An incredibly important speech on education by Diane Ravitch

That is a brief clip of Diane Ravitch addressing the Representative Assembly of the National Education Association on July 6, where she was receiving an award as the 2010 "Friend of Education."

Please keep reading.

The complete text of Diane's speech can be read here. She has given me permission to quote as much as I deem appropriate, including the whole speech if necessary.

I won't do that. You can follow the link to read the entire text if so inclined.

Let me offer some selections to at least whet your appetite, as well as offer a bit of commentary of my own.

... in all of this time, aside from the right-wing think tanks, I haven’t seen met a single teacher who likes what’s happening? I haven’t met a single teacher who thinks that No Child Left Behind has been a success. I haven’t met a single teacher who thinks that Race to the Top is a good idea.

I remind readers that the Representative Assembly passed a resolution of no confidence in Race to the Top.

And as I talk to teachers, by the end of my talk, I hear the same questions again and again: What can we do? How can we stop the attacks on teachers and on the teaching profession? Why is the media demonizing unions? Why does the media constantly criticize public schools? And why does it lionize charter schools? Why is Arne Duncan campaigning with Newt Gingrich? Why has the Obama Administration built its education agenda on the punitive failed strategies of No Child Left Behind?

Newt Gingrich - now there's a great ally for a supposedly progressive administration, eh? And during the campaign, Obama railed against NCLB, yet too much of the administration policy continues to rely on the failed policies of that approach.

I will continue to speak out against high-stakes testing. It undermines education. High-stakes testing promotes cheating, gaming the system, teaching to bad tests, narrowing the curriculum. High-stakes testing means less time for the arts, less time for history or geography or civics or foreign languages or science.

We see schools across America dropping physical education. We see them dropping music. We see them dropping their arts programs, their science programs, all in pursuit of higher test scores. This is not good education.

I have been told by some people in the Obama Administration that the way to stop the narrowing of the curriculum is to test everything. In fact, the chancellor in Washington, D.C., the other day announced she plans to do exactly that. That means less time for instruction, more time for testing, and a worse education for everyone.

Some of us have worried about this trend for years - I remember a group of elementary school art teachers asking their state for a test on art so their classes would not be eliminated. As it happens, my course is one in which there is a test that has high stakes - students in theory must not only pass a government course but also a state test in government in order to graduate from high school (although the latter requirement has some loopholes). Let me say that for too many students their course in government gets reduced, especially in the Spring as the test approaches, to drill and kill, practice for the test. For a subject that should excite them, because it has direct affect on their lives, they get bored and frustrated.

In speaking out, I have consistently warned about the riskiness of school choice. Its benefits are vastly overstated. It undercuts public education by enabling charter schools to skim the best students in poor communities. As our society pursues these policies, we will develop a bifurcated system, one for the haves, another for the have-nots, and politicians have the nerve to boast about such an outcome.

Public schools, as I said before, are a cornerstone of our democratic society. If we chip away at support for them, we erode communal responsibility for a vital public institution.

Bifurcated - even worse than what we have by geography, where wealthy communities have excellent public schools rich in resources and the students have access to all kinds of elective courses, and poor communities, whether in inner cities, inner rings of suburbs or the hinterlands, lacking equipment, with decaying buildings, and overwhelmed with students arriving st school with less background and current problems.

democratic society - if we really believe in it, economics would not be the sole basis on which we make arguments about our schools.

Last year, a major evaluation showed that one out of every six charters will get better results, five out of six charters will get no different results or worse results than the regular public schools. A report released just a couple of weeks ago by Mathematica Policy Research once again shows charter middle schools do not get better results than regular public middle schools.

Unfortunately, the general media coverage of the Mathematica report was badly flawed, focused on the schools that did 'better' while not including any of the caveats about even these schools. Charters COULD be used to offer alternative ways of teaching/learning to specific groups of students. Diane's next two paragraphs are very important:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, on whose board I served for seven years, has tested charter schools since 2003. In 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009, charter schools were compared to regular public schools and have never shown an advantage over regular public schools. Charter schools, contrary to Bill Gates, are not more innovative than regular public schools. The business model and methods of charter schools is this — longer school days, longer hours, longer weeks, and about 95 percent of charter schools are non-union.

Teachers are hired and fired at will. Teachers work 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They are expected to burn out after two or three years when they can be replaced. No pension worries, no high salaries. This is not a template for American education.

NAEP is the national report card on education. It is considered the gold standard of educational evaluation. It does not show that charters do better. One reason why some "reformers" like charters is that in many states they are a way around unions, and their teachers can be fired at will.


Let me skip down a bit:

And perhaps we should begin demanding that school districts be held accountable for providing the resources that schools need. Just like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top requires and pressures districts to close low-performing schools. The overwhelming majority of low-performing schools enroll students in poverty and students who don’t speak English and students who are homeless and transient. Very often, these schools have heroic staffs who are working with society’s neediest children. These teachers deserve praise, not pink slips. Closing schools weakens communities. It’s not a good idea to weaken communities. No school was ever improved by closing it.

Reread that please. Yes, you will read stories that supposedly focus on "high-performing" schools dealing with such students. In some cases the claims for high performance are based on selective use of data. In most cases the schools on which such focus is made get more resources (as do many charters), have longer days, etc. The "success" is claimed on the basis of test scores. What is not yet offered is any evidence that there are long-term gains in learning: that the students are developing skills and knowledge that they can apply outside of the test environment. Meanwhile we reconstitute schools. We use one of the four models approved by this administration, even though NONE has any research to demonstrate that they improve education.

