Edwize

[Editor's note: Ms. Socrates is a science teacher in a high school in Brooklyn entering her second year. She blogs at Teacher's Diary where this post originally appeared.]

The day after I got back from my trip to Europe, I was already feeling the pressure to start getting ready for my upcoming year. As I have reflected on my first year this summer, I feel I have grown a lot as an educator — I will certainly start this coming year off very differently than last year. Still, everyone says the second year is in some ways harder than the first. In the first year, I was not as hard on myself when things went wrong, telling myself it was a rookie mistake that I would learn from. In my second year, however, I know I will not be as forgiving. I’ll still be experimenting a lot, trying new techniques and lesson ideas, but after seeing how poorly my students did on the Regents last year, I am determined to do much better with my second crop of students.

Here’s what I’m thinking about as the new school year approaches:

1. Lesson Planning — Having strong lesson plans and unit plans ready before the year starts was a goal of mine last year that didn’t really pan out. I only had about a week and a half fully planned before beginning the year and that set me back for the rest of the semester. This year, I already have a week planned out, plus the overviews for the following two weeks, and I still have plenty of time to plan. My goal now is to have the first two units (about 8 or 9 weeks) planned before I start. I will also have time to co-plan, so that both my special education co-teacher and I are on the same page with the lessons. If I can do that, I’ll be in great shape going in.

2. New Classroom Routines — I’m redesigning how certain things work in my classroom work, especially homework. Last year, I planned to give homework almost every night, but the excessive amount of time I spent grading made me cut back. After observing a friend’s system, I plan to give homework EVERY night, so that it becomes a routine, but not collect it every time. Instead, students will check each other and I will simply record whether it was done or not. I also plan to allow more time for students to go over homework and quizzes — I ran out of time last year, but with better planning, I can surely fit this in.

3. Creating a Student-Centered Classroom — I read the book “Work Hard. Be Nice.” this summer (review to come) and it gave me some ideas about how a classroom should run — crisp, smooth transitions and lots of back and forth between students and teachers, like having a conversation. I want to include more student choice and have more classes driven by their questions and interests. Obviously it will still need to be directed in a way that prepares them for the end-of-year tests, but giving them ownership and having stricter policies will help with my classroom management.

4. Making Learning More Fun — While fun in the classroom is a controversial issue, I feel that students learn much more when they are absorbed and enjoying what they are doing. With proper planning, I think I can avoid the common pitfalls of having fun destroy any learning. There are ways to have both. I love the arts, especially music and drama, and I know many of my students do as well. By incorporating those things into the classroom, I can differentiate instruction to reach all learners and create lessons that truly engage students.

5. Decorating the Classroom — First impressions are very important, and although most of my students already met me last year, I want their first glimpse into my classroom to tell them that this is a new year and it is now their classroom. I didn’t do a great job last year of having essential questions around the room and using the posters that I did have in my lessons. This year, I want my walls to be completely covered with student work, vocabulary words, reminders and colorful posters to get kids excited about the classroom.

There is much more to do, but these are my top priorities. I hope all the other teachers out there are feeling confident about the upcoming year!

The UFT and Merrick Academy Charter School on Sept. 2 reached an agreement in the case of 11 staff members dismissed this summer by the school. The UFT charged that Merrick had fired the workers — who make up approximately one-third of the professional staff of the school — for union activity. The union had asked the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to order Merrick to rehire the fired staffers.

Under the terms of the agreement the UFT obtained the reinstatement of the teachers who wished to return to Merrick this fall. They will be reinstated at their old salaries. Other teachers and staff have had their cases resolved to their satisfaction. Further details of the settlement remain confidential.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “Teachers have a right to organize and bargain collectively, and we are happy to have confirmed that right for Merrick’s staff.”

The case began this summer when the 11 staffers were fired — with no warning — by FedEx letter to their homes. The UFT asked PERB to seek a preliminary injunction requiring the reinstatement of the fired staffers. PERB then sought a court order requiring their reinstatement.

PERB’s request for an injunction was being heard in Albany County Supreme Court by Judge Eugene Devine. As part of the settlement, the Public Employment Relations Board has withdrawn its court action against Merrick.

Merrick’s employees voted to join the UFT in 2007. The Public Employment Relations Board certified the UFT as the teachers’ bargaining agent in March 2008. After repeated fruitless attempts to negotiate a contract, the UFT filed for a declaration of impasse with PERB December 2009 and five mediation sessions have taken place.

Merrick Academy is administered by Victory Schools, a for-profit operator, which charges $1.36 million in fees per year, more than 21 percent of the school’s total budget, on management fees. Victory Management operates a total of six schools in New York City earning $4.41 million in fees per year.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s decision to fire State Education Commissioner Brett Schundler over the state’s failure to win a spot in the Race to the Top competition is reminiscent of the late Yankee owner George Steinbrenner’s serial firings of manager Billy Martin: you keep looking for a way to root against both bullies.* Certainly, there is enough blame to share over New Jersey’s runner-up status.  Schundler’s embarrassing faux pas of failing to submit an up-to-date budget was in part the result of a hasty rewrite of the state’s application, an act necessitated by Christie’s last minute decision to pull the rug out from underneath the state education commissioner’s efforts to gain district and union support. And New Jersey lost far more points — more than enough to finish in the money — from Christie’s scorched earth refusal to seek common ground than from the budgetary gaffe. But Christie is the portly Queen of Hearts, much like the late Steinbrenner, so it’s off with Schundler’s head.

On the operative principle that there ain’t nothing these days you can’t blame on teachers and their unions, the New York Post rushes into the fray today with an editorial apology for Christie which asserts that it was all the fault of the New Jersey teacher unions that the state was a runner-up. Really? Is that why Christie, Schundler and their proxies are now engaged in a race to fling the most mud at each other? For what it is worth, if the issue is lying, the only question is who is better at that craft: the New Jersey agreement which Christie nixed was not all that different from the New York application which came in at the top of the competition, contrary to Christie’s assertion in the Post editorial.

It seems that the Race to the Top is ending with the equivalent of a whimper — a spinning race to nowhere. A number of the most ardent blogging fans of the ‘zero sum game’ nature of the competition, in which one state’s success had to be another state’s failure, are now engaged in a mass whining that their favored home teams did not win [see here, here and here, among other places.] While the knowledge that a number of these nay-sayers were also paid consultants to various states in the RttT process might lead a thoughtful observer to take the complaints with a grain of salt, the role of dogmatic ideology should not be underestimated. What goes unsaid in the bitter attacks on Maryland’s success, for example, is that the cause of the enmity lies in the fact that Maryland charter law does not allow the state’s charter schools to opt out of union representation for their teachers. In ‘education reform’ circles, nothing breeds a sense of entitlement like opposition to teachers and their unions.

______________________________

Reggie Jackson famously said of Steinbrenner and Martin: “They’re made for each other. One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”

There is an old myth that vampires cannot be seen in a mirror. A vampire has no real substance, the story goes, so light simply travels through him, rather than bouncing back and creating a reflection. That myth came to mind when Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project recently asked “who’s a member of the ‘blame the teacher’ crowd?” and could not find a single person. Apparently Daly cannot see himself in a mirror.

