The Tempered Radical

Learning from the Met: Great Expectations?

One of the greatest shames that I carry with me is the one year that I spent working outside of suburbia.  Needing a professional change, I transferred from a school where less than 10% of my students were living in poverty to a school where just over 30% were living in poverty.

Now, I know what you're thinking:  "This guy's lost his mind if he thinks that a school where 30% of the students living in poverty is a difficult place to work."

But even working in a school that many of my peers in more challenging buildings would describe as "easy," I knew that I'd made a mistake from the day that I walked in the front door.  You see, we had a faculty meeting where the results of our state's testing program were announced and my new staff celebrated wildly over the fact that they'd met---rather than exceeded---the state's testing expectations for their students.  That meant every teacher would earn a $750 bonus.

For me, though, that meant a $750 pay cut because the students in the affluent suburbs where I'd spent the previous 10 years of my career always exceeded the state's testing expectations, earning teachers a $1,500 yearly bonus.

It didn't take long for naive little me to figure out why meeting expectations was such a cause for celebration in my new school. 

The work was HARD.  My classes were full of small handfuls of students struggling through the social wreckage that poverty inevitably causes.  I had kids who were homeless or whose parents were imprisoned.  I had kids who'd never been to museums or to libraries.  I had kids who came to school hungry on a regular basis. 

Life was a fight for each of them---and that fight constantly spilled over into my classroom. 

Having fallen behind their peers academically, an all-too-common pattern for students living in poverty, many of the kids in my classes struggled to draw from background knowledge to understand new topics, to apply basic skills to new situations, or to produce sophisticated final products. 

While many had the potential to do well, it took high levels of commitment and determination to complete tasks that students living in middle or upper middle class neighborhoods worked through easily.

The result:  Complete frustration. 

Bam and Arne Get It Wrong Again. . .

When Barack Obama was elected and subsequently named Arne Duncan the Secretary of Education, I had real hope that we’d see meaningful improvement in our schools and communities. 

Change we could believe in, right?

But aside from the occasional speech where Bam and Arne say interesting things about promoting innovation or ending testing, the past year has been nothing more than a long series of serious disappointments.  The most recent failure:  Bam’s comments defending the decision of a Rhode Island school board to fire every teacher in a high poverty high school. 

Speaking at an event where he promised to send more federal cabbage to districts that shake up their lowest achieving campuses, the wise one said:

"If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability…And that's what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests -- 7 percent."

See, Bam, here’s the thing:  Is it really just the school that is failing students in high poverty communities year after year after year? 

What Parents Don't Understand. . .

I really worry about public education, y'all.  I honestly don't believe that we'll ever be able to make efficient and effective decisions about the direction that schools should take primarily because everyone in the general public thinks they know what it takes to serve our students. 

That false transparency---the assumption that nonprofessionals truly understand the challenges faced by public schools because of their own experiences as parents and/or students---results in the kind of thinking I found in the comment section of this article debating the future of schools in my own county.

Here's a sample of a commonly held misconception about education.  I've bolded the thinking that has me the most concerned:

Sounds like Wake county education board has got a lot of people stirred up. I for one think busing is a waste of money when it is done for the sake of integration which this is all about. If all schools get the same monies (so much per student) and the teachers all meet the same qualifications education quality should be the same everywhere. If a student wants to learn they have the opportunity...Schools are for education not social reform.

Posted by dohickey, December 15, 2009

No offense to Mr(s). Dohickey, but to believe that distributing resources equally to schools serving affluent students---who have enrichment experiences beyond school and access to the tools that make learning easier---and schools serving students who live in poverty will result in the same outcomes borders on the illogical!

The fact of the matter is that students living in poverty have a set of unique challenges that have to be addressed before learning can even take place.  Some are homeless and are more concerned about finding their next meal than the are in memorizing Moh's scale of hardness.  Others have to set their homework aside in order to take care of younger siblings while moms and dads work second and third jobs.  Still more live in unsafe neighborhoods where gang violence can be all-consuming. 

And while I agree that schools shouldn't be a tool for social reform, teachers who work in high poverty schools have to sift through social wreckage before they can effectively teach.  Even in the most challenging school that I've ever worked---where a whopping 30% of my students came from disadvantaged homes---the work was difficult. 

Students who were so far behind in the curriculum that they couldn't keep up with basic tasks slowed down instruction for everyone.  Scrounging for pencils, pens and backpacks for the kids in my class became a part time job.  I spent hours trying to get my students help from school resource officers and guidance counselors.  I felt like I was teaching with one hand tied behind my back---and I know that my students were definitely at a disadvantage when compared to the students in the suburban school where I teach today.

