"Professors of education at New York University never lectured on how to handle flying-sandwich situations," McCourt goes on to explain in "Teacher Man," about his first day of teaching when two students had a dispute over lunch.
His solution: "I ate the sandwich. It was my first act of classroom management."
The material in quotes comes from Frank McCourt's Teacher Man and appears in an editorial in today's Boston Globe entitled Polishing the whole apple which is about teacher training, not only preservice (in "ed" school) but until retirement. It is one of two important article on education in major metro dailies that caught my attention today. The other is How Not to Pick a School by Brigit Shulte, a reporter for the Washington Post who has covered schools in wealthy Montgomery County and lives in Alexandria. I'd like to explore the connection I see between the two stories.
Shulte grew up in a non-diverse environment, but wanted something different for her children, which Alexandria provides. And yet had she gone only by test scores, the school which her children attend would quickly have been eliminated and she would have participated in the resegregation of American education. As she notes
The Civil Rights Project has found that 50 years after public schools were desegregated, they've re-segregated to an astonishing degree, even at a time when the nation is more diverse than ever and is heading toward becoming a "majority minority" society within a generation. And, in a recent report, Orfield and his coauthors found that white students are the "most racially isolated group of students" in the country, with the average white student attending a school in which only one in five students is of another race.
This is as much a phenomenon of our emphasis on test scores as is anything else.
And yet - children from white middle class families seem to perform at the same level whether in racially diverse schools with lower test scores or in more segregated schools whose scores are not pulled down by minorities. To quote two earlier paragraphs from this piece:
If there is one useful thing that has resulted from No Child Left Behind, it's that for the first time, the government requires schools to track and publish test scores broken down by racial and ethnic group. And the numbers show something interesting: white kids, on average, score about the same in all subjects no matter what school they attend. Education researchers have found that it's not race or ethnicity at all that best predict how a child will perform on a test: it's socioeconomic status.
Research has found that schools have an enormous impact on academic achievement for poor students. But for middle-class kids -- regardless of racial and ethnic background -- schools tend to matter relatively less, because parental influence matters so much more. To take the two extremes, it is hardly surprising that a middle-class child who has been read to often, taken on trips to museums and is surrounded by books and talk of college from an early age will score better on tests than a child living in a crowded apartment with non-English-speaking parents who work multiple jobs, or a child experiencing the often chaotic and hopeless environment of intergenerational poverty.
Shulte has found the school her children attend to be vibrant. Two blocks from their house
The student body is 55 percent Hispanic, 22 percent black and 19 percent white. More than 60 percent of the children are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. More than 40 percent speak a language other than English at home.
Originally she and her husband were concerned about the scores, perhaps unwittingly manipulated by all the stories. After visiting the school, and seeing children who were happy and teachers who were dedicated, they decided not to move and to send their son to the neighborhood school. As she notes
Our son is now in third grade. He reads well above grade level and his test scores are fine. Despite fears that the school would concentrate only on test-taking and on raising the scores of the lowest achievers, his teachers have often left me in awe. I've watched them teach as many as five or six mini-classes at the same time in the same room to reach everyone -- from those learning their letters to the child reading "Harry Potter." I've also watched them enrich the children by putting together a Native American feast, or setting up an Olympic competition after studying ancient Greece or having the children create their own pretend businesses and checking accounts to learn about economics.
She is also delighted that her children are growing up with a far more diverse group of friends than she experienced in her own younger days. [And I note that the enrichment of such diversity is something that is never accounted for if one merely examines test scores].
The key to the success of those schools clearly begins with the teachers. And that leads to the second article. The Massachusetts legislature is considering a bill that would
offers guidance for developing a solid-gold training pipeline to carry teachers from college to retirement. It would give them rich opportunities to learn, grow, and attain mastery.
It is not just that the traditional training methods in schools and departments of education are insufficient to prepare teachers for the challenges they face in our schools, it is that the training cannot end when one enters the classroom. The bill would allow some differentiation in the approaches taken by various colleges of education, with some specializing as they now do in urban education while others might concentrate on issues of special education, for example. The bill would seek to establish some commonality in what incoming teachers should minimally know. As the editorial notes,
This could spark a fight. But one way to promote a peaceful outcome is to put everyone in a room -- teachers, education school professors, and public education officials -- so they assess the problem and solve it as a team.
Indeed, the success of this entire bill relies on forming such partnerships. No one legislator, teacher, professor, parent, or student can dictate terms to anyone else.
This is key. One reason many attempts at school reform fail is that all constituencies do not have voice to help shape that reform.
Further, one real crisis in our schools is retention of teachers. Certainly the pay is an issue, and that may be one reason many teachers move into administration. This bill provides a new rung on the career ladder of master teacher that would enable strong teachers to remain in the classroom. Here I note that some districts around the country have already moved in that direction.
But what is really important is that teachers continue to develop. There are several related issues. One is that many of our assessments of teachers do not encourage growth. And it is also true that we do not put enough effort in attempting to help struggling teachers improve. Some teachers feel isolated, which this bill addresses by requiring schools and districts to provide
"time and access to other teachers and administrators for the purpose of improving instruction."