If there was ever a question about the existence of the ‘blame the teacher’ crowd, it was surely put to rest by the response of many in the self-identified ‘education reform’ community to the prospect of a wave of teacher layoffs as schools re-opened for the 2010-11 school year. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, Wal-Mart Professor of Education Reform Jay Greene: the blogging boys of the educational right have told all who would listen that the education funding crisis and the prospect of massive layoffs was a good thing, and that the passage of the edu-jobs legislation mitigating those layoffs was the real disaster. With Lenin, they embrace the formula “better fewer, but better”: public schools would be better off with fewer teachers. After all, what do teachers have to do with the education of students?

Joining the educational right were the ‘all power to the boss’ technocrats that run in Wall Street hedge fund and Democrats for Educational Reform circles. First, groups like Education Trust and the New Teacher Project lobbied hard to amend the legislation to allow districts to layoff anyone they wanted, without regard for collective bargaining agreements, in order to make it so unpalatable it would never pass. When that stratagem failed, Education Trust and the New Teacher project teamed up with Joel Klein’s Education Equality Project and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in a campaign to kill the bill by denying it funding, opposing the efforts of Representative David Obey to redirect a rather modest fraction of the funds in other US DoE educational programs such as Race to the Top to this purpose. When the bill actually passed, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had to broker a deal to have the funds taken from the budget for food stamps in 2014.

The fact that the cuts to food stamps will not take place for another three years gives the real advocates for families in poverty – which include congressional leaders like Obey and teacher unions – time to fully fund the food stamp program well before the cuts would go into effect. We fully expect to wage that fight without the slightest bit of assistance from Education Trust, the New Teacher Project, the Education Equality Project and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, all of whom are well known for insisting that alleviating the effects of poverty has nothing to do with providing equal educational opportunity to the students who struggle with them every day.

But that is not enough for the likes of Kati Haycock of Education Trust, together with her trusty ‘yes’ man Andy Rotherham of Eduwonk. Having done their best to sabotage the bill and create the mess around its funding that led to the Duncan deal, they now [here and here] blame… the teachers. And yet, there is no one in the ‘blame the teacher’ crowd, right Tim?

Have you no shame? At long last, have you no shame?

In a bold dramatic headline of the type associated with reports of international events that threaten global annihilation, a tabloid announced a few days ago that a handful of teachers were busted for faking illness in order to go on a honeymoon or for some other absurd motive. The story was accompanied by a spread of six pictures and had the flavor of a “perp walk.” The fruit of this investigative report was the revelation that some teachers took days off, with pay, to which they would have been entitled had they actually been a bit under the weather.

If they did in fact do this, they were wrong. Such practice must not be taken lightly and must not be condoned. We believe that the terms of our contract are binding on all parties and even though the DOE has taken liberties by various means of defiance and violations, we feel morally as well as legally bound and act accordingly.

Speaking for myself only, I do not necessarily condemn every single instance of teachers taking “sick days” to attend to special urgent matters in their lives. Often the difference between a “sick day” and “personal business” day is a technicality that does not significantly impact instructional continuity or cost the employer any money. It really does not rise to the level of “theft of service.”

Given that only three days per year can be taken for “personal business,” it is inevitable that many members will simply need some days during regular business hours to attend to any of a million ordinary emergencies that arise in our complex lives. Should someone lose a day’s pay when they have a hundred days in their sick bank to be drawn upon, generally without challenge? Does anyone actually deny that such practice is common among employees in other branches of the civil service as well as the private sector?

And although people who have never taught in a classroom tend to mock “mental health” days as just another scam by shirking teachers, it is recognized by psychiatric research that teaching is among the most intensive and stressful jobs and the finest instructors sometimes “need a break,” though this concept is not codified in law. Admittedly, this is an area that lends itself to abuse, which is intolerable from all standpoints.

In some instances we are forced by callous principals into fibbing about the cause for taking days off. Here is an actual case:

A teacher with no history of attendance abuse informed his principal that he would be “taking” a “personal business day” on a Tuesday eight days later. The teacher needed to accompany his wife to the hospital where her obstetrician, a specialist in high-risk pregnancy, would perform a test he deemed necessary as the patient had suffered a serious complication in a prior pregnancy. The test could only be done in the 16th week of pregnancy and Tuesday was the only day that the doctor was available. The principal was told all of this and was shown documentation. As a courtesy the teacher had given the principal plenty of notice.

The principal said: “You’re TAKING a personal day?? You mean you’re APPLYING for a personal day!” He wasn’t joking. His voice was raised with indignation and he turned down the request. Of course the teacher then took a “sick day” to accompany his wife and for many years thereafter never had cause to either “take” or “apply” for the principal’s consent again. He covered himself suitably and did what he had to.

The same principal, by the way, looked the other way when for several consecutive years an assistant principal took the first few weeks of the school year off for strictly elective cosmetic vanity surgery.

In some cases, teachers may be hesitant to take “personal business days” simply because they would be required to inform the principal of the specific reasons for the application and the teacher may regard it as a private matter. A person who has navigated through many decades of life may not wish to hear the principal’s opinion that the teacher’s colonoscopy can be rescheduled for the late afternoon hours after the completion of the 37.5 minutes.

In a perfect world these matters should be simply settled by means of common sense and a modicum of fairness. Usually they are. But sometimes a picayune fib is provoked by a system that so often seems to “game” its most conscientious employees far more egregiously than the other way around.

Over at Dissent Magazine, our own Leo Casey writes that the recent Mott’s strike is “the latest battle against the ‘race to the bottom,’ the process of undercutting labor market standards that has plagued American labor for the last three decades.” He also counters Matt Yglesias on the issue, saying that the usually reasonable progressive blogger “seems to lose the very capacity to empathize and understand” when writing about the plight of the working people at the center of the Mott’s story.

Given the high profile of recent efforts to spread the Harlem Children’s Zone model of school and social reform to other parts of New York City and the nation, it’s not surprising that a recent Brookings Institute report criticizing one of the Zone’s charter schools has attracted a lot of media attention. Despite the study’s small scale, its emphatic rejection of the HCZ argument that social service provision is an essential element of urban school reform makes it important to understand whether or not its criticisms are valid. In fact, the report has some significant weaknesses which call its biggest claims into question. The study’s statistical methods are one issue, especially its failure to consider proportions of special education students when comparing HCZ with other charter schools and the decision to use snapshots of test scores rather than measuring individual students’ or cohorts’ progress over time.

More importantly, however, the researchers’ decision to use a few years of test scores as the sole measure of whether HCZ “works” represents a huge misinterpretation of the purposes and significance of this model of school reform. While Geoffrey Canada and his supporters are certainly concerned about raising student achievement (as measured both by standardized tests and other factors), the uniqueness and value of HCZ is that it is aimed at larger-scale reform which affects the life chances of all young people in a region, with charters as one element of broader improvements in public schools and social services. From the beginning, HCZ has defined its success not only in terms of raising test scores, but also by longer-term goals such as college attendance, student health and safety, and community stability. Given recent criticisms of the poor design and questionable significance of the New York state tests on which the authors’ conclusions are based, it would be incredibly unfortunate if this single study resulted in a decline in support and funding for one of the few models which provides an alternative to the overemphasis on standardized test scores on which so much current urban school reform is based.

