About a week ago, I had the pleasure of going back to my old school to see how things were going.  My old students are all seniors now, and the school that I helped found (weird, huh?) is now a full house, with grades 6-12.  I must say, the experience of going back left me with mixed feelings.

First of all, it was really cool seeing the students again and my old coworkers.  My old students are really starting to look like young adults.  They’re working out plans for after graduation. 

Yet, it was frustrating to be see that they’re still lacking a certain something.  I think that “something” is perspective.  I’m worried that most of them are in for a very rude awakening when and if they finally get out of Baltimore.  Many undoubtedly will delay that reality check indefinitely by simply not leaving the city.  That feels a bit patronizing to write, because many of my students deal with reality that I couldn’t have imagined at their age, and probably still can’t.  But reality has many levels, and the one about which they lack perspective is the reality of how a person makes it to middle class career success. 

If they had perspective, they would be feeling a massive sense of urgency.  They would know that the game clock is down to the last few seconds, that it is time to be making some spectacular moves to get ready to compete on the next level.  Instead, I saw students meandering aimlessly during class hours and doing everything but being productive.  Above all, I feel sad to see that we failed to establish a culture in the school that was fundamentally different that the prevailing culture of the school system.  I don’t want to throw salt on my old school, but that’s the reality of it.  We worked our asses off. and we couldn’t do it.  In the year in the half since I left, my coworkers kept carrying the torch and new people came in and hit the ground running.

Speaking of the teachers, morale is about what one would expect at the tail end of the brutal grind that leads up to winter break.  They’re worn out and frustrated with the system and with the countless things that aren’t going as they should.  I got to sit in on a few conversations about how to solve problems that shouldn’t exist.  But it’s Baltimore City, and unless you’ve seen the schools first hand, every assumption you might have about what a school has and how it must work is probably not even close to reality. 

I pitched in a couple of suggestions, but to be brutally honest, I felt a massive sense of relief that tackling these problems is no longer my responsibility.  I feel a little guilty about it, but I’d be remiss for saying it.  There’s an unhealthy level of general absurdity everywhere you look.  Usually, it’s kind of an ephemeral absurdity that plays out in the details, but sometimes you run right into it, perhaps in the form of a half ripped sign saying, “DOOR MUST REMAIN CLOSED AT ALL TIMES”, barely hanging off an unwatched, slightly ajar door to the outside world.

The school itself has seen some changes too.  Millions of dollars had been spent to make some pretty impressive renovations to the building.  So there are some really cool things going on.  Clearly, a lot of people are working to make the place better.  Unlike me, they still have the energy to fight the good fight.

In any case, it was good to be back.  I want nothing for the best for all the students, teachers, and staff.  I’m looking forward to visiting again.  It’s actually quite enjoyable to see everyone, and it’s good to remind myself of what’s really going on, especially now that I am so disengaged from that reality on the ground.

The final spot where I’ve got to disagree with Principal Vanderhoek from my previous entry is where he says that there’s no magic bullet.  Humbly, I do believe there is a magic bullet, and it’s not that complicated.  It’s called social investment.   This hypothetical money should be spent primarily on increasing classroom staff in low-income schools.  Here are my other suggestions:

