Tag Archives: NCTQ

December 15, 2015 · 6:16 am

Advice For My Students: DON’T “Teach for America”

As Fall semester slides into exams, most of my senior students turn their attention to full time student teaching.  They also begin to think very seriously about how to enter the job market for new teachers beginning their careers in the Fall.  It can be a harrowing time.  In addition to being responsible for teaching a full load of students full time and engaging in deep capstone projects based on that teaching, they have to plan how they will seek out and apply for jobs.  Adulthood and difficult choices lie directly on the other side of the most challenging work they have ever done.  I certainly cannot find fault if any of them approach it all with at least some trepidation mingled with their excitement.

So it is unsurprising that I occasionally have students who apply for and are selected to join Teach For America.  Their reasons are varied.  TFA publicly espouses many values that are congruent with my students’ sense of vocationalism in service of their future students.  TFA offers to take the confusion out of the job application process by helping them find a classroom somewhere they may have never considered on their own.  TFA carries with it an aura of selectivity and prestige, and certainly by this point in its history, the organization has connections and influence among the powerful in education policy.

However, I have advice for my students regarding applying for or accepting a position with Teach For America: Don’t do it.

I don’t come to this advice lightly, and while I respect that my students might be excited to join an organization that says it is dedicated to getting young and talented people into classrooms with our most needy students, there is literally nothing positive that Teach For America offers my students that they cannot do for themselves.  And what they package with those positives is entirely negative for our profession.  There are a number of truths about TFA that my students should consider before seeking an application.

First, Teach For America needs you far more than you need them.  TFA may be influential, and the competitive nature of their system may seem prestigious, but my students do not need Teacher For America anywhere nearly as much as TFA needs them.  Anyone willing to join TFA is making two positive commitments: 1) I will go anywhere and 2) I will teach students from vulnerable families and communities.  Well, if you are willing to do that, and you hold a valid teaching certificate, there are precious few barriers keeping you from doing just that on your own.  Many states practice reciprocal certification with other states, and in other cases, fairly minor additional requirements are all that is necessary.  For already credentialed teachers, TFA is just a middleman that makes the process of finding a job in another state less stressful, but it is hardly necessary.  I know a great many of my students are deeply committed to working with students in poverty, and I applaud them for that.  They don’t need TFA.

On the other hand, TFA does need them, or, perhaps more accurately, TFA looks better every time a fully qualified, licensed teacher joins their corps.  My students who have joined TFA arrived vastly more prepared and ready to teach than most other corps members.  They have studied child psychology, education law, general methods of teaching and content specific methods, evaluation, classroom management, and they have completed full subject majors in the content they intend to teach.  Teachers who graduate from my program also have spent 100s of hours in experienced teachers’ classrooms where they have worked one on one with students, led classroom activities, shadowed teachers’ lesson plans, and planned and taught guest lessons – all before their full time student teaching began.  Our entire program is premised on the belief that learning to teach requires careful and thoughtful entry into the classroom using ideas and skills learned from both college faculty and from practicing teachers, and it is premised on thoughtfully planned experiences in classrooms that are crucial at every stage of learning to teach.  My graduates have also completed capstone projects working closely with our faculty examining the evidence of how their teaching has promoted student learning – and they have done so using substantive evidence rather than standardized test scores.  Further, they have passed difficult examinations of their content knowledge as required by the state of New Jersey, they have maintained GPAs well above their college peers, and all of their programs of study are subject to demanding accreditation requirements.

Compare that to Teach For America’s perspective that all new teachers really need is a great attitude and a summer training institute.  While all first year teachers, even those who are exceptionally well prepared, will find the experience more than the sum of their preparation, it is without question that TFA corps members who have actually studied to become teachers are vastly more ready than their counterparts who have not.

My students also benefit TFA in another manner: they all intend to stay classroom teachers.  This isn’t something they suddenly decided to do.  This isn’t a means for them to “give back” on their way to something else.  This is a career they have been thinking about since they were much younger and to which they have dedicated their entire time in college to entering.  TFA likes to claim that a huge percentage of their corps members “stay in education,” but they use marketing language to paper over the issue.  Consider:

TFA claim 1

TFA also claims that “the most common profession for TFA alumni” is teaching.  These are cleverly stated, but hardly as impressive as TFA wants you to believe.  The first claim is worded to encourage you to believe that up to 80% of TFA alumni are working directly in schools, especially in low-income schools, but it obviously means no such thing and can mean something entirely unexpected if the definition of working “in education” is treated very loosely.  Finish TFA, go to law school, and end up working with education “foundations” or fake grassroots and advocacy organizations pushing various elements of today’s testocracy and that easily slots in with TFA’s claim.  Whether “the most common profession” of former corps members being teaching is impressive or not depends entirely on how many other professions are counted and how large a percentage stay in teaching as a career.  50% teaching out of 20 professions total would be far more impressive than, say, 15% of 20 professions.  The language TFA selects is precisely chosen to obfuscate those distinctions.

Survey research conducted with Dr. Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard University has better news for TFA in this regard than many critics might expect, but hardly great news compared to traditionally prepared and hired teachers.  The study, conducted with TFA cohorts beginning  2000, 2001, and 2002 found that 60.5% taught in K-12 beyond their initial 2 year commitment, and 35.5% taught more than four years with 27.8% still teaching in their fifth year.  43.6% of TFA members continued teaching at their initial school past two years, but that number dropped to 14.8% at the end of four years.  Traditionally prepared education majors made up only 3.34% of corps members surveyed, but 71.3% of them taught longer than four years – well more than double of other corps members.