Background

Over the past decade, the Harlem Children’s Zone’s model of combining social service provision with changes in local public schools — including the founding of two charter schools, Harlem Promise Academy I and II (HPA I and II) — has been one of the most well-known models of school reform in the country. It epitomizes the community school-based “Broader, Bolder” education reform model, a platform endorsed by both Arne Duncan and the NEA during the 2008 election; the UFT also recently partnered with HCZ founder Geoffrey Canada in an effort to create community schools in New York City. HCZ also serves as the model for the Obama administration’s “Promise Neighborhood” program, for which over $200 million in funding is currently being considered in Congress. This report is notable for its strong critique of the “Broader, Bolder” approach to education, arguing that the lack of evidence for its effect on test scores (relative to school reform which does not include social service provision) indicates that it may represent an inefficient use of public funds.

This new report was funded by the Brookings Institute’s Brown Center on Education Policy, which is known for its strong support of market-based education reform and for its advocacy of charter schools and school choice in general. Previous studies (including one by Harvard researchers Dobbie and Fryer) have found that HCZ’s two charter schools significantly outperform the surrounding district schools on standardized tests. This study is the first to compare the impact on test scores of a Harlem Children’s Zone charter school with other NYC charter schools, rather than solely comparing the HCZ schools’ impact with that of the district schools its students would have otherwise attended. Another unusual point is that in response to criticisms of the study posted by HCZ founder Geoffrey Canada, the researchers expanded on the original report’s research in a follow-up blog post. The analysis below includes discussion of all three sources.

Major Findings

The two questions the researchers address are “whether the HCZ works and whether it works as advertised.” They answer the first question in terms of levels of student achievement (as measured by test scores from 2007-2009) and the second in terms of comparing the test scores at HPA I (and later, HPA II) to other charter schools which do not provide social services.

On the first question, they conclude that (like the majority of the charter schools in NYC), HPA I and II do better than the average across the city for schools with their demographic profiles. However, they also conclude that HCZ does not work “as advertised,” because its two charter schools’ test scores are only average in comparison to other charters in New York City (which, they acknowledge, are unusually successful compared to charter schools nationally). If the HCZ model was truly better, they argue, then its charter schools should have higher test scores than those which don’t provide social services.

Considering mathematics and English language arts jointly, they find that half or more of the public charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx produce test scores on state assessments that are superior to those produced by the HCZ Promise Academy. They conclude that “the same general pattern holds for math and English language arts considered separately, but it appears that mathematics is HCZ’s stronger suit.” This is true both for actual scores as well as scores adjusted for student demographics.

Their (somewhat confusing) table below summarizes these findings. Taken from the follow-up blog post, it combines data for HPA I alone (“Previous Analysis”) and from HPA I and II combined (“New Analysis”). Each number represents the percentage of charter schools with lower average scores than the HPA schools — this means that the higher the number, the better HPA did relative to other charter schools in the study. (For example, the “48” in the first column means that 48% of the NYC charter schools the researchers studied had lower average math scores than HPA I did; i.e., 52% had higher math scores.) The column labeled “Adj.” presents data adjusted for some of the demographic characteristics of the students in the schools (The researchers controlled for the percentages of students who received free lunch or reduced lunch, were limited English proficient, were African American, or were Hispanic, but did not control for the percentage of students in special education programs.)

Percentile Scores of the HCZ Promise Academy Charter Schools

Previous Analysis

New Analysis

Actual

Adj.

Actual

Adj.

Mathematics, relative to charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx

48

55

51

55

English language arts, relative to charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx

37

39

40

43

Grand Mean

42

47

46

49

Based on these numbers, the researchers come to “the inescapable conclusion…that the HCZ Promise Academy is a middling New York City charter school.” Citing their results as well as other studies, they argue that “there is no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs, and community improvement in general have appreciable effects on student achievement in schools in the U.S.”

Validity of the Findings

The validity of these conclusions is questionable, due to several issues with the research. Perhaps most importantly, the researchers failed to include data about the proportions of special education students when comparing HPA I and II to district schools and to other charters. As we have noted repeatedly here at EdWize, it is essential to consider the relative proportion of special education students (especially those with high needs) when comparing schools’ performance, especially in terms of how many students require more than a few hours of extra help per week.

Another issue is their decision to exclude Harlem Promise Academy II from the original study while using the research to make claims about the HCZ model as a whole. The researchers’ explanation for doing so was “to avoid confusing the results from the newer Academy II with those from the Promise Academy and to circumvent the HCZ from competing against itself in the school rankings.” However, the response from the HCZ to the researchers on this point noted that HPA I is only one year older than HPA II, and pointed out that the researchers were willing to include four KIPP schools within the rankings. If HPA II as a separate school had been assessed using the study’s methodology, they claimed, it would have been in the top quarter of the charter school rankings. The researchers’ response was to re-do their calculations by combining the scores at HPA I and II; this method again put the HPA model in the middle of the rankings. Without access to the data, it is impossible to know why these two different methods regarding HPA II resulting in such different rankings.

In addition, the researchers used combined average cohort scores over multiple years and grades to measure charter school performance, rather than using individual student or cohort growth over time (currently considered a stronger method of evaluation). The researchers compared the average 2007-2009 state test scores in ELA and Math at the HPA charters with those at all other charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, as well as with district schools. (For 2007, they examined grades 6-8; for 2008, they examined grades 3, 7, and 8; for 2009, they examined grades 3-5 and 8). The researchers then ranked the charter schools using two different methods, each of which had slightly different outcomes.

In the first method, all charter schools’ test scores in ELA and Math (for the grades listed above) were averaged across the three year period, and then schools were ranked on each of these averages separately as well in combination (“Grand Mean” = ELA + Math, divided by 2). In the second method, the researchers used demographic data from all district and charter schools in NYC to create “predicted scores” for each subject, year, and grade in each charter school, based on its percentage of students who received free lunch or reduced lunch, and the percentage who were limited English proficient, African American, or Hispanic. They then calculated the difference between these adjusted scores and the school’s actual scores for each subject, year, and grade, and re-ranked the charter schools based on the average of these “difference scores.”

This methodology is both overly complicated (especially in terms of reporting findings) and less statistically rigorous than other methods. Again, the HCZ response provides several relevant critiques. First, they note that this method fails to measure HCZ and other charters’ ability to improve student test scores over time, as it uses cohort-level snapshots of different grades in different years rather than tracking individual students or even individual cohorts over several years. The researchers defend their methods by noting that individual student and cohort level data was not available to them, and argue that including the 8th grade scores is sufficient to measure growth; however, the weakness of the original data sources lessens the validity of their conclusions.

Second, the HCZ response notes that because of a reporting error on their own part, the Brookings researchers understated the proportion of reduced price/free lunch students enrolled in HPA, thus comparing it to district schools with wealthier student bodies and lowering it in the rankings. The researchers respond to this by recalculating their rankings with the higher proportions of combined reduced/free lunch students reported by HCZ (their “new analysis” on the graph), with little change to the results — however, this new method fails to distinguish between proportions of students who receive free lunch as compared to reduced price lunch, groups with significant differences in income.

The HCZ response also challenges the report’s interpretation of Dobbie and Fryer’s research, which, the researchers claim, found “that students outside the Zone garner the same benefit from the HCZ charter schools as the students inside the Zone…proximity to the community programs had no effect.” HCZ notes that students from outside the Zone also benefited from “community” programs such as “free medical, dental and mental‐health services; access to social workers and counseling; afterschool tutoring; healthy meals; test prep; college tours; after‐school, weekend and summer enrichment classes; and recreational opportunities.”

