The 21st Century Principal

As an educator in a higher education doctoral programs, Endnote has become my choice for managing my bibliography, citations, and reference libraries for my graduate work. It is powerful software, even if the price tag seems a bit steep (there is student pricing however). Some of my favorite features include:

• Being able to search online databases through the software and its auto-complete reference feature.
• Customizable research file storage that I can make work for me.
• Auto-Bibliography and in-text citation feature that works with my word processing software.
• Ability to share and connect with others conducting similar research.

I have found its ability to work with Microsoft Word with in-text citations and bibliography generation to be mostly flawless. The only drawback, I also like to use Pages on my Mac, but I did not know that Endnote offered a plug-in for that word-processing software. It turns out, there is a plug in, and you can get it here. For more information about Endnote, check out their web site here.

It doesn’t matter whether it is MSNBC, CNN, or Fox News; each one of these cable news channels have proven through their education reporting during the past year that they aren’t in the least interested in getting all sides of the education story. The evidence of this is a Media Matters report that came out in November that found that “Only 9 Percent of Guests Discussing Education on Evening Cable News Were Educators.” (Also see Diane Ravitch’s summary of this report here.) In other words, all our cable news companies failed, for the most part, to involve those of us in the schools and classrooms in their discussions and coverage of educational issues. The question then becomes: Why do cable news companies refuse, either deliberately or inadevertently, to include educators in their discussions about educational issues? By practically ignoring educators in their education discussion, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox are guilty of engaging in a complete dismissal of an entire group of professionals who certainly have a great deal to add to these education policy discussions. They are also guilty of not getting all sides of the issues, which I thought was what impartial news reporting was about.

I would like to think that it is not deliberate, and that there are no ideological reasons for this. Perhaps because the pundits and reporters have all supposedly had an education, they see themselves as experts and that there is no need to bring in educators, but this ignoring of those who experience the things they discuss every day is puzzling. It is the teacher or principal who can really describe what current education policy has done to our schools, classrooms, and kids. For example, it’s the educators at the school and classroom level who can attest to what Race to the Top has done to education. Some of the effects of President Obama’s education agenda include the following:

• We test our kids more than we ever have before.
• As a result of these tests, we are transforming our schools into “test-prep” machines.
• We are standardizing learning for all students, when research and our experience screams to us that we should be personalizing, nor standardizing.
• Our schools have become more interested in credentialing students than providing them with worthwhile, life-changing learning experiences. (Which is a direct result on focusing on a statistic, like the graduation rate.)
• We now judge teacher and principal effectiveness by test scores, as if those scores can infallibly tell anything about how each are doing their jobs.

There has to be some reason why educators are being excluded from the education discussions on cable news channels. In the meantime, it might be more important for those of us who are educators to simply dismiss what MSNBC, CNN or Fox have to say on the subject, because they certainly aren’t getting the full story. We also need to work harder to get our stories out there as well, because we no longer have news networks interested in making sure all sides of these educational issues are reported. I just have to remind myself that cable news is more about entertainment anyway rather than trying to actually inform anyone of anything, so why would I even think they might be interested in getting all sides to a story anyway.

If your Facebook timeline is like mine, rarely does a day go when you don’t see a post that asks you to share it because your act of sharing will somehow benefit the subject of the post. For example, today I found a post from a well-meaning friend asking me to repost a photo with a description that stated, “If this boy gets 100 shares he gets his heart transplant for free!” Most of us would immediately repost without question, after all, it’s the least we could do in situations like this.

But here’s the real problems with these posts: they are bogus just about every time. Or so it seems. Lately, when I’ve seen these posts, I’ve gotten into the habit of googling the bylines, and just about every single time an article from Snopes.com comes up telling me the post is bogus. Snopes usually provides a bit of additional background as well, such as who is really in the photos, when the post began circulating, and other variations of the post. Web sites like Snopes are excellent tools for helping sort out fact and fiction from the web.

