How So-Called “Education Reformers” Have Learned the Art of War

I have been in education since 1970.  I have observed a great many reforms, changes in curricula, and reversals in methodologies. I have watched an attack on public education since “A Nation At Risk” was published in 1983 grow in leaps and bounds. That attack started small, almost inconspicuously. Now it has burgeoned with ferocity few saw coming and fewer know how to combat.

One of the major problems in the fight to save public education has to do with understanding strategies. For example, the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss recently posted an article about a fabulous teacher who won a contest to appear on “Live With Kelly and Michael” who had to quit because she could no longer “drill and kill” to prepare for PARCC exams.

The issue stressed by Strauss was PARCC.

Here is the really sad thing: By forcing her and thousands out of teaching, the reformers win. Why? Because they get to replace great teachers with drones who know no better.

I have been active on Facebook groups against Common Core, against standardized tests, for teachers, for parents, or against charter schools. Each site has its own myopic view of the issue. I have witnessed fights, harassment, and division between parents and teachers on many of these subjects. Few have a long view. Few see besides their own particular “hurtful” issue.

On the other hand, the “Education Deformers” do a great job at long-term planning. While we squabble among each other about which thrust they use against public education, they know they are on their way to their end game: destroying public education. So while they divide parents and teachers or elementary school people with secondary by having us branch off vs. Charter Schools, CCSS or PARCC, or OPTING OUT…. they march forward forcing good teachers and administrators out, increasing charter schools, so that even when we win our battles vs. these, they will have won the war, unless we see it and resolve not to let them do that to us.

They know and understand this idea from Sun Tzu’s Art of War. “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what no one can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

Do we understand the difference between strategy and tactic? Do we even see it? If we do not, we are doomed. We must unite to fight.

We all adore social media, but it has helped them divide and conquer us. There are so many bloggers, so many FB groups, so many organizations with their own websites, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. I would like to see us create a unified front with bigger clout. In 2011 we actually had this when Save Our Schools marched on DC in July with 7500 folks in the Ellipse and several hundred at a conference at American University.

We have all since splintered and the “deformers” rejoice.

CUOMO WORLD!

This is a perfect example of what we face in NYS:

A recent NYT story about 2 simultaneous rallies in Albany: It favors the New York City’s charter school rally in held in a park just outside the Capitol, with video screens, a rock-concert atmosphere, an enthusiastic mix of thousands of students, a raft of state leaders, a pop star, dance troupes and booming club music, including the Republican Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos.

The audience was supplied by the main charter organizations in NYC:

• KIPP, recruited parents and graduates to attend.
• Achievement First, brought its Brooklyn students if their parents came along.
• Eva S. Moskowitz‘s Success Academy, closed schools, held class on buses, and if parents did not want their children to make the trip north, they had to send them elsewhere for the day.

At the same time, supporters of teachers’ unions gathered at a convention center adjacent to the Capitol. Smaller in numbers, less festive, the unions were targeted lawmakers, including the heads of education committees from the Assembly and State Senate. Michael Mulgrew, the New York City union’s president told 1,000 parents and members in attendance at the convention center that it was their day to fight.

The points being that we are hidden indoors, union led, talking to pols, and they are packing a public outdoor space with recruited kids and parents in uniformed t shirts and hats and celebrities….

What’s it all about? Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal! Which is filled with:

THREATS AND BLACKMAIL:

His proposed $1.1 billion increase in school aid is contingent upon the approval of a series his education reform proposals, including a teacher evaluation system based more heavily on standardized testing.

To put pressure on districts, his staff has not released how much money each school district would receive after applying the state’s complex funding formulas. Without the charts, school districts cant plan their budgets, which must be approved by voters in the spring.

These are his demands:

1. CHANGE TEACHER EVALUATION. Cuomo described as “baloney” the state’s roughly 700 school districts own evaluation plans.

He wants to:

A – Require that student standardized test scores account for a full 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation rather than the current 20 percent.

• He ignores the position of the American Statistical Association on how not to use statistics to evaluate teachers.

• Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions.

• Assessment experts say top-rated school systems have had success with such systems that put no weight at all on student standardized test scores.

B – Deny an “effective” rating to any teacher who is rated “ineffective” based on test scores, and award bonuses of up to $20,000 to teachers who are “highly effective”

• Based on bogus test scores of their students.

• Merit pay systems in education have a poor record of success, undermine morale and long-term planning.

C – Make teachers eligible for tenure only after five consecutive years of “highly effective” or “effective ratings”, an increase from the current three-year probation period.

• Based on bogus test scores of their students.