Most importantly, the HCZ response also emphasizes that the researchers’ single-minded focus on test scores in a single school as a measure of the model’s success is a serious misunderstanding of the HCZ model, which is based on affecting all children in the Zone (not just those in the charter schools), especially in terms of guiding them into college, and is designed “to support development of the whole child, not just how they perform on standardized tests.” As noted in the beginning of this post, this issue is central to the importance of both HCZ and to the possible impact of this report on its future. It would be incredibly unfortunate if this narrow perspective on both the program and on the goals of urban school reform weakened the Harlem Children’s Zone model before we have the opportunity to see if it truly “works.”

At a “town hall” meeting perched on the airwaves of Sirius XM Radio earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan acknowledged the “need to do a much better job of listening to and empowering teachers.”

The tone and wording of that confession suspiciously lacks that Agency’s familiar ring of omniscience. Have they really reached the point of admitting that they don’t have all the answers?  Teachers are, with good reason, wary of freely-given deference to their expertise emanating from those non-professionals, whether high profile or behind the scenes, who agitate and set crucial education policy.

Teachers sense that an absence of overt criticism may be more a ploy to get them to let down their guard than a genuine solicitation of partnership. ( A field application of the concept that “you can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar”).

In his radio discussion, Secretary Duncan referred to teacher evaluation systems (which kept teachers in good grace and sufficed for generations when America led the world) as though he were talking about the Siegfried Line that needed to be breached. “Thanks to unions and school boards and superintendents working together,” he said, “real breakthroughs are being made.” (An aside: Are some team members are more equal than others?)

Still, however, “great teachers don’t get rewarded, teachers in the middle don’t get the help they need, and at the bottom…nothing happens there as well,” Duncan decries.

Definitions that won’t be pinned-down pay the price of being up-for-grabs. What does “great” mean? By whose reckoning and by what proper authority do they judge, other than the mere and often arbitrary political power invested in them?  What quality control standard is used to designate competent human resources who will intervene to assist “deficient” teachers? To whom will these mentors be beholden and how will their independence be safeguarded?

In some schools, mentoring of veterans is provided by “coaches” with scant instructional experience or class management skills but who were nonetheless hired because of their social or sentimental affinity with principals. Duncan clearly seeks to garner leadership “cred” by capsizing the dream careers of a greater percentage of teachers for reasons without necessarily distinct ties to performance accountability.

To evaluate teachers, Duncan claimed to be “much more interested in gain and growth than absolute test scores.”  (That was music to the ears of his studio audience at Sirius, but the tune was not part of his melody archive.)

Too remarkably audacious queries were posed almost submissively by the Secretary. It is doubtful that he would have asked them if he weren’t positive that he was the sole custodian of the correct answer.  Duncan wanted to know “How do you professionalize the profession?  How do you build real, meaningful career ladders so teachers will want to stay in the profession for 10,20, 30 years?” Was Duncan’s tongue “in cheek”?

Begin by putting educators in charge of their own profession. Theirs is a unique and tricky craft.  It requires creating and interpreting, not solely parroting. Don’t treat education as a “Stepford Wife” among professions. The staying power of teachers will increase exponentially if they experience respect not only in the abstract but also in the workplace.

The Obama Administration’s Blueprint for Reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which Duncan is the lead salesman, supports a well-rounded curriculum, rather than the narrowed syllabus that Duncan concedes teachers have been complaining about. As proof, he cites the government’s $300 million earmarked for competitive grants for teaching in the “STEM” fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

He didn’t address his Agency’s role in the neglect, some would say to the extent of abandonment, of a balanced course of study. The federal government, by its criteria for winning coveted Race to the Top dollars (such as standardized test scores in restricted areas), is “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”  Time and energy are lavished on targeted subjects that are relevant to RTTT at the expense of other academic disciplines that are no less vital.

For better or worse we must continue to work with Secretary Duncan.  It is to his credit that although he may not be amenable to absorbing into policy those views that clash with his own, he is neither violently allergic to them, unlike our local chancellor.

At least with Duncan we can have dialogue rather than simply “have words.”

Duncan does not come off as patronizing or condescending.  Could he maintain a cordial and non-dismissive tone when replying to the following comments of a blogger identified as “TFT” on the U.S. Department of Education website:  “You have demonized the profession and scapegoated teachers…claimed that charters can bring reform to scale…created a system of coercion (RTTT) that pits politics against the welfare of children.” That’s a harsh indictment that many classroom-based “grand jurors” would refer for prosecution.  School systems are carpeted wall-to-wall with potential evidence.

The blogger also argues that “universal health care and free early childhood education would do more to close the gap than all the school reform nonsense claims…Poverty is the cause.”

Now that’s another story.  Or is it?

The State Public Employment Relations Board of New York will petition the State Supreme Court for an injunction to prevent last month’s mass-firing of 11 Merrick Academy Charter School staff members, counsel to PERB notified the UFT and the school today.

After being petitioned by the UFT in July, PERB has reached the conclusion that “there is reasonable cause to believe that an improper practice has occurred and it appears that immediate and irreparable injury, loss or damage will result.” PERB will seek an injunction prohibiting Merrick from implementing its decision to discontinue the Merrick Teachers pending a full hearing and final disposition.

Last month the Queens charter school delivered termination notices to eight teachers and three teaching assistants, representing approximately one-third of the professional staff, via FedEx. Employees received no prior notice.

“The State Public Employment Relations Board’s decision to seek an injunction against the mass-firing of Merrick’s staff is an important step in vindicating the right of these educators to organize a union and bargain collectively without fear of retaliation,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

Merrick’s employees voted to join the UFT in 2007. The Public Employment Relations Board certified the UFT as the teachers’ bargaining agent in March 2008. After repeated fruitless attempts to negotiate a contract, the UFT filed for impasse with PERB December 2009 and five mediation sessions have taken place.

“After two years of obstruction, harassment and intimidation it is time for the Merrick board to follow the law, rehire all of the staff and negotiate a contract in good faith,” said Mulgrew.

Parents and teachers at the 500 student school have raised questions about heating and plumbing problems, textbook shortages, a leaky roof and unchecked financial mismanagement. Some teachers still earn the 2006 wage for New York City public school teachers.

Merrick Academy is administered by Victory Schools, a for-profit operator, which charges $1.36 million in fees per year, more than 21 percent of the school’s total budget, on management fees.  Victory Management operates a total of six schools in New York City earning $4.41 million in fees per year.

The following open letter to elected officials and community leaders was signed by over 200 Merrick Academy teachers, parents and community members.

Merrick Academy Charter School is in a state of crisis which threatens the education of its students and the very future of the school. In the recent past, a Board member was convicted of stealing half a million dollars of public money, the founding principal suddenly departed, and now nearly one-third of the teaching staff have been summarily and illegally fired for exercising their rights to unionize and bargain collectively. The scandals caused by the Board’s behavior are undermining the hard work of the staff, students and destroying the school.

We believe that the current Board at Merrick is now made up of individuals who have shown that they are unprepared and unwilling to make sound educational decisions on behalf of the school and its students. Perhaps nothing illustrates this more than the Board’s firing of nearly a third of the school’s teaching staff, including many of the best and most experienced teachers from a staff that has consistently obtained excellent test scores for the school’s students. The firings were done by Fed Ex notices sent to teachers’ homes, and none included even the most minimal explanation for their abrupt dismissal.

