TeachMoore

What Teachers Want From ESEA Reauthorization--Part 1 of 6

At a major forum during its 2011 Annual Convention, The American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) asked me: What do teachers want from ESEA reauthorization? Since I only had five minutes, I confined my remarks to the six items that have come up most consistently in discussions with other leading teachers from around the nation. I'll share them in this brief mini-series of blogs.

We want: A moratorium on the misuse of standardized testing and associated penalties until the next generation assessments are ready to go to scale. Though it had some good intentions, NCLB has been used to dilute curriculum, manacle teachers, and humiliate students----exactly the opposite of what education should be. Much of this collateral damage could have been avoided had we not gone down the path of distrusting teachers and uncritically accepting quick and cheap ways of determining students' learning and teachers' work.

The Administration, and just about everyone else who understands testing and assessment, acknowledges that the standardized achievement tests currently available were not designed to give the information needed for the life-changing decisions that are being based upon them. Nevertheless, we continue not only to use them but to expand their misuse, pushing states and districts to build financially and emotionally expensive accountability systems upon them.

Across the country, higher education institutions and employers are confirming this fact: As state testing programs have expanded, actual student academic performance has correspondingly declined. Despite passing the gauntlet of standardized tests, increasing numbers of public school graduates need more remediation to handle college-level work since NCLB than before its implementation.

The Department of Education, through its Race to the Top initiative is supporting two major state-level consortia as they work to develop the next generation of student assessments. The logical and humane course of action would be at the very least while those assessments are being developed, to put the sanctions associated with current test results on hold, and reduce the frequency of testing (especially during these times of economic distress) to random sampling of grades and students.

As the great Christian leader, John Wesley asserted, we "should do all the good we can, and do no harm."

Love Never Fails: Why We Shouldn’t Give Up on Public Schools

My pastor husband and I often find ourselves counseling couples struggling to overcome problems in their relationships. We remind them that love is a decision, not an accident, that requires disciplined commitment, especially when things aren't going smoothly. I apply that same thinking to America's relationship with our public schools.

The debate over whether the education of children in America should be a public or private enterprise is as old as the nation itself. Some are calling for our society to divorce itself from our moral obligation to provide quality, public education to all our children. While I highly respect those parents who choose to educate their children at home or pay for private education, I believe public education is essential for our nation. I humbly add myself to the long list of Americans who share that view.

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves. ---John Adams, U.S. President, 1785

It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republic of America was practically settled. --James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat, 1870

[T]he fact remains that the whole country is directly interested in the education of every child that lives within its borders. The ignorance of any part of the American people so deeply concerns all the rest that there can be no doubt of the right to pass laws compelling the attendance of every child at school...Frederick Douglass, African American writer and abolitionist, 1883.

A republican government should be based on free and equal education among the people.---Susan B. Anthony, 1900.

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.--Thomas Jefferson, U.S. President, 1787.

Fewer pillories and whipping posts and smaller gaols [jails], with their usual expenses and taxes, will be necessary when our youth are properly educated, than at present. I believe it could be proved that the expenses of confining, trying, and executing criminals amount every year, in most of the counties, to more money than would be sufficient to maintain the schools.---Benjamin Rush, physician and statesman,1786

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.--John Dewey, 1907.

"[We must] make known our educational needs and rights, and contend for every educational privilege, vouchsafed to our children as the coming citizens of a free democracy."--renown African American educator, Mary McLeod Bethune, 1924.

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. --Edward Everett (1794-1865, American statesman and scholar.

I would argue further that the push for application of free market principles in the reform of schools is insidiously counterproductive and may actually threaten American democracy in profound ways. Developing a rating system for schools based on flawed, limited testing instruments, then publishing those ratings in a push to get parents to shop around for educational options sounds like democracy in action. In reality, it exacerbates existing inequalities in educational and social resources. The goal should not be to see how many schools we can close down or force out of business, but rather how many schools we as a nation can reclaim, restore, and reconnect to the communities from which they should organically grow--Renee Moore, Christian, teacher, parent, taxpayer, patriot.

Shared Accountability

Accountability, by definition, includes power.

One can only fairly be accountable for those things over which s/he has a comparable degree of control. Contrary to media myth, for American public school teachers, the aspects of our work over which we have any control has increasingly shrunk over the past 30 years. That decline parallels the perceived drop in student academic performance both across the country and between the U.S. and other countries.

