How has school reform changed who the good teachers are?

There must be some connection.

Before I move forward, I want you to think back on your high school experiences. Try to remember the good teachers. The teachers who didn't just teach you but inspired you or gave you perspective or honed your skills. Recall which lessons you remember well and which ones you don't (I, for example, completely forgot that I had read Macbeth in the 10th grade and still know nothing about the play but I remember much of Julius Cesar from that same year [I should also point out that most teachers don't have time anymore for 2 Shakespeare plays]).

I want to be a bit controversial here and challenge you. Your favorite teachers. The ones you remember most fondly and who had a big impact on your life are NOT good teachers anymore.


I firmly believe you would not recognize the courses or activities of your favorite teachers if you could retake them today. But does this make them bad teachers? The alternative is for them to lose their jobs by not meeting the Standards. The alternative is for them to spend their own money from a shrinking paycheck. They have to put in more hours at school for remediation and for giving students extra time on assignments that previous years students' would have easily completed. 

SEE! That white boy is pointing
at AFRICA!

I think that for two reasons: either they had to substantially alter their curriculum or they left the profession. Schools are not the same as they were when you were in high school. If you graduated before 2004, you didn't have to take NCLB tests like the Georgia High School Graduation Test. If you graduated before 2004, your teachers didn't have to alter their curriculum to meet the Georgia Professional Standards. If you graduated before 2006, your school didn't have much data to see if it passed AYP. In other words, the school systems didn't demand two dozen (or more) days of test preparation from their schools. If you graduated before 2008, your teachers were still getting a 1% annual raise. Since then, the school systems have stopped the "step" increases and decreased teacher pay through furloughs all while hours worked have gone up.


Did extracurricular activities influence you? I probably benefited more from my high school debate team than any other factor in my education (except those socio-economic ones). My coach stopped sponsoring the team in 2007 even though we were in the state top 5 in all of our events since 2003 (and ranked nationally in the top 20 in 2004). Nobody replaced him. Most schools have cut all funding on non-athletic programs. Similarly, the coaches and faculty sponsors for smaller activities don't get extra pay for their coaching/sponsorship. Many schools dropped their newspapers entirely. Most year-books are simply created by a yearbook company and filled in through a template rather than created by the students. Teams (and teachers for field trips) have to rent county school buses for travel - most counties provide no money for travel of any kind. 


You should feel lucky that your gifted and AP teachers were shielded from this for a few years longer than the general ed. teachers. But schools quickly saw that having numerous AP programs made them appear prestigious. The number of AP courses went up. Enrollment in AP went up. Pass rates on AP exams went down. As a freshman, students can now take AP courses if they want to: AP human systems (social geography), AP ecology, AP exercise science (kind of like PE + anatomy but still taught by PE coaches). These all count as core content area credit for graduating high school but many students don't even take the AP exams for college credit. AP teachers are still required to meet the GPS even through they are also trying to meet college board requirements that don't always overlap.


What about vocational and career oriented programs? (My quick recall tells me that the only one among our readers who spent time in vocational courses was Lisa.) We hear plenty of rhetoric about schools needing to prepare students to enter the workforce but the vast majority of counties cancelled their vocational/career programs entirely. These classes didn't count toward the NCLB requirements because the policies sought to improve college attendance. Even though Lisa will be going to medical school next year (and focusing on how to best serve high-need populations) the health occupations teacher who inspired her and hundreds more to become a doctor (or nurse, or technician, or EMT) is told every year that the career technology program in her county is on the chopping block. In Gwinnett, if students want to take career courses, they have to enroll at a special high school in the far south of the county. They have to pay a few hundred dollars in tuition (I think it was about $250 a semester) and they are responsible for transporting themselves to school - no buses. Fayette just doesn't give you the option. You're college prep. Indeed, counties like Gwinnett and Fayette routinely boast that 100% of their students are on college bound tracks. 


Opinion 6: Policy makers and the public in general have a bias to replicate what worked for them. The point of challenging your memories is to point out a bias in our reasoning. We educated and (somewhat) successful people tend to want to replicate the factors which made us successful. In policy, we see that bias represented in the goals dictated: only careers in Law, Medicine, or Business have prestige because those are the careers from which our policy makers come. Is it any wonder that they seek to create a system which pushes kids to follow in their steps: don't go to that stupid shop class, take more AP classes; no matter what, go to a 4-year university; get into business school, law school, or medical school. The attitude seems to be: "college was great for me and made me successful; therefore, we ought to encourage students to follow in my footsteps". When we place these pressures on schools through both societal prestige/opinion and through policy, is it any wonder schools are failing to meet those demands?


