He might have meant that the state ought to work with unions before shoving participation in the Commonwealth’s GIC down the throats of teachers and communities that don’t want it. Some union locals have negotiated higher salaries in exchange for paying a higher percentage of their insurance premiums. Others have negotiated lower salaries in exchange for their employers paying a higher share of their premiums.
He might have also been talking about the Commonwealth sticking Gloucester with a charter school it didn’t want.
He might have also been referring to including teachers in decision-making of their schools and districts.
From the Globe editors’ point of view, however, cooperation from teacher unions means unions not protecting their works from changes in their working conditions or benefits. It means shutting up. It means doing what management wants. Being a willing partner means teachers unions ceasing to protect their members.
I think that editorial was in the draft stage when it was accidentally sent to printing, because the whole column doesn’t make sense. The column, broken down, reads as thus:
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p>1.There was concern that Teach for America* hires would get better job protection than non TfA hires. So, the school committee is rectifying that. The union is bad for bringing it up.
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p>2. Depending on how you count it, there are fewer pilot schools in Boston right now then scheduled. The Globe claims that this is the unions’ fault, offering no evidence.
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p>3. To prove it’s the unions’ fault, the Globe mentions that Menino came out strongly** for charter schools.
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p>4. Thus, unions** are bad.
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p>—————————-
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p>*Nevermind that the “acclaimed” Teach for America program paradrops people into teaching on five weeks of training, as opposed to the year it takes to earn a teaching license.
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p>**Menino did this in a mayoral race just as the other three candidates were coming out in favor of charter schools, as well.
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p>**The Boston Newspaper Guild is a union. Just sayin’
is slipped in front of Teach for America in the first paragraph like this reputation is common knowledge, a forgone conclusion. Cute. “Acclaimed” by whom? By what measure? And based on what?
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p>It’s clear the editorial board favors this bright shiny thing called Teach for America, but the editorial provides no data whatsoever to support its affection. My understanding is the jury is still very much out on this thing, but I have no direct experience with anyone coming out of the program.
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p>Given the history of this relationship, I think it’s pretty clear that the admonition to the BTU to behave like “you’re a willing partner” is a bit more like “act like you’re interested; it’s your wifely duty.”
This is purely anecdotal, but I’ve never met anyone with anything bad to say about Teach for America.
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p>I like sabutai’s take on this, but I’d add that TFA looks like an innocent party here.
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p>
TfA is merely the handiest club with which the Globe can beat the BTU.
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p>I haven’t heard much bad about TfA, save that Michelle Rhee got her teaching “experience” through them.
I’m not a fan of teacher prep programs in general, so if TFA can produce great teachers, I’m all for looking at what they do. But I have heard and read of others who describe TFA as putting out the equivalent of 90-day wonders, so there are critics out there.
“I have heard and read of others” is hard to follow-up for the interested reader đŸ™‚
I think it’s funny that we mere bloggers are more given over to backing up our statements than the pundits at the Globe…
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p>Stanford does deeper, more comprehensive, and more rigorous research on teaching outcomes than anyone. Here is a study (albeit 4 years old) that shows certified teachers outperforming TfA folks.
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p>Here is an essay from a professor at Brown Univ. Excerpted is a piece connected to how Boston Public views TfA:
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p>
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p>When Australia considered importing the model, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a strong piece against:
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p>
I’ll try to find some more, too. I know they’re out there.
Grrrr…..lemme look around. lol. It’s coming up on 9 PM, the official bedtime of teachers (in my school).
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p>Might be tomorrow.
You say “I’m not a fan of teacher prep programs…” Why in the world would you not favor programs to help would-be teachers (or any other profession) prepare for their chosen career? It sounds like you’re saying you don’t favor education in one’s field so that people will be competant in that field. Please clarify.
There are significant holes in the way we train teachers. Having supervised my share of student teachers through many a practicum, I can tell you that each and every one had significant deficiencies in several areas: classroom management, classroom persona, differentiated instruction, content area knowledge, and skillful assessment. All of the students had lovely and thoughtful lesson plans, complete with beautiful plastic sleeves bound in lovely three-ring binders, but a lovely lesson plan, as thoughtful as it may be, doesn’t mean shit if the teacher can’t a) implement it effectively or b) anticipate and plan for bombing contingencies.
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p>We often have to do a little deprogramming because the material often taught in teacher prep programs has little to no relevance in the real world. The practicum experience offers some taste regarding “real world” teaching, but in the end, it’s nothing like having your own class.
