The 21st Century Principal

According to a WRAL news story today, "NC Still Lags in Teacher Pay, Student Spending," the National Education Association released a report that ranks NC teacher pay 42nd nationally. 

As would be expected, North Carolina governor McCrory's education adviser, Eric Guckian, immediately dismissed the report. Whatever happened to the idea of arguing perhaps that the content of the report is incorrect and present the correct facts. Instead, our North Carolina's governor office labels the report as irrelevant.

In rather telling and interesting statement made by Eric Guckian, McCrory's "Education Adviser" the Governor reveals how he "really" feels about teachers.

"Governor McCrory is leading change that makes targeted investments in education spending that has students, not special interests, at the center of the equation."

Is he labeling every teacher in the state of North Carolina a "special interest" as if their needs somehow don't matter? Sure looks like it.

"The silence of thoughtful people creates a vacuum filled by extremists." Margaret Wheatley, Find Our Way; Leadership for an Uncertain Time

In her book, Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, Margaret Wheatley asks the question:

"Why is silence moving like a fog across the planet? Why is it growing in us as individuals, even as we learn of more and more issues that concern us? Why do we fail to raise our voice on behalf of things that trouble us, and then regret what we didn't do?" 

Why do public educators and school leaders largely remain silent while politicians and government bureaucrats bash public schools and inundate them with harmful school policies? Why do teachers, principals, and district leaders automatically ask the question, "How can we implement this educational measure?" rather than asking the tough questions about implementation issues and possible harmful effects on the public education system, its students, and its employees? Is it fear? Has our public education system become so hierarchical, with emperors and kings sending down mandates, and the educator's job is to unquestioningly accept whatever those mandates are and carry them out? My question is not intended to encourage that we should break the law, or be insubordinate. Legally, we're often bound to doing some things while holding our noses, and hoping that no one is harmed by those laws or policies. Still, if we quietly move to implementation mode, without expressing our concerns and opinions, then those in power take that acquiescence as consent and total support.

In the current education climate, our silence on issues like standardized testing, accountability, education budgets, and poverty does create the vacuum into which the enemies to public education, sometimes allied with well-meaning education reformers have poured their ideas. They have captured the marketplace of "what's-best-for-kids" because educators and school leaders choose to be silent, and in this, when it comes to our current educational climate, we've only ourselves to blame.

It is time, time for us to speak up. It is time for us to let our politicians know how their budgets and laws affect lives and our education mission. It is time for us to let federal bureaucrats know how their programs and policies are undermining our efforts to bring sound education to our students. It is time, for us to break the silence. While our speaking up may not change minds, laws, or policies, at the end of the day, we will not regret that we allowed all these anti-public education reforms occur.

Of course, those in "power" might see our speaking out as "insubordination" and "not being a team player." But since when does being on a team mean you check your expertise and opinions at the door? Since when is contributing your own concerns and objections deemed insubordinate? We do have a responsibility to be respectful when expressing our concerns and objections. And those objections and concerns expressed may do nothing to change the course of events. Still, we've not been insubordinate, and we are being the ultimate team player. We are contributing our expertise and ideas and experience when we do not remain silent. We are in the practice being "thoughtful people" who are trying to keep in check those whose agendas may not be in the best interests of our students and public education, and to help our leaders make sound decisions.

If I wanted to design an education budget that gives the “appearance” of supporting teachers and educators, what would that budget look like? What if my long term goals are to get the state out of the education business and turn that entire enterprise over to the private sector? How can I continue to “starve” public education to achieve this goal? Here’s what I might do.

First of all, since I would have to give some raises in pay during election years, I would, but do so strategically. I don’t really want young college students choosing education as a career, because then I would have to keep paying them and ultimately give them some kind of sound benefits and retirement. I want young teachers and young teachers only, so I make sure that teachers in the first 10 years or so get paid well. I would not want to pay them too much after that. In fact, I would take away experienced teachers' longevity pay and any other incentive they might have to teach beyond 10 years or so. I don’t value experience nor getting higher education degrees, so I would disincentivize those things as well. The goal in my planned destruction of public education is to attract teachers who use the job as a stepping stone to other careers, so keep the pay for experienced teachers flat.