Need more proof that students who live in poverty need more than their "fair share" of a community's resources in order to be able to succeed?  Then check out this blog post that I wrote a few years ago, sharing the first person account of a teacher working in a high poverty building or poke through this policy document, where North Carolina's most accomplished teachers reflect on what it will take to recruit teachers to high poverty buildings. 

The problem is that most Mr(s). Dohickies won't ever truly work to understand what it takes for schools to succeed.  Instead, they'll throw pot-shots from the peanut gallery based on their own flawed understandings of how schools work. 

And that's why teachers need to step forward and lead.  Until we raise our voices and paint accurate pictures of what life is really like in our classrooms, we'll be forced to wrestle with an underinformed populus who advocates for underinformed policies. 

Talk about a recipie for disaster. 

Building Parent Engagement in Schools

Larry Ferlazzo has been one of the most influential minds in my own personal learning network for a long while now.  I first stumbled onto Larry’s work when In Practice—a collaborative blog that Larry writes with two other thinkers I admire, Brian Crosby and Alice Mercer—was up for an Edublogs award a few years ago. 

That’s why I was so excited when Linworth Publishing agreed to send me a free review copy of Larry’s new book, Building Parent Engagement in Schools. 

(Note to FTC:  Does that qualify as a full disclosure statement?)

As usual, Larry doesn’t disappoint!  His text—designed to introduce schools to the kinds of strategies and actions necessary for moving parent participation in schools from involvement to engagement—details a series of key principles that define effective community engagement efforts AND a series of practical projects that communities could tackle tomorrow.

Living a Silent War. . .

Think that life in high needs schools isn't challenging? Then read this email from a first year teacher working in a school of poverty outside of Atlanta that was forwarded to me by a friend last week:

Amber and I volunteered to ride a bus today so that we could tell the parents they had to be at the stop or the children would be taken back to school and charged for after-school care. It was very mind opening to see the neighborhoods these children live in. There were several stops that we decided to get off the bus together because it was so scary.

Unfortunately five kids from my bus  had to be taken back to school because no one was there to pick them up---one who was a student in my class. After arriving back at school we had to wait for the parents to pick up their children and a little tiff broke out with the parent of my child. The parent said their neighbor was at the stop,  but they weren't---in fact, Ashley and I got off the bus, walked in the neighborhood, knocked on their door, and even called the emergency numbers with no answer. This is the same parent who got in a verbal argument on the first day and said it wasn't her responsibility to be at the bus stop....

Three of my students really stand out:

Child one: I found out that the same children (one of which is in my classroom) have been abused in the past and investigations are continuing, so I need to look out for abuse. On top of that, they have no lunch money and because my county is so big, the free and reduced lunch forms cannot be approved fast enough, so children bring lunch from home (which consists of practically nothing---cheese and bread---which the students do not eat).

Child Two: I stayed after and waited with a child until her grandmother came to pick her up from after school (which ended up being 6 pm). The child lives with grandma now because mom is in jail and we have no idea about the father. I have tried to call the grandmother everyday, and have even sent home notes on a daily basis. This girl has already been to the school counselor because she sporadically cries and becomes non-responsive.

After speaking with her kindergarten teacher, I realized that this is completely opposite behavior from last year so I decided to talk with grandma... since I consistently got no response on the phone, I waited... only to find out that grandma lost her job, and the phone, gas, and electric has been cut off. This child also struggles with being fed because grandma is not the legal guardian and thus cannot fill out the paperwork for free/reduced lunch---or so I have been told.

Child Three: This girl lives with dad and step-mom. They are trying to make ends meet, however mom is going to school and dad works full time (late hours, never home). They have three children, one a new-born and again no money. She is very needy and never has papers returned, behavior log signed---I call, and get no answer.

This is just three of my 15 children... all but two live in good home situations. I have children with severe behavior problems (due to the lack of structure at home, and one mother even tells him that when he acts inappropriately, "the devil is in his head"--obviously something you DO NOT tell a first grader!!!)

As I learn more about my students, I become more appreciative of my life, yet more discouraged with the world. This is exactly the type of students I want to work with... they need us more than ever. I am becoming more patient as I learn these shocking truths of my students. I have learned that not everyone has the tooth fairy visit them... so I don't ask when students lose teeth, "How much money did the tooth fairly leave you?" 

The answer is always none...