• This is another form of  “merit pay.

D – Keep a student from being assigned two teachers with “ineffective” ratings two years in a row.

• The plan does not specify how that would work for middle and high-school students with multiple teachers.

• Based on bogus test scores of their students.

2. He would add 100 charter schools to the state limit, bringing the total to 560, including opening up parts of the state to charters where there is little or no demand. 

BUT WHAT REALLY IS GOING ON IS REVENGE AGAINST TEACHERS, UNIONS, AND DISTRICTS. 

He is “using his political power…to settle scores.

• Unions did not support him, in the democratic Primary nor the general election
• Districts and principals have fought hard against his teacher evaluation plans and refusal to lift 2% cap on local property tax increases.
• Both Unions and Districts have publically demanded and end to the funding inequities between poor and rich school districts across the state that have reached record levels and has soared 43% in New York City.

Classic Cuomo strategy: Develop key relationships and pick apart powerful sectors, knowing they will be weaker once divided.

Straight out of the divide-and-conquer playbook.

How does he differ from republicans Scott Walker? Bobby Jindal? Chris Christie?

“The truth is, there’s no epidemic of failing schools or bad teachers.

There is an epidemic of poverty and under-funding that Albany has failed to adequately address for decades.

Overall, schools in poorer districts spent $8,733 per pupil less in 2012 than those from wealthier ones, an inequity that grew by nearly 9% from before Cuomo took office.

The inequity gaps were made worse by Cuomo’s 2% cap on local property tax increases that made it more difficult for needy districts to raise needed money.

Nearly 1 million New York schoolchildren—including more than one-third of African-American and Latino students—live in poverty.

Under Cuomo NYS has the “most segregated schools in the nation”.

His democratic opponent Zephyr Teachout said:

“He is holding children hostage to the demands of his Wall Street donors and his personal political motivations, while kids go to school in overcrowded classrooms without arts, sports, or counselors. He is right that we have one system for the rich and one for the poor, but the reasons is clear: the disparate funding that is his legacy,” she said.

The voters said: what really hinders education in New York:

• Little parental involvement 37%
• not enough money in schools and or the effects of poverty 35%
• poor quality teachers 10%

WELCOME TO CUOMO WORLD!!!!

Why does Ms. R and her students have to go through this?

OK, I know the font is small and it is not a 140 character tweet, but you should all read and share this article that shows the true nature of testing and CCSS mandates both for the students of a highly regarded elementary special ed teacher and that teacher. http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=17902

REMINDERS AND UPDATES ABOUT TFA…. LET’S NOT FORGET HOW IT LURKS OUT THERE.

From September 2008- June 2012 I mentored TFA corps members for Fordham University in the Bronx, NY. As a result of my direct work with them in their schools and some basic research, it is clear to me that what the public is told does not match what goes on behind the TFA scenes.

This just in from Bloomberg: Most Teach For America Instructors Plan to Flee Teaching:

More than 87 percent of TFA teachers say they don’t plan on remaining teachers throughout their careers, compared with 26.3 percent of non-TFA teachers working in the same subjects, grades, and schools, according to an analysis released last week by Mathematica Policy Research (PDF).

Twelve percent leave after their first year in the classroom.

A full 25 percent of them said they would quit teaching after the current school year, compared with only 6.7 percent of non-TFA teachers. And of those who plan to quit, 42.9 percent of TFA teachers anticipated leaving education altogether, compared with 6.7 percent of non-TFA teachers. TFA doesn’t provide the number of TFA recruits who don’t complete the two-year commitment, or who don’t stay in teaching. I wonder why.

TFA has stressed that the organization has more than 37,000 alumni of which 900 are now school heads, and 250 are leaders of district and charter school systems. That is their real GOAL: to create this corps of policy makers

WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO BE A CORP MEMBER?

– Corps members are usually successful and energetic students. Unfortunately many are also naïve. Often followers, they are perfect fodder for TFA leaders.

– Regardless of what TFA says, their 5-week boot camp training period and process is hell and does not come close to preparing corps members for what they are to face.

– They are taught by TFA to follow. Stay in line. Be formulaic. They are taught not to be like the great teachers they remember: wise, creative, independent, and spontaneous. Most of all, they are trained by TFA to be a corps member above all and not a part of a school or district.

– Most TFA corps members do not have command of the 4 c’s: Culture of schools, Culture of community, Culture of curriculum, and Culture of classroom management. Most also lack the practical wisdom or street smarts to have a good chance of success in the schools where they are placed.