There are passages about the right to unionize, which Diane supports, but which "reformers" oppose. Read this paragraph, and perhaps you will understand two things, (1) why teachers are reacting so positively towards Diane; and (2) why we feel unfairly besieged, that the playing field is tilted:

I have spoken out repeatedly to defend the right of teachers to join unions for their protection and the protection of the teaching profession. Teachers have a right to a collective voice in the political process. It’s the American way. I don’t see the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or the pundits complaining about the charter school lobby. I don’t see them complaining about the investment bankers lobby, or any other group that speaks on behalf of its members. Only teachers’ unions are demonized these days.

Teachers, and those who support them, ARE being demonized. By constrast, Hedge Fund managers (who are making major investments in things like charter schools for tax benefits) and Wall Street Firms (who came close to destroying the economy of this nation and the international community) get bailed out with our tax dollars, continue to pay bonuses, and spend millions to prevent appropriate oversight and regulation. Then they want to have a voice telling us how we should teach, how our schools should be run.

There is so much of value in the speech. By now I hope I have at least convinced you to take the time to read the entire thing.

Let me offer only a few more snippets, skipping over some very important material:

Around the world, those nations that are successful recognize that the best way to improve school is to improve the education profession. We need expert teachers, not a steady influx of novices.

One argument against Teach for America, for example. Now if those in that program actually stayed in teaching, people like Ravitch and me would have far fewer objections. The constant turnover in the schools in which they serve is unfair to those kids. The program benefits many in the TFA corps, and it certainly benefits TFA. It is not clear that the students are getting all that much benefit, and the model is not something that can really address the needs of the millions of students in inner city and rural schools.

The current so-called reform movement is pushing bad ideas. No high-performing nation in the world is privatizing its schools, closing its schools, and inflicting high-stakes testing on every subject on its children. The current reform movement wants to end tenure and seniority, to weaken the teaching profession, to silence teachers’ unions, to privatize large sectors of public education. Don’t let it happen.

The consequences of letting these "reforms" go forward unchallenged will be great damages far beyond the arena of public education. It will be further destruction of what is left of the union movement in this country. It will be increased privatization of what is left of the commons in this country/ It will be a narrowing of opportunity for too many of our young people. It will diminish us as a people as our young people receive narrower and narrower educations.

Diane urges those listening to her to be politically active, to remind people that there are millions of teachers, we vote, and so do our families, to not support anyone who is an opponent of public education.

Stand up to the attacks on public education. Don’t give them half a loaf, because they will be back the next day for another slice, and the day after that for another slice.

Don’t compromise. Stand up for teachers. Stand up public education, and say “No mas, no mas." Thank you.

Diane Ravitch received a rousing ovation for this speech. As a teacher, as a UNIONIZED teacher in a public school, I understand why.

I thought it important that as many people as possible encounter HER words, not just cursory news accounts. I think it important that voices that speak for teachers and for public schools be given as much of an audience as those who have described themselves as 'reformers' and seek to suppress or denigrate any opposing point of view.

That is why I asked Diane, a friend, if I could quote extensively. That is why Diane told me "You are free to cite or quote whatever you wish."

Thanks for reading.

Please pass on the link for her speech.

Peace.

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Bad and good ways to defend social foundations and reform teacher education

In Part I of a series of essays that somehow connect the politics of teacher education to austerity plans in Greece, Henry Giroux disappointed me most at "It is precisely this rejection of theory that prevents teachers from addressing the right-wing policies now being enacted in Texas and Arizona." There is something unreal about this argument that if only K-12 teachers had Theory, they'd be able to leap ideological nonsense in a single bound. Giroux has been prominent for decades in arguing that teachers can and should be intellectuals, and there is a core of a sensible argument in the essays (also see Part II and Part III), but it's wrapped up in so much intellectual confection that I saw little more than a gooey mess by the end of each essay. I've felt something like this regarding some other writers towards the end of their careers, that they desperately needed a strong-willed editor to help them cut the crap out. It is all the more disappointing given the need for clear-eyed perspectives on teacher education.

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I

In the first essay, Giroux points out that Arne Duncan takes for granted and is continuing much of the core set of assumptions that drove school reform in the Bush II era. The broad strokes of that is uncontroversial. And Giroux argues that Duncan, David Steiner, and many others want teacher education to be primarily technical rather than intellectual, and there's a core truth to that. But Giroux makes both errors of commission and errors of omission in a scattershot approach. Giroux argues that the praise of Louisiana's teacher education reform ignores the disparate outcomes from Louisiana's K-12 system. Pause, scratch head: how can the slow development of changes in training new teachers be responsible for continuing inequalities in a system where new teachers are a relatively small part of the equation? Here's a case where a good editor would say, "Hey, Dr. Giroux, this just doesn't fit. We're cutting it to make the essay stronger. Yeah, I know it's one of your favorite passages. Good authors kill their favorite children, or passages, or whatnot." Or the following:

Duncan's attack on theory and critical thinking is not only rooted in the most perverse form of anti-intellectualism; it is also in lockstep with a conservative and corporate educational reform movement driven by an ideological agenda largely shaped by a number of anti-public conservative foundations, politicians, legislators and intellectuals who argue for deregulation and exhibit a strange obsession with crunching numbers.