While not a significant portion of corps members, traditionally prepared teachers placed by TFA help bolster their image by being far more ready to teach than their modal corps members and by staying in teaching for far longer.  So when my students join TFA, they get help finding a job they could have found for themselves, and their preparation and career aspirations help TFA look better.

Second, Teach For America will challenge my students’ beliefs about quality education….but not in a good way.  Teach For America likes to claim that they do not favor charter schools over fully public schools in their placements:

TFA claim 2

This means that basically a third of corps members get placed in charter schools – which doesn’t sound like a preference until you look at the numbers.  There are just over 6000 charter schools in the country, enrolling roughly 2.3 million students.  That’s roughly 4.6% of the public schools in the country, and charter schools are only 10% or more of public schools in Arizona, Colorado, and the District of Columbia.  According to the Alliance for Public Charter Schools, charter schools account for 30% or more of schools in only 12 districts nationwide, and there are 147 districts in the country where charter schools comprise 10% or more of the K-12 enrollment in the district.  There are over 14,000 public school districts in the United States.  The nation’s largest school district, New York City, only enrolls 7% of its students in charters while Los Angeles enrolls 21% and Chicago 14%.

So, sure, Teach For America does not favor charter schools – until you look at how its placements in charters vastly outstrips the percentage of schools that are charters nationwide or the percentage of students in our three largest cities who are enrolled in charters.

And the charter sector as a whole should give my students pause.  I always tell my students to look very closely at the schools that offer them jobs to see if the school climate and leadership align with their own values, and that goes double for charter schools which are privately managed, rarely unionized, and whose leadership remains opaque to any scrutiny.  With 6000 charter schools in the country, I will not categorically tell my students to never work in one, but they have to be on the lookout for schools engaging in outright financial fraud,  schools whose real estate and management arrangements actively harm/steal from the communities that host them, and school chains that boast high test scores but also engage in disciplinary practices that violate everything my students have learned about caring for all children.  In New York City, TFA has a strong relationship with Success Academy, a controversial “no excuses” charter chain that has extremely high test scores, but whose academic culture is high pressure to the point of demeaning children and whose disciplinary practices routinely result in suspension of Kindergarten children.

My students have been taught to fulfill a promise that all children deserve an equitable opportunity to learn, not that the only children who deserve to be in school are the ones who can quickly conform to an exercise in extreme behavior modification.  But TFA has a significant preference for working with schools that do just that and then brag that they are “closing the achievement gap.”  That should worry any professional educator’s sense of ethics.

Teach For America’s own record of helping its own corps members is open to question as well.  A growing number of TFA “alumni” are publicly sharing their stories of how the organization failed them and their students. Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig of California State Sacramento shares the story of his former student who, against his advice, joined Teach For America and was placed in a “Knowledge is Power Program” (KIPP) charter school:

I never thought I would feel so alone in a organization like TFA. I imagined being a part of the Corps would provide me with the support I needed, even though I would be an inexperienced first year teacher. During my first semester, I was visited two times by my TFA manager.  Afterward, we met for coffee, and he would ask questions about my vision for my students, but never offered the type of resources and support that I needed to make my teaching life more bearable. Looking back, I’m not even sure what a two-time visitor could have offered that would have really helped me….
Shame has a terrible place in this organization.  I never believed that shame would become a motivator in my Teach for America experience, but shame holds onto the necks of many Corps members.  Placing young college graduates in some of the toughest teaching situations with 5 weeks of training has negative repercussions on the mind, body, and soul of Corps members.  The message is “If only I were stronger, smarter and more capable, I could handle this. I would be able to save my students.”  Unfortunately, TFA intentionally or unintentionally preys on this shame to push Corps members to their limits to create “incredible” classrooms and “transformative” lesson plans. Would these things be good for our students? Of course.  Is shame a sustainable method for creating and keeping good teachers in the classroom? Absolutely not. It is defeating and draining.

My students understand that having a robust support and collegial system is crucial for good teaching, both for novices and experienced teachers, and this is validated by research demonstrating that schools with “integrated” professional cultures do the best at serving the needs of teachers at all experience levels.  It is unconscionable that TFA would take college graduates with no training in education and leave them with both minimal preparation and entirely inadequate support systems.  Worse, many former corps members explain that TFA substitutes what amounts to a cartoonish version of “grit” for actual professional learning, support, and development.

TFA appears frighteningly unconcerned with the school conditions and philosophies where they place corps members, plainly favoring working with schools engaged in practices that do not affirm educational equity.  Further, TFA fails to provide what is critical for the development of good teaching and expert teachers, preferring shallow mantras over the complex and uncertain work of professional learning.  My students are vastly more qualified than most corps members, but they should know that TFA will not help them grow further in any careful or deliberate manner.

Third, Teach For America denigrates our profession, ultimately harming children in the process.  Recently, the Center For American Progress announced its campaign called “Teach Strong” based on nine principles that are supposed to “modernize and elevate” the profession of teaching.  The campaign so far has some very strange bedfellows.  Both national teacher unions have signed on as well the as the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, an organization of the nation’s  accredited university-based teacher preparation programs.  Teach for America is also a partner as well as the fairly odious “National Council of Teacher Quality,” a self-appointed watchdog of teacher “quality” whose signature “study” of teacher preparation quality was conducted by reading online course catalog materials.  Seated at the table with some allies but also with organizations long connected to the research on learning to teach and tasked with helping to improve and “elevate” teaching as a profession, one might think that TFA would take a good hard look at their own contribution.  Having signed on to a program whose stated principles include “reimagine teacher preparation to make it more rooted in classroom practice and a professional knowledge base, with universal high standards for all candidates” and “provide significantly more time, tools, and support for teachers to succeed, including through planning, collaboration, and development” one might assume that Teacher For America would be willing to reconceptualize their own “preparation” of corps members with nothing more than summer training institute and demonstrably uneven and inadequate support systems once they enter the classroom.

