Teachers, Doctors, and Professionalism

 Photo from Professorbaker's blog

Diane Ravitch shares a fascinating story a reader sent her:

A reader sent in a comment about holding teachers accountable for test scores.

He attended a “question and answer” luncheon hosted by the Lafayette, Louisiana, Chamber of Commerce, where Governor Bobby Jindal was the speaker. Jindal came late, spoke fast, and left without answering any questions. The reader, possibly the only educator in the audience, turned to the CEO of a hospital sitting next to him and asked “if he ever pondered posting his hospital’s mortality rate outside its door.”

The reader was “a little surprised at how firmly his ‘no’ response was—-it was as if I asked him to jump off of a bridge. I was merely trying to make a comparison to cohort grad rates and letter grading systems in our state to the business community.” The reader concluded that “accountability as educators know it will never be applied to any other type of profession much less within the business community despite their unwavering support of accountability for public schools. That CEO’s firm ‘no’ response was all the proof I needed that accountability the way we know it will not make anything better….and the business world knows this.”

Another reader liked that comment and added: “had the CEO offered more than his terse response, I suspect his explanation would include that although doctors play a role in a patient’s health, there are a number of other factors that doctors have no control over–patient’s genetics, prior medical history, willingness to follow the doctor’s prescriptions, environment, how far an illness has progressed before the doctor sees the patient, etc. And, of course, his explanation is perfectly valid. For some reason, though, when teachers make the same point regarding students’ test scores, corporate ed reformers are quick to accuse them of making excuses.“

Now it is true that doctors absolutely HAVE to go to school for a much longer time than teachers do given the amount of life-saving information they must know, sometimes right off the top of their head without being able to look it up.  And let's be honest, as important as the purpose of being a teacher is, the purpose of being an MD is much more important when all things are considered.  I can even see this being a valid justification for doctors making a lot more money than teachers (though, of course, public school teachers are still highly underpaid).

But the overall point Diane and these readers are making are absolutely true.  For whatever faults the teaching profession may have, teachers are still highly trained professionals.  Education, like medicine, is an area that is unconditionally paramount to a healthy, successful society.  Accountability - whether in education, medicine or elsewhere - is certainly important.  But accountability in any profession that serves such an important purpose should not be reduced down to an agenda-driven panacea (i.e. testing), while trying to factor in other such complexities of said profession are considered making excuses.  Accountability, especially when it is for a highly critical profession dealing with significant complexity, should be reflective of that complexity.  Here is what Ken Jones of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has to say about teacher accountability:

We most certainly need teacher accountability. But it should be the kind that builds capacity, not the kind that creates fear. It should look at complexities, not simplicities. Teachers should be accountable for grounding professional practices in the best available research, for maintaining a modern vision of what constitutes important mathematics, for providing students with engaging and relevant lessons and equitable opportunities to learn. This type of accountability must focus on individual responsiveness and interpersonal dynamics within specific contexts. It must be local in implementation and of high resolution in the light it sheds on teachers’ practice and students’ learning.

High-resolution accountability is a far cry from the new trend for high-stakes teacher accountability. It emphasizes information feedback and continuous improvement, not false and degrading “incentive” systems. It takes time, leadership, attention to the many details of practice, and a culture of reflective practice. Let’s face it—there are no shortcuts to improving education

Professor Thomas Baker of the English Department at Colegio Internacional SEK in Santiago, Chile also an a piece of teachers and doctors on his blog that is worth a read.  He sums the issue up this way:

Society is pretty darn lenient with doctors. We don’t hold them accountable for things which they could be reasonably expected to perform a lot better, for society as a whole.

On the other hand, society, in general, gets pretty riled up about teachers. People get angry when they talk about the performance of the teaching profession.

There is even, “strong empirical evidence that suggests teachers are the most important aspect in the educational achievement of students.”

And so, society is very upset with these so-called “Teacher Professionals”.

“Why can’t teachers be more like doctors?”, society asks.