– They must attend “mandatory” TFA meetings at “headquarters” (even if that time is spent on street corners surveying passers by).  They travel hours out of their way to go to local TFA “headquarters” for meetings or get the already prepared materials to copy and plug into the prescribed curriculum.

– TFA uses former corps members with only 2 years experience to go into corps members’ schools to provide what they call support, reinforce the TFA gospel, and tell corps members they must rely on TFA prepared materials to be successful.

– The recurring theme recanted to me over and over by almost all of my corps member mentees is that TFA is not only of little help, it creates even more stress on them than they already incur as untrained novices working under the most difficult of conditions.

– Because of all the time consuming TFA rituals, they can’t devote enough time to good lesson planning, so they are forced to use TFA provided worksheets: “teacher-proof, formulaic, guided worksheet/lesson plans that usually don’t work. The end result is reinforcing their fears of trying other things that actually work.

– From the mouths of corps members:

• “TFA does not teach us to work smarter.”
• “TFA tells us fairy tales about our superiority.”
• “TFA does not teach us to organize time and workload.
• “TFA does not teach questioning technique, or many of the most important tools we need to succeed.”
• “TFA boot camp institute simply does not prepare us.”

– Stuck in quicksand up to their nostrils, most corps members find it difficult to take advice from an outside mentor even when they know the advice will save them. Many corps members are afraid to use it because they will be accused of not following TFA rules and threatened with losing their stipends or worse.

– They become more frustrated and filled with self-doubt, remorse. Their goal of helping poor struggling kids during their two-year “community service” turns into the goal of getting out alive after their “two-year sentence” is up.

– All of this is on top of what any new teacher in schools in high poverty areas must face. There are thousands of TFA corps members who have a different story to tell than what tufa is passing off as the truth.

MYTHS VS REALITY:

MYTH: TFA produces educators:

REALITY: TFA is in the business of producing policy makers to support its and its financial backers goals.

TFA claims 67% “stay in education”:

• @ 20% actually teaching in public schools after their two years are completed.
• The rest work for:
  • TFA
  • District or school leaders
  • Policy groups like educators 4 excellence, or students first
  • District or charter management organization administrators.

2. TFA puts them in positions of power. LEE (Leadership for Educational Equity) is a TFA launched nonprofit organization to train and support TFA alumni to pursue public leadership. It connects them them to high impact opportunities in politics, policy, lobbying, and elected office.

MYTH: Corps members increase academic achievement.

REALITY: In studies touted by TFA, the students of corps members remained below their national peers and made only marginal gains.”

MYTH: TFA is a poor not for profit struggling to maintain its budget to support public education:

REALITY: TFA is about money and power.

• Its assets exceed $350m
• It charges districts from $4,000 -$10,000 per corps member provided
• It received $50m from The Department of Education
• It is funded by the Gates, Broad, Walton… and dozens of similar foundations
• TFA can afford a massive public relations campaign that includes films, concerts, and directly lobbying the federal government.

MYTH: TFA supports experienced teachers and only contracts to fill otherwise unfillable positions:

REALITY: Districts around the country contract with TFA to replace experienced teachers. TFA’s current labor policies have turned it into a source of “scab labor”…usually in right to work /non-union states.

• They want to have a “temporary” corps of unqualified teachers who will last no longer than five years. They hire TFA corps members.
• They want to make more teachers quit prior to vesting in pensions to reduce long-term pension costs. They hire TFA corps members.
• They want to cut salary costs by decreasing the number of veteran teachers and replacing them with new teachers who last 2-5 years. They hire TFA corps members.

Examples:

• Detroit: brought in 200 TFA corps members after nearly a score of Detroit public schools were closed and hundreds of veteran teachers were let go. TFA wants to start all TFA schools to replace those schools with charters led by former corps members.
• Dallas: brought in nearly 100 new TFA corps members, even though the district had laid off 350 teachers in the 2008-09 school year.
• Washington DC: former TFA corps member and schools chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off 229 teachers, but only six of the 170 TFA corps members in the system
• Chicago: an internal TFA document shows plans for a five-year charter growth plan forecasts a dramatic expansion of 52 privately run charters led by former TFA corps members to serve more than 30,000 students in the city.
• Kansas City: fired about 200 experienced teachers last year to make room for new TFA recruits.  The superintendent, who made this decision, went on to “lead” Detroit’s school system.

 MYTH: TFA provides support to its corps members:

REALITY: TFA provides hype, then stress, pain and hurt.