I would agree with the areas you highlight, and it still disturbs me that after a licensing program and five years of “professional development”, I’ve never been given any training in classroom management. Frankly, I lost a lot of hope for useful education reform when Deval hooked up with the head of BSC, a notorious practitioner of the fussy, bureaucratic, and ultimately pointless approach to pedagogy.
One year I supervised a bright young woman with spectacular lesson plans–for middle school. She was a big fan of color-coded sticky notes and flash cards, brainstorming, etc., and generally held that this sort of stuff used in 20-minute activities was the backbone of a good lesson. That’s a lovely thing in middle school, but in high school, not often the case. They tore her up. As it turned out, she was not really prepared at all to be the didactic figure in front of the room. Worse, she really was unprepared to teach the text she was supposed to teach, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. She didn’t know the first thing about Modernism, she didn’t know anything about Eugene O’Neill, and she hadn’t read the play or any criticism about it. We deferred the drama until I could teach her what she needed to know and point her in the right direction for criticism. Not good. Adding insult to injury, her advisor had been a middle school history teacher, so he was not particularly helpful for someone hoping to teach high school English. He dinged her on several aspects of her instruction that I thought were well done–like when she bailed on a bombing activity and had the courage to admit it in class.
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p>Anyway, the upshot is that she was not trained to provide context at all and had no idea how to communicate and demonstrate expertise in literature (in this case, O’Neill, Modernism, and his works in literary, historical, and social context). Simply was not in her repertoire. And when it came time for her to assess a 6- to 8-page critical analysis written from student-generated prompts on the text, that was a whole other issue. Part of the problem here was she was not an English major but had passed–with flying colors–her English MTEL. (A topic for another day.) And she was a private school product, not a state school product. Her family paid a lot of money for her education.
to teacher preparation and the difficulties of attempting it.
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p>I am ABD from a doctorate in teacher education at UMass-Amherst. I taught the introductory class in the secondary teacher education program for five years, mostly with continuing ed students. I also evaluated the lesson plans of students teachers for another course for a few years. I’ve had about 10 students teachers too. Like most teachers, I also a former student of such a program. During my graduate time, I was also interviewed by NCATE, the teacher education certification program.
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p>In my experience, the biggest problem with teacher education is that teaching itself is skills-based, and most college classes, indeed most of college, is geared, not toward acquiring skills, but toward acquiring knowledge. There’s a gap here.
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p>I taught in a program that featured a pre-practicum with an associated seminar and a tutoring project before student teaching. The set-up was decent, I think. It allowed for experience interlaced with readings and theory. By the time of student teaching, teacher candidates had a decent amount of experience.
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p>A truly excellent teacher education program would provide more experience and more reading. The biggest problem confronting this sort of program, however, is the time and associated costs. Every additional class costs prospective teachers money, the cost of the course and lost income from a job. Schools of education then need to hire more staff.
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p>I had similar feelings about teacher education after I completed my Master’s back in 1992, but gained a deeper appreciation from my recent experience on the other side. I also think that the program improved during that time.
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p>Teacher education programs differ. But we shouldn’t fault programs too much. Their hands are tied by the realities of the workplace and the limitations of book learning.
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p>
The rap on TFA is not exactly that it doesn’t help the schools it enters, but that its benefits are minimal and it has a destructive influence on education reform because its unscalable model is so beloved of uninformed pundits like the Globe’s ed board. It is essentially a charity. But it masquerades as a reform model because it allows upper-middle-class folks to imagine lazy, frumpy, middle-aged ignorant teachers from middling state schools being replaced by young, attractive, energetic, idealistic grads of elite colleges.
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p>Media critic Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler has been one of the most persistent documenters of this phenomenon, focusing e.g. on people like Wendy Kopp and Michelle Rhee’s combination of brilliant, inspiring p.r. with a total inability to provide data to back up their miracle anecdotes.
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p>Research on TFA’s effects is mixed. This study and this one find limited to negative results, this more recent one finds quite positive effects. Surveys of principals find overwhelming support, but then it does make their lives easier to have more entry-level salaries and pliable, childless, healthier people on their faculties.
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p>Can someone dig up an example of anything the BMG community seemed to like?
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p>Even Democratic party support whether Obama or Ted Kennedy or Patrick or Bill Clinton….no change effort gets love here.