• Reinvent the teacher role.  I have several suggestions for this:
• Double the number of teachers and halve their courseloads
• Separate the teacher role into its components — classroom manager, academic specialist, administrative assistant — and put multiple adults in each classroom.  Some roles could be shared between classrooms.
• Elite teachers should be allowed to assume multiple roles, and they should be compensated accordingly.
• Bring back tracking, but do it in a flexible way.  If a kid is not being successful in the large classroom environment, they often begin to derail the education of every other kid in the classroom.  Poor behaviors begin to eat away at the classroom culture, and before you know it, you start seeing behavioral issues spread, like a virus.  Nip that in the bud.
• Take the struggling children out of that environment and get them the intensive academic and/or behavioral help they need.  This is where the investment comes in.  We need to pour resources into the most challenged students.  Aim to get them back on the mainstream track, and use small settings, extended school days, and year-round schooling to make it happen.  Some will make it back to the mainstream, and others won’t, but either way, if this is done correctly, we will have made a substantial difference in life outcome for the most difficult students.
• Meanwhile, positive classroom culture becomes much easier to establish and maintain in the mainstream environment.  I believe that the impact on student achievement in the mainstream environment will be immediate and dramatic.
• Get rid of social promotion.  We have so many children that are behind their “correct” grade level.  Stop pretending that they’re going to magically catch up.  Teach them from where they are, in cohorts of kids at the same age/grade combination–sadly, there are more than enough behind-grade-level children to make this practical.  It might take a few more years for some children to graduate, but when they do, they’ll be a lot better educated.  This applies to the kids from point #2, who are out of the mainstream.  These are the biggest drop-out and delinquency risks, and we will do a much better job retaining them in the schools if we are actually meeting their needs.  The traditional age/grade correspondence is antiquated and unimaginative, and there’s no good reason not to replace it with something that actually meets childrens’ needs.

The only problem is that I don’t believe the average American cares about solving the problem.  As I’ve said before, people abstractly care about closing the achievement gap, but for the most part, it’s out of sight, out of mind.  People need to understand that it does matter to every American.  And it’s not just about social justice, it’s also about the pocketbook.  The issue is that the failings of education are costly to our country, no matter what. Right now we’re pouring money into combating the effects of poverty through band-aid programs (TFA isn’t free), police, jails, and welfare. If we can pour the money into fixing one generation of children, we can make a substantial dent in the cycle of poverty, and it’s going to pay off in the long-run in future reductions to those other costs.  To me, it’s a no-brainer.

I guess the real question is:  in today’s Taxed-Enough-Already environment, can we muster the will to invest in our nation’s future,  or are we just going wait around to let the free market work it out?

A friend of mine recently sent me a video on a revolutionary charter school called The Equity Project (TEP), located in NYC:

http://cnettv.cnet.com/av/video/cbsnews/atlantis2/cbsnews_player_embed.swf

The summary of the video is:

Katie Couric reports on an experimental New York City charter school founded on the idea of hiring the best teachers by paying them $125,000, while denying them tenure.

Let me first of all say that I think 60 minutes did a phenomenal job with the story.  They covered it from every angle, and they left it open for the viewer to decide whether the radical ideas of the founder/principal, Zeke Vanderhoek, are a promising way forward in education. Notably, TEP is not based on the idea of paying based on performance.  However, it is similar to the concept of merit pay in that it’s based on the idea that the prospect of greater teacher pay will boost student achievement.

One of the difficult things about new ideas in education is that it takes years to be able to truly evaluate whether it’s working.  So, I don’t hold it against TEP that their scores came out below average.  However, the totality of the video definitely brings up some concerns.

In the video, Vanderhoek said, “We’re trying to build a school where every teacher is a great teacher.”

Well, there’s no doubt about it, offering $125k is going to attract elite teachers, and that will probably eventually make TEP  a good school, but that’s not the issue, because we need many good schools, not just one.  The issue is that there aren’t enough elite teachers, and I don’t see what TEP is doing to create more of this precious resource.  All they’re doing is consuming, by pulling great teachers from other schools.  Their solution cannot possibly scale up; if every school offered the same deal, then we’d be in pretty much the same boat we’re in today.

Plus, how many people out there can make a career out of teaching with no administrative staff support?  As the lady said at the end, that school is like the Olympics of teaching.  It’s unreasonable to expect that we can staff every low-income school with career teachers, willing to work 90 hour weeks in bare-bones facilities with no support staff.  That money is going to bring a few more people into the classroom who otherwise would have pursued other opportunities, but it’s not going to keep them there for the long-haul.

The principal in that video fired two of his fifteen teachers after year one.  That’s more than 10% of his superstar staff, hand-selected from that giant bin applications they showed.  And he seems proud of it.  Where he sees success, I see a massive red flag.  If he can’t staff properly when he’s the only public school offering $125k, how in the world is it supposed to work if every other school was doing the same thing?