Giroux is not alone in crafting a monolithic explanation of why the Obama administration's education policies parallel those of the Bush administration in several ways, but there's something deeply unsatisfying with the argument that it's a single wrong idea that's dominating in an uber-policy sense. And it just doesn't hang together when put in the context of education policy overall. The elimination of subsidized college loans from the private sector to create a monopoly for the direct student loan program? The $100 billion in ARRA to save teachers' jobs? Neither of those policies fits with Giroux's monolithic argument. Look, I understand the concern with reductionist education reform policies, but "it's complicated" isn't just a Facebook relationship status. There's more to the Obama/Duncan policies than "continue what George W. Bush started." This administration has done some very, very good things with regard to education (especially in the stimulus and health-care bills), and they've done some foolish things. That's very hard to fit in a seamless explanation such as Giroux's.

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II

There is something fundamentally romantic about Giroux's grandiose argument defending classes in social and cultural foundations of education, and especially what he and others call critical theory. For those new to the term "foundations," it usually refers to four types of classes: educational psychology, measurement/assessment, curriculum theory, and humanities and social-science perspectives on education. Social or cultural foundations comprise the last. I push my students to think about the contradictions and dilemmas of education, so much so that a student from about ten years ago told me I had to read Giroux's essays. But I don't want them to save the world, or rather I don't really expect my classes to be the lynchpin in their future careers, however much my life revolves around my own area. For one thing, it's a bit absurd to simultaneously claim that we should be careful about all the child-saving goals some have for formal schooling at the same time we want people to Save the World using our perspective.

Far more realistic is a goal of sanity: If you take a class from me, I'll give you a rock to stand on when things are nutty. You should come out of my class understanding the central reasons why politics is inseparable from education policy, why there are conflicting expectations of schools, what the debates over the achievement gap revolve around, arguments over the roles of teachers and teaching as an occupation, and a basic outline of the history of education and social-science models of schooling. If you become a teacher after leaving my class, you'll have some ideas and tools to give you perspective as fads fly through your system. Or to take another analogy: my undergraduate classes in social foundations are the educational equivalent of defensive driving classes. Of course you need to know how to steer the car, work the mirrors, operate the clutch, and so forth. The mechanisms of driving are essential. But a good part of staying safe on the road is avoiding all the crazy drivers around you. Likewise with teaching: you need to know methods, but if you only learn methods you'll be crying frequently at 4 am, and not just in your first year of teaching.

The role of classes in humanities and social-science perspectives in education is different at the graduate level: researchers in other areas who wade into areas touching on humanities and social-science perspectives on education need to know something about the relevant materials my colleagues and I write lest they reinvent the wheel, misinterpret canonical authors such as Dewey, and otherwise lead themselves astray. One brief gloss on this is captured in books such as Tyack and Cuban's Tinkering toward Utopia (1995), after which graduate students in my classes commonly express amazement that "these things have been tried before" for a lot of these things policies. And, no, one book is not enough. Quick (for those who haven't taken social/cultural foundations classes at the doctoral level): what sorts of wheels do you not have to reinvent, thanks to Willard Waller? Robert Dreeben? Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir? Amy Gutmann?

The arguments over social foundations and "theory" in teacher education make me wince in part because they come from the counterfactual assumption that social foundations dominates teacher education. Arthur Levine made that error in one of his reports, Arne Duncan makes it, and David Steiner makes it. Were we so lucky that historians, philosophers, and sociologists of education ran the roost, but that just isn't so. Go find the social-foundations requirement in California state law or regs: I dare you. It's not there, and I don't know if there's a single state that requires it. NCATE doesn't. TEAC doesn't. Part of the difficulty with classes in social and cultural foundations of education is that they are often "infused" into other classes taught by faculty (or adjuncts or graduate students) without much more formal education in the constituent disciplines than a single class themselves. In some small college programs, there isn't much choice with the small numbers of faculty. But full-time positions specifically in foundations of education have declined dramatically over the past few decades, and it feeds a vicious cycle:

• External and internal pressures rise on teacher education programs to add technical content to programs.
• Programs of studies shift away from courses based in liberal-arts programs and towards more technical courses. (Sometimes this is reduction of gen-ed requirements outside teacher ed, sometimes in reduction of social foundations requirements.)
• As foundations requirements drop, colleges and universities hire fewer faculty in the area on retirements. Some social foundations faculty entirely disappear in institutions.
• Some time later, there is a countervailing push (either externally or internally) to increase material in teacher education programs on diversity, multiculturalism, the social context of education, etc.
• Teacher education program faculty restructure programs again to add the material.
• Without social foundations faculty, those who teach courses in diversity, multiculturalism, the relationship between schooling and democracy, and so forth have relatively thin backgrounds in those areas. They do the best they can...

... and the best that someone outside an area of expertise can do is often very different from someone who has spent years of study in the area. I've got three years of postdoc experience in a special education department, but you'd be nuts to ask me to teach methods classes in special education. I am just not competent to do so. Period. So what happens when people teaching classes in schooling and diversity do so with a small handful of graduate classes touching on diversity, themselves not taught by anyone with a liberal-arts background, and without being responsible for a broad field of readings beyond the required readings for those classes?

In other areas of education, we'd call this out of field teaching. To argue that teacher education is too laden with theory because you can easily find course titles, catalog descriptions, and syllabi with terms such as foundations, critical theory, diversity, and so forth when the instructors for those classes don't have significant academic backgrounds in social foundations is the teacher education equivalent of saying that high schools were too laden with science if we lived in a world where somewhere between a large minority to a solid majority of science teachers had no more than one or two science classes in college.

