Live Long and Prosper...

UNINTENDED?

Are the unintended consequences of the overuse and misuse of standardized tests really unintended? The misuse of standardized tests seems designed specifically to "prove" that public schools are "failing" so that "reformers," both corporate and religious, can continue with the business of privatization.

We know that standardized test scores correlate to the economic level of a school population rather than the quality of their teachers, but "reformers" say that "poverty is just an excuse" (unless of course their favorite charter school discovers that students from high poverty homes score lower on tests. Then it becomes a real factor). "Reformers" demand that education be the driving force behind the fight against poverty. Unfortunately for this approach, we know that the effects of poverty make learning more difficult, and poverty must be eliminated first.

We know that standardized tests, scored by temps with no experience in teaching children, are not a true or complete reflection of a child's learning.


We know that children learn at different rates and the rigid requirements of "standards" are developmentally inappropriate for many children. The standardized tests based on those standards are misused when they are the basis for teacher evaluations, student promotions, and other high-stakes decisions.

The point of the tests, however, seems to be not the evaluation of student learning, but rather to show that public schools are somehow "failing." Privatizers seem intent on closing public schools (see here and here), in order to divert public tax dollars to corporate and religious pocketbooks. Apparently "choice" isn't an option for parents who want to keep their public schools open.

Linda Darling-Hammond said in Rise Above the Mark,

The problem we have with testing in this country today is that...we're using the wrong kinds of tests, and...we're using the tests in the wrong kinds of ways.

The use of the "wrong kinds of tests" in "the wrong kinds of ways" have consequences damaging to public education, the teaching profession, and worst of all, our children.

Valerie Strauss posted an article recently by Susan Moore Johnson, an education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Johnson listed four unintended consequences of high-stakes testing for teacher evaluations.

CONSEQUENCES

Four unintended consequences of using student test scores to evaluate teachers

1. Making It More Difficult to Fill High-Need Teaching Assignments

Teachers’ confidence in VAMS as an evaluation method ultimately depends on whether these measures adequately control for demographic differences among students. Many experts report that VAMS do not yet do so. Although teachers may not have read these scholarly critiques, they generally are not convinced that VAMS are evenhanded. Thus, heavy reliance on VAMS may lead effective teachers in high-need schools and subjects to seek safer assignments, where they won’t risk receiving low, unwarranted VAMS scores.

If teachers are evaluated judged by the high-stakes tests of their students, then it's reasonable to assume that those teachers who have the choice will choose to work in schools with higher achieving students. This incentivizes teachers to avoid schools with students who need high quality teachers the most...schools with hard to educate students in general, and students who are English language learners or in special education specifically.

I'm reminded of the story of "the worst teacher in New York City" published by the New York Post. The post wrote,

When it comes to teaching math, she’s a zero.

Pascale Mauclair, a tenured, $75,000-a-year sixth-grade teacher in Queens, placed at the bottom of the heap of New York’s schoolteachers, according to rankings released by the Department of Education yesterday.

Mauclair got a cumulative score of zero, with a zero margin of error, for the 2009-10 school year.

The problem with the rating Mauclair received is this...

"Mauclair is an ESL teacher, and over the last five years she has had small, self-contained classes of recently arrived immigrants who do not speak English. Her students arrive at different times of the school year, depending upon that date of their family’s migration; consequently, it is not unusual for her students to take the 6th grade exams when they have only been in her class for a matter of a few months.

"The Post gets its share of the blame," he continued. "It engaged in the calculated effort to destroy the good name of a teacher whose sole crime was her vocation to make a difference in the lives of children. It set out to brutally strip her of her personal dignity, and paraded in public an egregiously false ‘naked’ portrait of her life’s work."

Why would a teacher who had a choice knowingly set themselves up to be professionally mistreated like this?

2. Discouraging Shared Responsibility for Students

Often teachers within a grade level capitalize on one another’s strengths by regrouping their students for better instruction in each subject. For example, an excellent math teacher will teach math to all students in the grade, while others specialize in their area of expertise. Using VAMS to determine a substantial part of teachers’ evaluations threatens to sidetrack such collaboration by providing a perverse incentive for the most effective teachers to concentrate solely on their assigned roster of students.

I have spent more than 40 years in elementary schools as an intern, student teacher, paraprofessional, classroom teacher, reading specialist, and volunteer...and during all that time I have found that no matter what my position, I could count on my colleagues (and they could count on me) to share their expertise and ideas.

Teaching in a public school must not be a competition. I have shared the responsibility of students' education by teaching science while another teacher taught social studies, by supplementing classroom reading instruction, by tutoring students, and by diagnosing learning problems. The goal was to give the children the best education we could...as a team, rather than to make sure that my students passed the test with no regard for anyone else.

At the end of every school year we would gather as grade level teams to divide our students up in the most equitable manner possible so that the makeup of the next year's classrooms was balanced. So-called "teacher accountability based on student test scores" leaves the door open for back room manipulation of class composition. Principals could damage a teacher's career by packing their classroom with hard to educate students, or provide a favorite teacher with a higher number of high achievers. The possibility for corruption is increased by the importance of the test.