This teacher, myself, asks the reverse question:

“What if doctors were treated like teachers?”

Andrew Hutman, Teach for America and the case against the "reform" movement

Everyone who cares even the slightest about education policy in the United States needs to read this article by Illinois State History Professor, Andrew Hutman on the Jacobin Magazine website.  It is entitled "Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders", and has recently gained much more traction in education circles with it's reprint in Valerie Strauss's Washington Post education blog, The Answer Sheet under the title "Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda".

It is an article that primarily discusses the fact that the Teach for America (TFA) program, and the influence it has had on this newest "education reform" movement.  Hutman talks about how TFA, and the reform movement as a whole, seems to care about the education of poverty-stricken students in the United States (and many in the reform movement, including Wendy Kopp, probably do care in their deep down).  But the reality of what their policies actually do is to push for "reforms" in favor of austerity and business-friendly interests.  Most of those involved in public education, including those who have been involved in the SOS movement, already know this.  But for those who don't, Hutman has done an amazing job of essentially laying out the case against the so-called "education reform" movement like no one else has since Diane Ravitch in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Here are some excerpts from Hutman's article.  First, his take on the true identity of TFA:

TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.

On the myth that TFA would "enhance the image of the teaching profession":

On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in The New York Times , 18 percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the 22 percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010. [In 2011 the acceptance rate was 11 percent.]

Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem. TFA corps members typically come from prestigious institutions of higher education, while most regular teachers are trained at the second- and third-tier state universities that house the nation’s largest colleges of education. 

Whereas TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance — or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership — most regular teachers must plod along, negotiating their way through traditional career ladders. These distinctions are lost on nobody. They are what make regular teachers and their unions such low-hanging political fruit for the likes of Christie, Walker, and Kasich.

Hutman on the idea of how programs and reforms fix the problem of "teacher quality" by kicking out bad teachers, and bringing in good ones:

Following the economic collapse of 2008, which contributed to school revenue problems nationwide, massive teacher layoffs became the new norm, including in districts where teacher shortages had provided an entry to TFA in the past. Thousands of Chicago teachers, for instance, have felt the sting of layoffs and furloughs in the past two years, even as the massive Chicago Public School system, bound by contract, continues to annually hire a specified number of TFA corps members. In the face of these altered conditions, the TFA public relations machine now deemphasizes teacher shortages and instead accentuates one crucial adjective: “quality.” In other words, schools in poor urban and rural areas of the country might not suffer from a shortage of teachers in general, but they lack for the quality teachers that Kopp’s organization provides.

After twenty years of sending academically gifted but untrained college graduates into the nation’s toughest schools, the evidence regarding TFA corps member effectiveness is in, and it is decidedly mixed. Professors of education Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez, in the most thorough survey of such research yet, found that TFA corps members tend to perform equal to teachers in similar situations —that is, they do as well as new teachers lacking formal training assigned to impoverished schools. Sometimes they do better, particularly in math instruction. 

Yet “the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well,” Vasquez Heilig and Jin Jez discovered, “than those of credentialed beginning teachers.”  It seems clear that TFA’s vaunted thirty-day summer institute—TFA “boot camp”—is no replacement for the preparation given future teachers at traditional colleges of education.

 On how successful most Charter Schools are:

But successful charter schools, Kopp maintains, also stop at nothing to remove bad teachers from the classroom. This is why charter schools are the preferred mechanism for delivery of education reform: as defined by Kopp, charter schools are “public schools empowered with flexibility over decision making in exchange for accountability for results.” And yet, “results,” or rather, academic improvement, act more like a fig leaf, especially in light of numerous recent studies that show charter schools, taken on the whole, actually do a worse job of educating students than regular public schools.

On Teacher Unions and the reform movement:

Rather, crushing teacher’s unions — the real meaning behind Kopp’s “flexibility” euphemism — has become the ultimate end of the education reform movement. This cannot be emphasized enough: the precipitous growth of charter schools and the TFA insurgency are part and parcel precisely because both cohere with the larger push to marginalize teacher’s unions.