• Few corps members quit, now up to about 12%, but more want to.
  • Corps members said they felt unprepared for their first job and unlikely to describe their training as useful in response to a survey.
  • Corps members said that they didn’t feel camaraderie with their non-TFA colleagues.
  • Corps members said that their work did not offer prestige, an intellectual challenge or opportunities for advancement.
  • Overwhelmingly, Corps members said they planned not to continue in teaching as their entire careers, compared to just a quarter of the regular staff. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/06/teach-for-america-teachers-arent-any-better-than-other-teachers-when-it-comes-to-kids-test-scores/?postshare=9371425686598676)

John Bilby is a hero.  He is a former corps member and mentee of mine in the Bronx who quit TFA in his first year because he knew it was the right thing to do. He went back to graduate school to get properly credentialed but unfortunately then had to do time as a national guardsman in Afghanistan.   It will be fitting to end with his words:

• I went into TFA with a realistic perspective on the difficulties ahead. I did not expect the kind of managerial incoherence and lack of structure that has become a hallmark of TFA placements.

• My experiences have led me to disagree with TFA’s model of placing inexperienced and idealistic teachers (most of whom come from entirely different worlds than their students) in the classrooms of these institutions, many of which have been dysfunctional for a generation or longer, and expecting them to be successful.

• The Institute was a highly structured psychological booster that provided very little in the way of training or preparation. Given my post-Institute experiences, it no longer makes any sense to me.

• I was in a school with no books, no curriculum, and a set of administrators whose schizophrenic responses to issues of communication and discipline have reflected leadership at its worst.  I have known poor leaders, but never have I seen such shameful and disgraceful leadership as at this school.

• The Principal bullies and intimidates the children. One day he walked into my classroom with two armed police officers, and pulled out two 6^th grade girls who were standing up and looking out the window at a fracas in the schoolyard.  The officers spoke in loud intimidating tones to the two girls, asking them if they needed classes in how to respect adults.  Two police officers interrogating children of color in such a way while the principal (also of color) looked on shocked and offended me.  It also reflected the kind of disturbing incoherence that has marked the school’s disciplinary response. After doing virtually nothing besides yelling at children for six months they went to the nuclear option, implying that violence will be used.

• New teachers are expected to arrive early at the principal’s forty-five-minute long ‘New Teacher Support Group’ on Thursday mornings, which one day consisted of him telling us to come up with lists of items to ask for on ‘Donors Choose.’

• Prep time is taken away for other unhelpful reasons and meetings. We need our prep time and such a waste of our time is disrespectful to us, and surely only fulfills some statistical need for PD [Professional Development].

• Six out of seven first and second year teachers were given unsatisfactory ratings on their formal observations, a pattern which, when paired with other administrative behaviors toward teachers, suggests that the administrators understand that the school is a sinking ship and are gaming a plan to place the blame squarely upon the teachers, so that they may fly away and alight upon another six-figure salary somewhere else.

• I have spent thousands of my own dollars making photocopies and buying supplies and rewarding good behavior.

• I begged, borrowed, and asked for my own literature textbooks from friends and family members to supplement my own curriculum. I held my own detention before the advent of the school’s After School Academy in an attempt to assert my  authority.

• I sent students to the Dean and Grade Team Leaders, only to become more confused and inhibited by their responses.

• I averaged three to four phone calls to parents a night.

• The best support was what I received from my Fordham mentor, who actually gave me the substance of teaching and helped me understand the dynamics in my classroom and my work with children.

• I have given my all, and I am angry, disillusioned, and unfulfilled.  I have spent hours preparing and planning, only to have things washed away by the dysfunctional and undisciplined nature of this school.

• If I stay here, I will be a piece of the systemic dysfunction that plagues this school. All children deserve to go to school in professional, supportive environments that provide the structures necessary for children and adults to thrive—and teachers who stay because of their satisfaction with what they do and who they are.

• TFA has a moral obligation to not place teachers in schools as poorly run like this one; if not for the good of these children, then for the good of future generations who would benefit from teachers who are far better prepared to teach than those from TFA.

http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Right-Thing-Teacher-Speaks/dp/1460225481

Say NO to Common Core Essay Writing By My Friend, Bernie Keller

In the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that I have corrected and/or edited thousands of essays and research papers, as well as a number of dissertations, in addition to having written a number of essays of my own, and not one of the aforementioned writings employs the current writing style espoused by the common core supporters. In addition, the current method, which asserts that the writer must provide a rebuttal in the introduction or at the beginning of the essay, makes no sense because you don’t rebut anything until there’s been some point that contrasts the point you are making.

