Tag: teachers

This is why we need to take teacher salaries seriously

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on This is why we need to take teacher salaries seriously

It comes courtesy of my friends at the Teacher Salary Project (on whose advisory board I sit). And it should make all of us embarrassed and unsatisfied.

Kory is a full-time public school teacher in San Francisco. She’s also a mom struggling to pay her bills, which means that in her spare time she drives a car for Lyft.

There are a lot of teachers like Kory, which should constitute its own national crisis.

Hire a Czar.

Call in the National Guard.

Declare a state of emergency.

And yet . . .

Consider this: if teacher pay had risen in proportion to per-pupil spending since 1970, the average teacher would make more than $120,000 today. Yet today the average starting salary for teachers in our country is $39,000.

The average ending salary—after 25 years in the profession? $67,000.

And here’s the thing: this is not a difficult problem to solve — it all comes down to what we value. Outgoing education secretary Arne Duncan said as much last week, when, as part of a larger condemnation of our racist adult imprisonment and student disciplinary policies, Duncan proposed the following:

If our states and localities took just half the people convicted of nonviolent crimes and found paths for them other than incarceration, they would save upwards of $15 billion a year. If they reinvested that money into paying the teachers who are working in our highest-need schools and communities—they could provide a 50 percent average salary increase to every single one of them. Specifically, if you focused on the 20 percent of schools with the highest poverty rates in each state, that would give you 17,640 schools—and the money would go far enough to increase salaries by at least 50 percent.

That sounds like killing two birds with one stone to me, but it still doesn’t address teachers like Kory.

Where would the money for those raises come from? Take a look at this pie chart, which shows where our discretionary spending is allocated, and see if you can come up with any ideas:

discretionary_spending_pie,_2015_enacted

2016 campaign issue, anyone?

Who is willing to make this issue their own?

And what might an educational-industrial complex actually engender?

OK, Obama Won. Now What?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on OK, Obama Won. Now What?

It’s official. Barack Hussein Obama has been re-elected.

Now what?

When it comes to public education, let’s start by recognizing that Race to the Top was well-intentioned — and ultimately out of step with a truly transformational vision of where American schooling needs to go. Yes, we need better ways to improve teacher quality and capacity; no, we can’t do it by doubling down on what we currently measure. Yes, we need to find a way to ensure equity across all schools; no, we can’t do it by ignoring the ways in which schools are inequitably funded and resourced. And yes, we need to ensure that every young person is prepared to be successful in life by the time they graduate; and no, we can’t do it by continuing to assume that the endgoal of schooling is a discrete set of content knowledge at the same time the new Industrial Revolution is removing all the barriers from knowledge acquisition — and accelerating the need for an essential set of lifeskills and habits.

The definition of leadership I offered in American Schools is the ability to balance a distant vision (“One day . . .”) and an up-close focus (“Every day . . .”). Great organizations, whether they’re schools or Fortune 100 companies, see, nurture, and respond to both mission and vision in everything they do. That’s the tension. That’s the art. And that’s the way to ensure that we’re not just solving the practical problems on our plate; we’re also working towards the aspirational goals that animate our efforts.

In Obama’s first term, we received a series of education policies that addressed the problems on our plate; and we were driven by a mission to perfect our ability to succeed in an Industrial-era system that no longer serves our interests.

What would a healthy tension between vision and mission look like in an ideal second term when it comes to public education? I’d suggest three things:

1. Vision (“One day, every teacher in America will be a special education teacher.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and teacher preparation program will work to deepen its capacity to prepare teachers for the 21st century classroom and its emphasis on greater personalization and customization.”)

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: every child has special needs, and every child deserves an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). Here’s something else that’s equally obvious: we are responsible for creating the “short-bus” stigma around special education, and we can change it.

Finland is instructive here. By investing deeply in the capacity of its teachers to diagnose and address the individual needs of children, Finland helped ensure that, in effect, every kid ended up in Special Ed. This removed the stigma, so much so that by the time they reach 16, almost every child in Finland will have received some sort of additional learning support. We could do the same. President Obama can’t require traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs from overhauling what they do, but he can certainly put public pressure on them to do so. And individual schools and districts can certainly shape their own professional development calendars with an eye toward that long-term vision, and a step toward the short-term goal of equipping teachers to become more fluent in the full range of student needs.