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p>2. Anyway:
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p>TFA is not supposed to be a cure-all. But USA draws our teachers from the bottom third of college grads. Not true in many other nations.
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p>TFA attracts, howsoever imperfectly, a few thousand folks each year from the top tenth of college grads.
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p>Is it really elitist to think that’s a good thing? Geez, there are 6 million educators in this country.
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p>3. Mark, perhaps the Globe editorial could have been more artfully written, something like:
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p>
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p>4. Here is a list of all the TFA studies. There is a Stanford “Education Next” report card which grades the studies methodologies if you follow that link.
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p>New York Times on most recent of those studies, by Urban Institute in DC:
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“It seems that any organization or reform effort trying to contribute to improving urban schools gets walloped on BMG.” And it seems that any idea that politicians label “reform” will get a staunch supporter from GGW, regardless of outcomes. Speaking personally, I have not been shy to propose reforms, even if they don’t align with current political interests.
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p>It’s nice that idealistic college students are attracted by TfA, but it’s a shame they’re taught that teaching is a simple thing that can be “picked up” in five weeks…and the commitment can be dropped as soon as the time is up. One would think that if these kids really cared about teaching, they would, you know, become teachers.
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p>I do thank you for linking to Stanford, who has the largest body of work comparing the traditional public structure to all these alternatives modes of education — CREDO is the academic leader on charter studies (though I doubt you’ll like the findings.)
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p>How would you feel about a program that sends idealistic college kids into urban health clinics as nurses on five weeks’ training? After a few poorly set bones, mistreated ailments, and counterproductive recommendations, the shine might come off such a program.
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p>Here’s a blog from today about how to reconcile them.
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p>Basically, Boston and NYC have super-charged, highly outperforming charters, controlling for all attrition.
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p>Nationally, that’s not true at all.
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p>Therefore, I’m in favor of more of the high performing charters in cities where kids benefit from them.
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p>Which is what the Gov proposed here.
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p>2. Do you think traditional one-year teacher training programs sends effective teachers into the workplace?
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p>I thought you did NOT believe that.
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p>3. I agree you propose things, to your credit – I remember your ambitious non MCAS evaluation idea.
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p>But that doesn’t speak to my point. Which was – all the EXISTING organizations that are actually doing something different, or policy stuff that’s actually on the table, get lambasted on BMG. Do you disagree?
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p>Now to be fair, as you’ve also pointed out, BMG education discussions tend to be an insider discussion of 5 people, 4 of whom are on the payroll of traditional schools, and 1 of whom (me) is on the payroll of a charter.
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p>2. I think a one-year program does poorly in preparing teachers. I think a five-week program — devoid of significant observation or coached practicum — is worse. Combine that with the chest-thumping superiority that is TfA (try googling “Teach for America” + “cult-like”) and these kids are more confident and less prepared than those in deficient teacher licensing regimes.
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p>3. “All the EXISTING organizations that are actually doing something different” I love public schools, and public schools are doing different things all the time. I’ve yet to be told of an innovation in education that came from a charter, not a public school. Oh, and I love the idea of pilot schools, and think the capacity of magnet/pilot/voke schools should be raised by 5% each year for the next five years.
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p>And yes, given that the majority of policy “fixes” are advanced by conservative organizations and fronts with the time and money to publish pretty little pamphlets, I will object to them.
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p>4. I pointed out that it’s 4-1? By my count, it’s 3-2…and you clearly spend more time reading literature that probably anyone else (no offense meant to anyone else).
Or, the children of the lurkers, at least. I’m here for every education knock-down drag-out you (plural) have, since my children will be entering the system in the next couple of years. Right now the options are:
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p>a) Public school system, which is consistently just outside the bottom quartile in performance in testing, a group of K parents more interested in after school programs than what their kindergartners actually do during the school day, and whose administrators don’t have the common courtesy to call back a parent with questions and concerns
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p>b) Charter school, boasting extended days and extended year (which I’m not convinced is positive for the majority of students,) an overly unforgiving conduct code, and exacting academic demands from the beginning of kindergarten
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p>c) Homeschooling, which my wife is concerned will drive me MAD, I TELL YOU, MAD!!!
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p>The more I hear about the public/charter debate, the more I welcome the embrace of sweet, sweet insanity. Your voices in these debates are helpful in the data collection process which will determine which direction we go.
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p>Thanks again for the input!