On TFA, Race to the Top, and the "business" of High-Stakes Testing:

TFA’s complicity in education reform insanity does not stop there. From its origins, the TFA-led movement to improve the teacher force has aligned itself with efforts to expand the role of high-stakes standardized testing in education. TFA insurgents, including Kopp and Rhee, maintain that, even if imperfect, standardized tests are the best means by which to quantify accountability. 

Prior to the enactment of Bush’s bipartisan No Child Left Behind in 2001, high-stakes standardized testing was mostly limited to college-entrance exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). But since then, the high-stakes testing movement has blown up: with increasing frequency, student scores on standardized exams are tied to teacher, school, and district evaluations, upon which rewards and punishments are meted out. Obama’s “Race to the Top” policy — the brainchild of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the former “CEO” of Chicago Public Schools — further codifies high-stakes testing by allocating scarce federal resources to those states most aggressively implementing these so-called accountability measures.

The multi-billion dollar testing industry — dominated by a few large corporations that specialize in the making and scoring of standardized tests — has become an entrenched interest, a powerful component of a growing education-industrial complex.

On Testing and Cheating:

More recently, cheating scandals have likewise discredited several celebrated reform projects. In Atlanta, a TFA hotbed, former superintendent and education reform darling Beverly Hall is implicated in a cheating scandal of unparalleled proportions, involving dozens of Atlanta principals and hundreds of teachers, including TFA corps members. Cheating was so brazen in Atlanta that principals hosted pizza parties where teachers and administrators systematically corrected student exams. Following a series of investigative reports in USA Today , a new cheating scandal seems to break every week. Cheating has now been confirmed not only in Atlanta, but also in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, Dayton, and Memphis, education reform cities all.

On TFA, inequality and corporate money:

In contrast to such “success,” the TFA insurgency has failed to dent educational inequality. This comes as no surprise to anyone with the faintest grasp of the tight correlation between economic and educational inequality: TFA does nothing to address the former while spinning its wheels on the latter. 

In her writings, nowhere does Kopp reflect upon the patent ridiculousness of her expectation that loads of cash donated by corporations that exploit inequalities across the world — such as Union Carbide and Mobil, two of TFA’s earliest contributors — will help her solve some of the gravest injustices endemic to American society.

Kopp shows some awareness of the absurdities of her own experiences — including a “fundraising schedule [that] shuttled me between two strikingly different economic spheres: our undersourced classrooms and the plush world of American philanthropy” — but she fails to grasp that this very gap is what makes her stated goal of equality unachievable. In short, Kopp, like education reformers more generally, is an innocent when it comes to political economy. She spouts platitudes about justice for American children, but rarely pauses to ask whether rapidly growing inequality might be a barrier to such justice. She celebrates 20 years of reform movement success, but never tempers such self-congratulatory narcissism with unpleasant questions about why those who have no interest in disrupting the American class structure — such as Bill Gates and the heirs to Sam Walton’s fortunes, by far the most generous education reform philanthropists — are so keen to support the TFA insurgency. Kopp is a parody of the liberal do-gooder.

 The philosophy of TFA:

In working to perfect their approach to education, TFA insurgents miss the forest for the trees. They fail to ask big-picture questions. Will their pedagogy of surveillance make for a more humane society? Having spent their formative years in a classroom learning test-taking skills, will their students become good people? Will they know more history? Will they be more empathetic? Will they be better citizens? Will they be more inclined to challenge the meritocracy? Or, as its newest converts, will they be its most fervent disciples? What does it mean that for children born in the Bronx to go to college they must give up their childhoods, however bleak?

 

The Message of the SOS March

Of all the events I missed writing about during my 5 month hiatus, the Save Our Schools March that took place in Washington, D.C. was probably the thing I wish I could have covered the most.  I wasn't in D.C., but I would have been there if I could have afforded it.  I ended up watching most of the speeches on the internet.  I thought I would share some of them here.