You would think that, but you’d be wrong.

In fact, TFA’s CEO, Elisa Villanueva Beard, told The Washington Post that they see no need to change their training program, saying, “We do great, very rigorous pre-training work.”

It has been clear for some time that TFA is on the side of teacher professionalism that honestly does not care if teaching is a lifelong profession.  Consider their obvious favoritism for urban charter schools, which frequently welcome unlicensed, short term, teachers who are easily molded into the school’s way of operating without any pesky baggage like existing pedagogical knowledge or classroom experience.  TFA’s perspective on this is well summed up by their founder, Wendy Kopp, who opined, “Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers….The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”

What Ms. Kopp is describing is not teacher growth and development as familiar to those who have dedicated their lives to teaching children, and I doubt that even former corps members who remained teachers would agree with her.  She is describing school models that have such narrow behavioral expectations for both students and teachers that “development” is a matter of drilling people into a single, precise, way of going about business, and the preference for barely trained TFA recruits makes absolute sense because they are more easily molded.  This is closely tied to TFA’s continued insistence that its training model is up to the task of preparing young people with no teaching experience and no undergraduate teacher training for work in schools with our nation’s most vulnerable children.  The model is painfully inadequate as career teacher and former TFA corps member Gary Rubinstein has repeatedly noted in his blogging.  More recently, the Network for Public Education has hosted stories from TFA alumni highlighting their lack of preparation for the often complex classroom situations into which they were placed and the lack of continued support needed to help them and their students thrive.  Nothing about the stories host there or in the “preparation” paradigm practiced by TFA does much of anything to “elevate” our profession.

TFA likes to boast about their alumni who are leaders in education, and to be sure, there’s a long list of such alumni who have occupied influential and highly visible positions from which they have wielded power over our public schools.  Sadly, as Gary Rubinstein also observed, a great deal of that influence has been entirely negative:

….these leaders are some of the most destructive forces in public education. They seem to love nothing more than labeling schools as ‘failing,’ shutting them down, and blaming the supposed failure on the veteran teachers. The buildings of the closed schools are taken over by charter networks, often with leaders who were TFA alums and who get salaries of $200,000 or more to run a few schools….

….TFA and the destructive TFA spawned leaders suffer a type of arrogance and overconfidence where they completely ignore any evidence that their beliefs are flawed.  The leaders TFA has spawned are, to say this in the kindest way possible, ‘lacking wisdom.’

TFA’s brand of education “leaders” are at the forefront of closing neighborhood schools in favor of opaque charters, using test scores to evaluate teachers, and breaking teacher unions.  In this school of thought, there are no problems in education of vulnerable children that require increased resources and the dedication of experienced professionals.  Rather, all that are needed are energetic but easily replaceable novices, a “no excuses” attitude, and school management that is relieved of any open and democratic accountability.  This runs counter to everything we know about our most successful schools.  Experienced teachers are more effective than novices.  Money and resources matter in educational opportunity and outcomes.  Wealthier districts have greater rates of teacher retention, significant levels of parental and community involvement and oversight – and higher test scores.  If TFA and its alumni leaders truly cared about righting the inequities in our public education system, they would demand that teachers and students in high poverty districts have equitable situations with their peers in wealthy districts.  Instead of denigrating teachers for failing to be comic book heroes, they could shine a clear light on the insanity of calling on teachers to fix some of the greatest injustices in our society armed with nothing more than youthful energy and attitude.

However, there is no sign that TFA or its enablers in board rooms, school districts, and legislative bodies across the country have the least interest in doing so.  It is past time for young people to stop lining up to “Teach For America,” and there is no reason that my students – who have earned the title of professional teacher through years of hard work – should ever join them.  I work with amazing and talented young people, many of whom are passionate about working with our schools’ most at risk children.  They can do that brilliantly, and more effectively, without Teach For America.

 

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Filed under charter schools, classrooms, Funding, politics, Social Justice, teacher learning, teacher professsionalism, teaching

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November 13, 2015 · 4:50 pm

#TeachStrong? Brother, Here We Go Again…

Education reformers in the 21st Century seem incapable of seeing any problem as something other than a marketing campaign.  Faced with growing grassroots opposition to the Common Core State Standards, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, backed with fresh cash from the Gates Foundation, launched a #SupportTheCore event on social media to try to make CCSS support look genuine and natural.  As they felt control of the education reform narrative slipping from their grip, major corporate backers of standardized testing and school privatization handed $12 million to former Arne Duncan aide Peter Cunningham to launch The Education Post, a pro-reform blogging outpost, providing content for itself and editorial pages.  Needing to dress up her campaign to destroy the collective bargaining and due process rights of our nation’s teachers as something more noble, former news anchor Campbell Brown set up her own web headquarters called The 74, referencing the estimated 74 million children under the age of 18 Brown claims she is defending from greedy unions.  It seems that whenever they want to tackle difficult and contentious issues, reform advocates turn immediately to the tools of viral advertising and public relations to create the imagery of genuine, natural support rather than bothering with the hard work of building it.

Cue #TeachStrong.

Let’s agree to set aside the choice of a name that inevitably invokes one of the worst doping scandals in the history of sport (although, seriously?  millions of dollars in expert branding experience and nobody thought about that??).  “Teach Strong” is the name chosen by a new group of stakeholders organized by the Center for American Progress to make teachers and the future of teaching an issue in the upcoming election.  The campaign launched this week with a splashy web site and social media campaign, which is is par for the course these days, and a declaration of 9 “principles” that they believe will “modernize and elevate” the teaching profession.