Part of us wants to believe that we can help someone so easily with the click of a button. We may even justify our reposting of things like this because we say, “What can it possibly hurt.” But in some ways we are perpetuating a lie and just maybe giving people a false sense of having done something good for another human being when we’ve really done nothing.

But sometimes the real issue we have with the web is our own personal approach to it. We turn to the web sometimes to only verify the world as we wish it could be or want to it be. For example, we want to believe that there are people like this little child who need a heart transplant, and there are people like us who can help. Better yet, just maybe, these opportunities to repost these requests for help exist to give us an opportunity feel better about all the time we waste thumbing through these social media sites.

Perhaps the truth is simply this: you can’t really believe much of anything that comes through your social media feed, and if you want to really make a difference in someone else’s life, turn off Facebook and help someone face-to-face this holiday season. In the real world, need can be a bit more obvious and you don’t need Snopes to fact check. If you take a hard look at the real world around, I bet there’s someone whose needs are apparent, and we might have to do a bit more than simply repost.

In a recent post on her blog, Diane Ravitch called attention to the continued machinations of the Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. According to a post entitled “North Carolina Plans to Adopt Koch-Funded Social Studies Curriculum,” the state of North Carolina is planning to adopt a “Founding Principles” curriculum develoiped by the Bill of Rights Institute, which is an organization with strong ties to both the Koch brothers and ALEC, and whose purpose is to teach and “promote a conservative interpretation of the Constitution.” (See here for more information regarding connections between Bill of Rights Institute and ALEC.)

ALEC has a solid presence in  the North Carolina Legislature for the past several years, so it isn’t surprising that it passed laws requiring a history curriculum that might be more in line with its conservative views. The fear I have is that with the implementation of this new curriculum, ALEC continues to solidify its hold on North Carolina and will begin to utilize public education as the means to indoctrinate students with its worldview. Rarely do these organizations seek balanced approaches to learning; most often they seek to stifle those who hold dissenting views. Let's just hope that's not the case in the Old North State.

When most of us were high school students, we often encountered the cliques, the pecking orders, and groups we had to navigate around and through during our high school experiences. Many times these experiences left us with unforgettable memories and even scars as we were struggling to fit in. It turns out that we as educators might be able to do something about “teen cliquishness” after all.

Sociology researchers Daniel McFarland, James Moody, David Diehl, Jeffrey Smith, and Reuben Thomas recently published their findings regarding “Network Ecology and Adolescent Social Structure” in the American Sociological Review. Without getting too deep in the details of this study, or getting tangled in their terminology, it turns out that there might be things about our schools that contribute to the development of these cliques. (See Edmund Andrews excellent summary of this study’s findings “Stanford Research Explores Why Cliques Thrive in Some High Schools More Than Others."

First of all, it turns out the organizational setting, or “network ecology” of a school has a great deal to do with how cliquish that school is or becomes. "Schools that offer students more choices——more elective courses, more ways to complete requirements, bigger range of potential friends, more freedom to select seats in classrooms——are more likely to be rank-ordered, cliquish, and segregated by race, age, gender, and social status.” These “pecking orders, cliques, and self-segration are less prevalent in schools and classrooms that limit social choices and prescribe formats of interaction.”

According to McFarland et al., “Smaller schools inherently offer smaller choice of potential friends, so the ‘cost’ of excluding people from a social group is higher.” In addition, the structured classroom offers more guidance on student interactions with “prescribed routes” and an “encouragement to interact on the basis of schoolwork rather than on the basis of their external social lives."

Some of the other interesting findings of this study include:

• Large schools tend to "accentuate teens finding friends more similar to themselves."
• Larger schools offer a broader range of potential friends, as well as greater exposure to people who are different, but the "freedom and uncertainty spurs students to cluster by race, gender, age, and socioeconomic status."
• A school’s openness to choice spurs cliques and social-status hierarchies.
• "Schools with a strong focus on academics, where teachers have a hand in setting the pace and controlling classroom interactions, teenagers are less likely to form friendships based on social attitudes imported from outside the school. Friendships are more likely to develop out of shared school activities and similar intellectual interests."