So the reality of teacher education today is that much "theory" is watered down, outside the context of a rigorous course in a liberal-arts tradition. I construct my readings so that no student can agree with everything they read in my course unless they've read poorly, but I can imagine someone with minimal readings in the area assigning a recent provocative writing in one particular direction without a broader context. In my undergraduate social foundations class, I assign more than a dozen pieces of writing that students usually find difficult and require close attention. But if the primary reading is a text and the emphasis is on understanding terminology or a cascade of regurgitated social-science models as separate "chunks" to memorize, students avoid a structure of close reading, deeper criticism, and a conversation among authors.

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III

Where to go from here on teacher education and the right mix of liberal-arts courses and technical courses? First, I think we call bullshit on those who simultaneously praise Teach for America and then want colleges of education to strip their programs of everything but vocational approaches. You can't ask schools deeply in need of good experienced teachers to take fresh-out-of-school liberal-arts graduates and then say every other teacher has to start with a purely technical background. Double standard, no? Second, when talking about social foundations we stop channeling George S. Counts, who argued in the 1930s that teachers could be social reformers in an explicit sense. That is essentially what Giroux is doing even while acknowledging the (culturally) conservative nature of teaching. That lays a pretty heavily guilt trip on future teachers, who can do a great deal to improve the world just by doing their jobs, keeping perspective on bad policy and going around it legally, and staying sane while doing so.

We also have to support a solid balance of liberal-arts and professional courses as essential for new teachers. That's enormously difficult in a public four-year college or university, as universities discovered in Florida when the legislature tried to mandate more than 30 hours of prerequisite liberal-arts courses for education majors. It was great in theory, but in practice it required students to know at the start of their first semester that they wanted to be teachers. It is also true that those who want to have secondary specializations need to start early because they essentially have to double-major if they want to be certified when they graduate. The current move is to require teacher-education students to have consistent field experiences every year (preferably every semester), with the right supervision, of course. Again, this sounds great, but it imposes structural inflexibilities in other parts of a student's program of studies.

What we are left with is the reality of structurally-incomplete programs: in four years, relatively few student are going to have both a great liberal-arts education and also a great professional education. In the 1980s, the Holmes Group had another theoretically-bright idea, which is to make teacher education a five-year process, adding in a masters-degree program before people graduated and acquired jobs. Unfortunately, lots of students need to have jobs before they can take the graduate credits, and in most public universities, graduate courses are a large quantum click higher in tuition. New York State pioneered the "masters degree during your early professional career" approach, which recognizes the incomplete nature of baccalaureate degrees as professional education.

In the end, the masters-in-five-years requirement may be the best approach to the inherently incomplete nature of undergraduate teacher education. Unfortunately, that doesn't address the individual gaps in a new teacher's background or the incompatibility of taking graduate classes in the academic year while you're teaching. So it needs tweaking: New teachers fresh out of college need to be told explicitly what they come in with, what gaps they need to fill, and what type of program they must take (whether heavy on liberal arts, heavy on technical methods, or something more specific). I don't care if they are formal masters programs or graduate certificates or whatnot; we just need to acknowledge that most new teachers need help both during the year in their classes and with deeper background in either liberal arts or professional education. Any liberal-arts courses need to be heavier in the summer than in the academic year. And school districts should pay teachers to acquire more education in their first few professional years as part of accelerated early-career raises.

I wish I could change the world so that teachers were paid well enough to wait until they have a graduate degree to start teaching, or that we really could provide a great liberal-arts and a great professional education all in four years. But it does no good to propose policies based on what isn't true now. What is true now is that few teachers come out of college fully prepared to be great in the classroom right off the bat, and that isn't going to be the case no matter what Arne Duncan or you or I would wish. So we have to accept that people graduate college with an incomplete preparation, and then we need to help them without pretending that either just a technical or just a liberal-arts education is enough.

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Learning on Other People's Kids - an important book on Teach For America

I wondered, "Whose America is Teach For America really teaching for? Why is it tolerable for education to be less-thanfor other people's kids? And, what are we, as a nation, really prepared to do about it?

Those are the concluding words of Barbara Torre Veltri in her book Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher

In just over two two decades since Wendy Kopp founded Teach For America as a result of her senior thesis at Princeton, the organization has become an influential player in education and politics in the United States. According to its website, for the past school year it had 7,300 corps members teaching 450,000 students. It regularly gets glowing press coverage from general media. Admission to its corps from selective colleges has become increasingly competitive. Yet what Teach For America is and does has been poorly understood.

Barbara Torre Veltri provides what may be the single most important examination of TFA I have encountered, and I hope you will continue reading as I explore the book and explain why I make that statement.

Veltri is herself a long-term educator, now a university-based educator of teachers. She began her own teaching career under emergency certification: like the members of TFA corps, that means she was NOT a fully certified teacher at the time she entered her classroom. Further, in her capacity as a university based trainer of teachers, she had a multiple year association with Teach For America: she was associated with one of the universities that serves as a site for the 5 week Institutes that represent the entirety of the training of Corp members before they get their own classroom, and she served as a resource for Corps members and TFA staff as the participants continued to learn how to teach even as they were already class-room based. The book is thus enriched not only with her insight into the experiences with which she was associated, but she had access to a large number of current and former Corps members and the people in school districts in which she was placed. Veltri is also a thorough researcher, having examined and absorbed much of the relevant literature.