Many of us have our emails on our profiles, should you want more detailed responses to your particular issues. I’m sorry you are confronted by what your local school officials, neighbors, and private concerns have done to narrow your idea of acceptable choices.
that get walloped. Education reform has been a 15-year bitch slap to public education.
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p>What are those premises?
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p>-American education is in crisis.
-Without the intervention of legislators, our country will be economically outpaced by China and India.
-Teachers are the problem with public education.
-Unions are the problem with education.
-Test scores give precise measurements that should guide policy and be used to evaluate teacher performance.
-Schools should be run like businesses with test scores as profit margins.
-Charter schools provide competition that will spur public schools to “improve.”
-Charter schools are inherently “innovative.”
Educational improvement is a topdown enterprise.<
p>I have some skepticism about TFA, but that was hardly the point of my post. My point is that the Globe editors uncritically subscribe to the ideology I’ve listed above. I don’t know anything about the other communities you mention. Nor do I know anything about the BTU. When the story broke about first year Boston teachers getting laid off, and replaced by TFA teachers, I did think that was a problem.
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p>I see charter schools as an interesting experiment, but not a solution. If it provides some students with a better education, particularly in urban areas, I’d keep what we have. But what’s the end game? I don’t think going to an all charter school district is the answer. Some suburban communities like Amherst, (is Gloucester a suburb?) don’t want charter schools. Are their students being under-served by the public schools? Not in Amherst’s case. I don’t know about Gloucester.
…American education is not in crisis, then you’re right, why do we need “solutions”?
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p>I can see a case where that argument is applied to the majority of districts.
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p>But you don’t see Lawrence, Springfield, Boston, Holyoke etc as in crisis?
I am sympathetic to the first two premises in the comment above yours. It seems every time you turn around there is another survey that shows American students behind their counterparts in other countries, including in some cases countries we assume lag behind us in the modern development department. Other surveys don’t compare us to other countries, but do give percentages of students who don’t know (fill in basic fact) and such percentages are sometimes embarrasingly high. I do favor tests to evaluate STUDENTS because there are some things you should just know – period. Barring a diagnosed learning disability or other special need we need to get tough and say if you can’t do X you don’t get promoted. We also need to encourage independent learning and figure out how to make people generally aware. A music teacher I have worked with often made note of basic relevant historical and literary facts just because she felt students should in general “have a clue” (her words) even if it was about something one doesn’t generally expect a music teacher to discuss.
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p>One example of basic facts that I can’t imagine someone “not getting the memo” for is identifying George Washington as our first President (and we certainly aren’t getting into Presidents of the United States in Congress Assembled for the purposes of this discussion!), but I have seen surveys in the past suggesting that there are those who don’t know. I honestly have no conscious recollection of learning this particular fact. I know I took US History in 7th and 11th grades, but I think the teachers assumed we knew this tidbit by then. It must have come up at some point in elementary Social Studies, but though I obviously not literally born knowing this I feel now like this is something I’ve “always known”. I suspect my learning this fact went something like this when I was very little:
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p>THE SCENE – home, TV news on, early 1980s.
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p>ME: “Mommy, who is that man on TV right now?”
MOM: “That’s Ronald Reagan; he’s the President.”
ME: “What’s a President?”
MOM: “He’s the leader of the whole country.”
ME: “Has he always been President?”
MOM: “No, we choose a new one every few years; he is our 40th President.”
ME: “OK, so who was the first President?”
MOM: “His name was George Washington.”
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p>I think this shows that kids’ natural inquisitiveness should be encouraged from an early age, though I certainly understand that the constant “why” from a 4-year-old can get awfully tiresome. Except for the most recent of immigrants there really is no excuse for not knowing this particular fact, though I suspect Washington is well enough known that many immigrants know him too. Speaking of immigration, I sometimes think we should hold us natural-born citizens to at least the same standard as naturalized citizens and require EVERYONE to pass the citizenship test before being allowed to register to vote. I’ve also read surveys suggesting that embarassingly high percentages believe creationism as literal science and the sun revolves around the earth. Excuse the elitism, but it’s hard not to conclude sometimes that we live among idiots.
Here’s someone who agrees with you.
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p>Kinda scary, huh?