First, there is the speech from actor Matt Damon, whose Mom is an educator:



Secondly, there is Diane Ravitch, who has become one of my heroes this past year for sticking up for teachers against the so-called "education reform" movement.



Finally, here is a message from John Stewart (another one of my heroes).



The message of this march was an important one.  There are so many problem in education, but the focus of how to fix the problems and the resources that are used all go to the wrong places.  Instead of blaming poverty (and all of it's effects) for the achievement gap, we blame teachers and teacher unions.  Instead of individuals with vast amounts of experience in education to run our schools, we hire individuals with ties to big businesses.  Instead of trying to make society more equitable and secure, we fire teachers and close down schools.  Instead of trying to improve the public schools we have, we open charter schools as a panacea that can refuse to take students who need the most help.  Instead of teaching a holistic curriculum that emphasizes practical application of concepts and critical thinking skills, we narrow our curriculum to reading and math, and teach kids how to take multiple choice tests.  And when that isn't good enough, people get desperate and cheat.

If you want a good summary of what is really wrong with public education today, watch this recent interview with Ravitch and New York City school teacher Brian Jones on Democracy Now.


Oh, and for fun, watch Matt Damon school a reporter from Reason TV on education policy.  You are the man, Jason Bourne!

Again, Thank You Jon Stewart

On last night's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart did another segment on the recent trend of teacher bashing.  As I said in my previous post on this topic, I can understand how the salary and benefits looks pretty good in this economy to many, but it wasn't all that long ago teachers (like a lot of public sector workers) were considered underpaid and overworked.  But now that times are tough, and so many in the private sector are suffering, public employee workers like teachers have it to easy.  Everyone has to bare the burden.  Everyone has to sacrifice. . .

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

 . . .except, apparently, the CEOs of major banks and Fortune 500 companies:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Also on last nights episode is an interview Jon Stewart has with Diane Ravitch. Enjoy!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Diane Ravitch
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Poverty, PISA, and the Myth About Public Schools in America and Around the World

Photo from Space Goddess

Recently in his Class Struggle blog, Jay Matthews has taken on two conventional myths about public education.  The first myth is that at one time, American schools were great and in recent years, they have greatly declined.  The truth is, as Matthews cites Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute, is that we were never that great, nor are we now that bad.  American schools have always been mediocre.  We have based traditionally based the success of American schools on test scores like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).  On such test scores, American students have always scored less than stellar on such comparative tests, even as far back as the 1960s.  While this is not really a good thing, this does not suggest that America, or American schools, are inferior to others around the world.

For the past 50 years, the United States has been one of the world's superpowers.  We have been the world's dominant country in both economics and military power.  While I would argue that there are better ways to measure the success and well-being of a country, it certainly can't be said that because we have never ranked that great on standardized tests, that we are are some how an inferior nation that struggles compared to the rest of the industrialized world. 

Picture from Finland Educational Guide 

The second myth that Matthew's looks at is that other countries around the world have superior schools because they test better.  These countries include schools such as China, India, and the country many consider to have the top education system in the world, Finland.  While there is certainly a lot to laud about Finnish schools, their superiority in test scores is actually something that is of great debate currently in Finland.  

Loveless is less dismissive of Finland, which has been scoring well for several years. But he says Americans who love the Finnish model of paying teachers higher salaries, decentralizing authority over educational decisions and eschewing high-stakes standardized testing should tune into the debate the Finns are having about their schools. 

Finnish children were doing well on international tests before those reforms were adopted. That suggests that cultural and societal factors might be the more likely reason for their success. Many Finnish mathematicians say that the country is catering too much to PISA, which emphasizes word problems and practical applications of math, and neglecting to prepare students for college math. 