3. Undermining the Promise of Standards-Based Evaluation

Those who recommend using VAMS for personnel decisions often contend that this approach is superior to the “counterfactual”— evaluations conducted by administrators. Admittedly, those evaluations had a poor track record in the past. Recently, however, many districts have adopted sophisticated and informative standards-based assessments. Recent research demonstrates that teachers’ instruction improves in response to standards-based observations and high-quality feedback (e.g., Taylor and Tyler 2012). But how will administrators respond when discrepancies between VAMS and observations arise? If they are uncertain about judging instruction or think that VAMS are more precise than their own professional judgment, value-added scores may unduly influence how principals rate teachers’ instruction.

Education is not an exact science. Teaching is more than standards and test scores. In a recent article for the Houston Chronicle, John Kuhn, wrote,

[Relationships are more important than pedagogy.] If you deliver flawless instruction but haven't nurtured relationships with your students — even the challenging ones — then you might as well teach to an empty room.

...or let the students sit in front of programmed learning on a computer all day long.

Evaluations must reflect the ability of the teacher to develop relationships with students as well as their ability to teach standards. The interaction between adult and child is an important aspect of education which cannot be reproduced on a computer.

4. Generating Dissatisfaction and Turnover Among Teachers

Those who promote the use of VAMS to make decisions about rehiring, firing, or awarding tenure often suggest that the best teachers will be more satisfied and decide to remain in their school once ineffective teachers have been dismissed. However, if the dismissal process requires more testing or diverts teachers from collaborating, skilled teachers—who arguably have the most to offer the school—may lose confidence in administrators’ priorities and decide to go elsewhere, even if that takes them out of education.

If teachers in a school see their colleagues mislabeled as failures then morale will (continue to) plummet. They will leave the school...and maybe even the profession. Perhaps "reformers" find this to be a plus...out with the old, expensive teachers...in with the new, cheaper teachers.

I would add a fifth unintended consequence.

5. Making it more difficult to place a student teacher

If a teacher's value is determined by the test scores of her students, what teacher is going to want to trust "test prep" to a student teacher? Mentoring and student teaching are important. If master teachers avoid taking on student teachers because it might have an impact on their students' test scores, then those student teachers will lose out on the opportunity to learn from the best.

TESTING IS THE VEHICLE - PRIVATIZATION IS THE DESTINATION

Are the unintended consequences of "reform" really unintended or are "reformers" just not interested in anything other than profit? Are students and teachers simply innocent casualties in the war for privatization of public schools, or are they targets?

The movement to privatize public schools is multi-pronged...it's coming from rich hedge fund edupreneurs bent on profit, Milton Friedman free market true believers who want to privatize every government service, and the religious right who see public education as a secular evil. For many in those groups, the consequences of public school privatization are not only intended, but celebrated.

More...

• 10 Great Things About America That Drive Conservatives and the Religious Right Insane

• Who Is Using Political Pressure to Drive Privatization of Public Education?

• Bill Gates and the Push to Privatize Public Education

• 4 ways privatization is ruining our education system

• Funding “Education Reform”: The Big Three

• Voucher Advocate Betsy DeVos, Right-Wing Think Tanks Behind Koch-Style Attack on PA Public Schools

• Back to School with the Religious Right

• Religious Right Activists Warn Parents Against Sending Students to Communist, Atheist, Gay Public Schools

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

NPE 2015 NATIONAL CONFERENCE


Three quotes from the Network for Public Education 2015 National Conference. See the videos at www.networkforpubliceducation.org.

From Jitu Brown, one of the directors of the Network for Public Education and the national director for the Journey for Justice Alliance.

"They look at our students as instruments of profit" -- Jitu Brown

From Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he is also a Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership.

We are in the U.S. one of the very, very few systems that allow everyone to "play in the system" for twelve years. That's something amazing. We do not select. We do not judge, and that preserves the diversity of talents. Once we privatize...once we allow people to select...you exclude people, normally too early. You don't know who they might become...any privatized entity has the right to reject. We are not running a country club. We're running a public education system...that is for the prosperity of the nation and the community and the individuals. -- Yong Zhao

From Lily Eskelsen Garcia, President of the National Education Association.

"What is wrong with the world where testing has become so absurd and so harmful to children that parents are protecting their children from a test [by opting out]...The solution has to be changing the world so we do not have toxic testing..." -- Lily Eskelsen Garcia

The Resistance Meets on Weekends

Peter Greene covered the Network for Public Education 2015 National Conference (as did many other bloggers...see here, here, here, here and here, for example) in an article about how many who support public education are busy with the actual work of education, while "reformers" are full time, anti-public education, privatizers.

At the close of the NPE conference, Diane Ravitch called on pubic education supporters to engage parents and grandparents, students (especially high school students) and retired educators...in other words, folks who can't be fired for standing up for public education.

From Peter Greene, Curmudgucation.

...the irony here is that while [educators] are amateurs in the field of shaping, twisting, and spinning policy, ["reformers"] are the amateurs in the actual field of education. They may have the tools, the money, the hired manpower, and the paths of power on their side, but we are the one who know the territory.

ATLANTA CHEATING SCANDAL

Demonizing Teachers, Privatizing Schools: The Big Lies and Big Plans Behind the Atlanta School Cheating Scandal

More about the Atlanta trial which sent public educators to jail.

From Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report

The one-percenters need us to believe public education in our communities is some new kind of sewer infested with incompetent teachers who are cheating children and the public every week they draw paychecks. The long, long crisis of public education has been designed, engineered and provoked by powerful bipartisan forces to justify their long game, which is the privatization of public education. That's the Big Plan.