McFarland does caution against the idea that students are better off in smaller schools with less choice. There is still more to learn on this issue. Still, as we ponder our school’s climate, we might want to think about the ways our schools are helping facilitate the division and cliquishness often found in high schools. For the first time, we may not be able to do away with cliques, but there might be some ways to foster a more inclusive culture of acceptance in your school.

“The research-based truth is that the teacher effect (i.e., 10-20% of the variance in test scores) is not strong enough to supersede the powers of the student-level and out-of-school influences and effects (i.e., 80-90% of the variance in test scores) from one year to the next.” Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, Rethinking Value-Added Models in Education

The current push by the Obama administration, Arne Duncan, and many state departments of education to solely tie student achievement to teachers, demonstrates that they are ‘true believers’ when it comes to the power of the teacher. That sounds magnanimous. It has the smell of being a strong supporter of teaching. In practice, it continues to erode the quality of our schools. Why? 

In defense of the massive increase in testing and the use of those tests in high stakes decision-making, these individuals point to one assumption: “The teacher is the single most powerful influence on student achievement.” All we need do is focus on the teacher. Ignore that teachers don’t receive adequate funding for their classrooms. Ignore the fact that the school has not been able to buy textbooks in over six years. Ignore the fact that the heating systems, the plumbing systems, and ceilings are all falling into disrepair and crumbling. In a word, under Race to the Top and Duncan’s No Child Left Behind waivers, schools have been given the go ahead and excuse to spend all the funding they can on testing and ignore funding for resources for the classroom and for professional development. In addition, schools have also been given permission to ignore the effects of poverty and other outside-the-school influences on achievement as well. This agenda of relently laying the burden of all learning on the back of the teacher has allowed states to continue to pour increasing amounts of money into testing and accountability systems with the belief that because the teacher is the most important influence of student learning, nothing else matters.

You will see variations of that statement, but this belief about teachers is the heart of what I will call the “Powerful Teacher Doctrine,” a statement of faith so many policymakers, politicians, and even educators have so recently declared allegiance to. It is used as an excuse to ignore and wall-off a whole range of societal problems, such as child poverty and lack of healthcare, because they do not matter as much as the teacher. It is also used the dimiss the need to adequately fund schools, because tied to this belief is another myth, “Just throwing more money at our education problems won’t fix them.” No one is advocating “just throwing money” at problems. What we do advocate is providing money for the resources needed to give our students a quality education. The cheap, mythological fix that all we need do is shift the entire burden of student achievement to the shoulders of teachers is simply throwing less money and creating many new problems. After all, why would anyone want to be a teacher in a system that demands results without providing the means to bring about those results?

So what is wrong with “The Powerful Teacher Doctrine?” We, as Americans, love our heroes, and we have created quite a few, and are quite fond of creating them when none exist; just look at our movie industry. Now, in the interest of school privatization, in the interest of dismantling the teaching profession, and in the interest of accountability promotion, it has been declared that achievement is to be balanced entirely on the backs of teachers. In doing so, we have created conditions in our education system so that teachers may demonstrate their “heroic efforts” against all odds to increase student achievement. We want our teachers succeed against powerful odds, so we create a system, both educational and socially, that forces heroic action. These conditions are created by our politicians, policymakers, state education leaders, who continue to use the “Powerful Teacher Doctrine” to starve schools, classrooms, and teachers of funding, because all that matters is getting a good, heroic teacher in those schools in classrooms and student achievement will increase. Our education leaders and politicians keep education funding stagnant and then expect our schools and teachers to overcome the mess they’ve created.