Tenure

When it comes to the question of tenure, I completely agree with Vanderhoek in that people shouldn’t be guaranteed a teaching job for life once they get a couple years in.  That’s absurd.  But equally absurd is the idea that there should be no safeguards to employment at all.  His school doesn’t have contracts, so although he waited till the end of the year to make his cuts, he could have done it at any moment.  Do we really want our schools to operate like the NFL, where a team is allowed to sever your employment at any minute, for any reason?  What is missing is a sense of partnership: where is the assurance that a school will work with a teacher to get them performing at a high level?  He also seems unwilling to apply his same standard of perfection to himself.

Maybe the issue is not that we have school systems that are chock full of lazy people who aren’t cut out for the job.  I would posit that we have school systems full of perfectly normal population of human beings, ranging from capable to brilliant, most of whom aren’t cut out for a job that is absurdly challenging.

Unlike Joel Klein, quoted in the video, I’m not worried about figuring out how to get non-superstar teachers out the door.  I’m worried about how to give people jobs that are well matched to their capabilities.  The problem is that the profession is structured as a one-size-fits-all job.  Whether you’re a TFA teacher fresh out of your five weeks of training or a 3o-year veteran with a proven track record, your responsibilities are substantially the same.  That makes no sense.  Rather than waiting for one million superhuman teachers to materialize, I say we need to start looking ways to make the education work for the human capital we actually have.

This entry is part one of a three-part series of somewhat-related entries I’ve written on education reform.

Merit pay is one of the big topics in education today.  The basic premise of the idea is as follows:

1. Teachers should get paid based on performance.  It makes no sense that superstar teachers should get paid the same amount as struggling teachers.  We should incentive great performance.
2. Teachers will teach better if they know there is financial incentive.
3. With merit pay, higher performing individuals will be retained, and a better talent pool will be attracted.
4. In this new environment, people will be competing to do what’s best for the children, both inside of schools and between schools, and the children will be the primary beneficiaries.

In regards to point #1, I believe that good performance should be rewarded, don’t get me wrong.  However, although the rest of the rationale seems completely logical at first glance, it leaves out important considerations.  How do you evaluate performance?  It’s one of those things where most people say, “I don’t know, but I know it when I see it”.

In education, evaluating performance is particularly difficult, both for schools and teachers.  Every school gets dealt a completely unique hand, demographically speaking.  How do you take that into account when evaluating a school?  What is the incentive to work at a more challenging school, when you know that you are far more likely to inherit and encounter unquantifiable challenges that make achieving at a high level more difficult?  What you really want is to get your best teachers to the most challenging situations, but what you don’t want is a “musical chairs” situation, where everyone is running around chasing the money from school to school.

Point #2 is premised on the idea that teachers decide how much to work based on compensation.  This may be true for some, but I know I didn’t enter the teaching profession to make money.  I had other higher-paying options, but I chose to teach because I thought it was an important thing to do.  I believe that most teachers teach primarily because they want to make a positive impact on children.  In fact, they prove it when they bring supplies to school, which they pay for out of their own paycheck.  In this way, teaching is quite different from high-stakes merit-pay occupations, such as law, sales, banking, and pro sports, where money is the primary reward.

As for point #3, say what you will about Teach For America, but there’s no question that they have proved that elite college graduates can be attracted to teaching without offering buckets of money.  In fact, TFA rejects about 6 out of 7 applicants.  People are beating down the door to get into teaching.  Granted, not all of them want to be lifelong teachers, but many of them are open to that possibility.  I can only speak to my own motivations for entering the teaching profession, but I know I speak on behalf of many other teachers I know when I say that the vast majority of us left inner-city teaching not because lack of money, but because of frustration and burnout.  I don’t know a single person who cited money as a driving force for leaving the classroom.

Would more money help recruitment?  Yes, but there are other ways to effectively recruit.  Would money help retention?  To an extent, but I don’t think it would make a noticeable dent in then 5-year retention rate.  Not to mention, teaching already does not provide very good career earnings numbers.  If merit pay is simply about shifting the same pool of money toward the highest-performing teachers, the result is going to be that solid teachers currently at the median will see a dramatic decrease in career earnings, and many are simply going to jump ship, rather than actually sticking around to hone their craft, trying to break into the money.