Jon Stewart: Cheating teachers go to jail. Cheating Wall Streeters don’t. What’s up with that?

Jon Stewart, who is leaving The Daily Show late this summer, will be missed. Valerie Strauss analyzed his review of the Atlanta cheating scandal. The entire segment of The Daily Show follows.

From Valerie Strauss, Answer Sheet

Jon Stewart on Wednesday night made the inevitable comparison between the former teachers and administrators in Atlanta who were sentenced for cheating on standardized tests — a few for as much as seven years — with Wall Street denizens who in 2008 connived in a way that nearly brought down the country’s financial system. Only one was sentenced to 12 months in jail.

POVERTY

Indiana superintendents rail against proposed school funding changes

Under the guise of "equalizing school funding" the Indiana legislature is threatening to reduce funding for large, high poverty urban areas and increase funding for low poverty suburban areas.

From Wendy Robinson, Superintendent of Fort Wayne Community Schools, quoted in Chalkbeat.

“The state is trying to act as if I don’t need different resources for that high school in the high-poverty area,” Robinson said. “The standards I set for the students I receive is the same. We treat our kids in poverty like it’s their fault. … That’s the fallacy of the (state funding) formula.”

TESTING

The One about Bullying, Threats and Arne Duncan...

The justification for annual testing is "parents need to know how their students are doing." Most teachers could provide the same information during any week of the school year, more quickly, and with more accuracy.

The real justification for annual testing, and test prep, and every other expense accompanying annual testing, is money...plain and simple.

From Mitchell Robinson, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Chair of Music Education at Michigan State University, quoted in Badass Teachers Association.

...no teacher needs yearly standardized tests to know if their students are "making progress or growth." Just as parents don't need these tests to know if their children are growing. The people that teach and love these children are well aware of what they are learning, what challenges and successes they are encountering, and what strategies will work best to help them continue to grow and learn. Let's not pretend that a once-per-year multiple choice test will somehow magically provide some special sauce that will reveal what kids know and are able to do.

Report: Big education firms spend millions lobbying for pro-testing policies

How much of our national treasure, some of which used to go to helping students, is now going to testing companies? Imagine how much they're making in profits if they can afford to spend in excess of $20 million in lobbying...

From Valerie Strauss, Answer Sheet

..four companies — Pearson Education, ETS (Educational Testing Service), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill— collectively spent more than $20 million lobbying in states and on Capitol Hill from 2009 to 2014.

Computerized Testing Problems: 2013 -2015

When you give a test before students are ready they often do poorly on it. The same is true when you give a test before the test is ready. The technical failures of the "new" computer based tests has added to the failure of the tests themselves. The testing companies still get their billions, though. FairTest has a list...

From FairTest.org.

The ongoing litany of computer exam administration failures reinforces the conclusion that the technologies rushed into the marketplace by political mandates and the companies paid to implement them are not ready for prime time. It makes no sense to attach high-stakes consequences to such deeply flawed tools

PRIVATIZATION

At the Network for Public Education 2015 National Conference, one of the speakers commented that privatization is more than just an "education problem." It's occurring in various places in America's economy. The most recent post of Privatization Watch covers much more than just education. It includes articles about a Senate cafeteria worker, a growing movement to transfer federal land to state control in Western states, the military pension system, the privatization of the state-run charity hospital system in Louisiana, and various toll road privatizations (because toll road privatization worked so well in Indiana).

Today's Privatization Watch post includes a link to an Atlanta blog article about privatization of public education...

GA: Opinion: Why competitive model fails schools. No one should lose in education

From Maureen Downey, Atlanta-Journal Consititution (AJC.com)

The Texas Miracle used to design No Child Left Behind was a case of cooking the books; the Atlanta Miracle included systemic cheating to save jobs and schools from being closed and educators are now sentenced to serve time behind bars; the New Orleans Miracle continues to be an embarrassment with the retraction of research reports indicating success and criticisms about bad data; and in 2013 there was confirmed test cheating in 37 states and Washington D.C., but surely it is more widespread than that given the high-stakes of the very tests that have been criticized for their bias, invalidity, very high cost, and damaging effects on what schooling has become. Not everything is a competition, not everything should be designed as a competition, and education – especially – should not be treated as a competition where there are guaranteed winners and losers. No one should lose in education. [emphasis added]

The narrow pursuit of test results has sidelined education issues of enduring importance such as poverty, equity in school funding, school segregation, health and physical education, science, the arts, access to early childhood education, class size, and curriculum development. We have witnessed the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy, a narrowing of curriculum, and classrooms saturated with “test score-raising” instructional practices that betray our understandings of child development and our commitment to educating for artistry and critical thinking. And so now we are faced with “a crisis of pedagogy”–teaching in a system that no longer resembles the democratic ideals or tolerates the critical thinking and critical decision-making that we hope to impart on the students we teach.

According to Arne Duncan, "Poverty is not destiny..." Jerry Bracey would respond, "Poverty is not an excuse. It's a condition. It's like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty."

I accept that "poverty is not destiny," however, while Duncan and the "reformers" are quick to give examples of high poverty children and schools which have succeeded, they ignore the effect that poverty has on the millions of children who are struggling. They use outliers as "proof" that poverty doesn't matter when we (and they) know that it does.

Spouting phrases like "poverty is not destiny" is an excuse to ignore it...to ignore the fact that our legislators, governors, and presidents have failed to resolve issues like poverty. It's much easier to find fault with America's public schools than to take on the difficult issues facing the country.