Secondly, I would look for strategic areas in the education budget that would have the greatest negative impact on public education in this state if they were cut. I would cut a bit here and there, change funding structures that in the end result in cuts. I could cut special programs like at-risk funding to make it even more difficult for schools to meet the needs of students, so I can say public schools are failures. I would keep textbooks and instructional supply budgets flat, so teaching becomes even harder. That has the duel effect of making sure no one chooses teaching in a public school as a long term career. It also makes sure that teachers can’t claim to be successful too much. After all, if my ultimate goal is to put public education out of business, can’t have teachers being successful.

Thirdly, I would tighten the accountability screws even tighter. I could use tests as bludgeoning instruments to further beat up the education system. Give schools ratings using these test scores (grade them on an A-F grading scale), and make it difficult for them to obtain the highest ratings. That way, we can use numbers, which I know everyone believes don't lie, to declare more and more public schools a failure. I would also use tests and a testing process that does not give teachers too much feedback on teaching. Can’t have them getting quality, timely testing data that can then be turned around and used to improve teaching and learning. After all, we don’t want public schools to succeed. We want them to fail, so we can then create a whole industry to take over the education enterprise.

Fourthly, I make sure teaching is no longer a profession. Tenure has to go so I try to pass laws with incentives for teachers to give it up or I pass laws so that it quietly goes away. After all, if the destruction of public schools is my ultimate goal, I don’t want due process rights to get in the way of getting rid of teachers when it becomes necessary to get rid of them. For example, at some point, I might want to toss teachers out to balance budgets or to keep from having to pay retirements. I also don’t want teachers in the system who might ask too many questions. If there’s no tenure, and they get too close to the truth, I can toss them out.

Finally, I add more money to voucher programs to continue the process of getting students out of public schools, and I promote legislation that supports the idea that “any-old-charter-school-will-do." It really doesn’t matter if charter schools or private schools are more effective. In fact, they can be less effective. All I want to do get students out of public schools and the funding that goes with them. That way I can continue to starve public education even further, as their ADM drops. I also cut the automatic funding stream too, that way I use it to further the public education starvation process.

With just these five steps, I can move the state closer to dismantling public education and turning education over to private enterprise, and give the "appearance" that I support education. I could simply use a four-pronged approach:

1) Make public school teaching less of a profession and a less attractive career,
2) Strategically cut money from the budget that has the greatest negative impact on public school success,
3) Institute measures to begin getting students out of public schools, after all this will in turn start pulling money from public education, thereby continuing the starving process,
4) Ramp up regulation, accountability and testing, and use both to bludgeon public schools and educators so they aren’t seen as successful.

This entire plan would perhaps so negatively impact public schools that the public would be screaming that they be closed.

Hmmmm…does all this sound familiar to anyone in North Carolina? I’ll let you be judge.

The North Carolina Legislative Task Force concluded its series of meetings to study teacher pay in North Carolina, and here’s their recommendations in a nutshell:

• Raise beginning teacher pay and not raise the pay of any other teachers.
• Future raises for any teachers should be performance-based or merit pay tied to test scores.
• The General Assembly should direct the North Carolina State Board of Education to study educator compensation models and submit recommendations to the General Assembly AFTER this fall’s legislative elections.

That’s it. Those are the recommendations of this so-called Task Force. While they might have buried these exact recommendations in tons of verbiage, these basically do the following:

• Endorse Governor Pat McCrory’s plans to only raise pay for beginning teachers. (Why am I not surprised that this Task Force turned into a rubber-stamp committee of the McCrory administration and our current legislative leaders?)
• Recommend that the state adopt some kind of merit pay scheme, even though that’s been tried and proven to not work multiple times. It has been even tried in North Carolina. (Again, considering the state of our North Carolina Legislature, I am not surprised at all they basically endorsed plans put forth by the American Legislative Exchange Council and many others who see merit pay as the salvation for everything.)
• Finally, recommend another study, this time by passing the buck the North Carolina State Board of Education. Of course this passing the buck was by design due to their own earlier law. Isn't it really interesting though that the State Board of Education is to REPORT BACK AFTER THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS this fall? You can certainly read much into that move!