As a veteran highly accomplished, highly effective teacher, I see at least two major problems with the current education accountability models. First, those systems, based largely on results of standardized testing, are neither rigorous nor comprehensive enough to hold teachers truly accountable for student learning or for the full range of professional duties required of a highly effective teacher. When I was still full time high school English teacher, the state test only covered about 1/3 of what I was responsible for teaching under the state curriculum. [Later, the curriculum was modified in an attempt to better fit the costly assessment]. Meanwhile, as fellow TLN blogger, Dan Brown, reminds us the tests only cover the work of about 30% of America's teaching force. The situation is akin to attempting to determine someone's blood pressure with a ruler. Nothing wrong with the instrument, but it's not designed for that task. Sure, some creative thinker might be able to rig up something that looks as if it might work (e.g., value-added measures), but the better plan is to use the right tools for the job. And even the Administration admits those tools do not yet exist.

Second, to share accountability, our evaluations must also include the work of those who are responsible for providing the working conditions and resources teachers need in order to teach effectively. In 1996, The Commission on Teaching and America's Future declared: "School reform cannot succeed unless it focuses on creating the conditions in which teachers can teach, and teach well" (10). Fifteen years later, a group of my TLN colleagues in a report on Teacher Working Conditions conclude:

The next question is whether the systems in place in our schools and districts support our efforts to be fully effective teaching professionals. In many cases, the answer is unfortunately "no." Despite access to Title I dollars, we tend to have fewer material resources available to us in our schools, including less well-kept and modern facilities. Most important, we frequently lack the human resources we need to reach a "tipping point" for success with our students.(7)…The national conversation about educational accountability must and will continue—but it should broaden to include accountability for administrators and education officials at every level (24).

This is not an attempt to throw off that part of the accountability that belongs to teachers, but thousands of teachers have helped their students make incredible gains in learning, despite consistent inequity in how educational resources are allocated in this country. The poorest children in the nation shouldn't have to pin their hopes for the future on the poorest schools in the nation.

In a recent series of blogs, another TLN friend, Bill Ferriter, helped by constructive pushback from some thoughtful school principals, helps us figure out that it is a waste of good energy to engage in a "them-vs-us" arguments between teachers and local administrators, and I agree. The current deplorable state of working conditions for teachers and learning conditions for students, particularly in high-needs schools are the harvest of a long series of bad decisions on many levels, including the persistent refusal of the federal government to fully fund IDEA so that special needs students can get all the services and supports which they have been promised in order to be successful. However, that does not stop the Feds from penalizing schools when those students are not successful on those same inadequate state tests I mentioned earlier, and courts have ruled that NCLB overrules IDEA when it comes to how those students are tested. It's a cruel circle of errors that ends up hurting our most vulnerable students.

Thankfully, we have many examples of local schools that have successfully worked to bring most of the educational stakeholders together in mutually respectful ways. The results have been schools that truly serve all children well, without costly, ineffective so-called turnaround strategies such as mass firings. Sadly, it seems turning these local examples into representatives of a cohesive, coordinated national education policy is, as my Mississippi friends say, "too much like right."

 

 

 

 

 

The Teaching Profession Our Students Deserve

Watch this great animated summary of our new book, Teaching 2030, on how to get us from here to the teaching profession our children deserve.  

Read This: Competitive Grants Do Not Help Rural Schools

The Rural School and Community Trust reports that in its most recent round of Investing in Innovation Grants (known as i3), the Department of Education "offered up to two bonus points if they included programs or strategies aimed at the particular challenges and needs of rural schools.

The result?

Of 49 recipients chosen, only 19 even claimed that some aspect of their grant would apply to rural schools, and most of those were not developed by or for rural schools, but were simply vague references to adapting innovations designed for urban settings. "Only two proposals are designed to operate entirely in rural schools."  Here's the link to the full story and report:

Taking Advantage: The Rural Competitive Preference in the Investing in Innovation Program: Rural School & Community Trust.

Rural schools exist in a context that is fundamentally different from the urban context that draws most of the attention of education policy makers and scholars. Certainly, rural students and educators share many challenges common to the education process everywhere. But they also face unique challenges. Those are the challenges that proposals claiming the rural competitive preference in i3 were supposed to address. With only a few exceptions, they did not. Open competition is not the best way to encourage educational innovation in a rural context.

Yet, President Obama says Race to the Top is the "most influential education reform of our generation," and it should be the model for ESEA reauthorization?  Guess those who aren't big enough or well-financed enough to compete just get left behind...