We are a profoundly divided nation...and the greatest divide is economic. While politicians try to destroy each other...while lobbyists buy legislators...while the wealthiest individuals control more and more of this country's resources...more than one fifth of our children live in poverty and attend underfunded schools. We know that there is a high correlation between a child's family and his/her academic achievement, yet, instead of providing health care, counselors, transportation, and other wraparound services, such as those suggested by the Chicago Teachers Union, we close schools, which punishes students for living in poverty, and punishes teachers for dedicating their lives to helping at-risk children.

Politicians and policy makers don't want to accept the fact that it is they who have failed, so they look for a place to lay the blame.

Privatizing hasn't helped. Closing schools hasn't helped. High-stakes testing hasn't helped. The source of the problem is child poverty.

Valerie Strauss

The biggest scandal in America

Valerie Strauss is one of public education's strongest voices...

There are many ramifications for this in the realm of public education. Because public schools are largely funded by property taxes, schools in high-poverty areas have fewer resources. Federal dollars appropriated to help close the gap don’t come close. Furthermore, if there is anything that education research has shown consistently and conclusively, it is that student achievement is linked to the socioeconomic level of families. Students who attend low-poverty schools do well on international test scores, as well as students in any other country.

Jonathan Kozol

Here is Jonathan Kozol's speech at the Save Our Schools March in DC, 7/30/2011. No one over the last 40 years has spent as much time advocating for poor children as Kozol.


Stephen Krashen

Protecting Students Against the Effects of Poverty: Libraries

• Children of poverty are more likely to suffer from "food insecurity," which means slower language development as well as behavioral problems (Coles, 2008/2009).
• High-poverty families are more likely to lack medical insurance or have high co- payments, which means less medical care, and more childhood illness and absenteeism, which of course negatively impacts school achievement. School is not helping: Poor schools are more likely to have no school nurse or have a high ratio of nurses to students (Berliner, 2009).
• Children of poverty are more likely to live in high-pollution areas, with more exposure to mercury, lead, PCB's (polychlorinated biphenyls) and smog, all of which influence health and learning, and often impact behavior as well (Berliner, 2009, p. 23; Martin, 2004).
• Children of poverty have very little access to books at home and in their communities, with less access to good public libraries and bookstores (Neuman and Celano, 2001).

Protecting children from poverty a better investment than the common core.

The major reason for our unspectacular school achievement is our level of child poverty, now 23%, the second highest child poverty level among 35 “economically advanced” countries. Poverty has a devastating impact on school performance. When we control for poverty, American children's international test scores are near the top of the world.

There is no evidence that more rigorous standards and increased testing improve school performance.

There is strong evidence that that protecting children from the effects of poverty will increase school performance: Strengthening food and health care programs, and providing better support for libraries and librarians is a much better investment than the common core.

Alfie Kohn

Poor Teaching for Poor Children … in the Name of Reform

Those who demand that we “close the achievement gap” generally focus only on results, which in practice refers only to test scores. High-quality instruction is defined as whatever raises those scores. But when teaching strategies are considered, there is wide agreement (again, among noneducators) about what constitutes appropriate instruction in the inner city.

The curriculum consists of a series of separate skills, with more worksheets than real books, more rote practice than exploration of ideas, more memorization (sometimes assisted with chanting and clapping) than thinking. In books like The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol, another frequent visitor to urban schools, describes a mechanical, precisely paced process for drilling black and Latino children in “obsessively enumerated particles of amputated skill associated with upcoming state exams.”

Not only is the teaching scripted, with students required to answer fact-based questions on command, but a system of almost militaristic behavior control is common, with public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that calls to mind the token economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals.

David C. Berliner

Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success

...despite their best efforts at reducing inequalities, inequalities do not easily go away, with the result that America’s schools generally work less well for impoverished youth and much better for those more fortunate. Recent test results from America’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and from the international comparisons in both the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Program on International Student Assessment (PISA) all show this pattern. Figure 1 (following), from TIMSS 2007, illustrates how closely linked school scores are to the school’s enrollment of low-income students. Comparing the scores of schools in 58 countries in the TIMSS pool against only wealthier American schools, instead of overall averages, makes the link clear. Looking first at the American schools with the lowest levels of poverty—where under 10% of the students are poor—we find that the average scores of fourth grade American students are higher than in all but two of the other 58 countries.6 Similarly, in American schools where under 25% of the students are poor, the average scores of fourth grade American students are higher than all but four of these other countries.

And others...

Hunger, Academic Success, and the Hard Bigotry of Indifference

Research on young children in several U.S. cities found that food insecure children were two thirds more likely to experience developmental risks in expressive and receptive language, fine and gross motor control, social behavior, emotional control, self-help, and preschool functioning. These outcomes held even after controlling for potential confounding variables such as caregiver's education, employment, and depressive symptoms. Other data from a study of 1,000 poor families identified associations between food insecurity and children's behavior problems, such as temper tantrums, fighting, sadness, depression, anxiety, and loneliness.

Map: How 35 countries compare on child poverty (the U.S. is ranked 34th)

UNICEF’s data is important for measuring the share of children who are substantively poorer than their national average, which has important implications for the cost of food, housing, health care and other essentials. Its research shows that children are more likely to fall below this relative poverty line in the United States than in almost any other developed country.