There’s absolutely nothing in their findings that wasn't out there and already being discussed. Meanwhile, North Carolina is hemorrhaging teachers who are seeking greener pastures elsewhere, and there are so few teachers graduating from colleges to replace them. In addition, morale for teachers in this state has never been lower, and all our state leaders can do is study so that they can again study the studies? This is all due to a legislature, who at least judging by their actions and appearances, absolutely detest public education.

Some other interesting things coming out of this exercise in political pointlessness, were the comments made by some of the teachers on the task force.

“I’m struggling to understand why we were brought here.’' Teacher Timothy Barnsback stated. He also called the whole ordeal’s four meetings “Presentations and Propaganda.”

Johnson County History teacher Richard Nixon said the report ignores veteran teachers who have been frozen out of their contractual pay increases for six years. He stated, “I don’t recall anyone saying we should raise salaries for beginning teachers and leave the rest down the road.”

It is clear that our North Carolina Legislature continues to predictably be no friend to public education. After passing a slate of legislation all designed and directed toward dismantling the teaching profession, it isn't really surprising at all that nothing substantive comes out of this North Carolina Legislative Task Force on teacher pay. Our state political leaders have certainly remained steadfastly dedicated to their anti-public education agenda, and they are counting on kicking this "teacher pay can" down the road past this fall’s elections.

UPDATE: Read WRAL's article here "Teacher Pay Report Gets Chilly Reception" and also you can read the Legislative report here: "NC Educator Effectiveness and Compensation Task Force Report."

"Since the formation of the United States of America, there has been debate over the roles and purposes of education." Christopher Tienken & Donald Orlich, The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myth, and Lies

Because educational policymakers were so successful in using the Sputnik incident in promoting new education policy and change, it seems we have a new "Sputnik-moment" every 10 years or so, and with Arne Duncan, we seem to have one every time the latest round of PISA scores are released. According to him, our schools have been in a crisis since he came into office. Like education-researchers David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, one can't help but wonder whether or not this is a "Manufactured Crisis" which was the title of their book back in 1996. It would almost seem that Duncan and his fellow corporate reformers are using the same Sputnik playbook to push their tired, worn-out educational reform agenda of more standards, more tests and lots of airy rhetoric. Even in 1996, Berliner and Biddle tackled head-on the myths about declining achievement in national test scores and rising illiteracy rates. They painstakingly pointed out where the media, pundits and policymakers were getting it wrong. Even then, the myths continued unabated and many of them have continued through to this day.

At the heart of all reform efforts today is a both a fundamental disagreement on the nature of schools: it purposes and reasons for existence. Also at the heart of reform efforts by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and many others are what Christopher Tienken and Donald Orlich describe, in their book The School Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myths, and Lies, as the "Eight Self-Evident Fallacies of the Modern Reform Movement." These eight fallacies are at the heart of current education policy from increased standardized testing, using of test scores in teacher evaluations, implementation of the Common Core Curriculum, and our incessant focus on accountability. These eight fallacies, according to Tienken and Orlich have their roots stretching all the way back to the Sputnik incident. I include their fallacies here with my commentary and I've taken the liberty of adding one of my own fallacies.