I'll use myself as the test-case. I come from an affluent family. My parents are well educated from good universities and my dad was very well compensated for his work at a major Wall St. firm. I attended an elite suburban high school (and private school when I was younger) and the value of my post-secondary education is somewhere around $60 thousand dollars (in terms of tuition, state schools are cheap). I have my masters in teaching and I can't find work and I make $18k a year with no current prospects for improving that. The guy installing my dad's high-definition satellite is an electrician who owns his own cable/satellite installation business on the side. He went to tech school for 2 years and is a trained, certified electrician. He makes $60k a year in salary and more off the side business. Yet he has no prestige. No politician looks at him and says "there's the American dream". Oddly, only the marketplace rewards him in the form of adequate compensation for his expertise and hard work.


This is all to say that our vision of success and prestige is just as guilty of warping our educational system as the policies of NCLB are. When being a good teacher only means pushing kids to pass standardized tests and then pushing them into 4-year universities, we're doing our communities a disservice. Yet nobody seems interested in changing where the prestige falls. Nobody want to pat an electrician on the back and say "you're a model of success".


Our schools and policy makers are busy trying to get us to replicate their success. Toward that end, our teachers are on the line for preparing kids for "a global marketplace" or for "high-skill, high-wage" careers. The good teachers are ones who meet the needs of these goals.


But what really makes someone a good teacher? 


Opinion 7: It is nearly impossible to decide who is and is not a good teacher. Teachers might succeed in one environment but fail in another. The school I work in used to be one of the best schools in Georgia. In 2004 it had the highest SAT scores in the state. The community it serves was an affluent suburb of professionals with a strong middle class background. It was mostly white but the county bussed students in from poorer areas in an effort to improve their performance. The results were inconclusive. Many of the teachers there have been at the school since it opened. Several teachers have won state teacher of the year over the 14 years the school has been open. Many of the teachers have been nationally recognized for their involvement, teaching, or coaching. There are numerous teachers with PhDs and EdS degrees. Many are certified by the National Board. The teachers generally live in the community that the school serves. Their children went to school there. Parents and community members were heavily involved in the school. I couldn't imagine a better recipe for a successful school.

The school, however, has changed over the past five or six years. The demographics of the community shifted in the wake of the real-estate crisis. Apartment homes were built in the spaces between neighborhoods and property values dropped. Minorities, especially Hispanics, moved into the area. With them they brought the dual challenges of language and poverty. The school didn't make AYP last year by a hair-thin margin.

These former teachers of the year are finding themselves with an increasing failure rate. "These kids," they say, "don't do the work. They don't study, they don't do homework, they sleep through class. They deserve to fail." So they fail. Are these bad teachers?

In my view, these teachers need to change their attitudes. If they still taught the same kids they taught six years ago, they'd be fine. But they don't. What purpose does the "rigor" serve if it results in too many students failing. Failures are fine at 5% of the student body. At 10%? 20%? 50%? Are we really doing society a favor by holding these students to the same standards as their demographically distinct predecessors? 

I suppose this is a flip side to the dehumanization of the testing system. The teachers here are used to one kind of student. They were wildly successful with that group of kids and are finding themselves threatened as they fail to meet those same expectations with another group of students. 

When I did my student teaching in a Title I school, I heard several teachers and administrators comment that teachers in "good" schools weren't good teachers because they didn't have to try. They didn't have to work hard because their students would always do the work in front of them. The refrain was: "they don't have to teach". I'm beginning to wonder if there's some truth to that. 

If a student doesn't have a computer at home, or the time to do reading/homework because he or she needs to work to feed him/herself, why would you expect that student to live up to the same standard of performance? 

I work with a teacher who expects her students to complete work at home or if they can't, they should come in before or after school. My (unvoiced) question to her is "How?" How can these kids get here early? The bus arrives 10 minutes before first period begins. Their guardians leave early in the morning to work (or simply won't bring them to school). They can't afford a car. There's no local transit system (one big advantage students had in Gwinnett county was Gwinnett's public transit system stops near many of the schools). If they stay after school, nobody will come to pick them up. Many students don't have computers at home or can't afford the software used in this particular class. These aren't problems which this teacher is used to dealing with. This teacher frequently tells students that putting in extra time is the only way to pass the class, but extra time is a luxury. Teachers at this school fail to recognize this and are hurting their students.