To me, point #4 is where the merit pay logic really falls through.  In a truly great school, everybody works together.  There’s not such thing as “my classroom”, there is only “our school”.  People pitch in where they’re needed.  It’s a communal atmosphere.  If you give each school a pool of money based on its performance, and distribute that money to the teachers based on their performance, I think you destroy any sense of common purpose.  You’re going to see far more cheating, fudging, and backstabbing on every level, and far less sharing and cooperation.  Suddenly, everything becomes about “what’s in it for me”, and “what’s best for the children” becomes an afterthought.  Those brilliant lesson plans you used to give to new teachers become your precious golden eggs.

Merit pay is not a bad thing per se.  Unquestionably, at the most hypothetical level, it’s more fair toward teachers, but what is our ultimate goal?  Is it fairness toward teachers or  I think there are many reasons to believe that it could actually have a detrimental effect on overall student achievement.  One thing is for certain, if implemented, it needs to be done in an extremely careful and conscientious manner.

Things have been quite busy with grad school lately, but I do keep up with what’s going on in education.  I just don’t have much time to write a whole lot about it.  One of my old professors, who feeds me a lot of good info, sent me an interesting article:

For Students Raised on iPods, Lessons in Bridge

My reaction:

Interestingly enough, for my basketball players, it took the experience of losing their first game 66-12 to before they would even listen to the head coach and myself.  They finally realized that they couldn’t do it alone.  From that point forward, they were much easier to coach.  And especially so when we started experiencing a mix of success and failure.  They could see how harder work led to better game-time performance.

I really believe that one of the keys to low-income education is activities, whether they be basketball, bridge, or something else.  I saw major improvements in work ethic inside and outside of the classroom in the basketball players I coached and taught.  It made me conclude that most people probably learn to connect hard work to success through sports, hobbies, and other activities.  Video games may be helpful to an extent, but they don’t teach kids the apprenticeship role that would most transferable to the classroom.  Kids need to learn to teamwork and the value of learning from people who have experience.  The students I taught that had outside activities were noticeably more disciplined and self-motivated.

Unfortunately, when basketball season ended, the old behaviors came back.  To me, this just says that one season of basketball isn’t enough to change deeply ingrained habits.  From this, I conclude that students really need overlapping activities, year-round, to constantly reinforce the hard-work/success connection.

For schoolwork, that connection just isn’t immediate enough for kids.  You don’t win or lose based on your math skills until you find out what colleges you got into.  By then, it’s way too late.

That title is a mouthful, but I couldn’t figure out how to shorten it.  There was a sad and thought-provoking story published in the Baltimore Sun about a child with behavioral issues who died in Baltimore last week.  It raises questions about–as the title of this post states–the challenges of working with children with serious issues.  The story is about the aids and the bus driver whose jobs are in limbo, but I felt a definite connection with my own experiences teaching, and the difficulty of preventing challenging students from taking actions that harm themselves.  The original story is here:

Questions raised as family prepares to lay student to rest

My reaction:

The issue of trying to control multiple students with severe behavioral and/or emotional issues is very fundamental to what is challenging about urban education, and it’s something that doesn’t get enough press.  The mere act of discussing the fact that kids from low-income settings tend to have a higher incidence of these sorts of issues brings up feelings of classism and racism.  Yet, the truth of the matter is these issues have a huge impact on a teacher’s ability to do their job.  I’m going to get politically incorrect now and get into my thoughts on this hot-button issue.

If severe emotional/behavioral issues are prominent enough and go unchecked by the management systems a school has in place, they start to affect the entire climate of the school and the behavior of students that don’t even have the same sorts of issues.  Actions and behaviors that should seem really out of place become commonplace and you start seeing a lot of copy-cat behavior.  I’ve experienced situations as a teacher where a class that seems out of control returns to order with the removal of a single student.  Once, a girl I taught actually remarked, “there goes our ring-leader”.