The idea that an essay must contain a “rebuttal” makes no sense to me. First of all, if you were to look up the elements of an essay, you would not find a rebuttal listed as one of its elements, nor would you find it in a definition of the word essay. In fact, rebuttals are elements found in debates and in reference to speeches, (e.g. The State of the Union Address by the President).

In fact, if common core supporters are correct as it pertains to the value and importance of current essay writing techniques, that would argue that the style and methods and techniques of essayist such as Thomas Pain, Voltaire, Emerson, Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., just to name a few, were not methods and techniques worthy of the esteem, reverence and acclaim that generations have bestowed upon them.

In point of fact, the purpose of an essay is to advance a point or idea and then provide reasons- proof, facts-that show your reader your point has substance, (even if your reader is not persuaded by your point). For me, the most important job of any essay is not to persuade the reader, but to clearly identify the point you want to make and then to defend it with proof- facts, reasons and logic.

The ability to cogently make a point and strongly defend it is the most important skill students need to develop and hone in order to become better thinkers, better speakers and better writers. In fact, ensuring their ability to this would make the act of writing the persuasive or argumentative essay much easier. The problem is today’s “experts” are conflating the ability to clearly advance your point with being persuasive. You don’t learn the crossover dribble before you learn to dribble, you don’t learn division before you learn multiplication, you don’t learn to run before you can walk, and you don’t learn to persuade others before you have learned to clearly advance and support your own point!

My essays have been read, discussed and published. With the occasional exception in which I intentionally juxtapose a contrasting point against my point in order to underscore or emphasize the absurdity of the contrasting point, my essays identify the point I want the reader to “walk away with” and provide the reasons I am advancing this particular point.

I teach people, “If you can talk, you can write.” This means if you can organize your ideas enough to clearly express yourself in speech, you can clearly express yourself in the written form as well. Any successful speaker or writer must be able to clearly identify his/her point and support that point with reasons that show that point has value or substance. After all, if you are thinking “I hate milk”, how would you express that in speech or in writing? Wouldn’t you say and write, “I hate milk”?

The current method of teaching writing makes writing far more difficult than it has to be. Essay writing didn’t start today or with the methods and techniques of the current experts. Essay writing has existed for centuries and produced essays that made cogent, logical, intellectual and edifying points, long before the supporters and experts themselves or today’s essay writing methods ever existed. This point asserts that, like many of the current educational theories and methods, the decision to obliterate what has existed and been successful before as meaningless and without value, is at best misguided or just flat out wrong.

Successfully writing an essay is not some inscrutable algorithm. It does not require some exacting, intricate calculus. Successful writing is the sum total of a clear understanding of the point you want to make, and the ability to provide the reasons, facts, or proof to support that point.

It’s really just that simple. Really.

Math Professionals #sayNOtoCCSSTests.

From a friend and former colleague:

Hi Dave,
I am a trainer for Meaningful Math-a student centered program that is problem based. Years ago I taught IMP (Interactive Mathematics Program) which started in California and was a really great alternative way of teaching and learning. Today I received this email from Sherry Fraser, one of the authors of the IMP program and I think you will find it interesting.
Marilyn

Subject: Common Core testing

Many of you know Steve Rasmussen as he was president of Key Curriculum Press and sponsored many IMP functions. He is now spending his time researching the common core tests that are coming our way. I read this article and then took the SBAC practice test and I agree with everything he says. The article is long and detailed and definitely worth reading.

Sherry

SR Education Associates Releases a New Report by Steven Rasmussen:
Common Core Mathematics Tests Are
Fatally Flawed and Should Not Be Used
An Critique of the Smarter Balanced Tests for Mathematics
Read the full report at www.mathedconsulting.com.

Summary: This spring, tests developed by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium will be administered to well over 10 million students in 17 states to determine their proficiency on the Common Core Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM). This in-depth analysis of sample mathematics test questions posted online by Smarter Balanced reveals that, question after question, the tests (1) violate the standards they are supposed to assess, (2) cannot be adequately answered by students with the technology they are required to use, (3) use confusing and hard-to-use interfaces, or (4) are to be graded in such a way that incorrect answers are identified as correct and correct answers as incorrect. No tests that are so unfair should be given to anyone. Certainly, with stakes so high for students and their teachers, these Smarter Balanced tests should not be administered. The boycotts of these tests by parents and some school districts are justified. In fact, responsible government bodies should withdraw the tests from use before they do damage.

If you read nothing else about Common Core assessments — read this!
— Sol Garfunkel, Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP)
Archives for the IMPTEACH list are available at:
http://www.math.uic.edu/~cpmp/listserv.html