And it's only going to get harder. In two years it is possible that this school will become Title I.

I don't want to misrepresent the school. I don't work with every teacher and I am only sharing impressions based on the interaction I have had (I'd love to do a formal academic survey of teacher attitudes here but I don't know how). I firmly believe that the school is still effective for most of its students. I simply think that the faculty and staff here are going to have a difficult time with the changing demographics if they continue to have the same strategies and expectations they've had for the past decade. This is no different than the challenges facing schools like Lassiter and Sprayberry in Cobb county, or Duluth high school in Gwinnett.

I don't think these are bad teachers. I don't think they deserve to be fired because their kids aren't passing state exams. I simply want them to learn how to adapt and how to put their previous energy and dedication into new lessons and new expectations. I want them to find a way to alter the curriculum in a way that maintains the rigor but embraces the difficult home lives of their students. 

It's asking a lot, I know. It's also something which their school system won't help them do. They have the added pressures mentioned above: high expectations, less pay, more responsibilities, increasing accountability. I'm also not sure how to help them. I don't have magic lesson plans to reach the hardest to teach students (despite what my Masters program led me to believe). I can't bring up attendance rates in high risk communities (can't teach 'em if they're not here). I can't make their parents or guardians care about school or find them the time in their busy lives to help students on homework and projects. I can't fix the county's or the state's revenue problems (at least not until election time). 

Opinion 8: I can only do one thing: become a teacher. While I've spent 3 years (as of this May), $30k on a degree (and cost of living while being a student), and countless hours trying to become a teacher, I haven't gotten my own classroom yet. Maybe it shouldn't be this hard to become a teacher. Maybe I'm a failure or maybe I'm just unlucky with my timing. But I know that I have a chance to be great. I know that I'm aware of many of my assumptions about teaching and learning and that I am flexible enough to change with the students. I believe in the stated mission of public education: learning provides opportunity. I will give it my best shot. I will bend over backward to help my students. I will put in the hours and the money and take on all the stress and thankless assessment and pay cuts because I have no other choice. If I'm going to do something good, a classroom is the place for me to be.  I am going to be  good teacher.

School vouchers

I'm going to go a little off topic and post about school vouchers. David was kind enough to share an article with me about public opinion and vouchers. The article contained the following confusing chart:

Yglesias reaches the following conclusions:

The primary driver here seems to be religion. White evangelicals and Catholics (both Latino and white) want the government to pay for them to go to religious schools. South blacks are dubious about vouchers because they see them as a backdoor resegregation policy but elsewhere poor blacks like them. Mainline Protestants and non-evangelicals are happy attending non-religious schools and don’t seem interested.

As with most things on the internet, the linked post is part of a long conversation. I'll link it up in order below:

The conversation started with Matt Ridley's Wall St. Journal article Free-Market Solutions to Overweight Americans.

Then it was commented on by Tyler Cowen at the excellent Marginal Revolution.

Tyler Cowen has the status of Blog-father in the politico-econo-blogosphere so everyone is required to react.

Which brings us to the Yglesias post linked above. You can read or not at your leisure.

I'll get to that teacher post at some point I promise.

Dehumanizing the vulnerable through bad inscentives

I have two more things to add to the testing debate, one short one long. 

Short first: there's no really good evidence that our current batteries of tests accurately assess student capabilities. In fact, there's good evidence that the way the tests are administered is seriously flawed. Standardized writing assessments, for example, are produced by testing companies and scored by, well, pretty much anybody. I suspect that the linked practices are the norm among testing companies. There's an assumption that test scores are valid as long as they fit a standard bell-curve, but nobody stops to think about whether or not it should be fitting the bell-curve. Indeed, these companies stand to make a greater profit when schools fail their tests than if schools pass them because then the schools buy millions of dollars of test preparation software, test books, and practice tests (which they have to pay to have scored). States rarely develop their own standardized tests, preferring to hire education companies to write and score the tests. The Georgia Assessment for the Certification of Educators, which everybody has to take in order to teach in Georgia is created and scored by Pearson Education Inc. Although standardized tests are the preferred (and only politically viable) method of measuring student and teacher performance, their efficacy is questionable. And even if these tests are accurate, I still don't think they should be the only way schools, teachers, and students are assessed.