Does America Really Care About Its Children?

I'm really not interested in hearing politicians on either side of the aisle talk about "reform" when they can't even keep per pupil spending at least constant (and that's not even counting for inflation!). And I'm especially uninterested in hearing billionaires tell us their latest wacky schemes to "reform" our schools when the money that's not being spent on our children is winding up in their pockets.

More on Poverty...

No school can make up for years of neglect before a child reaches school age. No school can correct the damage done by lead poisoning or poor nutrition as the child grows. No school can teach a child who has been traumatized by violence. Closing public schools and opening militarized charter schools - such as our new Secretary of Education did in Chicago - do not solve the problem caused by years of social indifference. “Better” tests don’t improve teaching and learning. You don’t fatten the cow by weighing her with a better scale.

Schools need to be included as part of the solution to the problems of generational poverty, crime and malnutrition - absolutely…but someone has to carry the ball back to the children’s homes…and someone has to deal with the other 18 hours a day that the children are not in school.

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

THE IMAGE

Bloggers, pundits, and news organizations jumped all over the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher released recently.

As one might expect, the supporters of the so-called "reform" movement found the survey to be indicative of the laziness, incompetency, selfishness, etc. of America's teachers. At the aptly named, Dropout Nation, we read,

The Only Useful Point from MetLife’s Teacher Survey: We Need to Train School Leaders Better

There’s also the differences be [sic] a newly-hired teacher, a longtime veteran heading into retirement, or even a mid-career teacher . For the latter two, in particular, the changes to the profession brought upon by systemic reform — including the use of objective student performance data in teacher evaluations — can be quite a cause for dissatisfaction, even if the changes being wrought are beneficial both for kids and their younger colleagues...The reality is that the teaching profession is changing — and must change — in order to help all students get a high-quality education. Which means that those in the profession and aspiring teachers coming into it must have the talent necessary to deal with the sophisticated, hard work it always was (as well as becoming). And not every teacher currently working in the profession will want to adjust to these realities.

I agree that the job of the professional educator is changing...and change is hard. However, change is but one cause of dissatisfaction. Lack of resources or lack of respect can also make someone unhappy in their work. Furthermore, not all change is good, and some veteran teachers might recognize inappropriate or damaging change and raise an objection. We call that the voice of experience. Experience is sometimes a good thing.

Note the suggestion that veteran teachers are against or afraid of "Objective student performance data" -- an obvious reference to standardized tests. Anyone who has ever spent time teaching in a real public school classroom (unlike most of the so-called "reformers") knows that standardized tests are not necessarily objective. In addition, those who know and understand tests, measurements and statistics, understand that standardized tests were developed to judge students (however poorly they might do that) and are inappropriate tools to use to measure teachers. In simple language, tests should be used to evaluate that for which they were developed. Using a standardized achievement test developed for student assessment to evaluate teachers is like getting an x-ray to check for kidney disease. You'll get some results but it's not what you need.

This attitude is also present in responses to articles about the survey. In an Answer Sheet article, U.S. teachers’ job satisfaction craters — report, Valerie Strauss writes,

It’s no wonder so many teachers have low morale. They say that modern school reform — with its emphasis on getting rid of bad teachers, assessing teachers by student standardized test scores, and rewriting tenure and collective bargaining laws — essentially demonizes them.

A comment which expresses the same feeling as Dropout, though with quite a bit less thought behind it, is one from captclamdigger...whose name is apparently a reference to his or her level of achievement.

Boo-freaking-hoo, they feel stress and don't love their jobs. That's why they get paid and why it's called work. They have jobs where they don't get fired unless they cause a major, major screw up and they have a retirement plan and solid benefits.

It's called real life.

Another comment from Theplantruth [sic] is only slightly more rational.

Really my heart bleeds for the over paid glorified baby sitter's that continues to receive raises of 5% annually in the school district that I pay taxes too. I guest getting every weekend, holiday , and summers off isn't enough. Or the Monday - Friday daylight schedule is so terrible too. That school teachers benefits are costing them an arm and a leg vs the rest of the national work force. No I believe that out of any profession that school public school teacher should be happy with what they got and quit whining about their demoralized levels of stress from work. They got it really good.

[Too many errors in the above to note each separately. Apparently Theplantruth has trouble with punctuation, sentence fragments, and noun/verb agreement as well as facts.]

Given the obvious lack of knowledge in the above two comments about what teachers actually do and what the job of teaching is actually like, I understand their anger. If I was working every day at a difficult job, clam digging, for example, and came home each night stinking of clams, turned on the news and listened to someone tell me that teachers were overpaid, only worked 6 hours a day for 9 months of the year, could never be fired and were only in it for the money, I'd be angry, too. The fact that teachers' jobs are nothing like that doesn't matter. In my low status, low wage job as a clam digger, I am angry that I don't have it better and I WANT to be angry at someone.

Politicians, pundits and policy makers are expert at using that anger, and turning it towards someone else instead of themselves. Here are a couple of illustrations...




THE REALITY

Let's look at another comment, this one from Rubytunes...

The most telling part of the teacher survey was that those who teach in challenging neighborhoods feel the most stress. Why? Because they and their students are the ones getting inundated with constant ongoing test prep, more meaningless meetings, more tests of all kinds (weekly benchmarks, quarterly benchmarks, pre-tests, post-tests, state tests, grad tests, end of unit tests, etc., etc., etc.), constant endless nitpicking data analysis, parent initiatives, all in the vain effort to achieve 100% proficiency or be deemed a failing school. The message clearly is: Don't go to work in a high needs area because this will be your life!