Lyndsey Layton mentioned in The Washington Post that the coalition includes “some strange bedfellows,” and she certainly was not kidding.  On one side, Teach Strong has both major national teacher unions, the NEA and the AFT.  It also has the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, the national association of college based teacher preparation programs, and it has the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, a long standing national organization for public school leaders.  Also in the coalition is the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which grew out of the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy’s response to A Nation At Risk and the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, whose early work was heavily influenced by executive director Linda Darling- Hammond, indisputably one of the leading experts in teacher preparation. Teach Strong is also joined by the National Center for Learning Disabilities, a long time education advocate for disabled children and by The New Teacher Center, a non-profit that grew out of the nationally recognized teacher mentoring and support program at University of California, Santa Cruz and which now assists states and school districts across the country in developing new teacher induction and mentoring.

On the other side?  There is the omnipresent Teach for America which recruits high achieving college students, gives them less than two months of preparation, and then places them in some of our nation’s highest need school districts for two years.  They are joined by “Educators 4 Exellence,” a foundation funded astroturf group dedicated to promoting the Common Core State Standards and hosting a pledge that has members standing up for assessing teachers using standardized test scores.  The similarly foundation backed “Deans for Impact” joins the table as an extremely small group of education school deans committed to various aspects of current reform efforts, and Relay “Graduate School” of Education is also present, bringing their odd posture as a graduate school that produces no research and which basically uses no excuses charter school teachers to certify other no excuses charter school teachers mainly using online modules.  Former Arne Duncan aide Peter Cunningham’s Education Post is present, which is bizarre given its status as primarily a content delivery forum for education reform advocates.  Revoltingly, the National Council on Teacher Quality is also on board – NCTQ is a self appointed watchdog of teacher “quality” which has such a rigorous system for reviewing teacher preparation programs that it basically sits in its offices in Washington reading online course catalogs before informing the nation that our teacher preparation programs are all horrible.

I suppose representatives from the Center for American Progress, an organization that has long been on the reform side of the Common Core and standardized testing debate, would call this a “Team of Rivals” to match the famed Lincoln Cabinet.  I guess that’s one way of looking at it.  Another way of looking at it would be if the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics partnered with the Hormel corporation to design a school lunch program – you hope the more knowledgeable partner is guiding the work, but you strongly suspect that a lot of snouts and tails are going to get in there too.

What will TeachStrong aim this odd set of partners at?  Nine principles are given top billing:

teach-strong-infographic

Peter Greene of Curmudgucation rightly notes that many of these principles are laudable – depending upon what actually materializes from them.  Given the perspectives and previous projects of many of the partners in this effort, including TFA which stated in The Washington Post article that it felt no need to change its own five week training program to meet the principles outlined above, it is right to be cautious about what will materialize here.  If “Reimagining teacher preparation to make it more rooted in classroom practice” means helping to bring more university-school district professional development schools to scale so that prospective teachers can constantly learn from practice while universities and schools inform each others’ work, that would be wonderful.  If it means setting up more outfits like Relay “Graduate” School of Education where people with no teacher preparation get competency based modules on no excuses charter school practices, no thank you.  If “Provide significantly more time, tools, and support for teachers to succeed” means giving teachers genuine collaborative control of their professional development and having administrators facilitate teachers getting what they determine they need, fantastic.  If it just means more “granular” standardized testing data and a few more resources to jump through SLO hoops, that’s a big meh.  If “create career pathways” means acknowledging excellent teaches and finding roles for teachers to play in induction and mentoring, curriculum development, and setting school and district policy, let’s talk.  If it just means finding teachers with high value added measures on tests and giving them bonus cash, forget it.

While the devil remains in the details, a bit of that devil also resides in some very obvious retreads of past efforts to reform teaching.  In fact, efforts to “modernize and elevate” teaching go back to the founding of many of our comprehensive public universities that began as normal schools before morphing into teacher colleges and then to regional universities.  At every step of this evolution, there was an odd relationship whereby the field of education was held in disrepute even though the emerging comprehensive universities relied upon the teacher preparation mission of education schools.  While the model of teacher preparation within a university setting was well established by the middle of the 20th century, this lack of status for the work persisted, and, following the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, a flurry of activity was aimed at enhancing and improving teacher preparation.  In fairly short order, reports from the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy and The Holmes Group produced proposals on how to improve teacher preparation and make it more in line with professional preparation in high status professions.  Clinical language and portrayals of teaching as at least a partially technical practice subject to data driven analysis became more common.  John Goodlad weighed in with Teachers for our Nation’s Schools that included 19 “postulates” outlining the professional territory and responsibilities of teacher preparation.  The National Commission for Teaching and America’s Future also provided a summary report called What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future which further detailed a professional vision of teacher preparation aimed at replicating crucial elements of high status professions.

nation preparedtomorrow's teachersgoodlad

NCTAF

So let’s just stipulate that this is hardly a revolutionary concept, okay?

What might be ground breaking is the standard imprint of 21st century education reform – slick marketing, an emphasis on jamming things through quickly without thinking about consequences, and generally treating problems as public relations issues instead of as structural concerns.  I am apprehensive that this is precisely where this is heading in no small part because, like so much else we contend with today, the campaign appears rooted in the notion that everything we are doing in school is obsolete and must drastically modernize immediately or we are all doomed.  This is painfully wrong, and anyone who thinks that teacher preparation has remained unchanged in the past 30 years (Yes, that’s you NCTQ) needs to retreat to a library and not come back for at least two semesters.  While I will never say that teacher preparation is unable to improve, it is also true that anyone who has gotten a teaching certificate since the 1980s has likely seen significant changes, often positive changes, as a result of efforts previously mentioned.  From increased time spent in classrooms prior to student teaching, to stronger pedagogical and content preparation, to vastly improved preparation for working with students with disabilities, teacher preparation has not been standing still, and it would behoove a number of the Teach Strong partners (Again, that’s you, NCTQ) to familiarize themselves with the kinds of evidence that the 656 teacher preparation programs accredited by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (since merged with TEAC and changed to the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation) have had to provide in order to demonstrate their strengths.