Which brings me to my second testing objection and 5th opinion:

Opinion 5: Our educational system, as currently constituted, systematically dehumanizes and discourages the very people it ought to help most. The importance of standardized testing has increased dramatically over the past decade. All jobs public schooling are dependent on test scores: teachers all the way up to superintendents and school system CEOs (yes, schools have CEOs now) are required to continually improve test scores. Children, as a result, are reduced to vehicles for testing. They are their test scores because that's all that matters. 

Google image search always finds the most relevant images.

To flesh out my point, I'd like to use a few examples from my time student teaching, substitute teaching, and working as a paraprofessional. I'll be leaving names and school names out of the mix because they really don't matter. My experiences have taken me to a wide variety of schools from Title I urban schools to elite suburban high schools and everything in between. I've observed similar dehumanization across the board because, as I maintain, the system demands it. 

Let's call one of the students I've taught Victoria. Victoria was absent one day and missed a test. When she returned she asked her teacher if she could make up the test. Victoria, however, did not have a note from the office excusing her absence. She explained that she was absent because she had to stay home and watch her baby sister. Watching siblings is not considered an excused absence by the school and Victoria was not allowed to make up her test and now has a zero for her test grade. Ask yourself, what kind of situation is Victoria's family in that she must miss school one day to take care of her baby sister? Can't her parents afford day care or a babysitter? Couldn't one of her parents have stayed home to watch the child? How often does this happen to Victoria? Don't they value their daughter's education? I think the answers are pretty clear. They don't have another option. I'm sure you can fill in other demographic and social information about Victoria and her family - your assumptions, in this instance, are probably accurate.

Victoria probably missed assignments in other classes too. Maybe some of her teachers were kind enough to give her the work anyway. Maybe they weren't. Victoria has learned that the school doesn't care about her or her family. In her mind she obeyed her parents and helped her family, yet the school is telling her it's the wrong choice. She's probably missed (and will miss) many days of school to help out her family. Before long, her grades will drop and she will be targeted for remediation. The school does a good job of identifying students who are struggling. They know that students who fall behind tend to snow-ball and are at risk of dropping out. So they do what any school would do: enroll her in standardized test prep classes. This particular school has a seminar class three days a week for 30 minutes. Most students can choose their seminars (ex: Yoga, or guitar, or video gaming) but students targeted for remediation have no choice. They spend seminar learning testing strategies in the subject they score lowest in. If a student is particularly low-performing, he or she will be pulled out of elective courses three days a week for more test prep. When this happens, students tend to get behind in their electives. So Victoria sees her grades drop further. Classes she enjoys (she picked her electives after all) are taken away from her so she can practice word problems or reading comprehension for the graduation test. 

Is it any wonder students drop out? They know the school doesn't see them. The school only sees a test score. Victoria doesn't matter. Her little sister doesn't matter. Her socio-economic situation doesn't matter. Her test score matters. The administrators need to meet AYP or they loose their jobs. Soon, teachers will loose their pay or their jobs because of students like Victoria. Teachers already pitch a fit when they are assigned groups of low-performing students. How's it going to be when their pay is on the line too?

I'm surprised standardized test scores don't effect your credit score.
There has to be a correlation.

I had another student who I'll call Nina. Nina was a 5th year senior and clearly hated being in school. She rarely showed up and failed classes regularly. What Nina wanted, more than anything, was to take her GED exams and move on with her life but she didn't know how to enroll for the tests or that she had to withdraw from school before she could sign up to take the GED. Her guidance councilor, teachers, and administrators weren't allowed to give her information about the GED. You see, when a student formally withdraws, it counts against AYP. If Nina took the GED, it would effect the school negatively. Because this girl wanted to graduate on her own terms, she was forbidden help. Her teachers had to encourage her to stay in school for up to 2 more years (at 21 they are removed by law without penalty to the school) and faced potential administrative reprimand if they gave her GED information. Eventually she stopped showing up. A few weeks later, she withdrew from school for nonattendance (happens automatically when students max out consecutive absences). Lose, lose.

It pains me to participate in a school system which reduces its students to numbers. I do my best to treat each student as a real person. My hope is that I can somehow keep kids from being ground down by the system. Maybe I can for a while but sometimes I read things like this. Even though I have a low opinion of teachers, I think there are some fantastic people teaching. There are teachers who really make a difference and still manage to jump through all the hoops. Our policy responses keep adding hoops and more teachers become discouraged. Is the teacher in the linked article a bad teacher? Let's say she continues teaching but finds that more and more students are failing her courses and/or failing state exams. Then is she a bad teacher? If she quits because of her change of heart, is she someone who "wasn't committed to education"?