Why, one might ask, would a Board make such an educationally inexplicable and indefensible decision? For one reason and one reason only: these same dedicated teachers had been exercising their right to unionize and bargain collectively, and have been negotiating with the Merrick Board for two years to protect their rights at work with a union contract.

All of the educators who were fired were union supporters, and included members of the contract negotiating committee and the union’s chapter leader. This is a flagrant violation of the New York State Fair Employment Act (also known as the ‘Taylor Law’), and of the New York State Education Law, all of which guarantee the right of teachers to unionize, bargain collectively and participate in a union.

On July 23rd, the United Federation of Teachers filed a request that the Public Employment Relations Board again intervene, this time with an order enforceable in court that will compel the Merrick board to reinstate these teachers with all back pay and benefits that are due them.

The students, staff and families of the Merrick Academy Charter School have every right to expect that the Board act faithfully on the trust given to them by the State of New York. It must follow the law, it must act in the best interests of the school by re-hiring without delay the fired teachers and teaching assistants, and it must conclude in good faith the negotiation of a collective bargaining agreement they have resisted for two years. Given the history of this Board, however, we find no reason to believe that they will do so. As a result of the pattern of illegal and irresponsible decision-making on the part of this Board, we call for their resignation and replacement with new members who are prepared to act in accordance with the school’s mission and charter.

If the current Board remains in place and continue to make the educationally indefensible decisions which they have carried out over the past year, we fear that Merrick will not survive. We challenge you to stand on the side of fairness and justice and to join Merrick parents, students, and teachers in the effort to ensure that the current leadership of Merrick Academy Charter School no longer abuses their power in ways which hurt the academic success of the school’s students.

The Merrick Academy Charter School Community

An appalling act of public humiliation and shaming: that it the only honest way to describe the decision of the Los Angeles Times to publish the names and pictures of teachers who scored poorly on a “value added” statistic derived from their students’ standardized test scores. Even if “value added” measures were completely reliable and accurate measures of an individual teacher’s performance — and the best research indicates that in their current state of development and with the current flawed regimen of standardized tests, they are not — the decision to publish the names of teachers would still be indefensible. It submits to public disapprobation individuals who had committed no crime and engaged in no professional misconduct, and issues a summary judgment, for which there is no appeal, on their careers of many years. The decision of the Times to publish names tells us more about its distorted sense of journalistic ethics than it does about the performance of the teachers in question. And the rush of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to cheer lead the Times action, telling its reporters in grand Orwellian fashion that “in education, we’ve been scared to talk about success,” puts to rest any hope that the Duncan who recklessly embraced the mass firings of all the teachers in Bedford Falls, irrespective of their actual classroom performance, was an aberration of that moment.

There are many historical analogies for this action, but one with remarkable resonance is Mao Zedong’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Rituals of public humiliation are only one point of convergence between Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the movement which celebrates the act of the Los Angeles Times. Both movements are united by a common voluntarist theory of change: the idea that the force of the human will alone can completely remake established institutions and social relations into new, ideal forms. Through sheer effort, teachers should be able to overcome all of the accumulated social and economic hardships and educational challenges faced by students living in poverty, just as Chinese working people were to overcome their nation’s historic impoverishment with a ‘great leap forward’ that ignored actual conditions. Both movements have a common disparagement of professional expertise: the Maoist notion of ‘better red than expert’ has its corollary in the ‘education reform’ idea that with a few weeks of rudimentary preparation, any intelligent graduate of an elite university can be an exemplary teacher, singlehandedly bridging the achievement gap. The ‘red guards’ of the Cultural Revolution, storming the Communist Party and Chinese state headquarters on Mao’s command, have their analogue in the non-educator lawyers, MBAs and hedge fund managers who have set out to colonize the commanding heights of American education, from which they wage war on the ’status quo.’ Most importantly, there is a common ideological dogmatism that underlies both Maoism and the education reform movement: where Maoism made a ‘golden calf’ of an unfettered state, concentrating all political power in the hands of the  ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ its counterpart is engaged in an idolatry of the unfettered market in education. In their hands, the answer to every educational question is the market. Thus, in her haste to provide an apology for the Times’ decision, California Secretary of Education Bonnie Reiss declared that “publishing this data is not about demonizing teachers.” Rather, it’s about creating “a more market-driven approach to results.” To have markets in education, there must be accounting ledgers and bottom lines. It matters little, apparently, that those bottom lines have all of the accuracy of a pre-2007 Bears Stearn or AIG annual report, so long as there is a bottom line, and names can be named.

Sherman Dorn and Daniel Willingham are both on target that righteous indignation, however richly deserved, is not a sufficient teacher union response to this action. But it is worth pointing out that there have been places where teacher unions have taken on directly the development of a rigorous and robust system of teacher evaluation, such as was done here in New York when NYSUT and the UFT agreed to legislation with the Chancellor of the Regents and the State Education Commissioner that become law this spring. As important as that step was going forward, we did not take it under the illusion that it would satiate the ideologues of the Great Bourgeois Cultural Revolution. That is a struggle that continues.

The large bold font of the headline of what may have been an advertorial passing as a news story in the “Religious Schools Section” of at least one prominent community newspaper in Queens not long ago caught my attention and wouldn’t let go. Can you read it and break free of its implications?

The headline reads “Why Do Private Schools Not Have To Teach To (the) Test?” The last paragraph is most revelatory.

“Private schools don’t teach to the test. They teach to prepare their students for serious academic work in college. They also balance academics with athletic and extra-curricular activities thereby teaching the whole child.”

That statement is loaded with implicit criticism. But what is their target? It is not public school teachers; it is what public school teachers are reduced to doing in the name of education.  It raises the truth that is obvious to most people but obscure and elusive to some purveyors of so-called reformism: that when test-prep supersedes and becomes a substitute for curriculum, a gaping hole in subject knowledge and skills will result.

The article also highlights the relationship between school systems’ acceptance of public funds and their compulsory adherence to the “standards-based education” laid down in the No Child Left Behind Act.  Most private schools do not accept those funds, so they are free to be ruled by their conscience and the dictates of rational research and tradition.

Some would argue that the observance of a core curriculum is in its way as suffocating as is the total reliance on test preparation as a measure of teaching and learning. Hardly. The “core curriculum” is a living organism, always growing and adaptable. In the private schools, it is often supplemented by religious training or some other specialized focus. Teaching to the test is supplemented by nothing other than teaching to the test. It doesn’t yield anything more any more than a stone grows hair.

The article also touches on the issue of academic achievement as it bears on school reputation. It asks and answers the question: “How can you measure the academic success of a particular private school? Start by asking where last year’s class got accepted. How competitive is the admissions process? While the academic achievement and competitive admissions are not necessarily linked, they do give you an idea of what other parents think about the school.”

That’s a bit simplistic and only a small part of the picture, to be sure.  Education is about more than acing high school or college admission standards, just as it is about more than scoring a score of proficiency on a state test, even one that is not fatally flawed.

Education is a long road leading to a state of grace.  It is filled with complexities and intangibles and rebirths and undying truths.  It is also about the acquired memory of experience and knowledge accrued over a hundred generations. And there’s no escape from the reality that it includes plenty of facts, figures, dates, events and voluminous specificities.