It is no doubt that education funding remains stagnant. Just look at North Carolina as an example. I haven’t seen a new textbook in five years in our school, and that’s in any subject area. Our legislature this year provided a meager $25 million on the table for textbooks statewide. By the time that’s distributed to the schools, schools like mine only receive around $2,500. Now, how many textbooks can you purchase with that? Just look at the price of a popular science textbook. Take Glencoe’s current student biology text priced at $87.48. If you do the math, purchasing a class set of only 30 is $2624.40. A class set means that not every student gets a textbook either. This is a pure example of how our state politicians and education leaders are using the “Powerful Teacher Doctrine” to keep education funding low in the area of textbooks. After all, the extension of this belief is, "The omnipotent teacher is resourceful and can find ways to teach students without resources.” All we need are good teachers in the classrooms and the resource problem will take care of itself.

This “Powerful Teacher Doctrine” drives other areas of funding as well. North Carolina spends a miniscule amount on professional development too. Teachers are often forced to pay out of their own pockets to attend national conferences in their teaching specialities because there is no funding for such activities. Once again, this belief that good teachers will find ways and resources to improve their instruction is the underlying belief. Many good teachers do find ways to learn how to improve their craft. But when one looks to the medical field or business, these organization invest in resources for professional learning. Not so in public education. The expectation is that teachers come out of college, fully-developed professionally and willing to pay for their own training if it is needed.

My whole point here is not to deny the impact a teacher can have on students in their classrooms. They do impact student learning. The problem I have with the “Powerful Teacher Doctrine” is that our politicians, policymakers, and some educators use it as an excuse to not adequately fund and provide resources needed for education. School leaders often buy into this argument so much, that they forget to advocate for increased resources. They make a conscious decision that “advocating for increased resources for my school or district” is outside my sphere of influence, so they give up. It is this very thinking that has put our schools in the starved conditions in which they operate.

What happens when all that matters are test scores? Just ask former El Paso Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia who was sentenced by a federal judge to three and half years for a test-cheating scandal(See “Former EPISD Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia Gets 42 Months, Offers No Apologies for Scandal.”) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t shift the blame for one minute away from from Garcia. As a leader, compromising your morals to cook the books is never excusable, even if there’s pressure from elsewhere to do so. Yet, Garcia’s actions are understandable in a corporate American culture where “cooking the books” in order to deceive investors is acceptable. After all, is that not what the financial meltdown was about? Was it not about Wall Streeters who hid toxic loans from investors while making exorbitant salaries? “Cooking the books” has become an American management strategy, so should anyone be really surprised when school leaders like Garcia, or Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall does just that to make their school systems appear to perform better than they really are?

In his book, Who’s Araid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has the Best (and Worst)Education System in the World, Yong Zhao blames the accountability system based on high stakes testing. True. This obession with test scores in the United States is unhealthy. Our politicians and state education leaders have convinced many school leaders that obtaining higher test scores is the ultimate goal and product of school systems. No wonder there are cheaters who cook the books of school accountability to make it look like their districts are performing better than they really are. Accountability in the United States is evolving into the same game that Wall Street bankers play; cook the books to make it look like things are better than they are.

But at the end of the day who are these who cook the books really fooling? Are our students really learning more than they ever had? Are we actually producing the best graduates we have ever produced? Is our graduation rate really any higher than it has ever been? In some ways, I am afraid accountability in education has become a game that educators play. In a culture where numbers ultimately matter more than kids, education has adopted the exact same thinking that Wall Street adopted; whatever you can do to make your bottom line appear better than actually is becomes acceptable. Instead of focusing genuinely on the kids, accountability is game of data manipulation.

Garcia and Hall did a great disservice to education by cheating. Their actions are inexcusable. Yet, there are other educators still playing the game of accountability, shifting data points around, in order to make it “appear that their school or district” is on top.

Wall Street's “book-cooking” tactics have no place in education. What we do as educators determines the course of young lives, and when our focus shifts from that to numbers alone, we too are as guilty as those who wrecked the economy, and who “cook the books of accountability” for appearances sake.