The bill which was developed by a working group of 43 including leadership of the state teachers union, has a number of other notable features. It assumes that even the best teachers can learn more. It calls for
rigorous evaluation of teachers and principals, for building a more sophisticated assessment system, and for evaluating teachers not just by their students' test scores, but by multiple measures. Teachers would also be judged on the basis of classroom observations of how they teach and on how they readjust their approach to help students learn better. The goal is to help everyone improve. . .
Weak teachers who need improvement would get a year of intensive support. Those who didn't improve could be quickly removed from their jobs.
Let me digress for a moment. Good and dedicated teachers know that there are some among their fellow teachers who do not belong in a classroom. On the other hand, many teachers worry that without the protections of union contracts good teachers and teachers who with assistance could become good could become subject to bullying and worse by administrators and school boards. They are willing to accept FAIR procedures that weed out those who don't belong while protecting others from abuse. Many are willing to accept the kind of flexible approach embodied in this bill, gaining support for ongoing development in return for a different but more meaningful kind of "accountability."
The editorial begins with McCourt:
Where did I get the nerve to think I could handle American teenagers?" Frank McCourt writes in his memoir "Teacher Man." His answer? "Ignorance." It's a comic take on a serious issue: How can public K-12 schools be staffed with a corps of exceptional teachers who can handle education's many challenges?
One misimpression is that great teachers fall out of the sky and into lucky schools. But greatness doesn't just happen; it must be nurtured.
I am finishing my 12th year of public school teaching. I have taught in an upper middle class white suburb, and in two schools in a majority African American system, one a middle school that was a mix of working class and middle class kids, but with a 93% African American student body, the other an incredibly diverse high school with a full range of socio-economic backgrounds. I have served as a union building rep. I completed most of a doctorate on educational policy, and as regular readers know frequently write about education, both online and occasionally in print. I am fortunate that I do not have financial pressures that might move me up or out of the classroom. I have received multiple awards and commendations for my teaching, and have served as a mentor to others, both student teachers and those beginning their careers. I have served as a department chair who had to help counsel those who were struggling. And I can still improve as a teacher. Like all teachers, I need time and space to reflect upon my practice, the opportunity to observe what other teachers do and to have others give me feedback.
The key to improving education is clearly that every child is entitled to the best teaching possible. But let me be clear - the measurement of the quality of that teaching cannot be measured solely by test scores, any more than can the quality of the learning and experience of the student. That is one thing that ties these two pieces together. Often in our attempts at educational reform we are able to identify key issues that we must confront, but how we attempt to address them makes the situation worse, as the over emphasis on test scores in NCLB has clearly demonstrated.
In America we are obsessed with comparisons and measurement. Today is in many ways an appropriate one on which to make such an assertion. In a number of hours a major portion of our population will watch a sports event, designed to determine "the best" professional football team. They will be inundated with statistics, designed to help us understand, statistics that will be used to make assertions which may or may not increase our understanding.
How do we measure the health of a democracy? Schools cannot exist in isolation from the rest of the nation. If our nation is badly divided along class lines, and has an obsession on the success of individuals apart from the larger community, then we will see parents reluctant to put their children in schools with those whose lower test scores are in fact little more than an indication of a preexisting class differentiation that is inimical to a healthy democracy. One of the idiocies of NCLB is that a student whose own scores are more than adequate is allowed to move from a school whose overall scores are not considered adequate. But is that school failing that student? Even using test scores as the rationale this seems a bit ridiculous, and inevitably creates more problems - such movement tends to lower the overall score of the school from which the child moves, and may in fact do the same for the receiving school. Schools at both ends of the transfer may resist because of negative impact on the overall score of the school, while the issue is supposed to be one of addressing the needs of individual children.
Brigit Shulte talked writes about the vibrancy of the school her children attend. She describes the enriching quality of diversity in her children's lives, something she did not have growing up. The proposed bill in Massachusetts wants teachers able to adapt to the different needs of students, and wants to help all teachers be better prepared at the start of their careers, and continue to develop throughout their careers. In both cases, quality teachers are a key to educational success. And in both cases the voices of multiple constituencies have to be part of planning for that success. Shulte is active in the parent-teacher organization of the school. Teachers and parents have been part of planning the reform of teacher training and support in MA.
This diary is NOT part of the official planning for the Education panel at Yearlykos 2007. It is the viewpoint of one person, me, who just happens to be in charge of the preparation for that panel. But it is connected. The issues addressed in these two newspaper pieces overlap with many of the issues with which we wrestle in our impossible task of redesigning American education.
It is also appropriate for a political blog. Education policy may be as important as any other issue in our political discourse. How we define and address educational policy inevitably has a huge impact on the future of our political discourse and even the shape of our democracy.
I hope this diary serves a useful purpose. I look forward to any comments offered by others, and will, as my time allows today, monitor same and respond where appropriate.
Peace.