• "Fallacy 1: Government coercion will accelerate achievement." This myth believes that the only way to get educators and students to improve is through coercion, whether through sanctions or rewards. One would think that this same fallacious thinking would have folded after the miserable failure of No Child Left Behind, but it survives and has only spurred an even more high-stakes environment where teachers and students are now subjected to greater penalties and more testing than ever. At the heart of this fallacy is the belief that teachers and students do not work hard so we have to make them work harder. What government coercion is doing to teaching in North Carolina, and I suspect elsewhere is encouraging more who would might show an interest in becoming a teacher to seek some other more hospitable profession. Who wants to teach with the gun of accountability and test scores stuck to your head?
• "Fallacy 2: Big business values will improve public education." This fallacy puts faith in the business model as a way of saving education. It says that education will improve through competition and an intense focus on the bottom-line. It views teachers as expendable just as business and industry currently views their own employees. In the business model, workers are to do as they're told. In education, the same: teachers are not to question the latest policy, curriculum or reforms. Just do them!
• "Fallacy 3: Intuitively derived standards can replace empirically derived solutions." The standards movement, according to Tienken and Orlich are examples of authoritarianism. The entire thinking is, "We must raise our standards! We must raise our standards! We must raise our standards!" Instead of looking for the difficult solutions to improving education, our policymakers and politicians take the easy way out and develop one more set of standards. The problems in our schools involve child poverty, lack of resources, and a dwindling number of qualified teachers among many other things. Raising the standards in those situations does absolutely nothing to resolve the real issues we face.
• "Fallacy 4: Standards are technical specifications being confused with, but applied to human learning capabilities." The whole philosophy behind the standards movement is that students are passive vessels into which what is to be learned is poured. Standards ignore that students have an active role to play in learning. Learning is a mechanistic process, not an organic process. Under this fallacy, "schools are assembly lines of knowledge" and students are sped through on a conveyor belt and learning is done to them as they pass through. Standards ignore the human side of learning entirely and view it as a process to which students are subjected.
• "Fallacy 5: High-stakes, state-mandated testing and assessment programs will improve student learning." In spite of our country's obsession with testing and accountability, our PISA scores have remained flat. Our College Board testing scores haven't dramatically increased. (That's if testing is the right measure of achievement, which I am not convinced that they are.) Testing has not resulted in higher graduation rates. It has resulted in fostering a massive culture of distrust with teachers as professionals. State-mandated testing and accountability systems have ultimately turned our schools into places where little else matters.
• "Fallacy 6: All high school students will benefit from being enrolled in college preparatory programs." This fallacy just isn't true. While statistically, college degree earners might earn more, it doesn't follow that they do, or that they can even get a job. There are countless college graduates unable to find jobs, and that are working in jobs with no better pay than non-college graduates. Additionally, to believe that every student is capable of doing college level work isn't realistic and ignores reality.
• "Fallacy 7: Students and parents are unconcerned about the psychological abuses by one-sized  fits-all standards and testing." Most of parents want what's best for their children. Subjecting all students to a one-size-fits-all standardized education where their individual learning needs are discarded at testing time is malpractice. In time when we're standardizing everything in our schools, we should be personalizing. Assessments given to students that we know aren't going to be successful is idiotic. Our parents should be more upset about all the testing we do in schools., but they are not because our policymakers work hard to disguise all the testing done behind rhetoric, jargon, and even changing the names of tests.
• "Fallacy 8: Centralization of educational decision-making benefits our nation." Education needs in our country have always been specific to locale, and that hasn't changed. Our students need their needs met by responsive local school systems who can meet their needs without being encumbered by a mass of regulations coming from the US Department of Education and state departments of instruction. These bureaucracies may mean well, but they are always too far removed to see the effects of their latest rounds of decrees from on high have in the local school. The only thing centralization of educational decision-making benefits are those hungry for power. Big centralized bureaucratic education systems fail to meet the needs of individual students.

“Without these common exams, we have no objective way to measure the value teachers give their students, and this is an important part of North Carolina’s teacher evaluation model.” Rebecca Garland, Chief Academic Officer, NC Department of Public Instruction

In a recent post to the Charlotte Observer entitled “Newly Required Tests Aren’t as Numerous as You Think”), North Carolina Public Schools Section Chief, Rebecca Garland, defended that state’s massive increase in the number of high-stakes testing. The main gist of her argument is students were going to be taking teacher-made exams anyway, which would be true if these Common Exams or MSLs (missiles as we like to call them) were on the same level as teacher made exams, but they are not.

North Carolina is elevating the importance of these tests to “high-stakes level” because teacher performance will be judged based on them. In the end, North Carolina has massively increased the number of “high stakes tests” it is administering under its “Common Exam Project.” So Garland's remarks are misleading at best.

Garland defends these tests as well by using the common “buzzwords” used by politicians and other policymakers. Judging from her statements in the above post, in one fail swoop she declares these tests:

• Objective:
• Fair
• Accurate
• Reasonable

Are these Common Exams “objective?” Too often, policymakers and politicians view “objective” as meaning “multiple-choice” or otherwise limited to answers that can’t be verified or constructed. I submit that these common exams are not objective, nor could they ever be. Because these tests were developed by teachers far-removed from the classrooms in which they will be administered, they are not objective. In developing these tests, teachers and state-level test developers make SUBJECTIVE judgments about what would be included on these tests and what would be discarded. This process, by default, is a subjective value judgment on what exactly is worthy of being tested and what is not. The tests might be “objective” in the sense that there may be no room for variability in student answers and do not require the judgment of teachers in determining right and wrong, but the way the tests were developed is a subjective process.