2. Vision (“One day, every child will be equipped to use his or her mind well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”); Mission (“Every day, every school and classroom will identify, and assess, the skills and habits it believes its graduates will need in order to use their minds well and in the service of a more just and harmonious society.”)

As I’ve said before, it’s time for teachers to stop defining themselves as passive victims of the policies of No Child Left Behind. It’s been a decade, and no one has stopped us from identifying — and then piloting — a better, more balanced way to assess student learning and growth.

Actually, that’s not true. The New York Performance Standards Consortium has been doing this for awhile now, and with great results. Individual schools like The Blue School in New York City or Mission Hill School in Boston have been doing it. And forward-thinking districts like Montgomery County in Maryland are exploring ways to do it more.

What are the rest of us waiting for?

The future of learning is one in which content knowledge stops being seen as the end, and starts being understood as the means by which we develop and master essential skills and habits — the real endgoal — that will help us navigate the challenges and opportunities of work, life and global citizenship. This future will require us to do more than merely give lip service to the skills we value; it will demand that we find ways to concretely track and support each child’s path to mastery, while maintaining our awareness and appreciation for the nonlinearity of learning and of human development. And the good news is the art and science of teaching and learning are not mutually exclusive. We can do this. In fact, many of us have already begun.

3. Vision (“One day, it will be universally agreed-upon that education in America is a public good, not a private commodity.”); Mission (“Every day, every policymaker and decision-maker will repeat this vow: whatever the most privileged parents want for their children must serve as a minimum standard for what we as a community want for all of our children.”)

In America, we hold two definitions of freedom in creative tension: the first is the capitalistic definition, in which freedom means choice and consumption; the second is the democratic definition, in which freedom means conscience and compassion.

This will never change; our challenge will always be to manage the tension between the two in ways that serve both. But it’s foolish to unleash choice and consumption in American public education and expect that it will deepen our capacity to exercise conscience and compassion. We can either see education as a private commodity or as a public good. And we must choose.

That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of charter schools or choice; in fact, I’d say it’s undeniable that almost every great school I’ve visited has become great in part because it had greater freedom to chart its own path. But it does mean any investments in school choice need to be proactively made in light of the original vision of charter schools, and that we stop pretending that schools with smaller class sizes, better-trained teachers, and richer learning options are only appealing or viable for the families of the wealthy or the well-located. Simply put, a great learning environmentis challenging, relevant, engaging, supportive, and experiential — no matter who the kids are, and no matter where the community is located.

If I were in charge, those would be my marching orders.

What do you think?

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

This is What Great Teaching Looks Like

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on This is What Great Teaching Looks Like

There’s a lot of talk nationally about the importance of teachers, and the need to identify what great teaching actually looks like — and requires.

Our search should start and end with people like Kathy Clunis D’Andrea.

A veteran educator at the Mission Hill School in Boston, Kathy epitomizes everything that’s good about the profession — and everything the rest of us need to pay closer attention to if we want to support a better, more holistic vision of American public education.

It starts with her three-part recipe for success: Love, Limits & Laughter. It succeeds because of her recognition that what matters most is equipping young people with an essential set of skills and habits that will guide them through life. And it endures because of her school’s commitment to create an environment that is consistent across classrooms, and grounded in shared values of trust, equity, and empathy.

See for yourself. And spread the word.

(This post also appeared on Start Empathy.)

Empathy for a Teacher

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on Empathy for a Teacher

In the airy, sun-filled space that will house my son’s foray into formal education, I watched as a tow-headed classmate named Thomas patrolled the edges of the room, choking back tears.

It was the first day of school – and my wife and I were doing our best not to hover too closely over Leo, who was, thankfully, already hard at play in the newly discovered puzzle section. Leo’s co-teachers, Ms. Allison and Ms. Luz, were busy greeting (and consoling) parents, organizing materials, and helping the 28 children – each one their family’s own special miracle – find a way to feel comfortable amidst an unfamiliar world.