I have learned that most kids do not go home to mom or dad and get help with homework--they go home to an empty house. It's hard to understand how some of these students survive in the living conditions they were born into. Not that I didn't know it already... but I see how lucky I am to have had the "tooth fairy," "Santa Claus," stuffed animals, clean clothes, food, candy, tv, air conditioning, a clean bed, and parents always around. Sometimes I get home and it's hard for me to get my mind off of my children and whether or not they are safe, being fed, etc.

While there is so much sadness in these children's lives, they are, for the most part, incredibly happy children (at school). We have our times where discipline must be enforced, but these children are so good at keeping their lives a secret... no one would ever guess that these children are living a silent war that begins at 2:15 everyday.

The first two weeks are almost over and I have already learned so much. Each day is a new adventure... We've had bathroom accidents, several teeth have fallen out, crying fits that last for what seems hours... I collapse into bed each and every night. I hope you are having a good week... and even if you are having a bad day... just remember my kids...and how our lives could be worse... it's been a huge reality check for me... but I wouldn't change a thing.

Love,
Maggie

Maggie's words left me speechless---and wondering how long she'll remain in the classroom. Her spirit is positive and she approaches her work with a zeal that defines many of those who work with students of poverty, but will zeal be enough to keep her going day after day in the face of almost insurmountable challenges?

Her words also paint a clear picture of why schools serving high needs communities are often staffed by under-prepared educators. Long hours, constant criticism and heart-wrenching circumstances drive all but the most self-sacrificing educators to schools serving less demanding populations. 

When will we realize that equal funding, staffing and compensation for teachers in high needs schools is insufficient to ensure success for every child?  When will we begin to advocate instead for equitable funding, extra positions and additional salary supplements for those willing to work in difficult circumstances? 

Johnny Doolittle Heads to Capitol Hill…

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to speak—at the invitation of the Center for Teaching Quality and the National Education Association—to an audience of educational policymakers in DC on Capitol Hill. The topic of the briefing was the challenges of recruiting and retaining teachers in high needs schools.

Needless to say, I was pretty geeked. It's not every day that a guy who is "just a teacher" has the ear of those who make decisions that shape our work. I was proud of myself, though—there was no "Shriek Heard 'Round the World" from me!

Here's what I said….Tell me what you think:

First, let me thank you for coming today to allow your thinking to be shaped by the voice of classroom teachers. As a passionate advocate for education, I've always believed that the best policies are those that are informed by practitioners because we possess a nuanced understanding of the culture of schools, and can quickly identify policy weaknesses that won't translate easily into our profession.

The issue of recruiting teachers to our highest needs schools is no exception. Understanding the importance of ensuring that schools of poverty are served by our most accomplished educators, decision makers are working diligently to craft policies to recruit teachers to the schools that need them the most. Those policies, however, tend to be under informed, over relying on alternative compensation models that incentivize work in high priority buildings.

Now don't get me wrong: I am a firm believer that the time has come to restructure teacher compensation in America.

But I also believe—based on my work with over 1,700 National Board Certified Teachers in five states on behalf of the Center for Teaching Quality, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the National Education Association and the Teacher Leaders Network—that new salary structures alone will not solve the staffing challenges faced by schools serving poor communities. In fact, while accomplished teachers rightfully expect additional compensation for accepting challenging assignments, financial incentives are rarely cited as the most important factor in a teacher's decision to work with children of poverty.

You see, our most accomplished educators rarely make decisions about where to work based on the socioeconomic status of their students. Instead, we're thoughtful and dynamic, driven by the desire to examine and perfect our craft. We are motivated by opportunities to reach our peak performance levels. As a result, schools with poor working conditions—regardless of the student population that they serve—rarely have a strong core of highly adept teachers and have little capacity to attract them.

So, which working conditions matter the most to teachers considering a move to a high needs building?

When highly accomplished teachers are asked to rank the top five factors that most influence their decisions about where to work, good principals inevitably end up on top of the list, followed by the opportunity to work with other skilled colleagues, having reasonable class sizes and student loads, and having access to instructional resources like science labs and classroom libraries. Financial incentives routinely finish in last place on the list.

These findings have been confirmed time and again in data points collected from the almost 250,000 teachers in ten states that completed a teacher working conditions survey since 2004. Analysis by the Center for Teaching Quality has shown that school leadership, professional development and empowerment are all strongly connected to student achievement and teacher retention. Additional findings include:

1. That schools reporting high levels of trust between faculty members are better able to help students learn.
2. That principals and teachers have greatly different perceptions about the presence of essential working conditions.

What implications do these findings have for policymakers?