The fact is, classroom teachers not equipped to deal with some of the issues that the children can bring in the door.  Public education with low-income populations can work, but there needs to be an understanding that the needs of the students as a whole are greater and consequently, there need to be more resources allocated.  Children with emotional/behavioral issues that cause disruption to the general ed setting need very small settings and interventions, and they can be gradually be integrated into larger settings as their issues are resolved.  In most cases, they can and should probably be integrated with general ed students, as long as the group size is kept very small.  And obviously, they need the highest quality teachers.

Just imagine how much Baltimore City life could be changed if the most difficult students could be effectively educated?  It can be done, but not without the resources.  The question is, do we have the fortitude to make the necessary investment?

According to some dude from the root, the answer to inner city education has been right under our noses for several decades, and it’s a technique known as direct instruction.  Check out the original article here:

We Know How To Teach Black Kids

My thoughts:

 

The New York Times recently profiled what’s going on in education in Baltimore.

(P.S.  As part of their analysis, they visited Green Street Academy, where my girlfriend and former roommate teach.)

A Mission to Transform Baltimore’s Beaten Schools

My thoughts:

It’s an interesting piece. I most people agree that Alonso has had a
very positive impact, with respect to what had gone on in the city prior
to his arrival. He’s ruffled a lot of feathers, but overall, he’s been
much more successful navigating the politics and gathering consensus for
the sweeping changes he makes than Michelle Rhee was in DC.

One thing that caught my eye was how they mentioned that old black
educators are getting pushed into retirement. I think the author missed
something there. I don’t think it’s just old black teachers that are
getting pushed into retirement, I think everyone is getting pushed into
retirement. The system has become very high-stakes, and there is
immense amount of pressure to perform. In my experience, teaching was a
60-100+ hour per week job, and I still wasn’t able to actually
accomplish all the work I was technically supposed to be doing.

As a result, there is massive teacher turnover in City schools. Teach
For America gets a bad rep as a program that produces teachers for two
years who then leave the district they were placed in to do something
else. This isn’t precisely true, because many TFA teachers stay for
several years beyond that, although I’m sure the vast majority leave
within five. But I think if you look at the population non-TFA teachers
within the same schools TFA places teachers, you would see almost the
same statistic. You’ve got a diminishing group of older veterans, a
constantly flowing group of new teachers, and not a whole lot of
classroom teachers in their 30’s and 40’s.

I think a fundamental problem with education is that the general public
has no idea how intense the job of K-12 teaching in a low-income,
high-pressure setting is. I have friends who have left teaching for law
school, business school, banking, engineering, and just about every
other job under the sun, and for 90% of them, it’s not because the money
wasn’t good enough in teaching in the city. With little exception, they
are happier and less stressed out after leaving teaching. Yet, to the
general public, teachers are a bunch of bums that couldn’t get real jobs
and have too much vacation time.

Unfortunately, this means that rather than building a solid, experienced
teacher corps, new teachers constantly have to be trained from scratch.
Many K-12 educators say that it takes about 5 years for a teacher to
really approach peak effectiveness, but few people reach that level in
inner city schools.

Yet, I don’t hear a lot of talk about the retention problem directly.
The closest people usually come to talk about retention issues is when
talking about compensation and the currently fashionable movement toward
of merit pay. And although on the face of it, paying teachers more
seems like a worthwhile idea, I don’t think it’s the answer. I think
it’s going to provide a moderate bump in recruitment, but that it will
make little to no difference in retention. I think this because of all
the people I know who left teaching, not one of them left because of the
pay. At least in Baltimore, teachers actually do get paid reasonably
well, compared to the cost of living. People leave because it’s just
too intense for the vast majority of even the elite group TFA recruits.

The current direction is to try to recruit, train, and retain a corps of
highly paid superhumans who can actually handle the job stress. I think
the real answer is to find ways to split the jobs of classroom teachers
and administrators so that they can be taken on by teams of normal
people, who can pool their talents together–even if it means they don’t
get as much. Until the expectations of the job become more reasonable,
poor retention is always going to be a major impediment to any
meaningful improvement in K-12 education.

