Good Rheedance

Much as I'd like to, I can't take credit for that clever title. It goes to Roger Kaplan, who wrote an excellent article regarding Michelle Rhee's timely exit from the Chancellorship of the D.C. Public School system. You can read the whole thing at The American Spectator: http://spectator.org/archives/2010/10/18/good-rheedance.

[P]ublic schools, like our nation, evolve, and indeed evolve in ways that parallel the larger society's. The most significant of these parallel trends is the surrender of local responsibility to government authorities, and the pretense of the latter to rely on "experts," a.k.a. technocrats, people parachuted into communities where they have no ties but whose problems they can solve . . . .

School reform has focused historically, one might almost say cyclically, on such scarecrows as "entrenched interests" and "out of date pedagogy." In plain English, reformers have tended to think they understand the problems and challenges of educating undisciplined if lovable savages (children and teenagers) better than the people whose job it is to do it, and furthermore that they have a system for teaching math and reading that will work better than any other. In both regards they are very much in the venerable American tradition of snake-oil salesmen, though the Ph.D.'s they often hold are authentic, compared to the "doctor" titles conferred upon themselves by your old-fashioned mountebanks. In terms of truth-in-packaging, the latter were probably more honest . . . .

The schools reflect our society, and being vitally, warmly, constantly interested in the immediate and crucial bond between our communities and our schools is part of the job of running them and working in them. This bond has been sundered by the massive infusion of federal money in our school systems. That is what is really wrong with them. It scarcely matters that teenage boys hate to read -- that would not be news. They should spend more time in shop then, or under the supervision of their coaches and their ROTC colonels. They will come to reading in their own good time. No superman is going to change that, and it is symptomatic of the narcissistic, rules-are-for-others types that they can think of nothing better than blaming teachers for a system that has lost its moorings and its compasses, including most pertinently its
moral compasses.

Bloated Bureaucracy

Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute has developed an Excel spreadsheet showing that the actual dollars spent per pupil by the District of Columbia Public Schools is more than $28,000. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/do-you-still-think-dc-spends-only-15000pupil/

In a post on the Cato Institute's website in February 2010, Mr. Coulson wrote:

If you’d like all the gory details, drawn from the official DC budget documents and the District’s own audited enrollment figures, then have a look at this Excel spreadsheet file. I’m happy to go over the calculation with any DC or DCPS official — or journalist — who would care to dispute it. (It’s only been challenged once before, and the official in question fell silent after seeing the spreadsheet.)

Interviewed by John Stossel, Coulson commented on the Byzantine nature of school funding:

School district budgets are so convoluted it’s almost as if they’re made to be confusing... DC has split up its education spending into seven different budgets, all of which go to k-12 public education, but only one of which is called “the DC Public School budget."

The next time you hear someone say our public schools are underfunded, keep that $28,000 figure in mind.

It's Not Rocket Science

So if teaching's not rocket science, what is it like? If it's not, in the words of educational psychologist Lee Schulman, "the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced,and frightening activity that our species has ever invented," then what is it like?

The best answer I've heard is that teaching, parenting, and counselling are alot alike. That observation comes from my sister, a homeschool mother of five who also has a master's degree in psychology and extensive experience counselling people with eating disorders. Another excellent description of teaching comes from Norman Atkins in his foreword to Doug Lemov's outstanding new book, "Teach Like a Champion." Atkins describes Lemov's study of outstanding teachers this way:

For the past dozen years, he has been standing in the back of hundreds of classrooms, watching thousands of hours of teachers' game films, analyzing their teaching moves with more enthusiasm and attention to detail than virtually anyone else in the history of American education . . . .

What he discovered is surprising for its simplicity and portends good news for the teaching profession . . . what he repeatedly saw and captured on video,beyond the no-shortcuts preparation and an essential mind-set of high expectations, were highly skilled individuals, working with a common, discrete set of tools, building systems of classroom culture and instruction, brick by brick.

We need to be realistic when we talk about teaching. A false view of teaching leads to unrealistic expectations and is a recipe for failure. When school superintendents and leaders such as Charlotte Danielson compare teaching to rocket science and claim that it is the hardest thing on the planet, bad consequences follow. The "teacher as rocket scientist" view of teaching allows administrators to set unrealistic expectations, to make everything harder and more complex, to disable, make dependent, and micromanage teachers, and to delegitimize common sense and personal experience.

Doug Lemov's new book, "Teach Like a Champion," is must reading for any teacher and is a welcome antidote to those who compare teaching to brain surgery or rocket science.

Are Teachers Really that Insecure?

While researching the District of Columbia Public Schools' new IMPACT teacher evaluation system, I came accross the following quote from Charlotte Danielson, whose work, Framework for Teachers was cited by the developers of IMPACT:

Educational psychologist Lee Shulman (2004) illustrated the complexity of teaching by comparing the fields of teaching and medicine. He noted that teachers have classrooms of 25–35 students, whereas doctors treat only a single patient at a time. Even when working with a reading group of 6–8 students, teachers are overseeing the decoding skills, comprehension, word attack,performance, and engagement of those students while simultaneously keeping tabs on the learning of the other two dozen students in the room. "The only time a physician could possibly encounter a situation of comparable complexity," Shulman pointed out, "would be in the emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster" (p. 258). He concluded that classroom teaching "is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced,and frightening activity that our species has ever invented" (p.504). http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/summer09/vol66/num09/A-Framework-for-Learning-to-Teach.aspx

This got me thinking, are teachers really that insecure? Must we be told that teaching is the hardest thing on the planet? I've taught in the lower grades (K-3rd) for twelve years, and I'm here to tell you that teaching little ones is alot more than wiping noses and zipping zippers. But I'd be exaggerating just a tad if I said it was the most complex, challenging, nuanced, demanding, and frightening activity ever invented by the human species.