The reality is that our teacher workforce, whether made up of recent graduates from traditional programs who have benefited from changing preparation in the last 3 decades or whether made up of experienced veterans who have been continuously improving their practice over time, is not a static and obsolete lump that threatens our future as portrayed in the Teach Strong launch rhetoric. How we prepare and license teachers grew and developed over a 100 year long period, and there have been significant efforts to develop that process over the past three decades that have actually impacted change.  If Teach Strong can work thoughtfully to help increase the scope of the most beneficial of those practices, it will be a positive influence, but if it simply tries to rush in the shallow metrics of NCTQ and the fly by the seat of your pants preparation of TFA and Relay, well, you get the picture.

There is, however, another, deeper, problem in all of this.  While the teacher professionalization efforts of the 1980s and 1990s had some positive impacts, they had one seriously negative effect, an effect that has been compounded since test-based accountability took control of education policy.  By emphasizing the type of preparation practices in high status professions, teacher professionalization tended to emphasize teaching as a technical and rational act with special emphasis on those aspects of teaching that can be measured or demonstrated.  While this has some merit, over emphasizing it has diminished a critical aspect of teaching: vocationalism.  David Hansen wrote cogently on this concern:

To describe the inclination to teach as a budding vocation also calls attention to the person’s sense of agency.  It implies that he or she knows something about him or herself, something important, valuable, worth acting upon.  One may have been drawn to teaching because of one’s own teachers or as a result of other outside influences. Still, the fact remains that now one has taken an interest oneself.  The idea of teaching “occupies” the person’s thoughts and imagination.  Again, this suggests that one conceives of teaching as more than a job, as more than a way to earn an income, although this consideration is obviously relevant.  Rather, one believes teaching to be potentially meaningful, as a the way to instantiate one’s desire to contribute to and engage with the world.

If Teach Strong is serious about a pipeline of great potential teachers, it had better look harder than most recent reform efforts that constantly emphasize getting the best students into teacher preparation without being concerned whether or not they are driven by the best motivations.  It also means that rather than focusing on impossible goals like elevating the salaries of 3 million teachers to the salaries of doctors and lawyers, it would be much better to focus upon working conditions that grant teachers significantly more autonomy and input into how their work and workplaces are conducted.  People driven by vocational aspirations may be willing to forgo some compensation – but they cannot forgo having a say in what they do.

This is the kind of teacher we should all be working to see with all of our children:

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Filed under Media, NCTQ, politics, standards, teacher learning, teacher professsionalism

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June 18, 2014 · 1:37 pm

What Does It Really Take To Evaluate a Teacher Preparation Program?

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) is back in the news having released their second report on the quality of teacher preparation in America.  To the surprise of nobody, they found that university based teacher preparation remains dismal.  Just last year, NCTQ described teacher education as “an industry of mediocrity” in a report so riddled with errors, it would have been reasonable to assume that they would fade away – if not permanently, then at least for a few years.  My favorite of their many mistakes was how they gave credit to Teachers College for having “highly selective” standards for admission to their undergraduate teacher preparation programs.  Friends and colleagues affirmed how selective these programs are — they have never admitted a single student because they do not exist.  Alas, the fade away did not happen, and they are back this year.

In order to understand how NCTQ could purport to make a serious contribution to teacher education while making such glaring errors and then putting them in view of the public, it is necessary to understands that the organization’s flaws are both methodological and philosophical.  NCTQ is an organization that was established by the Thomas Fordham Institute and has an expressed purpose to “shake up” traditional teacher preparation.  Given that they are generously funded by a laundry list of corporate reform advocates (The Gates Foundation, Edythe and Eli Broad, Carnegie Corporation, etc.) and given the presence of people like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein on their advisory board, it stands to reason that they are looking for faults.  But more important is the preposterous methodology employed by NCTQ to “evaluate” programs for evidence of “quality”.  Even before schools of education, looking at their bias and their proposed methods, declined to actively cooperate with them, NCTQ proposed that they would evaluate all teacher preparation programs in the country by not visiting a single program and by not speaking to or surveying a single graduate.  Instead, they examine web sites and publically available documents such as course catalogs and syllabi for “evidence” of the programs covering topics that they consider essential.  When programs decline to turn over internal documents for their examination, NCTQ is not above using deception to acquire them.

Such “methodology” has been aptly compared to writing a review of a restaurant by reading an online menu and making conclusions about the quality of the food preparation.  NCTQ misses how instruction is delivered and evaluated in every meaningful way, but they do not seem especially concerned about that given that a number of programs have tried to correct NCTQ’s errors only to see them published anyway.  This would be comical if the organization was not given uncritical coverage in influential publications.  Last Fall, both Joe Nocera and Bill Keller took to the opinion pages of the New York Times and cited NCTQ’s ratings without any indication that the group is both politically biased and rife with errors.  This year’s report is not being met with quite so much attention, but NPR did a very friendly interview with NCTQ President Kate Walsh with little focus on the organization’s methodology.  NPR did ask one pertinent question and it was why, if teacher preparation is so dismal, don’t principals and superintendents sound the alarm that new teachers are not able to teach?  Walsh replied:

“There’s a great hesitancy of public school educators to stand up to higher ed,” Walsh explains. “They’ve almost been bullied by them, and one of the things (NCTQ) is trying to work on with districts is to get them to be more assertive about their needs and to say ‘I’m not going to hire from you until you teach effective ways of reading instruction.’ “

I would like to challenge Ms. Walsh to come to New Jersey and try to find a single high school principal who is willing to admit, even off record, that he or she is intimidated by me.  Go on.  I’ll wait.