As should be clear from how I began, Veltri now raises serious questions about our reliance upon Teach For America. That does not mean she is necessarily opposed to alternative programs to recruit and train teachers for hard to staff schools in inner cities and rural areas: in her Acknowledgments she refers to Jumpstart of Manhattanville College, whose model "includes 6 months of coursework, practicum, and mentoring, prior to placement of career-changers into New York Schools." By comparison, TFA Corp members get a 5 week institute. The difference can perhaps be reflected best in retention statistics - as of the writing of the book, 85% of those who completed Jumpstart remained in the classroom (these are 9 year figures(, whereas the vast majority of TFA leave the classroom upon completion of their two year commitments, taking advantage of the benefits offered by graduate and professional schools towards former TFAers, and includes a stipend from AmeriCorps equal to $5,000/year for use against any past or future educational expense. Remember (1) this is paid for by our taxes, and (2) TFAers qualify for this regardless of any financial need.

And while I am on the financial aspects about which you will learn in this book, let me also note the following. TFA requires that their Corp members be paid the same as would certified teachers in the same positions EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE NOT THEMSELVES CERTIFIED. Further, the contracts with school districts require a payment to TFA of several thousand dollars additional for each Corps Members, thus effectively making a TFA placement MORE EXPENSIVE than hiring others to teach, whether fully certified or - like TFAers - provisionally certified.

And there are the costs associated with the constant turnover of teaching faculty. On p. 168 Veltri cites a study that says the costs of teachers leaving the classroom range from $4,366 and $17,872 for each teacher leaving this classroom. There is further non-financial impact in the negative effect upon learning that is clearly documented across the professional literature in schools lacking a constant teaching faculty.

The real value of the book comes less from the statistics and studies which Veltri cites, but from the words and experiences of those who themselves were participants in TFA, with whom Veltri built a sufficient relationship of trust that they were willing to be quite candid with her. While most had little intention of staying the classroom permanently, they were drawn to this service because they wanted to make a difference, even if they were also drawn by the long-term benefits they believed would accrue to them after completing their two years. Many felt unprepared for what they were encountering in the classroom. They desperately needed experienced mentors, but TFA's support was largely limited to former TFAers, and they were on their own in finding support within their schools. They acknowledged their lack of relevant background on which to draw, and how overburdened they felt. Let me offer a few examples to illustrate this:

I tend to go over my lesson plan time. How do you fix that? (Cortina)

“My students need experienced teachers who know what works and can implement it effectively. Instead, they have me, and though I am learning quickly, I am still learning on them, experimenting on them, working on their time.” (Marguerite)

I mean, in a lot of was, how I am teaching right now is what I remember doing in high school. It's what makes sense to me. It's a kind of ... prior knowledge. I guess it is just that. (Ali)

... And, part of the problem is, I just never know exactly if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing and that creates a lot of stress. (Kyle)

That stress is increased by the requirement of completing 15 credit hours during their rookie year, because of their emergency certification status:

What does TFA want me to do? Attend UPenn classes four nights in a row, grade my student papers, and prepare for teaching, or listen to them? I'm done with it! (Curtis)

Let me comment briefly on the requirement for 15 credit hours. When I began my doctoral studies while in my 2nd year at my current school, I needed special permission to take 9 credit hours, because our system believes taking on anything more than 6 credit hours at time jeopardizes one' effectiveness as a teacher. I already had 4 years of teaching experience, one of which was in the school with the same preps as I would have while attending graduate school. I have seen beginning teachers with emergency or provisional credentials struggle to balance the demands of the classes they teach and those they attend, even with 6 hours and MORE PREPARATION than the 5 weeks offered in TFA institutes.

Another key value of the Veltri book is that she explores serious questions. If I may quote from her website, the book is organized around key questions:

Previously unanswered questions are addressed: Why do intelligent college graduates apply to Teach For America? How are they recruited, trained, and hired? How do they learn the culture(s) of the community, schools, grade level, and curriculum? Is there a “culture” of the TFA organization? Do TFAers see themselves as effective teachers? What recommendations do corps members offer to TFA, its’ donors, policy-makers, future corps members and the public?

It has three main parts, of which the final, as Veltri puts it,

presents TFAers’ views on their corps teaching experience, analyzes the “master narrative” as it relates to the education of poor children, and raises questions for readers to contemplate.

One real issue for many beginning teachers is managing the classroom, for if students are not on task learning is less likely to occur. Allow me to quote what Veltri says on this topic, on p. 111:

Classroom management proved to be one of the top three needs of first year TFAers over seven consecutive cohorts whose classrooms I visited in both the middle Atlantic and Sothwest regions.

One question some often ask is if the TFA approach is effective. The organization likes to claim that its members are more effective teachers (as measured by test scores) than others in the same setting. Perhaps in this regard it is worth noting a new policy brief, Teach For America: A False Promise, produced by the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy
Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University with funding from the
Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. The subtitle is Alternative teacher training program yields costly turnover while doing little to improve student achievement. Allow me to quote two paragraphs to illustrate why the TFA claims, while somewhat accurate, are deceptive:

Studies show that TFA teachers perform fairly well when compared with one segment of the teaching population: other teachers in the same hard-to-staff schools, who are less likely to be certified or traditionally prepared. Compared with that specific group of teachers, TFA teachers "perform comparably in raising reading scores and a bit better in raising math scores," the brief's authors write.