The "reformers" don't want anyone to bring up the fact that poverty is a factor. They call it an "excuse" and deny that it matters. The fact, as Rubytunes writes, that teachers in the "most challenged neighborhoods" are the most at stress is due to a myriad of social and economic factors. Students, their parents or guardians, and communities in poverty all have issues that need to be dealt with. School systems and states often don't provide the necessary resources to counteract the damage done by serious community problems.

It's much easier, as the so-called "reformers" have illustrated over the last several decades, to blame the teachers. Not only do they have a scapegoat in teachers, but they can use the social and economic problems which they've left untreated as an excuse to privatize public education, get more money for private schools, and/or publicly sponsored, privately run for-profit charters*, and leaving the children with more serious problems to languish in the failing public schools.

John Kuhn, on of my favorite superintendents (Perrin-Whitt CISD, Perrin, TX) also wrote about the MetLife survey [ and the first sentence in the paragraphs below is a gem!] He said...

Circling the Wagons

The American teacher stands on the front lines of poverty and inequity that our fellow Americans refuse to acknowledge, on the front lines of the real social condition of our nation–not the advertised one–and we stand together. When we look over our shoulders, there’s no one there backing us up. The rest of the army is off pretending there is no fight to be had here, no excuses to be made, no hardships to decry, no supply lines to worry about, that things in American society are just hunky-dory outside of the fact that the teachers just don’t care enough...

What the reformers need to know about teachers is that we are in this together, and they’re on the outside. They are not one with us. They’re interlopers. They aren’t change agents–they’re foreign agents. They aren’t leaders. They are cheerleaders for the business lobby, not for the child. When we look at one another, we see people who strive and try and cry for kids, who face them and embrace them on a daily basis. When we see the most hostile of the reformers, we see pontificators and armchair critics. When the Church of Reform chooses to place teacher-bashing into their book of orthodox behaviors, they declare teachers to be their enemy. And they have their wish. We will be their enemy, but we will be allies to one another to the end. We will circle our wagons.

Yes, we’re demoralized. But, unfortunately for those who would cast us aside, we are still very, very united. And we are the last people in America to know the good that we do, and to disbelieve the lies that are told about us to an unsuspecting public.

*References to charters generally imply corporate, for-profit charter schools. Quotes from other writers reflect their opinions only. See It's Important to Look in a Mirror Now and Then.

Valerie Strauss printed an excerpt from 60 Minutes -- an interview with historian David McCullough. See Historian David McCullough: No ‘professional teacher should major in education’

She wrote,

Everyone’s a critic about the teaching profession. That includes award-winning historian David McCullough, who was profiled on CBS’ “60 Minutes” on Sunday by correspondent Morley Safer. Along with talking about teacher education, he noted that young Americans are “historically illiterate” — and it’s not just the fault of teachers, but parents too.

What makes McCullough an expert on public education? He's America's Greatest Historian, according to his publisher, but I don't see any experience in his bio to indicated any experience in education, primary or secondary. He's apparently well respected in his field, but I don't understand why that gives him the expertise to pontificate about education training. I might have opinions about how to write a history book, or interpret an event in history, however, those of you who read this blog regularly (anyone? anyone?) will note that I don't write about history...and especially don't write about how historians should be trained or educated.

Here's what McCullough said which upset me...

David McCullough: ...I don’t feel that any professional teacher should major in education. They should major in a subject, know something. The best teachers are those who have a gift and the energy and enthusiasm to convey their love for science or history or Shakespeare or whatever it is. “Show them what you love” is the old adage. And we’ve all had them, where they can change your life. They can electrify the morning when you come into the classroom.

This is just another instance of not respecting teachers. Arne Duncan claims that advanced degrees don't matter -- perhaps because he doesn't have one. McCullough takes it one step further and claims that education degrees don't matter.

And here's the comment I left on the web site. I've edited it a bit in order to correct a couple of things, but it's essentially the same.

In my district elementary teachers usually teach all subjects...which, I believe, is fairly common around the country. It's the norm for an elementary teacher in our district to teach 6-8 different subjects...English, Reading, Writing, Spelling, aka Language Arts, along with Math, Science, Health and Social Studies.

Are we supposed to major in 5 different fields in order to teach a class of first graders?

It seems to me that McCullough, as well as many others, confuse content area knowledge learned through degree programs with educating students. I agree that a high school history teacher (or math teacher, or science teacher etc.) who teaches 120-160 kids the same (or similar) subject all day every day needs to have specialized training in their subject area, but McCullough's comment that no professional teacher should major in education is just plain ignorant. An education degree, if it's done right, includes teaching methods, child development, child psychology, curriculum development and a myriad of other things that subject area specialists, like professional historians, don't get exposed to. Educators don't fill up students with knowledge. They teach children how to learn.

If he's talking ONLY about secondary teachers then let him say so...instead of ignoring the millions of pre-k to grade 5 teachers. On the other hand, I'm not sure I agree with him even if he IS talking only secondary.

One of the problems in the public debate over education is the proliferation of experts...seemingly everyone who attended school - except teachers - Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and now David McCullough.