More seriously, that claim is bizarre because while a handful of institutions may offer grants and opportunities that are attractive to school districts, the reality is that for quality teacher preparation, I need schools more than they need me.  I need partners who are willing to open up their experienced teachers’ classrooms for student teachers and for clinical internships and who are willing to mentor teacher candidates in ways that make a strong connection between their studies and their developing practice.  To suggest that relationship is so lopsided as to see school districts as cowed beneath the Teacher Preparation Industrial Complex is simply strange.

I would never state that teacher preparation does not need improvement.  There is always something new to learn, and there will always be an effort to make meaningful connections between theory and practice and to situate prospective teachers in classrooms where they learn from skilled mentors able to discuss practice meaningfully.  But I would like to offer what it looks like to really examine and evaluate your work and to subject it to meaningful outside examination and rating.  My teacher preparation program is accredited by the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), formerly the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. Such bodies are recognized by state departments of education as having high standards for the review of teacher preparation programs and for having rigorous methods of evaluation.  In preparation for their review, I have to prepare a report about our secondary students studying to become high school English teachers and submit it for review to the National Council of Teachers of English to determine how well we prepare students who are specifically seeking to be English teachers (other content areas submit similar reports to other content specialty associations).  In this report, I provided complete data portraits of three cohorts of graduating candidates that showed that they knew English content, that they knew pedagogy for teaching English and that they knew how to assess students’ needs, design instruction to meet those needs and evaluate the effectiveness of their instruction.  The report drew data from their coursework, lesson planning in courses, evaluations from field internships prior to student teaching from university supervisors and cooperating teachers, evaluations from their semester long student teaching experience and a Teacher Work Sample capstone project in their student teaching seminar.

The report was submitted directly to the National Council of Teaches of English where multiple reviewers read it and granted our program National Recognition as meeting high quality standards for the preparation of English teachers.  This is only one of many reports written by my colleagues and represents only our preparation for an eventual site visit by CAEP where the entire unit will be evaluated.  Such work is time consuming, but I have to admit that to a degree, I actually enjoy it because it helps, indeed it requires, that I take a step back from my own practice and examine artifacts that are indicative of its success or failures.  The process means that I have to propose ways to use what I have learned from the evaluation process to make improvements for following cohorts, and it pushes all of us to not merely rely upon impressions of success and failure but to have substantive reasons for those assessments.

When I began teaching in 1993, I said to myself that the day I figure that I have nothing left to learn is the day that I should quit teaching.  Substantive internal and external evaluation helps assure that I keep looking for things to learn.

Of course, even this is not the be all and end all of effective teacher preparation.  Data driven assessment is very useful, but it also contains the danger of becoming reliant on data to the point that teaching is treated as merely a technical performance that is neatly mapable onto standards, which is untrue.  There are qualities to teaching and to learning to teach that are aesthetic and which require a qualitative approach.  Most teachers have a narrative of their reality in mind when they commit to becoming teachers, and they need to constantly revisit and revise that narrative in ways that allow them to understand others’ purposes and to challenge themselves and their sense of purpose.  These qualities, championed by Maxine Greene, are critical for prospective teachers AND the teachers of prospective teachers, so we should embrace the role of data in our work as a tool of continuous improvement.  But we should not raise it so far above all other matters that we ignore their importance as well.

Which is why in addition to the substantial work I have put in to demonstrating my program’s quality to actually qualified experts, there is another testimony that is not being currently examined by any agency in a way that captures their real importance.  I know a large group of early career teachers who are simply outstanding young educators and who are doing fantastic work, both quantitatively and qualitatively, with 1000s of students across the country.  They came to my classes from diverse backgrounds and with varying ideas about the critical importance of public education, but they all left having had shared experiences in university courses and in lengthy field assignments that taught them what it really means to move from being a student to being a teacher.  They are remarkably interesting and talented, and they balance deep understanding of how to transform content into pedagogically powerful experiences with their students with the aesthetics of classroom community and student motivation.  I am lucky to have worked with them and to continue to know of them and their teaching.

If you want to evaluate the quality of a teacher preparation program, you need to speak with and observe the teachers they graduate.

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June 13, 2014 · 12:38 pm

My Argument With the Director/Producer of the Fauxcumentary “The Cartel”

You may have missed that National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released another report recently, this one taking aim at teacher absenteeism.  It being an NCTQ report, it is not an exceptional work of scholarship, and they try to discuss policy implications absent any real statistical analysis.  This is par for the course from an organization that purports to seriously investigate the quality of teacher preparation in this country, but which does so by sitting in their offices looking at course descriptions online and calling up schools of education demanding materials and, failing that, trying to deceive schools into giving them those materials.  Needless to say, their errors are both shocking and laughable (my personal favorite is that Columbia got recognition for how selective its undergraduate teacher preparation programs are — those programs don’t exist, so they are VERY selective), but they are less laughable when you realize that influential people take them at face value.  It just goes to show that sometimes all you need to do is to put the letter “N” in your acronym to be considered serious.

This current report is perhaps not as egregious, but it is also not exceptionally interesting, mainly because all NCTQ does is provide a national overview of descriptive statistics  regarding teacher attendance and then claim that they have proven something.  Two problems:  First, the descriptive statistics are not complete.  NCTQ spends most of the report providing bar and pie graphs and a lot of averages, but they do not appear to have calculated means, medians, modes or standard deviations.  Consider that they divide teachers into attendance categories of “excellent”, “moderate”, “frequently absent” and “chronically absent”.  How many standard deviations separate a “chronically absent” teacher from a teacher with “excellent” attendance?  Damned if I know, and NCTQ provides no indication that they know either.