Whatever education is, we know enough to realize that it’s not about “teaching to the test.”

What are your views?

Some additional thoughts, responding to the comments below.

1. It seems that a number of the comments on Bill Gates simply reassert, without logical argument or supporting evidence, what is actually put into question by my original blog post — that Gates and Sam Walton of Wal-Mart are both of the same cloth, the sworn enemies of teachers, unions and public education who seek our destruction. In fact, the contrast between the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation is instructive in this regard. The Gates Foundation has spent billions on efforts to improve district public schools, while the Walton Foundation has spent not a dime on district public schools — all of its education money goes into charter schools in ways clearly designed to establish them as an alternative, non-union system of schools. The Gates Foundation record on working with teachers and unions is mixed, but it does include support for efforts, such as pre-Joel Klein New Century Schools in NYC, which where done through collaboration with teachers and unions; the Walton Foundation record is ideologically driven and is involved in education solely for the purpose of pushing an anti-union, privatization agenda — in order to pursue its agenda against the American labor movement. While I am entirely in favor of a passionate commitment to our current struggles, we are even more desperately in need of an unsentimental political analysis which understands and acts on just this sort of distinction between a Gates and a Walton. Rhetorical broad brushes are no substitute for critical thought.

2. There is no question that teachers, unionists and advocates of public education have very real policy differences and a different vision than Gates. The issue here — and at the AFT convention — was not whether we should abandon our differences, but whether we should have a conversation with Gates about both our differences and our commonalities. It is, I would insist, the central hallmark of a sectarian politics that it fears and avoids dialogue with those with whom it disagrees, and that is precisely why in its never ending quest for moral purity, it becomes a politics of self-marginalization. To the extent that we adopt such a politics of self-marginalization, we will be doing real harm to ourselves at a most critical time.

3. A politics which indiscriminately draws “line in the sand,” as if having “lines in the sand” were an end in itself, is a politics which sets itself up for defeat after defeat. “Lines in the sand” must be carefully drawn, and one better be damn sure there is a good prospect of successfully defending such a line before it is drawn.

4. Once one opposes “politics” to the act of “standing up for what we believe in,” one ensures that this “standing up” will become morally pure AND politically ineffectual statements of abstract principle. Politics is about the power to realize that part of our  beliefs and visions which is possible in a given context. We should be the progressives, the left wing, of what is possible in education.

5. My post made no reference either to the Chicago Teachers Union or to the “walkout” against Bill Gates at the AFT convention, but since they have been introduced here as red herrings, it seems necessary to clarify these issues.

The UFT reached out to our Chicago sisters and brothers at the AFT convention, and worked positively and constructively with them to have their voice heard and included on important issues such as closing schools. We will continue to work in that same fashion with them.

The issue of the “walkout” was much more than how one felt about Bill Gates — a question on which there were a range of different opinions. It was perhaps even more an issue of the norms of civility and respectfulness that delegates expect from each other in our proceedings and deliberations. In a hall of thousands of delegate, barely two dozen people “walked out” — and a good portion of this number were not even elected delegates to the convention. The AFT convention has a long tradition of respect for dissent, for the right of a minority — even a minority of one — to be heard in debate and discussion. But the delegates understood that the “walkout” was not dissent, but a fizzled attempt at disruption, not about a right to be heard, but about a failed attempt to silence.

In the classic text Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, the renowned cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas examines how a society’s behavioral norms and taboos are constructed around notions of impurity and pollutants. Some societies have more fluid concepts of  purity and impurity, while others develop more rigid and inflexible conceptions. Douglas found that societies which have more rigid and inflexible conceptions develop elaborate rituals and practices, and devote considerable cultural energy, to the policing of these boundaries.

Douglas’ cultural anthropology provides an important insight into education politics. One way of understanding sectarian politics, in education and elsewhere, is that it develops rigid and inflexible conceptions of the politically impure, and then devotes nearly all of its energy to attacks on every possible source of pollution of the politically pure, no matter how minor a threat it might be. Indeed, for the sectarian, the greater danger is the pollutant which is closer to the pure since it may not appear to be an enemy. That is why sectarians often train their main fire on the near side of the political spectrum — such as left sectarians against liberals, social democrats and democratic socialists — rather than those on the other side.

This emphasis of sectarian politics on the danger of the impure characteristically takes the form of treating virtually every political difference as a relationship of enmity. Now, there are real political enemies: for example, there are those who seek the destruction of democratic modes of governance, and they should be understand by democrats as our political enemies.  In education politics, there are forces which seek to eviscerate public education and eliminate teacher unions, such as Wal-Mart’s Walton Family Foundation and the far right, charter management forces that control the New York Charter School Association. It is appropriate to view them as political enemies. But for educators of a democratic inclination, most political differences in education should be read as disagreements over policy, not as battles with a political enemy. We can oppose someone on questions of policy without concluding that the opponent is our political enemy, seeking our destruction.

The American Federation of Teachers invited Bill Gates to speak at our national convention with the full knowledge that on issues of educational policy, we had both significant differences and meaningful agreement with him. Yet on principle, we believe that democratic politics involves dialogue and deliberation with those with whom we disagree, even on fundamental points. So long as we share with Gates a common appreciation for the importance of the classroom instruction, it is worthwhile to be engaged in a conversation on the best approaches to maximizing the quality of classroom teaching. Such a dialogue needs to be conducted with open eyes, fully recognizing our important differences over issues such as individual merit pay.

To borrow Henry Ford’s attack line against Walter Reuther for a headline that describes Gates as “the most dangerous man in America,” as one blogger did during the AFT convention, is to indulge in a form of hyperbole that quickly shades into unrecognizable caricature. While there certainly is enough in the educational stance of a Gates to take issue with, this sort of discourse is more in the vein of a sectarian calling out “Impure! Impure!” than it is a serious political engagement. In its rigid identification of the politically impure and its promiscuous definition of the political enemy, it has all the marks of a sectarian politics of self-marginalization.

There is more at stake here than the democratic principle of dialogue and engagement with those which whom one agrees. As a practical political matter, advocates of public education, teachers and their unions and will be in a very difficult if not impossible political position if there is a completely unified corporate front in educational politics, of one mind in eviscerating public education and eliminating teacher unions. Even dogmatic thinkers on the left have recognized the importance of divisions among the corporate class for advancing the cause of working people and promoting the public sector. Traditionally, important sections of the American business class have been among the key supporters of public education — with a different vision of that education than teachers and their unions, but supporters nonetheless. We ignore that history, and embrace the moral purity of a political sectarianism that treats dialogue as betrayal, at our peril.

It’s true, in a sense, that all that happened Wednesday was the state reported test scores using a higher cut-score. It was just like they’d moved the goalpost further down the field, one Buffalo educator (and apparent football fan) explained. More kids failed because they graded the tests harder.

But a lot more happened than that.

As State Education Commissioner David Steiner explained at the state’s press conference, the state tests have not simply become too easy. They have become bad tests.

They have been assessing only a very narrow band of state standards and virtually ignoring the rest of the state curriculum. They have repeated questions from year to year, making it easy to game the tests. And they do not reflect what students need to succeed in college and careers.

That is going to change. Over the next three years, the  tests will become longer. They will test more material, have more open-ended questions and require more writing. They will aim to assess not whether students learned “test-taking tricks,” in Steiner’s words, but whether they can apply knowledge and explain their answers. By 2014-15 the goal is that our state tests will be able to tell students honestly if they are on track to succeed in college and beyond.