For a few moments, I noticed that Thomas was alone. He wandered purposelessly in search of ballast, his cheeks streaked with salty tears. Another boy in the class noticed, too – clearly a veteran of this multi-age classroom where children spend their first three years of school with the same teachers. Without any adult prompting, he went over to Thomas, took hold of his hands, and gave him a welcoming hug.

I felt as grateful as if Thomas had been my own child. Such compassionate behavior in someone so young was a clear reflection of two things: his parents, and his teachers. Sarah and I gave Leo a final hug and walked quickly out of the room, choking back our own tears. It was someone else’s turn to help raise him.

I’ve worked in schools my whole adult life, so I’m more aware than most of the daily challenges and rewards of being a classroom teacher. I’m less aware of how different the classroom starts to look when your own child is in it. But I’m starting to see now how easy it is, if we’re not careful, to view the miniature world of our children’s classrooms through a single, self-serving lens – what is being done to meet the needs of my child, all day, every day?

On one level, this is not an unreasonable question. When we turn our children over to their schools and teachers, we are required to take a serious leap of faith. And, to be sure, I expect Leo’s teachers to get to know him well, to help him understand his own strengths and weaknesses, to give him comfort and challenge him, and to help him fall in love with learning. I also recognize that some days will be better than others, that he is one of many, and that his teachers are not superheroes. Like the rest of us, they are works in progress.

I worry sometimes that we have lost sight of the monumental, sometimes insurmountable challenges of being a classroom teacher. It is the most difficult, most rewarding job out there – filled with daily doses of a complex web of human relationships, emotions, needs and aspirations. Of the 3.2 million teachers in the United States, nearly two out of five are still in their twenties. Nearly nine out of ten are (still) female. And despite the surge of support for better pay, no one is in it for the money.

We know this. Yet we tolerate or participate in conversations about school reform that paint teachers into a two-dimensional corner – you’re either an aging, selfish laggard coasting to a cushy, state-supported retirement package, or you’re a youthful, sleep-deprived warrior willing to forgo any sense of work-life balance to personally deliver your students to the promised land. I’ve met and worked with both stereotypes – and I’d say they account for no more than 5% of the workforce.

Throughout the rest of the profession, you’ll find committed adults like the ones my son has. You’ll find curious professionals who are always searching for ways to get better at their craft. And you’ll see people who are trying to transform the way we think about school by replacing the timeworn expectation that the child must adapt to the school with the revolutionary notion that the school must adapt to the child.

That sort of personalization and support is the sort of vision of schooling our children need. It’s also a lot harder to do well, day in and day out. It is, in other words, not the sort of thing teachers can fulfill by themselves.

So let’s keep our expectations for our nation’s teachers high and fair. Let’s keep our cool when everything doesn’t unfold exactly as we’d like it. And let’s do our part as parents to ensure that every classroom is not just filled with caring adults like Ms. Allison and Ms. Luz, but also with compassionate children like the boy who helped make Thomas feel at home.

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

When it comes to the free-speech rights of teachers, the joke’s still on us

Posted on | by Sam

The good news is that Republican lawmakers in Arizona are now retreating from their recent proposal to require teachers to limit their speech to words that comply with FCC regulations on what can be said on TV or radio — a half-baked idea rightly characterized by one critic as the “most hilariously unconstitutional piece of legislation that I’ve seen in quite some time.”

The bad news is that, Arizona’s foolishness aside, when it comes to the free-speech rights of teachers, or any other public employee, the joke is on us.