The National Board Certified Teachers of North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington and Ohio brainstormed a list of over 80 recommendations that are currently being used to drive change in their respective communities over the past two years. Some of the recommendations that seemed to translate across state boundaries included:

1. Invest in principal professional development programs that show school leaders how to better use accomplished teachers as change agents at the local level. NBCTs often report feeling undervalued and underutilized by their building administrators.
2. Provide time and training to teachers who accept positions in high needs communities. Meeting the academic and social demands of children living in poverty requires a set of skills that few educators automatically possess. Opportunities to engage in high quality, teacher driven professional development during the course of the school day and year will ensure that teachers feel success with economically and culturally diverse student populations.
3. Develop a range of financial incentives designed to attract teachers to high needs buildings. While salary supplements may appeal to young educators interested in raising their base pay, more experienced teachers are motivated by tax breaks, college tuition credits or additional years towards retirement. By developing a menu of incentives that teachers can choose from, we respect the personal and professional differences of our best educators.
4. Create hybrid roles that allow accomplished teachers to work part time in the classroom with students and part time beyond the classroom supporting colleagues as mentors and curriculum leaders. By doing so, we make what has become a stale profession more appealing to educators passionate about continued growth.
5. Begin using teacher working conditions as an indicator of school success on par with Annual Yearly Progress. By doing so, we focus attention on the significant connections between essential working conditions and student learning.

In the end, if there was one thing that accomplished teachers wanted you to take back to your work as education's decision makers, it would be that we have a responsibility to ensure that every child in America—including those living in poverty—has a great teacher. Meeting that responsibility, however, will require sophisticated solutions for what are very real and very complex problems.

Just Another Debate....

One of the teachers that I most admire is a woman named Mary who works with some of the highest needs students in one of the poorest counties in her state. She is at once passionate and intelligent, understanding the complexities of issues that other teachers rarely work to tackle. More importantly, Mary is an outspoken advocate on what it takes to help restructure schools in high needs communities.

Mary recently read my entry on staffing high needs schools and left the following comment that I wanted to highlight:

As I read Bill's eloquently written, researched based article, I can appreciate the depth of his views on the subject. Every child deserves our best but we know that it will not happen as long as the playing fields are not leveled.

The question that most grabbed me was when he asked, "Did I get a good education because of the neighborhood my parents elected as our place of residence?" Here in lies the truth and the painful reality of class, caste, systemic inequities. If we were to ask all children, "Who wants to be born in poverty?" we would get no takers. "Who wants to be taught by teachers that are not certifed, accomplished, and lacking in vision and preception?" we would get no takers.

So, how will we get equitable funding, resources, highly qualified teachers and administrators? Will it take a private institution's plan to raise the performance level of public schools' performance? The guilt Bill feels comes more from being part of a system that has biased practices, but he can't control how government spending is channeled. I wonder what it would take for Bill to leave his school system and school to teach the children who had no choice in the matter of parents, economic status, neighborhood, principal, or teacher.

While every challenge issue he raises is true and every proposed solution is what school systems like mine in Halifax County needs, I feel that it's impossible to fully understand what is needed in high needs schools unless you are willing to teach in those schools and live within a proximinity of those communities for more than one year.

While I agree in principle on many things Bill writes, the one thing that is crucial to success in high needs schools is the freedom to allow flexibility, creativity, and top notch leadership to flourish. I can almost guarantee that those essential principals are absent in low performing, high needs schools. The way to combat poverty is with resources. What most high needs schools are deprived of is economic, human, capital, and academic resources.

The true question remains,"Does my state consider the education of the children in my school significant enough to society to strategically address and provide empowering vehicles to bring about major changes in the current way high needs schools operate? Is our state willing to revamp the entire school's program and provide the same economic and substantial opportunities for learning that Bill's County and school district offers? If not, isn't this notion of addressing the real issues of high needs schools just another debate?

Not a Tool to Punish?

In advocating for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind legislation at a ceremony honoring the nation's 50 teachers of the year last week, President Bush made a statement that I'm not sure I totally agree with. He said:

"Measurement is not a tool to punish.  Measurement is a tool to correct and reward."

I'm not sure that the rest of the critics who have made a living throwing darts at public schools over the past four years have gotten the message! End of grade test results are regularly used to label schools---to the detriment of students---as failures in the eyes of the public, whether it be the "A, B, C, or D" ratings given to Florida's "Zone" schools, North Carolina's "Priority Schools" tag or the dreaded "In Need of Improvement" label from the Federal Government. 

Hard-working principals and teachers in these buildings are subjected to ridicule and humiliation. Morale plummets and recruitment of new educators becomes difficult at best and impossible at worst.  All but the most self-sacrificing leave after a few years, looking for jobs in buildings where shame is not a part of the yearly routine.