Increase content requirements for subject area teachers if needed, but don't blame teachers for anecdotal lack of content knowledge. I wonder how long a history major would last in a class of 40 kindergartners in the Chicago Public Schools...

John Calvin denounced Nicolaus Copernicus for saying that the Earth moved around the Sun. Calvin claimed that it was the Sun which moved.

We know now that the Earth, along with the other planets, asteroids, comets and other rocks and ice balls of various and sundry sizes (including the dwarf planet Pluto) do, indeed, orbit the Sun. The fact that early church leaders didn't believe it, didn't make it untrue. The Earth was steadily and quietly orbiting around the Sun all during the arguments in the 16th century (and earlier).

Anti-science/anti-intellectual arguments are still with us today...more than a third of all American don't "believe in" evolution (some recent surveys have claimed that the number of those not believing in evolution is higher...approaching half of all Americans, but those numbers may be skewed). Almost a fifth of all Americans deny that the world's climate is changing.

There is a large anti-science feeling in the US...a feeling that science is not reliable - probably due to the fact that as the findings change, so does science. The average person might see that as meaning that science is unreliable...as opposed to self-correcting.

This isn't new to the United States. Anti-intellectualism has been here for a long time. Isaac Asimov wrote

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

Asimov's position on this was obvious. Just because a free society allows people to have false ideas doesn't mean that we should, as a society, accept those false ideas as valid.

Sometimes the anti-science attitude comes from the government and the business community. Take one of the main conflict areas in the recent Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike -- Value Added Measures (VAM) as part of a teachers evaluation process.

Illinois state law requires that at least 30% of a teacher's evaluation must be determined by student progress -- clearly referring to standardized tests. Illinois is not the only state with that requirement, though. Dozens of states (including my home, Indiana) have jumped on the "use standardized tests to evaluate teachers" bandwagon. To be fair...many only did so in order to qualify for federal money from the Administration's Race to the Top program.

The CTU claimed, however, that those sorts of evaluations weren't valid.

Valerie Strauss agreed.

The [New York] Times can say that using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers is a sensible policy and Obama can say it and Education Secretary Arne Duncan can say it and Emanuel can say it and so can Bill Gates (who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop it) and governors and mayor[s] from both parties, and heck, anybody can go ahead and shout it out as loud as they can.

It doesn’t make it true.

No amount of support for VAM based teacher evaluations changes the fact that researchers have found the method to be unreliable.

A group of Chicago area researchers objected when Mayor Emanuel came out with his plan to evaluate teachers using the method, and they urged restraint and caution. In Misconceptions and Realities about Teacher and Principal Evaluation the Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE) wrote

Assessments designed to evaluate student learning are not necessarily valid for measuring teacher effectiveness or student learning growth. Using them to measure the latter is akin to using a meter stick to weigh a person: you might be able to develop a formula that links height and weight, but there will be plenty of error in your calculations.

A similar objection was written by researchers in Georgia. The Georgia Researchers, Educators and Advocates for Teacher Evaluation Reform said

No evidence exists that evaluation systems that incorporate student test scores produce gains in student achievement...Testing companies themselves advise against the use of their instruments to evaluate educators...Assessments designed to evaluate student learning are not necessarily valid for measuring teacher effectiveness or student learning growth...

These researchers are joined by the National Research Council. Strauss notes in her article,

The National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academies, which include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, issued a major report last year on this issue that said:

The standardized test scores that have been trumpeted to show improvement in the schools provide limited information about the causes of improvements or variability in student performance.This would be true, presumably, for any school system that use standardized tests as a measure of achievement.

In other words, using students' standardized test scores to evaluate a teachers effectiveness in the classroom is bad science. The real research shows that those methods are incorrect usages of standardized tests and they are unfair to students and teachers, and anyone else involved, including parents, communities and local governments. Just because you want something to work a certain way doesn't mean it does. Good science suggests that we not use these methods for teacher evaluation until they have been shown to be reliable and valid.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson said "The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

Stephen Colbert on the Texas GOP's view of critical thinking...

(for mature audiences)


In contrast take a look at the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education's platform. It starts with...

To build a school, family, and community partnership that fosters learning, creativity, critical thinking skills, and success among our children...

See also, Valerie Strauss' analysis at Texas GOP rejects ‘critical thinking’ skills. Really.

To be fair, the Texas GOP claims that the plank was included in their platform by accident.

“[The chairman of the Texas GOP's Education Subcommittee] indicated that it was an oversight of the committee, that the plank should not have included ‘critical thinking skills’ after ‘values clarification,’” Elam said. “And it was not the intent of the subcommittee to present a plank that would have indicated that the RPT in any way opposed the development of critical thinking skills.”

It seems that the Texas GOP's Education Subcommittee could have used someone with critical thinking skills...

This is what we're doing to our children in the name of education.

Jim Horn at Schools Matter said,

Valerie Strauss shared this. Hope you do, too...

Here it is...

Testing day: ‘More like lockdown than an elementary school’

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Larry Lee of Montgomery, Alabama, former executive director of the Covington County Economic Development Commission and the West Central Partnership of Alabama. Lee, who writes often about education, sent the following email to friends and other people whom he thought would be interested. He gave me permission to publish it.

Larry Lee’s email:

Friends,

I have long felt that we need to have a statewide conversation about “What is education?” rather than continue to bounce from one “flavor of the month” ed reform notion to the next. And had you been with me [a week ago on] Monday, I think this point would have been made loud and clear.