The dark days began back in 2006, when a closely divided U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 ruling in the case Garcetti v. Ceballos. Up to that point, courts had always looked for two things when evaluating a public employee’s free-speech claims: first, whether the person was speaking out on a matter of public concern, and not just some personal grievance; and second, what the proper balance was between the individual’s right to free expression and the employer’s interest in ensuring an efficient, disruption-free workplace.
The legal precedent for this test stemmed from a 1968 Supreme Court case in which a public school teacher had been fired for writing a letter to his local paper in which he criticized budgetary decisions by the local school board. A lower court upheld the school’s decision to fire the teacher, but the highest court in the land reversed. Writing for the Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was clear: “Absent proof of false statements knowingly or recklessly made by him, a teacher’s exercise of his right to speak on issues of public importance may not furnish the basis for his dismissal from public employment.”
Then came Garcetti in 2006, a case that began when an assistant district attorney from Los Angeles, Richard Ceballos, wrote a memorandum criticizing the failure of his office to dismiss a case that was marred by false testimony. Ceballos no doubt felt comfortable that his actions would be protected under the existing standard for public employee speech, and, sure enough, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his right to blow the whistle on his superiors. But five Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, resulting in not just a dramatic turn of events for Richard Ceballos, but a new categorical exclusion for official, job-related employee speech.
As First Amendment Center scholar David Hudson explains, “The Garcetti decision caused a sea change in public-employee First Amendment jurisprudence, as many employees who speak out on important issues or blow the whistle on corruption no longer have a constitutional claim.”
Sure enough, since 2006 it has become increasingly difficult for public employees to speak out on matters of public concern that relate to their official duties. As Hudson explains, “After Garcetti, the importance of the information is not relevant. Many employees have spoken out on matters of public concern – even rank corruption in the workplace – but if the speech can be classified as official, job-duty speech they have no First Amendment protection.” Hudson says this new climate has led to a new term lawyers use to describe their clients who still seek First Amendment protection. Instead of getting justice, they get “Garcettized.”
So let’s enjoy a short laugh at the foolishness and the poorly-constructed effort of Arizona’s lawmakers to muzzle their state’s public school teachers. And then let’s remember that a more carefully constructed bill may not be as outlandish, and unlikely, as we think.
(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)

The Wisconsin Teachers Protest: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Wisconsin Teachers Protest: Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

As school systems across the state of Wisconsin cancel another day of classes — the result of massive protests in Madison following Governor Scott Walker’s effort to strip educators of the bulk of their collective bargaining rights — I can’t help but think of the old adage that two wrongs don’t make a right.

Continue reading.

How ‘Bout A Little Respect?

Posted on | by Sam | 4 Comments on How ‘Bout A Little Respect?

I realize the only work-related issue in K-12 education that anyone wants to talk about today is the rumored jobs bill making its way through Congress — a bill that could, depending on whom you ask, either save thousands of essential teacher jobs or simply delay the need to trim excess positions out of a bloated bunch of state budgets — but I can’t stop thinking about a conversation I had last night with my brother-in-law, a recent graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program and a prospective Special Education teacher in a city that sorely needs them.

Now, without bragging, I can objectively say that my brother-in-law is an ideal candidate for someone so new to the profession — he’s smart, dedicated, talented, well-schooled, astute, and also well-aware of the reality of the situation he’s entering. He’d make a great hire, and it sounds like plenty of NYC principals agree — except they can’t hire him yet, and they may not be able to until the last week of this month, just a few days before the start of the school year. That’s because a huge slew of jobs won’t technically become available until then, resulting in a now-annual mad dash at the end of the summer, and a rather disorienting (and stressful) point of entry into an already-challenging gig.

I remember that feeling of disorientation well. Over a decade ago, I began one school year as an 11th grade English teacher in Manhattan. Then, over a month into the school year, I was given my walking papers when another teacher with more experience who had been let go from somewhere else in the city was “assigned” to my school — leaving my department chair with no choice but to tearfully let me go, moments after the final bell on a Friday afternoon.

I was stunned. I had just started to establish meaningful connections with my kids. Now I would never even have an opportunity to tell them what had happened. I would simply disappear.

I spent the weekend frantically calling around to see if other opportunities existed at such a late date. Amazingly (and disconcertingly), they did, and by Sunday evening I was on the verge of accepting a new position. Then my department chair called to say there was an opening in the History department. I could stay at my old school as long as I switched the students, grade and subject I taught. And so, over the course of two days, I swapped out a complete set of kids and lesson plans for another classroom and subject — five full weeks into the school year.

My point in all this?

As I’ve written before, we will not have meaningful change in this country until we invest deeply and over the long-term in the establishment of a true long-term teaching profession, and not a short-term teaching force. There are a number of key policy levers that need to be pulled for this to happen — and a few ideas we must avoid at all costs. But how about we get started right away by ensuring that teachers don’t have to wait until a week before the school year to find out where they’ll be working?