Conversely, studies which compare TFA teachers with credentialed non-TFA
teachers find that "the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of credentialed beginning teachers," Heilig and Jez write. And in a large-scale Houston study, in which the researchers controlled for experience and teachers' certification status, standard certified teachers consistently outperformed uncertified TFA teachers of comparable experience levels in similar settings.

The study goes on to note that the majority of TFAers leave at the end of two years, with over 80% being out of the classroom after three. Some of the claims for evidence of better performance are based on the less than 1 in five who stay, who have become fully certified.

I entered teaching through a traditional Master of Arts in Teaching program. I had 16 weeks of practice teaching under the supervision of experienced teachers, 8 each in middle and high school. I had received formal training in pedagogy, both general and related to my content area (social studies). Before my student teaching I had multiple occasions in which I observed experienced teachers in a variety of settings. I was trained in the legal requirements of special education students. I was given training and education in teaching students whose culture and background might be very different than my own. I was an honors graduate of an elite college (Haverford), in other words, the kind of candidate sought by Teach For America. I had previous teaching experience to adults in business, and years before in a private secondary school. And when I got my own classroom in 1995 I was 49 years old. Still, it was not an easy task, although now having completed my 15th year I am generally considered an excellent and effective teacher.

I have a certain antipathy towards the TFA approach, because I believe it is unfair to the students and schools in which TFAers serve. I refuse to accept the framing that implies a TFA teacher is better than currently available alternatives. The correct answer to the need is to provide properly trained teachers who are committed to students and the profession. I do not think we do our students justice when they are viewed as a part of getting one's ticket stamped for something else in life, and the opportunity to have claimed to have been of service.

I also think the resources dedicated to Teach for America might be better spent on preparing regular teachers. Veltri provides a table using data from TFA, showing that in 2006-06 the 4,700 corps members were served with an operating budget of $39,500,000, while for 2009-10 the projected figures were 7,300 corps members with an operating budget of $160,000,000. Let's put those numbers on a per capita basis. In 2005-06 the cost per corps member was 8,400, while in 2009-10 it had ballooned to $21,917, or more than half what most teachers in this country make in their first year. I question whether that is money well spent.

Veltri raises other pertinent questions as well. She notes that to be a cosmetologist requires 9 months of training for licensure in her state, and wonders why those to whom we entrust the education of our young people should have only a 5 week institute that does not connect with the real world of the classrooms to which the TFAers will go. As Veltri writes on p. 196

When teacher training is compressed like a microwaveable meal and field experience is deemed unnecessary or a waste of time by those in public policy positions, a message is sent that "other people's kids" are able to withstand someone learning how to teach on them.

Teach For America and its alumni are highly visible. It serves as a 501c3 organization favored by corporations. Its graduates are highly sought after in business and law schools. It garners glowing media coverage. It is now expanding its reach to other nations around the world.

And yet, the question should remain: does Teach For America truly serve the needs of those it claims it is helping? Does it even fairly serve the needs of its Corp members while they participate in TFA? I would argue that it does not. And had I any doubt before, what I read in Veltri's book would have convinced me.

If you care about education policy, I strongly urge you to read and digest this book. It will provide you with information relevant to those who are considering associating with TFA as a source of obtaining teaching staff.

Please note - I fully understand the desire to be of service, even if only temporarily. After all, that is the motivation for the many who have entered the Peace Corps, an organization I admire in many ways and for which I was selected but was unable to accept the offer. I am not necessarily criticizing those who apply, although I think they are misguided.

Perhaps you are not yet convinced. I suggest that if you read Veltri you will be.

Which is why I again urge you to read her book.

Peace.

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50 Political Ideologies

I thought this was an interesting attempt:

My list of the 50 most significant modern and contemporary political ideologies. Students and teachers may find it especially valuable (it worked well in a class I guest-taught in the Peace and Conflict Studies Department at UC-Berkeley in April 2010).

Along with each ideology below, I’ve suggested two readings. Most are by co-creators or advocates of the ideology at issue, and nearly all were written in our 21st century. All are freely available on the Web -- just click on the blue titles below.

Needless to say, no reading is – or can be – perfectly representative of a political ideology, which is typically the construction of a myriad of scholars and activists and is anyway never finally set in stone; hopefully, each reading here will prompt you to dig deeper in the literature.

Example of what is there (sans links).

PREFACE

A. Why Ideology?: Slavoj Zizek, “20 Years of Collapse,” New York Times, 9 Nov. 2009

B. Human Nature, I (quasi-tragic vision): Steven Pinker interviewed by John Brockman, “A Biological Understanding of Human Nature,” Edge Foundation website, 9 Sept. 2002

C. Human Nature, II (blue-sky vision): Dacher Keltner, pp. ix-xii & 3-15 in Keltner, Born to Be Good, 2009

INTRODUCTION

A. Understanding Ideology: Manfred Steger, “Introduction: Political Ideologies and Social Imaginaries,” pp. 1-5 in Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary, 2008 [after you click on this link, you’ll need to type “Social Imaginaries” into the search box]

B. Creating Ideology, I (bottom-up): Lawrence Goodwyn, “The Alliance Develops a Movement Culture,” pp. 20-35 in Goodwyn, The Populist Moment, 1978

C. Creating Ideology, II (young turks): Todd Gitlin, “‘Name the System,’” pp. 171-88 in Gitlin, The Sixties, rev. 1993 [after you click on this link, you’ll need to type “Name the System” into the search box]

D. Creating Ideology, III (top-down): Cheng Chen, “Post-Communist Russia’s Search for a New Regime Ideology,” conference paper, American Political Science Association, Aug. 2009 [after you click on this link, you’ll need to click on the box marked "One-Click Download" and then on the box marked “Chicago Booth”]

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No Matter How Hard You Try, No One Will Listen

What follows is a mostly verbatim text from a student in our Bachelors program. This was written for a timed exam for students seeking prior professional experience credits, so she did not have much time to revise it. I think it gives it an immediacy lacking in most of the texts we read in academia.