Revelations by Subgroup

Surprisingly, the city’s education leadership conveyed little of these developments. Mayor Bloomberg told reporters at the city’s press conference later in the day, “Nothing has changed. You’re writing a story about a change in definition.”

As far as he was concerned, they’d just moved the goalpost.

But the mayor was overlooking crucial signals from the tests. For one, the black-white performance gap doubled in math and grew by 50 percent in ELA. It wasn’t just that everyone went down the same. Many higher-needs students, who have been the focus of the mayor and chancellor’s education mission since 2003, were shown to be hovering just barely over the Level 3 line, the result of just enough test preparation but not enough solid education. When the bar was raised, their lack of mastery over grade-level skills and knowledge was cruelly revealed.

Here are the figures for the percentages of city students meeting standards, by race:

Math 3-8 2009 2010 change White 92.2 74.5 -17.7 Black 75 40.4 -34.6 Hispanic 78.5 46.2 -32.3 Asian 94.9 81.7 -13.2 ELA 3-8 White 84.8 64.2 -20.6 Black 62.9 32.6 -30.3 Hispanic 62 33.7 -28.3 Asian 84.5 64.2 -20.3

What they show is Black and Hispanic students lost much more ground, as a group, than did whites or Asians. If you compare the racial gaps from 2009 to the 2010 gaps you see:

MATH: The black-white gap widened to 34.1 points in 2010 from 17.2 points in 2009. The Hispanic-white gap widened to 28.3 points from 13.7 points in 2009.

ELA: The black-white gap widened to 31.6 points in 2010 from 21.9 in 2009. The Hispanic-white gap increased to 30.5 points from 22.8 points.

(Statewise, racial performance gaps widened as well, but not as much. In math, the state black-white gap widened to 30 points from 17 points. The Hispanic-white gap widened to 24 points from 13. In ELA the state black-white gap widened to 30 points from 22, and the Hispanic-white gap widened to 28 points from 21.)

The city’s other high-needs students lost more ground, proportionally, as well. English Language Learners, who have logged steady performance gains over the last several years, fell back hard, to just 13.4 percent meeting ELA standards from 34.8 percent in 2009, while English–proficient students lost only a third of their gains. Just 23.2 percent of special education students met math standards this year, a drop of two-thirds, compared to a 31% drop for general education students.

Test prep vs education

At the city press conference, NPR reporter Beth Fertig asked the mayor if teachers’ longstanding complaints of excessive test prep resonated with him now.

The mayor snapped that “the things we are focusing on are the basics and until kids can do the basics,” talk of a more well-rounded education is “nice,” but irrelevant. “If you want to teach children to hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya,’” he said derisively, trailing off to the obvious point that these squishy skills are pointless until children’s test scores show they can read and add. Real life is full of tests, he said, and students have to learn to take them.

What he didn’t seem to acknowledge is that a test-prep curriculum has failed to even produce mastery of basics, as the new tests indicate. And by calling for a continuing focus on “the basics,” the mayor dodged the issue of whether prepping for a bad test is a good idea.

It’s not. What Steiner and other educators were saying rather bravely Wednesday about our state assessments is that they have failed. They don’t assess 21st-century reasoning or analytic skills and knowledge. Drilling for them — as teachers have said until they are blue in the face — isn’t leading to student success. One could argue that in the case of black and Hispanic children and special-needs students, it has amounted to fraud.

The good news is this is on track to change, spurred by state and federal efforts to fix the assessments and rewrite curriculum. It will take several years, and of course the outcomes are not guaranteed. But at least it is crystal clear now that the test-prep emperor has no clothes, and that is a major step forward.

In a post on the Education Week blog Inside School Research, veteran reporter Debra Viadero cites some intriguing conclusions and issues raised by Duke University researcher Helen F. Ladd’s new study of the relationship between teacher credentials (both traditional and alternative) and student performance.

Noting that most studies of this topic are old and concentrate on the elementary school level, she examined mandated end-of-course tests given to high school students in North Carolina.

Among her findings, quoted by Viadero, are that “measurable teacher credentials do indeed matter and have an… impact on student achievement… Teachers with an alternative license were slightly less effective than teachers with traditional licenses.”

It was also observed that “getting a high score on the subject-matter tests that teachers take for certification was linked to greater student learning gains… Teachers who were certified in the subject they taught were found to be more effective than those who were not.”

Some critics might argue that these conclusions are themselves inconclusive, were taken out of context or lend themselves to contradictory interpretations. But there is no rational cause for doubt.

Hopefully the parties to the debate are not so far apart on the spectrum of common sense that there is doubt that supervisors should be at least as expert in knowledge and teaching techniques as the subordinates whose performances they judge and whose careers they largely control. That should be a “given” among “traditionalists” and “reformers” alike. But it is not.

In a cynical and ironic effort to restore school principals to their rightful role as instructional leaders, some major schools systems nationwide have eliminated teaching experience as a job requirement and replaced it with a pre-civil service eligibility based on cronyism and subscription to narrow ideas that in some respects resemble a cult.

Flying high as a supervisor can be an almost overnight affair even before one has earned one’s “wings” in the classroom.

Until less than a decade ago, successful candidates for principal invariably had at least a dozen years experience as a teacher and assistant principal. An increasing number of new principals are hardly adults themselves.

Nobody should be become a principal until they have passed muster in the classroom and competed in an open process in which backgrounds are screened and unrigged interviews held with administrators, teachers and parents, as was standard before appointments were replaced with anointments.

Apart from demoralization and educational failure, the consequences of a topsy-turvy system can bring some tragic-comedic relief, as in the following true situations:

A veteran music teacher who had been a child prodigy and whose own musical compositions were lauded by a major media critic, (and whose teaching style and effectiveness were almost universally praised by colleagues, parents and students) got a “U” rating from a principal who didn’t know how to read musical notes and who had been a laughingstock for the two years that she was a teacher. Knowing the extremely bad odds of a principal’s professional judgment being successfully challenged, no matter how ignorant and biased, this teacher left the system in disgust.

In the same school, the position of science department supervisor defaulted to the principal’s favorite crony. He didn’t know biology from black magic, chemistry from clairvoyance, or geology from gee-whiz. But at behest of the principal, who wanted to give the job to the relative of a friend, he drove out a teacher who had an engineering degree and had entered the profession as a second career after 20 years as a senior Defense Department scientist.

The social studies supervisor who knew nothing about history, geography and economics but everything about ambition and career networking fulfilled her mandate of rating teachers unsatisfactory who had forgotten in any given day more knowledge than the supervisor ever possessed.

The principal herself, who couldn’t write a coherent letter to the Parent Association without the intercession of that virtual angel called “Spell Check” ruled an English teacher “incompetent” after he had earned satisfactory ratings for more consecutive years than had elapsed since the principal had been conceived in her own mother’s womb.

How is it that these principals have lost perspective on themselves? Perhaps we should be more forgiving. They are, after all, not fully grown up yet, even though the Dept. of Ed. has given them a “pass.”

On Thursday, Aug. 19, at 6:30 p.m., the Museum of the City of New York will host a panel discussion on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike of 1968.