Second, NCTQ tries to draw conclusions from these data without demonstrating that they have analyzed them thoroughly using statistical inference.  For example, contrary to previous research from academics at Harvard and Duke, NCTQ claims there is no connection between the poverty characteristics of a district and teacher absenteeism.  In fact, they said:

Given the existing research on teacher attendance, an increase in teacher absenteeism was expected as school poverty levels increased. Surprisingly, there was no significant increase in these districts. The difference between the average days absent in the highest and lowest poverty schools was under one day and was not statistically significant.

How did they prove that?  Well, from the report, they lined up some bar graphs, and that appears to be it.  The report appendices claim use of a significance test that did not apply to poverty characteristics and a use of a variance test that did, but these results are not provided in the text of the report.  Readers are, supposedly, to look at the bar graphs, nod their heads and agree.  Such appeals to “obviousness” are a good way of avoiding doing sophisticated analysis (NCTQ does not mention any statistical testing that uses sophisticated methods capable of capturing poverty effects), but they are also a way of thoroughly deceiving lay people with no knowledge of statistical reasoning.

Such a lay person turned up on my Twitter feed. Looking for any news on the NCTQ report, I came across this tweet from a Mr. Bob Bowdon:

Not knowing who he was, I replied:

I thought that was it, but a few days later, he responded:

This is a typical strategy when given a reference that poses serious questions about something: take a little bit of it and use that to defend what you like against the rest of the article.  So I gave it another try:

I decided at this point to figure out who @BobBowdon actually is, and in short order found out that he is the director and producer of the “fauxcumentary” film “The Cartel” wherein he takes a hard look at education in New Jersey and decides that everything that is wrong with our schools can be traced back to and directly blamed upon…you guessed it: teachers’ unions.  He is a practitioner of a form of “advocacy journalism” that looks like what would happen if you blended Michelle Rhee and James O’Keefe.  Unsurprisingly, his work is riddled with errors in assumption and fact, points amusingly documented by Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker, here, here, here, and here.  I suppose he was feeling confident given that the NCTQ report came with numbers and graphs, so he replied again:

And I replied:

What I got back seemed defensive (and clueless):

Trying to be nice one last time, I responded:

There’s a stance in his comment that I find fascinating, however.  It is one that is impervious to even considering a critique and relies heavily on ignorance to bolster a position that is not especially strong.  I have no idea if Mr. Bowdon has no working knowledge of the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics, but he displays no interest in finding out here.  Further, he retreats into calling my objections “convenient” rather than inquiring after their substance.

His next tweet:

Ah, yes, “apologists” – boilerplate anti-union talk wrapped up in a thorough lack of understanding of how research is conducted whether deliberate or otherwise.  His complaint here is instructive, however.  Saying “any study can be called ‘incomplete'” covers the fact that the NCTQ report can barely be called a “study” because it really has no research questions but it tries to make inferences from the incomplete descriptive statistics that it employs.  Calling teacher “absences” “hard objective stats” is, I suppose, some attempt to claim there is no ambiguity in the data and any inferences we want to make from them can be made by appealing to “obviousness”.  This is how someone thinks when they truly do believe that you can make “statistics say anything” but it not anything that would be said by any honest person who understands reasoning with statistics.  For example, the NCTQ data suggests that teachers are absent more than the workforce average, and from that, they infer a need for policy interventions.  But without knowing the REASONS for teachers being absent, or if such absence rates are actually significant, it is impossible to make any informed comments on existing or possible interventions.  What if teachers are absent more than average because they work in close contact with children and get sick more often than the rest of the workforce?  What if teachers are more absent because the teacher workforce is still largely female and women still bear a disproportionate share of child care duties in American families?  Policy interventions for either of these circumstances would be radically different, but Mr. Bowdon is obviously only interested in blaming teachers specifically and unions generally.

So I took out the teacher in me:

 

Okay, fine, that’s a lot to read, but I was surprised that he tried to as if I hadn’t just written to him like he was capable of understanding my points:

I admit that baffled me.  But I have been teaching for twenty years, and I think that even the most obstinate of students is capable of a breakthrough:

Mr. Bowdon was still pretty oblivious:

Sometimes you have to throw in the towel:

Mr. Bob Bowdon is not an isolated case of low information punditry trying to stake out ground as a “thought leader” in education.  He calls his website a national “hub” for online information about education reform, but his bias in that space is obvious, where he actively champions education “reformers” seeking to increase testing, spread charter schools and curtail teacher unions and where he labels people who oppose such efforts as the education “establishment”.  Mr. Bowdon finds the NCTQ report important not because it reveals interesting and important insights into the teacher workforce (it doesn’t), but because he can use it to argue that unionized teachers abuse the “perks” of their employment. This is similar to no end of billionaire-funded efforts to fundamentally change the way we offer schools without a public vote and which dare to call themselves civil rights movements.

It may be momentarily fun to demonstrate how low knowledge many foot soldiers for corporate reform are, but it is also entirely serious.

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April 9, 2014 · 9:25 pm

Lessons For the Media in the Age of Social Media

Earlier this year, Bill and Emma Keller found themselves in a bit of hot water online.  The trouble began when Emma Keller published a blog in The Guardian on January 8th that was, charitably, poor received by many readers.  In it, she discussed a woman named Lisa Bonchek Adams who blogs and tweets about her experiences living with metastatic breast cancer.  What was striking about Keller’s blog were inaccuracies about how Adams discusses her disease, intimations that she is at death’s door rather than living as many women do with stage 4 cancer, and language that struck a wide range of readers as inherently disrespectful, even going so far as to ponder if Adams’ frequent tweets amounted to “deathbed selfies”. Not unexpectedly, Keller’s blog generated a massive wave of criticism, and not merely from Adams’ many readers. Shortly thereafter, it became obvious that Keller had quoted from private correspondences with Adams and did not disclose that to either her subject or her readers, and The Guardian took down the post for being out of compliance with their standards.