Something tells me that routine public criticism rarely feels like a "reward" to the communities struggling with the myriad of challenges that contribute to poor results on the standardized tests of our nation.

Teach for America?

The Washington Post had an interesting article today on plans in the District of Columbia to recruit additional Teach for America teachers to high needs schools:

Teach for America, which has operated in the District since 1992, has 160 teachers working there this year. The number will grow to 250 in the fall, with 25 assigned to Prince George's schools. If the school systems agree, there could be 500 such teachers in the District and Prince George's by 2011, making Teach for America by far their largest supplier of new teachers. The expansion reflects what organization officials see as a new commitment to reform by the administration of D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Prince George's officials.

While I admire the commitment shown by Teach for America candidates, I question the decision to invest heavily in a program that has shown little significant impact on student achievement. By Teach for America's own standards, the only reliable study conducted on the impact that Teach for America recruits have on student achievement is a 2004 Mathematica piece titled The Effects of Teach for America on Students. 

The results of this study were less than impressive. While TFA teachers in the study did produce greater gains than those of comparable novice teachers, the gains merely brought struggling students from the 14th to the 17th percentile nationally. Even more disconcerting were quotes throughout the report like this one:

"The consistent pattern of positive or zero impacts on test scores...suggest that there is little risk that hiring TFA teachers will reduce student achievement."

Is providing students of poverty with teachers who have little risk of harming student achievement truly our goal?

The real focus of discussion should be on the incredibly poor qualifications of teachers currently working in our highest needs schools. In the Mathematica study, only 54.5% of all teachers and only 33% of novice teachers in the control group had degrees in education. High needs schools are filled with teachers on emergency and provisional certificates and are plagued with higher rates of teacher turnover.

I believe we should work as a nation to design comprehensive programs that recruit and retain some of our best teachers to our neediest schools. Doing so will take a focused commitment to improving working conditions for teachers in these buildings. Ground breaking work has been done in recent years by The Center for Teaching Quality---in partnership with the NEA---to bring teachers into the conversation, resulting in this report highlighting the conditions and incentives necessary for both recruiting and retaining teachers in our hardest to staff buildings.

Armchair Educators and School Reform....

I stumbled onto an interesting--albeit belated--strand of thinking the other day started by the Education Wonks when they wrote:

Why is it that so many would-be EduReformers (who are so quick to criticise our public schools) would never consider going into a classroom and actually work with children themselves?

We weren't the first one to notice....

Some of us who do serve children on a daily basis continue to be amazed at the large number of non-teaching teaching experts that are out there.

Maybe it would do many of 'em some good if these "armchair educators" went down to their local school district, filled out an application, and, if nothing else, did a little substitute classroom teaching.

We think that this person might find such an experience to be enlightening.

Matt Johnston, author of Going to the Mat, replied:

I will tell you why.

I am a taxpayer, I have a constitutional right and a duty to petition the government (that includes school boards, administrator and teachers) for a redress of my greivances. If that makes me an "armchair" edu-reformer then so be it and I will wear the title with pride.

I also can read data pretty well. The data tells me that our schools have not improved in nearly 40 years, that test scores have remained flat and that there are better methods available to be tried. I see evidence of reluctance to try anything new.

As an attorney, if my clients don't like my services, they are free to find other representation. Public school kids don't have that choice and so it is up to us parents and "armchair edu-reformers" to take up the cause--ca ause too many politicians, teachers and certainly the teachers unions have proven unfit for the task.

Now, I genuinely like Johnston. His work is reasoned and thoughtful, unlike critics of education that resort only to spitting venom. And in this case, I think he's got at least one legitimate point: Lack of school choice sentences students in underperforming schools to poor educations with no recourse. There is something inherently wrong in a system where we knowingly overlook the very real fact that some schools are serving children far better than others. Students of poverty deserve more.

We disagree on where the blame for this reality lies. When Johnston argues that teachers have proven unfit for the task, he is pointing fingers in the wrong direction. Teachers working in troubled schools face barriers that are almost insurmountable, attempting to address the social, emotional and academic challenges of children who have been overlooked by a society comfortable with the growing economic gap separating rich families from the poor. What's more, teachers in troubled schools often go without basic resources, time, parental support and professional development in facilities that are crumbling around them.

That's where the Ed Wonks argument that "Armchair Educators" should spend some time in schools carries weight. Once reformers realize exactly how little control teachers have over the results of "the system," they will be able to put the proper target in their crosshairs and offer real suggestions for driving change based on an understanding of the reality of our work.