I was hoping your link would include the test, but I’m sure it can be found somewhere. I remember a few years ago PA Governor Ed Rendell chaired some sort of civics awareness commission and he expressed exasperation that many students didn’t know there were 100 US Senators. “All you have to do is multiply 50 states by two Senators per state!” he exclaimed incredulously. I found myself very cynically thinking, “Yes, Governor, but that assumes three things: you know there are 50 states; you know each state gets two Senators; you are capable of multiplying 50 by 2.” Another example is a political cartoon I once saw featuring two kids chatting in the school yard. The first kid says to his friend, “Forty percent of my class didn’t know Washington was our first President!” to which the second kid replies, “Wow – that’s more than half!”
citizenship (or used to as recently as two years ago) test as part of their history curriculum. You can probably get some information there.
The US Government releases a bit of a “study guide” for prospective test-takers that may be one of the most clear-eyed, concise examinations of American history I’ve ever seen.
Students aren’t taught about the “Father of the Country” any more, indeed that phrase has been purposefully erased and replaced by the phrase “Founding Fathers”, in order to both minimize the significance of George Washington’s unique and heroic role in the founding of the country, and to undermine the meaning of fatherhood and heroism itself, brainwashing the plural “fathers” into children, as if there can be more than one, and they are all the same. Ignorance of George Washington is a great victory for some people.
is not in crisis.
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p>I agree that education in urban and rural areas (real rural areas, not most of Western Mass) have serious problems. Other than what I read in the papers, I don’t know much about Lawrence and Boston.
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p>I have some acquaintance with Holyoke. I acknowledge the problems in those systems, but I think it’s irresponsible, inaccurate, and unfair to say Holyoke schools are failing. Given the low socioeconomic status, second language problems, and even homelessness of a significant portion of Holyoke’s student body, it would take a miracle for a school not to be “failing.” It would be better to not to label schools with a loaded term.
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p>What we really have are significantly large numbers of students in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups clustered in certain public schools failing to test well, graduate, or continue on to college. This is a crisis of a community, not merely a crisis of education. Education may be much of the solution, but it’s less of the problem than particular needs of the student body.
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p>We probably agree on much this. The next question is, what is to be done?
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p>I don’t see charter schools at the high school level out here being answer. One school in Springfield made national news for mishandling a bullying case and a young kid hanged himself. That school’s mission focused on character education, if I’m not mistaken. The other major charter school in Springfield does a better job, I think. Though every time I interview for a new English teacher I usually get three or four applicants from there.
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p>As I’ve stated elsewhere, I think the real school improvements will come from empowering, not disempowering, teachers. Holyoke hasn’t tried that. They’ve brought in America’s Choice to run things. It’s not easy to empower teachers. It takes leadership and time. But there are quick or simple solutions in education.
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p>Even then, I don’t believe urban education as a whole will make vast improvements until urban communities improve.
Charolette Iserbyte
John Taylor Gatto
I think the adversarial model of union/management in tension and opposition is acceptable for making cars and other commodities, if, only because, when the union/management interface breaks down, the cars don’t go on to spend the rest of their lives locked into a socio-economic trap.
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p>But I think that here, in the public education space, the model is a poor fit to begin with AND the union/management interface has broken down (a long while ago…) It’s clear that the Globe has chosen which ‘side’ to take on this issue. I wonder if this view of ‘sides’ has anything to recommend it at all..
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p>I start with the presumption that people don’t go into teaching for either the money or the glory. (Although, growing up in the 70’s and early 80’s, the majority of my teachers in public school were female, and I have to wonder if they had much of a choice… ) And, I think unions, adversarial or no, are an important counterweight in the capitalist pond we swim in. I further think that policy makers and, especially, bureaucrats who serve them (or is the other way around…?) tend to the heavy-handed. I don’t think this is deliberate, but it is common enough to make me think it inevitable without care and planning. I also think there is a tendency, especially amongst policymakers, to rely on ‘technocratic’ solutions: the idea that pushing the right buttons and cranking the right levers will produce the right outcomes in every instance. Frankly, I think much of this technocratic viewpoint is simply low-self-esteem efforts to be seen as ‘doing something’; many politicians lack the self-confidence to let things happen and must muddle around changing things to give themselves a sense of accomplishment. So, in addition to our present view of unions/management adversity, there are these systemic issues that pit policy against pedagogy: we have not yet found a way to have creativity in teaching while satisfying the policy makers and producing clear objective results.