Are these Common Exams fair? Throughout North Carolina’s development of these Common Exams, state level policymakers have used this word repeatedly, as if by declaring these exams "fair" makes them so. There are so many question marks regarding the “fairness” of these tests and how the state has chosen to use them that whether they are “fair” has never been established. For example, take the whole idea of using “value-added” measures. North Carolina has chosen to use this way of evaluating teachers in spite of the fact that statisticians and test designers have cautioned against using such models. In addition, Garland and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction make the argument that they are only using it for a fraction of the evaluation. But if using value-added measures have flaws at all, should they be used in decisions that determine the individual livelihood and futures of educators? Another question of fairness has to do with the tests themselves. Normal final exams are teacher-designed for a reason. That teacher knows the content that was covered and the students to which that content was taught. That means that teacher is able to design tests that measure what they taught and to tailor those tests to the needs of their students. Using the common exams, teachers are forced to give tests developed by others far removed from their classrooms, making them hardly true measures of what was taught.

Are these Common Exams accurate measures of how good a job teachers are doing? We've been trying to judge school performance based on test scores for years. After No Child Left Behind flopped, it was a natural progression for North Carolina to move to the next flop---using test scores to judge educator effectiveness. North Carolina has not done any studies correlating the use of test scores to determine whether teaching improves. But then again, they define "effective teaching" as having "high test scores." Never mind whether those tests have any validity or quality.

In the end, in spite of what Garland and NC DPI assert, North Carolina’s “Common Exams” is a massive increase in the number of “high stakes” exams our students will be subjected to and to simply say they are like the final exams students usually take is misleading. These tests which have been hurriedly assembled, kept in secret, and developed to appease the United States Department of Education are not the salvation of our North Carolina education system. There is a real problem when our own state department of education turns into a propaganda machine, incessantly trying to sell a testing program that no one wants, rather than assisting and serving the educators and students in this state. In the end, our students are the ones that suffer.

A veteran teacher once told me in the early days of my career as an educator, "Be careful what you wish for. When federal and state agenices do away with one policy, they almost always come up with something much worse." In my naivete, I obviously did not believe that. I still had an unwavering faith in the system, and that those who make the rules always mean well and often know more about those things than I do. Now, 20 some years after that conversation, I have to admit, my old friend had many things right. When our policymakers and politicians do reform, revise, revamp, or scuttle an education policy, the result is always something much worse. Our current example of this? The Obama administration's transformation of No Child Left Behind to Race to the Top and the whole series of waivers states can apply for to escape the sanctions of NCLB, which most everyone agrees is a bad law, but a paralyzed federal government can't agree on how to fix. Take North Carolina as an example.

North Carolina Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger released his education reform plan today. The plan is called the Excellent Public Schools Act. Based on a quick read-through of the legislation and from Senator Berger's Web Site, here are the reforms outlined in that plan:

• Ending social promotion for 3rd graders who can't demonstrate they can read based on state adopted reading tests.
• Add "intensive reading instruction" for students struggling to read.
• Grade schools as A, B, C, D, or F based on test scores.
• Add a North Carolina Teacher Corps program, modeled after Teach for America, that would allow recent college graduates and mid-career professionals teach in low-performing schools.
• Pay teachers based on merit as determined by test scores?
• End teacher tenure and have teacher sign a contract for employment each year.
• Provide funding for the instructional days that the General Assembly added last year but did not fund.
• Allow state employees to volunteer in a public literacy program for up to five hours per month.

Yesterday, North Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Pat McCroy released his plan to reform education. Basically, that plan suffers from a total lack of new ideas and innovation and simply carries the Republican Party line of trying to privatize public education. Here’s the basic components of McCroy’s ed reform package taken from a document on his website entitled “A Passion for Education: The McCroy Plan for North Carolina Schools.”