My next post will be about teachers (again). Specifically, who are the good ones and who are the bad ones? How can we tell?

Charter schools.

Sorry I didn't post Friday, I am visiting my family and was distracted. Charter schools are an interesting case study in school autonomy yet it seems as if many schools decide to exercize that autonomy in one way: teacher accountability. Remember, charter schools still have to make AYP and get their kids to pass the same standardized tests as public schools. Those tests are still the only way charter schools are officially assessed under NCLB. Here's what I wrote:

Opinion 4 (continued):Charter schools are the darling example of good schooling put forward by the Obama administration, the left-leaning education think tanks, NBC, etc (but not teacher's unions). They argue that charter schools, which are established by state DOEs and are exempt from some legal and union controls, provide a reproducible model for school success. The often cited film Waiting for Superman depicts successful charter schools serving urban poor populations. (Notice Michelle Rhee makes another appearance in the film and on its website. More on her record here and here.) The reasons charter schools are said to succeed include their ability to fire teachers at will, their ability to use merit pay systems, their ability to hire non-union teachers, their ability to use a non-traditional curriculum, and their emphasis on teacher accountability.

Diane Ravitch is one of the biggest critics of the charter school movement. She plows into the fight headlong with an article reviewing Waiting for Superman and the mythos growing around charter schools. She writes:

The message of these films has become alarmingly familiar: American public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money. Public schools already spend too much. Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, whose jobs are protected by powerful unions. Students drop out because the schools fail them, but they could accomplish practically anything if they were saved from bad teachers. They would get higher test scores if schools could fire more bad teachers and pay more to good ones. The only hope for the future of our society, especially for poor black and Hispanic children, is escape from public schools, especially to charter schools, which are mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations, many of them operating to make a profit.

and

Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?

and

According to University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber, about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors, such as family income. So while teachers are the most important factor within schools, their effects pale in comparison with those of students’ backgrounds, families, and other factors beyond the control of schools and teachers. Teachers can have a profound effect on students, but it would be foolish to believe that teachers alone can undo the damage caused by poverty and its associated burdens.

Lest you think I am biased and omitting counter-counter arguments, read this article about Diane Ravitch's intellectual "u-turn" in recent years. Long-story-short, she was one of the biggest advocates of NCLB and has completely changed her mind as to the validity of standardized testing. She's a bit of an iconoclast in the education world, but I enjoy her work and think she has good points to make in the overall debate. Here's another article about her change of mind.

I also have my own questions about the strengths of Charter schools. The documentary shows what I believe to be the biggest flaw in charter schooling: selection bias. Even though the schools are populated through lottery style drawings, students (or more accurately, their parents) still have to apply to be entered in the drawing. Even though hundreds of kids are in the lottery, how many aren't? How many kids have parents who don't care enough about their children to sign them up for a chance at charter schooling? That one little step selects out a huge chunk of the most at-risk students - those whose parents just don't care. Parental involvement has a big impact on students' performance in school. If these kids moms, dads, and grandparents cared enough to get them into the lottery, then they already have an advantage over their peers. 

Charter schools simply don't have to serve the same population of students that the public schools do. Public schools have to serve everybody. EVERYBODY. That includes students who don't speak English; who have severe learning, mental, or physical disabilities; who commit crimes; who have high truancy and absentee rates; who just don't want to do their work. Any of these factors could prevent a child from attending a charter school (and from ruining their high achievement reputation). Do the studies of charter schools compensate for these affects? I haven't seen any literature suggesting they do. As far as I'm concerned, charter schools are similar to private schools: they get to pick their students and therefore get to keep the best and drop the rest. (Yes, students can be kicked out of Charter schools but not public schools - no seriously, I teach kids who fight, sell weapons at school, who can't speak English, and who will never be eligible to go to charter schools.)

I suppose this is the last of my targeted criticisms. You'll notice that I've left off school vouchers. I don't know enough about how vouchers would work and what their unintended consequences would be. No states have instituted a voucher program on a large scale. No major studies of voucher systems have been done by uninterested 3rd parties (usually academic economists, because you can't trust the research coming from schools of education). I know they're every bit as controversial as charter schools, but I just don't know enough about vouchers. So I'll refrain from having any opinion, for now.

In my next post I'll look at how standardized testing, as the only method of teacher and school assessment, has significantly changed the way schools view themselves and their students.