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p>Of course, my solution is to simply do it: let the teachers be creative and give the students the best of their efforts, keep evaluating this and let the teachers tweak themselves. It’s not that different from how other professions work, specifically doctors and, especially, lawyers. Whether you call this ‘charter’ or ‘pilot’ or ‘banana-flakes in a paint-can’, I don’t care… If you think about it, it’s not that much more of a leap than when we first implemented public schools. The model used then, agrarian, rote and authorial, didn’t really have that much to recommend it and yet we’ve adopted it to such an extent that we can’t seem to shake it off at all.
I have a somewhat different take on where go from here, spurred by your adjective “agrarian” in your last sentence.
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p>I think, instead, that we are firmly stuck in an industrial-era model of education, replete with unions and management. Our children pay the price.
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p>My children today (in public schools, grades 8, 10 and 12) attend essentially the same factory that I attended. I think it’s an industrial-age paradigm, designed to produce industrial-age workers. The buildings look like factories. Their comings and goings are scheduled by bells. Their social architecture is heavily authoritarian, replete with “Principal”, “Vice-Principals” and so on right down the line. Their job, as students, is to learn how to fit in, jump through the right hoops at the right time, and above all else pass the MCAS exams.
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p>It appears to me that we are using an industrial-era paradigm in an era that has demonstrated compellingly why such an approach fails its participants, fails the society it serves, fails — in fact — everyone except its owners.
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p>It seems to me that we need a revolutionary paradigm shift in the way we think about education, the way we think about learning, the way we think about our children, and the way we think about ourselves. I’d like to see us move beyond the “vaccination” theory of education — “I’ve already had that, I don’t need to study it again.” Starting this year, upwards of 80 million baby boomers are going to be starting new careers, buying new homes, and entering activist politics (Link).
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p>Is there some reason that public education has to stop at grade 12? Is there some reason public education can only happen in buildings that look and feel like factories? Is there some reason that newly-trained educators must be under 25?
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p>I hope that the professional educators among us will lead the charge to articulate and execute a new vision of public education, one that calls us to the 21st century instead of the 19th. I hope that we can transform “teacher” into a title of honor, prestige, and — yes — compensation. I’d like to see our teachers recruited from the top of the class. I’d like to see our teachers paid at the top of the income distribution. I expect a great deal from my children’s teachers and public school, and I would like to participate in a society that values them accordingly.
… I was using the term ‘agrarian’ to describe the schedule of partial days and summers off: which schedule once made sense when people got up early to milk the cows and had to be home early to attend to chores around the farm and required entire months in the summer for harvest.
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p>I take you points about the ‘industrial’ ethics (rigid schedules, factory flow-through, etc..) to be good ones. I don’t, however, think that we need ‘revolutionary paradigm shift’ other than what I’ve already described: let teachers teach. The term ‘models’, at least as applied to education, seems to translate into ‘that which is imposed.’ I’ve never, personally, understood what was so magical about a 180 day school year, nor the thinking that derived the schedule. I think a little less casting about for ‘radical paradigm shifts’ and more getting off the teachers backs is the ticket.
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p>I think your point about schools and the ‘factories’ aesthetic is good also: architecture, especially public architecture, is often our first, if often also unconscious, interaction with government and public policy. I distinctly remember being a young child in the late 60’s or early 70’s having a visceral reaction to a prison visible from the highway on a road we passed going to and from church. Looking at the thing, I can still recall feeling like shards of glass had been pressed into my head: I could tell, without prompting, exactly what the builders thought about the people inside. To varying degrees many schools can send messages just as impactful, if not (I hope) so dire…
I think we need to pay our educators top, rather than bottom, dollar. When industry doubles and triples annual compensation of our teachers and still gets a bargain, we have a major problem.
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p>I’m not willing to let my children’s teachers teach when those teachers can’t manage three paragraphs on my child’s IEP without making gross grammatical errors. I ask for “radical paradigm shifts” and new models because as nearly as I can tell very little about the fundamental dynamic has changed in the last four decades — with the exception that the disparity between teacher salaries and everybody else is far more pronounced today.
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p>One of my daughters, who loves to spell, loves to read, and loves to write, was asked in sixth grade to assemble a list of favorite words for a classroom project. She brought a list with words like “comprehension”, “rejuvenate”, and “apprehension”. Her teacher berated her, in front of the class, for choosing “complicated” words — “I wanted you to list words you use every day, not things you picked from a dictionary.” I got to dry my daughter’s tears and reassure her of her self-worth, not her teacher. It was, apparently, incomprehensible to her teacher that my daughter did use that language, every day.