Teaching is the most difficult and rewarding job a person can do. Under the sorts of conditions I just described, it becomes almost impossible. Deep and sustained investments in teacher preparation will take a generation to truly develop. But letting teachers know ahead of time where they’ll work is an easy, and important, self-correction that needs to be made ASAP.

Teacher Money Will Have To Wait, Senate Democrats Say

Posted on | by Sam | 1 Comment on Teacher Money Will Have To Wait, Senate Democrats Say

Yesterday, Congressional Quarterly reported that Senate Democrats have abandoned efforts to add $23 billion for saving teachers’ jobs to their chamber’s supplemental war spending bill, acknowledging they don’t have the 60 votes to block an expected Republican filibuster.

Republicans have criticized the White-House backed proposal as a “bailout” that shouldn’t be attached to an emergency war spending bill. Supporters of the education jobs measure say that it would stave off the loss of tens of thousands of education positions at a time when state budgets are stretched thin and funds from the 2009 economic stimulus law are running dry.

I’m sorry — I realize that teachers have become the face of our dysfunctional education system these days (which is another story), but could there be anything more essential to our national interests than ensuring that our schools remain well-staffed in the midst of numerous state budget crises?

The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand?

Posted on | by Sam | 2 Comments on The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand?

In case you missed it, Steven Brill wrote a relatively balanced piece in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the national education reform landscape — and how teachers unions are truly facing a sink-or-swim moment of reinvention.

As someone who feels neither allegiance nor antipathy toward either of the increasingly polarized camps (I actually like and respect both Linda Darling-Hammond and Jon Schnur), I see the partial truths in each side’s argument. On one hand, for example, it’s clear that K-12 teachers should not be granted lifetime tenure so easily — tenure, after all, was originally designed to protect the free-expression rights of college professors, and since the First Amendment barely even applies to public employees anymore, that point is moot. So I say bring on this reform.

It’s also clear that teacher evaluation systems need to be dramatically retooled. When educators can only be scored ‘satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory,’ that’s a huge problem. So again I say yes to any reform that results in a new system that creates a reciprocal flow of feedback and helps educators improve the quality of their professional practice.

However, I see one massive problem — and it’s a problem that no one, Brill included, seems interested in addressing:  Everyone wants to tie these new teacher evaluations to student performance data, but no one wants to talk publicly about the fact that we lack sufficient metrics for truly evaluating the full extent of whether or not young people are learning and achieving at high levels.

As I’ve written many times before, basic-skills tests in reading and math provide a single, useful proof point that is, in the current climate, dramatically overvalued. To help students learn to use their minds well, schools — and teachers — need to focus on not just basic- but also higher-order skills; they need to engage children in not just reading and math but also the arts and sciences; and they need to focus less on just data per se, and more on how well we’re equipping our teachers to respond to data in ways that improve the overall learning conditions (and outcomes) for kids.

A system, therefore, that incentivizes compensation and job security by using a single measure to count for as much as 50% of an evaluation will incentivize — you guessed it! — a relentless focus on basic-skills reading and math scores. But that’s not enough if we want the achievement gap to mean more than test scores. And more people need to start calling it out.

The good news is that although we may not yet have these more sophisticated metrics in place, at least we know what we should be looking for. This month, I’m finalizing the manuscript of a book that brings together 50 powerful stories about teaching and learning — selected from the many hundred that have been submitted by people across the country as part of a national campaign. The stories recount a wide range of experiences — from third grade classrooms to Outward Bound courses to church missions to prison sentences — but what they combine to make visible are the core conditions of a powerful learning environment. (See for yourself at rethinklearningnow.com.) And although they do not reveal a simple, single answer to the deeply complex question of how to improve our schools, they do clarify the question we should be asking ourselves at every turn — How do we create more challenging, engaging, supportive, relevant and experiential learning opportunities for children?

Imagine if more people started asking that question. Imagine what a new statewide teacher evaluation system would need to look like in response. And ask yourself — would you want that sort of environment for your child?