Oddly enough, the Kellers were not done writing about Lisa Bonchek Adams because on January 12th, Bill Keller, husband of Emma Keller and former executive editor of the New York Times, took to the opinion pages of that paper with a column pondering the propriety of so-called “heroic measures” when faced with an illness that will, ultimately, take one’s life.  His column compounded the errors in his wife’s blog by characterizing Adams’ blogging and tweeting in military terms when she had repeatedly written how much she dislikes those metaphors.  Keller apparently even contacted Sloan-Kettering to discuss the cost of a therapy dog program that Adams’ wrote about, a discussion that Sloan-Kettering quite correctly refused to have with him.  While Keller, in a response from the Times’ public editor, insisted he respects Adams’ choices for her own treatment and public persona, it was hard for many readers, myself included, to not read condescension when he compared his father in law’s death as “humane and honorable” even as he consistently portrayed Adams’ stance as military in nature, a metaphor he said contributed to make death an “expensive misery” in America.

Suffice to say that I believe the Kellers cooperatively stepped in it. But what was more instructive to me was their response to the enormous wave of criticism they received.  Bill Keller defensively declared that many readers would only accept him having said “Right on, Lisa!” and Emma Keller insisted that she had been “misread”, which is not an uncommon refrain from those who are displeased that they have been criticized precisely because people understand full well what they meant.

I find this instructive because it rather neatly demonstrates how poorly many elite media personae, who should know better, understand the world of information in which we live today.  When I was a child, people like the Kellers were likely the only way any of their readers would have ever learned of Lisa Bonchek Adams and her perspectives on living with stage 4 cancer.  The odds of any given reader encountering her would have been miniscule, and while a paper might have granted her a right to publish a few lines defending herself, that would sit in unequal weight to the writings of well respected journalists.  Further, influential people both in governance and industry would seek out leading opinion makers and court their voices.  It must have been a position both humbling and ego gratifying.

That world has changed dramatically, but the Kellers blundered into it unaware.  Lisa Bonchek Adams has 10s of thousands of readers who know full well how distorted a view of her writing was placed in venerable institutions like The Guardian and the New York Times.  Further, media itself has exploded with many more bloggers finding venues for commentary, both prominent and humble.  Simply put: the opinion page of the New York Times is not the only game in town but the paper’s recent executive editor seems unaware of how unprivileged his position has become. Worse, both Kellers seemed unwilling to process just how sloppily they had misrepresented Adams’ writings and perspectives even when they had her entire body work literally at their fingertips.

Watching that unfold helped me realize what was going on in a series of Op-Ed page pieces regarding education in the United States.  In October, Bill Keller repeated accusations from the National Council on Teacher Quality that teacher education is an “industry of mediocrity”.  Keller was followed in November by Joe Nocera repeating more NCTQ accusations on the failures of teacher education.  I found this puzzling not because there is no room in teacher education for both improvement and for innovation, but because NCTQ’s landmark “study” was not exactly without its critics.  It was conducted without a single site visit to a university based teacher preparation program and drew its conclusions about the content of programs mainly by sifting through publically available documents.  Linda Darling Hammond of Stanford University made this crystal clear in an article months before Keller and Nocera’s pieces were published.  If the gentlemen from the Times still found NCTQ’s conclusions compelling, they are certainly entitled, but what stood out was how completely unaware they appeared to be of the organization’s agenda and, by then, notorious errors.

The same lack of fundamental investigation has guided editorials relating to the Common Core State Standards.  In November, the Editorial Board published a piece on the progress of standards implementation that presented none of the concerns about tying teacher performance to the standardized examinations that are central to the enterprise.  A few days later, Frank Bruni used his personal Op-Ed column to tie concerns and opposition to the unfolding Common Core to parents who wish to “coddle” their children from all disappointment.  Bruni conflated two easily relatable phenomena, parents who do not raise their children to become sufficiently independent and able to adapt to failure and opposition to standards largely by failing to ask any questions that might make that relationship problematic.  Both Bruni and the Editorial Board treated the Core as entirely uncontroversial, and this, too, is odd given that legitimate and well founded concerns about the Core’s development, implementation and connection to high stakes testing are easily available.  I suppose it is very tempting to assume there is nothing wrong with the Common Core when patrons both influential (Bill Gates) and powerful (the Obama administration) are enthusiastic and court the press, but readers could have left both columns with no knowledge that anyone has concerns about the current reforms more meritorious than fringe conspiracy theories and “coddling” children from disappointment — or that rising test scores could ever be a sign of poor teaching.

I like to think that the journalists of my youth were more rigorous than this, and perhaps that is itself terribly naïve.  I certainly have no idea how many unresearched opinion pieces graced the pages of the Times in the 1970s.  What I do know is that I have identified a pattern of intellectual laziness that, for reasons I do not know, eschews due diligence when writing about topics that have multiple, legitimate, points of view.  Further, I see a pattern of columnists in historically influential and exclusive positions failing to effectively fact check in an age when such information is easier than ever for them to access — moreover, that information is easier than ever for their READERS to access.  It is a pattern that bodes poorly for our ability to believe that institutions like the New York Times can be trusted to set a legitimate debate on matters like public education and that means they will be subject to more and more crowd sourced skepticism.

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