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p>I think we need to value excellence. I think we need to celebrate excellence in our children’s behavior in school, demand it in our children’s educators, and pay for it at tax time. I’d like to see Hermione Granger held up as a role model more often than Barbi and her many clones.
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p>I wrote more about this last spring. The current model has failed. I don’t want more of it, and I resent being told I should step back and get out of the way when I criticize it. When the compensation of the average teacher rivals that of the average cardiologist — and when the NEA holds the average teacher to professional standards comparable to those the AMA applies to the average doctor — then and only then will I be receptive to “letting teachers teach”.
…about your daughter being criticized for selecting “complicated words” is absolutely unbelievable! Here I was thinking that teachers should ENCOURAGE the expansion of one’s vocabulary – how silly of me! As someone who’s also been “accused” of using “big words” (by peers, fortunately never by teachers as far as I recall) I can sympathize. When I substitute teach I tell students I may use an unfamiliar word when I speak to them, but they should raise their hand and ask what it means since chances are half the class is wondering the same thing. Hearing words used in context and getting into the habit of using them yourself will internalize definitions a lot more thoroughly than memorizing a list for this week’s test only for them to be mostly forgotten in a month.
There has been continuous debate over the most effective method for teaching vocab, and I have seen both methods–contexual and explicit–used successfully. Rote memorization, while boring, does have its place. Understanding through demonstrated usage, however, is preferable. When we test vocab in my department, the preferred method is to let the student tell you what the word means in their own words and then attempt to use it in a sentence that demonstrates meaning. In a heterogeneous classroom, this approach is essentially required.
It doesn’t matter what method her teacher was using. My daughter was and is excited by learning, verbal, and loves words. She chose words that she loved, she thought she was doing what her teacher wanted, and she was already somewhat fearful that she was “too smart”.
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p>She was fully able to say what her chosen vocabulary means in her own words, those were words she used all the time, and she was eager to use them in sentences that demonstrated their meaning. Holding her up to her class as an object of ridicule exemplifies the sheer cruelty that too many children — especially gifted children — experience daily in public schools. It is especially inappropriate for that ugly lesson to come from her teacher.
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p>I will accept no excuse or rationalization for ridiculing her in front of her peers, especially when that ridicule was prompted by her verbal excellence.
…either to the offending teacher or the principal? If so I would be curious as to the result. Lightiris refers to heterogeneous grouping above and that does seem to be the norm, but when I was growing up we segregated by ability level in reading and math as far back as elementary school. It is unfortunate in my opinion that my town (I substitute teach in the same system I attended.) no longer does that. Whenever Prop. 2 1/2 forced budget cuts the gifted and talented programs were always the first on the chopping block because they were considered luxury, yet the law protects the services for kids on the other extreme of the spectrum. I’m in no way suggesting that special needs services should not be protected, but I very much wish that we would acknowledge that the need to be challenged IS ALSO a “special need”. In my case the other thing teachers would give me a hard time about was not showing every step of my work in math even though I usually got the ultimate answer correct. The flip side of the “No Child Left Behind” coin is “No Child Held Back”. We must without hesitation, question, or budget hinderances, serve the needs of our top students as well.
After we talked about it, she decided that she preferred to handle it herself, which she did. Her school system does not have a “gifted and talented” program and it shows.
“Her school system does not have a “gifted and talented” program and it shows.”
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p>There are, I believe, two systems south and east of Boston with such a program (Barnstable and Framingham). I can’t speak for other regions, but policymakers in DC and Boston have structured the system to run against the needs and interests of gifted and talented students.
I did not mean to imply that present rates of teacher pay was adequate. It clearly is not. Myself… in a rare confluence, I was offered a teaching position at a local High School and I was offered my present position, in the financial industry, on the same day. Taking the teaching position would have cut my salary by nearly 60%, which I simply couldn’t do. Frankly, I don’t know how teachers do it. I had pursued the teaching without realizing just how much of a pay cut I’d be required to take. Though I’m given to understand that I might see dramatic rise in pay if I ‘stuck it out’.
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p>But I don’t see anything radical, drastic, or altogether shifting of the paradigm by paying teachers more. Degree versus kind. It ought to be simple: pay better salaries and the salaries will be taken by better workers. I therefore think the issue of pay, which we both agree upon, is orthogonal to ‘letting teachers teach’.