A similar exaggeration came from one of my heros, Harry K. Wong. I love Harry and Rosemary Wong's classic book, The First Days of School: How to be an Effective Teacher, but always thought Harry's dedication was over the top:

Dedicated to my father and mother,
Who wanted me to be a brain surgeon.
I exceeded their expectations.
I became a scholar and a teacher.

-Harry K. Wong

In fairness, Harry is using hyperbole and that's fine. Nothing wrong with a bit of hyperbole, but if you listen to what other educators are saying, you can't tell if they're merely using hyperbole or if they really do have an unrealistic view of teaching. Exhibit A comes from Marion Brady, author of numerous articles and books on education, who wrote of teaching, "No other profession, not brain surgery, not rocket science, not politicking, is as difficult as is altering the images of reality in young minds." According to Brady, the "inherent complexity" of teaching is what attracts the best teachers to the field - not a love of children, not a desire to help others, not a passion for the subject matter. http://www.marionbrady.com/PrimerForReformers.pdf

And then there's the Superintendent of schools where I used to teach first grade. She recently told an assembly of several hundered teachers that "teaching really is rocket science." That teaching "really is rocket science" was the theme of her speech, which had to do with how critical every moment in the classroom is and how difficult the teacher's job is. But why would any teacher compare himself or herself to a rocket scientist?

Our work as teachers is important and hard and nobody is questioning that, so spare us the comparisons to brain surgery and rocket science. Or do we suffer from an inferiority complex? (My wife tells me that at her college,"bunny classes" was a common pejorative for education courses. Perhaps those who compare teaching to rocket science and brain surgery are raging against the idea that education courses are nothing more than "bunny classes?")

In 1999, the American Federation of Teachers published an article entitled, "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science: What Teachers of Reading Should Know and be Able to Do."
//http://www.aft.org/pdfs/teachers/rocketscience0304.pdf

That's embarrassing, frankly.

Failure is Information

"Failure is information." I'm going to remember that little gem the next time I have a child complain about getting the wrong answer in my classroom.

The quote comes from Carol Deiner, who as a graduate student in psychology worked with Carol Dweck, author of the book, Mindset, the New Psychology of Success. (2006) What Deiner and Dweck are saying is that we can view failure with a good or bad attitude. The bad attitude says something like, "I'm not smart enough to do this." The good says, "This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” Think Thomas Edison and his endless lightbulb experiments. (Okay they weren't endless, but don't be a nitwit - you know what I mean!) Failure is information.

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/dweck.html

According to Deiner and Dweck, our level of success depends on which of these two attitudes we take. If we view ourselves as not smart enough, not capable enough, or just inherently limited in some way, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. But if we view failure as information to use in solving a problem, our chances of ultimate success are so much the greater.

Dweck's book, Mindset, is listed as one of the sources consulted by the drafters of the District of Columbia Public School's new IMPACT teacher evaluation system. I am intrigued by Carol Dweck's research and intend to read her book, Mindset. I'll also be interested to see just how her research fits into the IMPACT system.

DC Public Schools Fire 241

The District of Columbia Public Schools, headed by Michelle Rhee, recently fired 241 teachers under its new teacher evaluation system known as "IMPACT" which is noteworthy in that, for the first time, teachers' job status is tied to students' test results. According to the Washington Post, 165 teachers were fired for poor evaluations under a new teacher evaluation program called "IMPACT." The remaining 89 teachers appear to have been fired over licensing issues. The Post notes that those fired for poor performance represent about 4% of the DC Public School system's 4,000 teachers. Rhee also announced that an additional 737 teachers were rated as "minimally effective" under the new IMPACT teacher evaluation system, and that they had one year to improve or be fired. Thus, according to Rhee, about 22.5% of teachers in the DC system was minimally effective or worse.

On his blog, "Inside DC Schools," Washington Post education reporter Bill Turque highlights some of the misgivings many people have with the firings and the new IMPACT system. He quoted one teacher who responded to a survey conducted by the teacher's union, "I think the only thing the IMPACT system has provided DCPS teachers with is an atmosphere of fear and rejection."

Turque quoted another teacher:

IMPACT is an out-of-touch and convoluted corporate construction which has no validity in the gritty reality of teaching in DC public schools," wrote another. "It seems designed by political aspirant edwonk self-aggrandizers who have little or no real teaching experience or any respect for the heroic job DCPS teachers do every day.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcschools/2010/07/impacts_impact_fear_and_reject.html?sid=ST2010072303662

Of course, these are only two voices amid many on both sides. From what I've learned so far, I have major qualms with IMPACT. In my next series of posts I'll attempt to explore them in a fair and helpful manner.