Loveless says more than 200 university mathematicians in Finland petitioned the education ministry to complain of students increasingly arriving in their classrooms poorly prepared. "Knowledge of fractions and algebra were singled out as particularly weak areas," Loveless says. 

 So the reason that Finland tests so well on international scores is because there education system is geared towards testing well.  That alone doesn't make their schools more superior than other countries, and in point of fact, is the topic of great debate in Finland.  This same point was made by both Diane Ravitch and the Wall Street Journal a month ago about China's schools.  As Ravitch writes:

In The Wall Street Journal, Jiang Xueqin, the deputy principal of Peking University High School, lamented that those high scores were purchased by sacrificing such qualities as independence, curiosity, and individuality. Even educators in Shanghai, he wrote, recognize that the singular devotion to test scores was "producing competent mediocrity."  

 In the quote from Matthews above on Finnish schools, I highlighted a sentence that he wrote, but really didn't explain.  That being about "cultural and societal factors" as one explanation why Finland does so well in schools.  What are those factors exactly?  Well, I believe Ravitch stumbled upon the problem in her piece:

The other salient factor about U.S. performance on international tests is that we have an exceptional and shameful rate of child poverty. Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution says that more than 20 percent of our children live in poverty, and she expects that proportion to increase to nearly 25 percent by 2014. As poverty deepens, Sawhill writes, we should be strengthening the safety net that protects the lives of the poorest. Robert Reich, the former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, says that income inequality is higher now than it has been in many decades. Most of the nations (and cities) that compete on PISA have far lower child-poverty rates. 

In recent years, we have become accustomed to hearing prominent reformers like Secretary Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Klein say that reference to poverty is just making excuses for bad teachers and bad schools. But there is plenty of evidence that poverty affects students' readiness to learn. It affects their health, their nutrition, their attendance, and their motivation. Being hungry and homeless distracts students and injures their health; living in an environment where drugs and violence are commonplace affects children's interest in academics. Living in communities where many stores and homes are boarded up, and where incarceration rates are very high, affects children's sense of possibility and their willingness to plan for the future. 

Researchers for the National Association for Secondary School Principals disaggregated the PISA results by income and made some stunning discoveries. Take a look at this link ("PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid"). It shows that American students in schools with low poverty rates were first in the world when they were compared with students in nations with comparably low poverty levels. Thus, the picture painted by doomsayers about American education is false in this respect. We have many outstanding schools and students, but our overall performance is dragged down by the persistence of poverty. Poverty depresses school achievement because it hurts children, families, and communities.

Picture from China Smack 

 The truth of the matter is that, all things considered, American schools are no worse than most countries around the world.  If anything, our schools as they exist in many neighborhoods are just as capable of outperforming schools in Finland, China, or any other industrialized nation.  There certainly are things that our country can do better to improve the quality of schools and education as a whole.  But the main reason that a school district usually struggles to begin with is poverty.  The reason that inner-city school districts struggles with lower test scores, higher drop-out rates, violence, increased teen pregnancy, and so on is because of the poverty that most of the students and their parents live in.  Everyone knows this is the case, and has known it for years.  For all of the well-being and economic success our country has had compared to the rest of the world, poverty (and all of the societal problems that are linked to it) is the great albatross around America's neck.

I find it interesting that so-called education reformers believe the key to fighting poverty in inner-cities today is battling teacher unions, funding charter schools over public schools, and narrowing the curriculum to focus mainly on reading and math test scores.  While I am sure most of them have good intentions in their actions, their policies will only make things worse for our country.  They are hurting public schools in inner cities, and treating them as if they are the source of so many problems.  True, inner city schools have serious issues, but it is not public schools as a whole that is the source.  Wealthier, suburban districts with low poverty rates don't seem to have the same problems that these school districts have, and those schools have teacher unions, and government regulation.  It seems that so much money and energy that the reformers spend on fighting unions and opening charter schools could go to the root of the problem to begin with.  There are better ways to improve public schools and fight poverty than the current conventional thinking by reformers.