For me, this student's story captures better than almost anything else I have read the tragic position of working-class parents of color in inner-city public schools.

I was the parent advocate for my own son. I had to advocate for his ADD disability. The origin of the advocacy initiative was the school saying if my son doesn’t take his medicine he cannot come to the school any more. I had a problem with this because when he was on the medicine he became a zombie and no learning was taking place. He was suspended more than he was at school. So my journey began with me being a parent who needed to advocate for my son who could not speak for himself.

First I had to deal with real emotions from the teachers who were tired of dealing with my son on a day to day situation. He was extremely out of order in class every day.

I was called to come to the school every day. Which made me lose two jobs. Taking care of my son’s educational needs ending up being my fulltime job. I had to advocate for my son’s education because the school district had decided if he didn’t take his medicine then you might as well keep him at home. I would come to the school in the mornings to calm him and help him get the morning classes out he way, and hopefully I could leave but normally that was not the case.

I knew I had to find a teacher my son liked in the school so that we could get the process of learning started. Once I found the teacher that could deal with him, the school said no that he was to stay put in the class he was in. I don’t take no very well, and I had to figure out how to get this principal to change her mind on his placement. The first thing I did was go directly to the principal and appeal to her that my son needed to be with a teacher that he respected and enjoyed being with. She still said no.

The next step I had to come up with is to get his IEPs scheduled more frequently, like once a week until we get a handle on his behavior. The IEPs helped a little, I could tell the principal had an attitude problem and the teacher was just staring into space. The only person who seemed interested was the school psychologist. The meetings were supposed to benefit my child but they always turned into me being a bad parent by not giving my son his medicine. I knew I had to find a way to ask the right questions, because I felt the school perceived me in a bad light. Possibly a parent from the ghetto who was using the school as a baby sitter. In the beginning I didn’t know how to ask the right questions because the staff was always on defensive and that made me go on defensive with them.

I knew I had to understand the playing field better. Who could I trust? They needed to know what my expectations were for my child.

I got extremely frustrated at one point because the only thing the school was saying to me was force the medicine in him. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I defiantly was on the wrong side of the playing field with these educators who were smarter than me. I learned to write down everything , keep a journal so when stuff changes I would not have to remember by memory. I had 3 years of journals to refer back to.

The next step was how to deal with a hostile environment in the school. The staff, to me, was taking this too personal. Sometimes even yelling at my son telling him he was bad and going to be stupid. This type of environment was not conducive for learning for any one.

The next approach was to find ways of boosting my child s ego before he got to school. I would tell him that he was going to be the best kid today. And that if he could make it to lunch with no outbursts, tantrums, or attacking some one I would reward him with going to the park to play. I know he had a lot of energy and needed to get the steam off. If my son woke up in a bad mood it had to do with something he went through the night before, and I would have to solve this before I would take him to school. It would take till he got to the 6th grade before the outburst would stop. Because soothing him before he got to school did not work.

When my son got in the 6th grade I realized he still could not read or write, he was at a 3rd grade level so I had to hire him a tutor to get him up to par. The IEPs did not address his education they were only addressing his behavior. So not only was the school failing him I was failing him. So myself and the tutor took upon ourselves to have school every day and teach him his abc’s how to write and his math was below par too.

At this point I had to find a job to support us. My advocacy turned to letter writing first to the school district, then to a lawyer. I wrote so many letters my fingers were numb. I needed to find some one to help me with my case. My son’s education was suffering because the only thing the school was concentrating on was his behavior. He was being shipped from one alternative school to another. And he was not learning a thing. I became an assertive parent advocate so that I could be a effective parent in helping my child get educated. I talked to whoever would listen to me. I was at the school board more than I was at work. . . .

I finally found an educational advocate for my son, someone to speak for him at his IEP meetings. This worked because the staff listened to her she was one of their peers and could not say some of the dumb stuff they had said to me over the years. I found too that I had to keep up with the documents that labeled him mentally retarded. My son was not mental he had a severe behavior problem and I knew this was going to hinder him from learning because if everyday he was acting out he was not learning. I knew the resources were limited and I did not care, I asked for whatever the school district had in the budget to use for my son. I asked the school to hire him a mentor to walk with him to every class so he could stay focused on going to class and actually entering the class room and not walking the hallways. This worked perfectly until the school received budget cuts and the first person to go was my son mentor. I knew I had to walk in the schools shoes and I needed them to help want to help my child. This was a hard task, because once you start asking for things for your child you get labeled as the enemy.

I failed as an educator advocate for my child he is now 16 in and out of jail, he still can't read or write that good and if you ask him if he wants to go to school he will tell you no. My child has turned down any help we have offered him and at this point I hope he graduates, I don’t see this happening because he is 16 and still in the 9th grade. Nothing worked after he got old enough to say no to the forced medicine at school. . . .