The Strike That Changed New York: Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Politics of Education, & Race Relations in New York City, will feature Clarence Taylor, professor and author of Knocking At Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools, and Jerald Podair, professor and author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, who will discuss the crisis and its aftermath with the Reverend Herbert Oliver, Chairman of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local school board, and other participants from both sides of the struggle. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York. Reservations required. $6, museum members; $12, non-members; $8, seniors and students. Purchase tickets »

“Balanced literacy,” as any literate person exposed to it realizes, is neither “balanced” nor is it “literacy.” The entrepreneurs and contractors who coined the phrase, concocted the notions, launched the fad and marketed the hoax, parlaying it into an empire of a thousand cash cows and classroom straitjacketing schemes, are minor-league mischief makers compared to the peddlers of “Balanced Education for Everyone.”

According to the Denver Post, “Balanced Education for Everyone” is a “national campaign linked to an unsuccessful effort to remove the teaching of man-made global warming.” Its advocates are convinced that global warming, if it exists at all, is totally unrelated to any human behavior.

They do not consider abuse of the environment by the production of industrial waste to be a factor in global warming. Blaming corporations and other agents of pollution is “false science,” say these soccer moms and tea party-animals whose views are at odds with almost all the world’s experts.

The “Balanced Education for Everyone” folks are an alliance of conservatives who feel that major petroleum corporations deserve a little TLC rather than the indignity of government regulation. The group’s creator, the Independent Women’s Forum is reportedly funded by them. They’d rather see baby seals clubbed to death than Congress grill BP executives.

So what do they want?

They demand that the school curriculum be revised so that global warming is presented as an exclusively natural phenomenon and beyond the influence of human error, excess or irresponsibility. An officer of the Western Conservation Alliance actually petitioned a school board to forbid the teaching of man-made global warming. The more moderate wing of the movement would allow equal billing of both views. But that would be like creationism and evolution auditing each other in a syllabus.

The school board wisely rejected the demand and the Balanced Education for Everyone website has suddenly and inexplicably been shut down, perhaps coincidentally. Too bad for ResistNet.com, which dubs itself the “Home of the Patriotic Resistance.” They had recently been directing their supporters to the defunct site.

But this story is made up of more than the sum of its narrative details. Its implications are far-reaching and disturbing.

They point to the extreme danger of scientific or historic truth being doctored to suit a dominant ideology. When truth cannot stand for and by itself, any “assistance” provided it, no matter how righteously motivated, adulterates and corrupts it. All reality becomes vulnerable to revision and with it the lessons they carry, which in the case of slavery and other abominations of the chronicles of mankind, such as the Holocaust, may be, if we choose to learn, their only collateral benefits.

Self-styled “conservatives” are the culprits in the Balanced Education for Everyone case. They feel that they have a monopoly on patriotism because they have selected the version of events that best serves the country (comports with their bias) they profess to love.

Truth, of course, knows no partisanship but rather “lets the chips fall where they may.” And “progressives” are every bit as proud of nationhood but at the same time no more immune (though probably less prone) to folly and intolerance than “conservatives.”

With their website now as closed as their minds, what will the unbalanced “Balanced Education for Everyone” folks think up next? Do the planets really revolve around the sun or is that “false science” like global warming?

Yet another report has just been released which shows that charters have extremely uneven effects on student test scores — and, in some cases, may actually have a negative impact on the scores of certain types of students. This study has some of the same limitations as earlier work comparing charters to district schools (including a failure to distinguish between high-needs special education students and those with fewer challenges, and the merging of students who receive free lunch vs. reduced price meals). In general, however, it is a worthwhile addition to a growing body of research which documents this pattern of uneven performance, and calls into question arguments that the charter school model should be rapidly expanded without further exploration into whether or not it truly improves student achievement.

The new research, done by Mathematica Policy Research with a grant from the federal Department of Education (a strong advocate of charters) looked at test scores and other results from 36 charter middle schools in 15 states. Using a method in which the test scores of students who won charter lotteries were compared with those who entered the lotteries but lost (in order to compare students with equally motivated parents), the researchers found that on average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries are no more successful in raising students’ achievement than the traditional public schools their students would have otherwise attended. On average, these charter schools had no significant impacts on students’ math or reading test scores, on other measures of academic progress (such as attendance or grade promotion), or on student conduct within or outside of school. However, attending a study charter school did significantly and consistently improve both students’ and parents’ satisfaction with school.

One especially strong aspect of this study is the researchers’ efforts to examine which specific practices and policies (beyond just the charter model itself) were associated with positive and negative effects on student success. After looking at a wide range of possible factors, they concluded that only a few features of charter middle schools are significantly associated with more positive impacts on achievement, including smaller enrollments and the use of ability grouping in math classes. Charter schools serving more low-income or low-achieving students also had statistically significant positive effects on math test scores (but no significant effect on these students’ reading scores), while charter schools serving more advantaged students — those with higher income and prior achievement — had significant negative effects on these students’ math test scores.

As with other research, these conclusions should be considered in the light of the methodological limitations of the report. Although the lottery-based method of studying charter school effects is one of the strongest in terms of validity, the researchers’ screening process to select schools for the study resulted in the winnowing of the total number examined to 36 schools out of the 492 which were potentially eligible. In addition, the researchers note that, on average, the charter schools in their study “served students who were more economically advantaged, less likely to come from racial/ethnic minority groups, and more high-achieving” than students in other charter middle schools. As the study does not provide the names of participating schools, it is difficult to gauge which schools their results do address.

In addition, this study also does not fully address issues of retention and attrition, which previous studies (including Mathematica’s own study of KIPP and this recent Edwize post have shown can differ widely between charter schools and district schools. The report does examine the question of peer effects (comparing the demographics and achievement of lottery winners’ and losers’ classmates and schoolmates), but concludes that the differences it finds are not statistically significant. Finally, it also fails to address differing levels of need within the categories of special education and reduced price/free lunch categories of students. For the former, the UFT’s studies of New York charters (Separate and Unequal; Special Education in Charters and District Schools) have shown that charters tend to enroll students in the lowest-need categories of special education, while district schools’ special ed enrollments tend to have higher proportions of students who need more services. Similarly, the differences in economic background between students who receive free lunch and those who receive reduced price lunch are both significant and not addressed in this study. The study’s lack of focus on these differences calls into question the relevance of some of its conclusions, especially since schools in New York City and other urban areas tend to have higher proportions of very low-income students with high special needs.

However, this study supports the argument that the charter model is not a panacea, finding (as did the earlier CREDO study) that charters vary widely in their impact on student test scores and other measures of achievement. Its finding that charters actually have a negative average effect on students with relatively high levels of previous achievement and those from relatively advantaged economic backgrounds should be especially sobering for those who have promoted the charter model as an inherently positive reform. Like the study’s authors, we agree that more research is needed to determine whether (and under what circumstances) the charter model has positive or negative effects on student achievement.

Labor Arts’ most recent online exhibit is a pair of photo galleries documenting District 75 schools.

This exhibit features two series of revealing photographs taken by long time documentary photographer Gary Schoichet. The photographs depict New York City teachers who may have the most difficult jobs in the city: in Bayside, Queens they teach children and teens recovering from traumatic brain injuries; in East Harlem they teach children who are “medically fragile” — one label among many which is inadequate to describe their truly overpowering disabilities.

Many of these photographs originally appeared in two articles written by New York Teacher reporter Ellie Spielberg.