the issue. The state is conveying—in red tape—that European history is more important to our American history teachers’ base of knowledge than is Latin American history. Of course, both are important. Ideally every teacher of history would enter the classroom with an intimate knowledge of the history of the entire planet, but the reality is that when we actually study history, we focus on something in depth. Evidently, the history that occurs south of our borders isn’t valuable in the classrooms of New York.

Or is it… In fact the vast majority of the students my friend teaches are from the Caribbean, or their parents are. The specific way this teacher is able to weave together U.S. history with that of the Caribbean and Latin America helps create a cohesive understanding of the history of both Americas for her students, at times bridging the two worlds in which they live. This ability is very much in line with the increasingly global world our students need to understand.

Meanwhile, this teacher is threatened with suspended pay when school lets out later this month, while she has to take (and pay for) additional European history courses this summer. This is a teacher who invested in a full year of student teaching and a 45-credit quality teacher education program at Bank Street College—that’s 15 credits more than the usual 30-credit masters program.

In another middle school where I worked, the strongest teacher on the floor had taught social studies there for 15 years, was a cornerstone of the school, and a leader in the interdisciplinary humanities department. Originally from Puerto Rico, he had a degree in journalism from a University on the island, where he was a news reporter before entering the teaching profession (an experience that helped him make social studies content relevant to his mostly Latino students). When the state came in to evaluate the school and set it on the road to improvement, they discovered that this master teacher was licensed to teach only Spanish, not Social Studies. This year the administration had no choice but to assign him to teach Spanish as a foreign language—and he has no experience doing this!

The policies around having “highly qualified” teachers in every classroom just aren’t adding up for me right now. A brand-new NYC Teaching Fellow with a degree in European history and no course work in education would be considered a highly qualified social studies teacher in the state’s eyes. New York needs to rethink these definitions to account for the demonstrated success of a practicing teacher as well as the specific knowledge of the teacher in relation to school context and the global world in which we live.

[Image found at http://www.airhighways.com/images/americas_map.gif]