• Educational Choice: McCroy describes his version of choice as: 1) Choice between a college ready diploma and a career ready diploma, 2) Expanding virtual classes for public, private and homeschooled students, 3) Streamlining the charter school approval process so that its faster.
• Use tests to determine whether 3rd graders should be promoted and a proficiency test for all ninth graders: McCroy would use the results of tests third graders take to determine whether they would be promoted to fourth grade or not. He would also implement some kind of proficiency test in reading and mathematics for ninth graders. Those not passing would take remedial courses, but he does not say that they would not be promoted.
• Merit Pay for teachers: McCroy would change the pay system for teachers in North Carolina to “reward teachers for the job they do instead of the number of years they teach.”
• Grading Schools: McCroy would use what he calls “unbiased,objective exams” in reading and mathematics to grade schools. Schools would be graded for both proficiency and growth according to McCroy’s plans. In his school grading scheme, half of a school’s grade would be based on proficiency levels, and the other half would be based on growth.

So what is wrong the McCroy Plan for North Carolina Schools? Here’s some things for starters.

• It lacks any specificity at all. It isn’t a plan at all. It is at best a policy statement. I would shudder to think that anyone can reduce their plans for education reform to only three pages. That indicates either a superficial, incomplete understanding of the troubles facing public schools in North Carolina, or it indicates an acceptance of a boilerplate reform plan from special interests and political parties.
• McCroy’s plan relies on measures that have been tried and failed or that fly in the face of research. North Carolina has tried to stop social promotion before and discovered that they just didn’t want to base a student’s future on the results of one test of dubious reliability and validity. Placing such weight on state testing also violates the state’s testing code of ethics. Also, North Carolina has tried the old high school proficiency test idea for many years with the old competency tests high schoolers had to take and pass to graduate. That ended because it wasn’t working. North Carolina even tried a form of merit pay by giving teachers bonuses based on test scores, but our politicians canned that when budget times got tight. Then there’s the research cited by authors like Daniel Pink and Dan Ariely that point out how futile merit pay is any way.  Grading schools was tried under No Child Left Behind, and we all know how successful that’s been for the past decade.
• It follows the standard boilerplate Republican platform that ultimately seeks to privatize public education. One thing you can’t accuse McCroy of is straying from his Republican handlers. But because of that, his entire education plan is a “status quo” plan. There’s not an ounce of originality or thought put into it. It is more about furthering a political agenda than genuinely reforming schools. If it were, there would be innovative and thoughtful ideas in it, not a rehashing of what Republican governors are doing around the country already.
• McCroy’s plan is still caught in 19th and 20th century education models. He is still hung up on classifying students by superficial grade levels, and by using “tests” to determine the “defectiveness” of products (students). Those not making the grade are recycled back through the process again. This plan still at its core believes you can grade and classify students by groups. It sees a system of education that pushes students through like factory parts.
• McCroy’s plan keeps the faith in the power of standardized tests to accurately and infallibly measure the progress of students. McCroy’s thinking about assessment is still caught in the 19th and 20th century model of assessment. He would take our state back to bubble sheets that determine the individual fates of students, in spite of the fact that we’ve had a decade of that under No Child Left Behind and it hasn’t worked. The “unbiased, objective exams he calls for are the tools of schools that are test-prep factories, not schools that are educating students for the 21st century.
• McCroy leaves a lot of things unsaid in his education plan. For example, how is he going to pay for merit pay schemes when our state has been unable to give anyone a raise in four years? I know he says they’ll look for places to trim in order to pay for it, but he forgets our budgets have been cut for the last few years. He also says nothing of school vouchers, which I know he supports. When politician presents a plan for something that is so vague and unspecific, you can’t help but wonder what he is hiding.

For once, I just wish a candidate for state or federal office would step away from the party line and develop a truly innovative education agenda and plan instead of relying on party apparatus to write that plan. As a twenty-plus year educator, I have to say both political parties are guilty of listening to special interests, political parties, and think tanks funded by individuals with overt or covert agendas. The “status quo” that McCroy says is so unacceptable will only be perpetuated by his unoriginal, stale, partisan education agenda that he outlines in this plan.