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p>I too, have children with impressive vocabularies. I used to drive my mother-in-law absolutely nuts by refusing to talk down to my children. “They don’t understand those words!!” she’d say when they were 3 and 4. True enough, then… Now, after exposure and discussion, it’s not an issue. But, I’ve also been forced to deal with people who have some idea and/or authority, like my mother-in-law, and your daughters teacher, about what ‘ought to be’. I don’t think such attitudes are a systemic problem for teachers any more than for mothers-in-law… but perhaps I’m off base here, with so small a sample size.
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p>That’s a nice vision. As I’ve been at pains to point out, the NEA, much unlike the AMA, is fighting a rear-guard action against over-eager and meddlesome public-policy wonks and heavy-handed bureaucrats who’ve turned the debate into a circus. The NEA has a congressional charter to answer to as well as a Secretary of Education AND a Secretary of Labor IN ADDITIOM to local (state) iterations of these policy entities. Under most versions of ‘let teachers teach’ I think the NEA would be a vastly different organization and one more in alignment with your vision. Or, put another way, you can argue and fight me, and nobody gets what they want, or you can agree with me and, if implemented, we both get what we want. win win.
I have two recent and telling experiences with school architecture. The first experience is with the building I currently teach in. It’s brand new and won a major national architectural award for its design. While some shortcomings have become apparent, in general, however, the building is a joy to work in. The building is a crescent, built on the mall concept with classrooms on three levels along one side. There are no corridors to speak of. The balconies frequently freak people out because it’s a long drop from that third floor down to the first, but the design helps immensely with visibility and control. From the center of the building on the third floor connector, you can see virtually the entire interior of the school. There is an atrium, which serves as a meeting place and cafeteria and plenty of ambient light from enormous skylights. The building is wide open, inviting, and aesthetically pleasing. Carpeting, too, keeps the building quiet, and the technology is first rate. The school, housing 800 kids, was built on time and under budget. We had been in a building that was originally built in 1935.
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p>In response to the new building, new attitudes, and new ambience, student behavior and engagement improved measurably. Students now express pride in their building and themselves, and understand that they are valued by the community.
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p>My other experience is with a project that was supposed to be a $50 million renovation and expansion that turned into a $91 million nightmare. The building committee will be discharged next month after seven years of service. Seven years. Without dredging up the gory details, the renovation portion is just that. There’s not a lot one can do with a maze of corridors built in 1957 or so. The additions are lovely, but the core of the building still feels institutional. That said, the building is beautiful and the facilities top notch. The high school, by the way, is enormous, too, housing roughly 2000 students. Sadly, we could have had a brand new building for less money had there been community support. This year, after over six years of construction, our student achievement scores went through the roof, and students themselves as well as teachers attribute at least some of this improvement to the quiet new facility. The school performs in the top 10 percent of Massachusetts high schools.
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p>So, to your point, schools require thoughtful planning by professional educators and architects. The bunkers we’re used to seeing (and attending ourselves) convey subtle messages to students about what the school is designed to do, i.e., house, and what the community values.
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p>No other profession has as many backseat drivers as public education. No other profession is governed at the state level by bureaucrats who have no qualification in the practice they are regulating. It’s ridiculous.
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p>Part of the problem here is contempt bred from familiarity. Everybody’s an expert on teaching and learning. Everybody. Why? Everybody has an educational experience s/he views as emblematic and instructive. When people who have no formal education in pedagogy start lecturing me on what I should be doing in my professional life, I usually try to get them to see their error by using the following analogy: you have a beating heart, but that doesn’t make you a cardiologist. You went to school, but that doesn’t make you an expert in education. People usually shut up right about there.
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p>Part of the issue here is governance. Our locally controlled model is outdated, irrelevant, and, often, counterproductive. I’m elected to one of the largest school committees in the state–there are 20 of us. I’m in my third three-year term, so I’ve seen a fair amount. Some of what I’ve seen is downright frightening. Professional educators, just like professionals in every other industry, should a) be responsible for their own quality control, b) be responsible for their own research and development, and c) responsible for the standards that apply to competent practice. They should be licensed by a board comprised of experienced professionals with demonstrated expertise.
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p>Getting the armchair quarterbacks out of the room and the discussion would be immensely helpful in moving education forward. That’ll never happen, though, given the commodification of children and the deprofessionalizing of the industry.