If you have the chance, check out the series Teach: Tony Danza on A&E.  To sum it up, last school year, Tony Danza decided to teach English at Northeast High School in Philly.  I’m not sure it’s quite comparable to the TFA experience–he only teaches one class period per day and he has a mentor teacher in his room at all times.  Also, his school is in the city, and I could be wrong, but Northeast appears to be a bit nicer than most where TFA teachers are placed.  But, generally, it does capture the experience.  He does all of his planning, and his mentor teacher simply observes.

It’s incredible that as much as Tony Danza must be used to performing for people, he’s actually quite awkward in the first couple of episodes in front of the children.  But it’s also really endearing to see how much Tony cares and how hard he tries.  He really goes out of his way to connect with the kids on a personal level, and he puts himself out there, even though he knows the kids think he’s foolish.  In a lot of ways, I wish I had been capable of lowering my guard while I was in the classroom.

And although Tony is extremely enthusiastic about education, you can see how hard teaching is for him.  He makes tons of rookie mistakes, and he’s really hard on himself, as all good teachers are.  He gets visibly worn down by the workload and frustrated by the red tape.  He gets bogged down with extraneous requests.  At one point, another teacher questions his commitment to teaching, asking if he just wanted to know what it’s like, or if he really wants to teach.  Tony clearly loves the idea of teaching, but he responds that he’s not sure if he could do another year.

I’ve said it a million times, but I think something is wrong with teaching as a profession.  Obviously, there’s no career that you can just walk into and be an expert.  But there are very few other professions where that’s exactly what is expected of you.  Our schools will never be able to retain talent as long as they keep chewing it up and spitting it out.  I don’t care how you incentivize it.

My hat is off to Tony Danza though.  The guy is almost 60, and I’m sure he’s got it made financially.  Yet, he volunteered for one of the toughest jobs in this country, and he does his best, with plenty of enthusiasm.  Check this show out, so far, it’s one of the best I’ve seen on TV in a while.

I went down to Georgia this past weekend for a family reunion that included a lot of family history.  Interestingly enough, much of it had connections to my experience teaching.  I’ve often felt that teaching must be harder now than it was in the past, because my experience was so brutal.  Well that might be true of the recent past, but there was a time not so long ago when things were far more difficult in many ways.

As part of our tour of the historical archives of a town in Georgia that is the historical home of much of my family, we learned about the school that blacks attended in the area from the end of slavery until the end of segregation.  School for blacks was held in a one room school house and education from 1st to 7th grade was provided simultaneously by a single teacher.  The only supplies provided to the school from the county were hand-me-down books and a single chair, for the teacher’s use.  Education ended at 7th grade, at which point, kids were big enough to go pick cotton.  There was no option for high school, let alone higher education.  And yet, some of my ancestors did manage to attend historically black colleges.

While the proprietor of the archive spoke, relatives of mine nodded their heads in affirmation and mentioned their own memories.  Obviously, all of this is old news to anyone who has ever taken a class on US history, but hearing about it from people who actually lived through those times made me really think about it.  Reflecting on the fact that there are still people alive today who were educated in these completely unequal conditions, it made me think, of course we’re still struggling with the education gap, you just can’t fix the effects of systematic discrimination overnight.  We learn a lot from our teachers, but we also take in a unquantifiable amount of information from our families and our societies.  How much of a disadvantage is it to a child to be raised by parents who never had the opportunity to go to high school at all, let alone a good high school or college?  How much is that disadvantage compounded when it’s the norm for an entire community?  We’re only a few generations past segregation.

I think that what makes education so difficult today is that we are finally starting to take the challenge of educating these urban kids seriously.  It has only been within the past 10 years that No Child Left Behind forced educational standards upon every school in the country.  Until then, kids were graduating from inner city schools, but it was a lot easier to pretend that they were actually getting an equal education.  I wonder how long it will take for the country to realize that “equal” will not be achieved until “separate” is done away with.  In the meantime, I think teachers face a different sort of difficulty than they did during segregation.  Then, there were no resources, but I doubt there was much in the way of standards and scrutiny either.  Now, teachers have a lot more resources, but also the pressure of working under a magnifying glass.