Nothing happened because the school district fought me tooth and nail. They did not care if my son got educated, he was passed to the 9th grade and that is where he probably will be when he turns 18. My efforts went unnoticed because I was only advocating for my son, I did not meet any other parents that had children with type of disorder.

I learned that the school district has a long way to go on compassion for children that have problems. I was beat down so many times because I didn’t know the right questions to ask. Anybody who met my kid either hated or loved him. I fought a long and hard fight for my son but he has now chosen the thug life and school is on the bottom of his agenda. I have not given up. I do pray for him and call and encourage him. But when teens have their mind made up that they are already grown and can make their own decisions there is basically not much you can do. I have learned that you can only do so much with little support from educators who are supposed to be on your side. Yes I probably should have given my son the drugs but I still feel today that they should open schools for children like my son so that they can get the education they deserve and not focus solely on his behavior.

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More Poor People are in Suburbs than Cities

"A new image of urban America is in the making," said William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings who co-wrote the report. "What used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into 'bright flight' [sic] to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambiance as an attraction."

"This will not be the future for all cities, but this pattern in front runners like Atlanta, Portland, Ore., Raleigh, N.C., and Austin, Texas, shows that the old urban stereotypes no longer apply," he said.

The suburbs now have the largest poor population in the country. According to the analysis, between 1999 and 2008, the suburban poor grew by 25 percent; five times the growth rate of the poor in cities. During that same time period, the median household income in the U.S. declined by $2,241.

As I have noted before, this shift in population will have significant implications for schools, although the "losing whites" title and "bright flight" framing certainly have racist overtones at least.

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The Argument Itself is Dated

Almost 11 months in to raising our first child, I am finally getting back to doing some blogging.

...and regretting not doing better spell checking...

I am child-myopic these days, and the influence on my thought, actions, and writing will undoubtedly focus on how he, to borrow from Gert. J. J. Biesta, comes into the world as a unique singular being despite the forces that would shape and construct him otherwise.

As this is a policy blog, and an educational policy blog in particular, I will do my best to relate our son’s unfolding to schools, schooling, policy, and policy implementation. If I drift too much into “raising baby,” I trust my colleagues will reel me in.

I woke up this morning thinking about schools as a type of technology, one created to serve a specific function: to educate.

What that means is obviously debatable.

If it’s a public school and you’re asking the current, or previous administration for a definition, to educate is to ram facts into a child’s head and then test the child to see how much fact has stuck.

School is a hammer; knowledge the nail; the teacher is a carpenter and a child the entity under construction. Said differently, school is a needle; the teacher a nurse; history, English, math, beauty, and Truth are the medicines administered in various doses according to the doctor making the rounds.

This is a simplistic way to “educate” as we live in a world where appropriation of fact is a quickly satisfied task for anyone with access to a laptop (or a phone, but not MY phone) can find and appropriate almost any fact desired without having someone nail or inject it into one’s psyche.

Applying that fact is an entirely different matter, as is bringing new facts to bear (sp?) on those committed to memory, evaluating both sets of facts (old and new) and then acting to make a change in one’s life, family, or community in light of reflection on what’s been tried, what’s worked, and what has not.

As a space for achieving all of the above (imagining, testing, critiquing, reflecting, resisting, creating, and attempting) I believe schools as we know them now, the schools I’ll be sending my child to perhaps, are ill suited technologies for encouraging the higher order thinking and intelligent behavior that I want my son, and indeed all children, to engage in.

This brings me back to my phone...which also happens to be our son’s favorite new “toy.” My phone is 4 years old, a veritable dinosaur in a world of eagles. Texting is impractical, as I have to hit the same button several times to scroll through choices before finding the letter or symbol I desire. I cannot access the net from my phone, and if I could, I imagine surfing it would be akin to realtime-surfing on crutches.

I am limited by my 4 year old phone as to how I can interact, learn from, and change my world. Imagine if it was 40 years old. Imagine carrying a 40 year old cell phone around in your pocket.

How about a computer?

This laptop is 5 years old and cannot keep up with my wife’s new machine, which cost us half the old one and has quadruple the power (but it’s a Window’s device and I make myself feel better by noting I have a much cooler marketing apparatus behind my aging iBook™).

Imagine using a 50 year old laptop...you’d need a much bigger lap, one the size of a bedroom. Now imagine using a 100 year old computer. Harder to do because they weren’t around. 100 years ago few people could imagine the processing power we’d eventually have quite literally at our fingertips.

To finally make my school-related point...A 4 year old phone and a 5 year old machine help me function in the world and make life livable and workable, but they have their limits. I’d buy a new phone and new computer if I wasn’t thinking more about my child’s education.

In 5 years there’s a good chance I’ll be sending my son into schools still wedded to designs over 100 years old, technologies that use the basic hardware and operating systems from the 19th Century. Yes they help people get by, and yes they can train children to function in particular ways, but the walls, the bells, the goals, the end of the day desires held by most of the people constructing "schools" will not work in an era that demands more advanced operating systems.

So I’m sitting here thinking to myself:

"Self, are you going to leave your child’s education up to people employing dated technologies, and if so are you prepared to reap the cosmic consequences of reducing Asher’s opportunities for robust exploration and growth as part of an organic-democratic-whole in the name of standards and accountability, themselves dated artifacts?"

I have to answer NO.

Advanced operating systems to be discussed below or outlined next week...

drpk

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