I got up at 5 a.m. to drive 115 miles so I could be at Fruithurst Elementary in Cleburne County by 8 a.m. I went because last week and next are when schools across the state are taking THE TEST and I wanted to observe this process first-hand.

Fruithurst is a really good rural school, one we studied extensively in 2009 when we wrote the publication lessons learned from rural schools. more than 70% of these kids qualify for free-reduced lunches. Yet math proficiency rivals that of all Mountain Brook elementary schools where not a single child in the system gets a free-reduced lunch.

Christy Hiett is principal and a very, very good one. (If every school in the state had a Christy Hiett as principal, we would be in great shape.)

I have been to this school many, many times. It is always filled with the normal sounds of a school. Kids asking questions in class, laughing at something the teacher says, whooping and hollering on the playground. Lots of smiles. Christy getting hugs from her students as she walks down the hall.

Not so Monday, the first day 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th graders were taking part one of the Alabama reading and math test, the test that so much emphasis is based on these days.

Honest, it was more like lockdown than an elementary school. No laughter, no smiles, no hugs, too many straight-faced youngsters, too many with stress so evidently showing (which is why the school nurse was a key part of the staff yesterday as kids were going to see her with upset stomachs and headaches).

There were no backpacks in the rooms. They lined the hallway. Teachers turned in their cell phones to the testing coordinator. Rooms were stripped of anything that could possibly give a student as clue as to what a correct answer might be.

Each teacher had a plastic box full of exams, exam instructions, pencils and scratch paper kept under lock and key in the test coordinator’s room. In fact, this room was behind two locked doors. Only the principal and test coordinator had the keys to this room.

About 8:15, the teachers began picking up their individual boxes and signing forms. Testing began at 8:30. Each teacher had a timer in her room.

Special ed students were tested separately. The counselor tested a visually impaired student. Some 95% of students are required to be tested. There were three of the nearly 300 students absent yesterday. Friday will be make up test day.

(During the testing period, a car horn accidently started going off and was quickly quieted. One of the special ed students was very distracted by this. Christy said the incident would be reported as a “testing irregularity.”)

All staff wore sneakers so there would be no sound as they walked. I had on a pair of loafers with leather soles and wondered if I should take them off as I clicked down the hall. Christy steadily monitored each room, noting her presense on a sign-in sheet taped to each door.

When a group of kindergarteners needed to take a bathroom break, they were sent outside around the building to reach the restroom so they would not go down a hall and cause a distraction for students taking the test.

When the test was completed, teachers took their boxes back to the test coordinator’s room where they were locked up, waiting to be delivered to the central office.

As students lined up in the hallway afterwards to go to the restroom, there was still no smiles and no laughter. It was eerily quiet.

I questioned two teachers afterwards. A 6th grade teacher said, “I suppose it’s a necessary evil, but you really have to wonder how good of a picture do you get of how well a child can read when you test them for only 160 minutes with largely multiple choice questions.”

A 4th grade teacher now in her third year of teaching confessed that she was not quite as stressed as last year, but nervously said, “It’s still a lot of stress because you know how much is riding on the results.”

And what do the kids get from all of this? Not a damn thing. None of their grades will be impacted by how they perform on THE TEST. This is all about trying to reach unrealistic goals set by No Child Left Behind that declares that all children in this country will be above average by 2014. In other words, Lake Wobegon here we come.

As I left to head home my only thought was: “My God, these are children. They are not small adults.” Here are kids growing up under difficult circumstances in many cases. (Christy told me of one family that lived in a camper with no running water on land that was not theirs. She told me of a second-grade boy who is being raised by only his grandfather. She does not know what happened to the mother and daddy or to the grandmother. One day the grandfather wanted to show the boy what a gun could do and why he should not touch them, so he shot and killed the boy’s dog while he watched.)

These scenes will be repeated time and time again in Alabama for the next few days.

Robert Scott, the Republican commissioner of education in Texas, recently said that the notion that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be.

Several hundred Texas school boards have now passed a resolution saying that high-stakes standarized tests are “strangling” public schools.

I saw nothing Monday to make me think otherwise.

The Council on Foreign Relations just released a report which calls the failure to adequately educate our children "puts the United States' future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk." In other words, America's public schools are failing and the future of our country is at risk.

The report, titled U.S. Education Reform and National Security claims that we must

Make structural changes to provide students with good choices. "Enhanced choice and competition, in an environment of equitable resource allocation, will fuel the innovation necessary to transform results."

"Choice and competition" -- that means that we need to increase the number of charter schools and vouchers for private schools.

The report task force, chaired by former NYC Chancellor Joel Klein and Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, also says we must

Implement educational expectations and assessments in subjects vital to protecting national security.

...which means that we need to increase testing.

Simply put, the report follows the corporate line spouted by Klein, Bloomberg, Gates, Broad and Duncan -- more money for charters, more money for privatization, and more testing.

It's not surprising that the report "found" just what the corporate interests wanted it to find (this reminds me of the National Reading Panel report. See HERE).

Unfortunately, the news media won't dig deeper into the report and will inform everyone that the public schools have failed which puts the nation in jeopardy. Coupled with the current, regular dose of teacher bashing, the average American will have little trouble concluding that American teachers and their unions are leading the United States on a path of self-destruction.

Fortunately, there are voices (some from the task force itself) who are stating that American schools are not failing, American students are not the worst in the world, test scores do not equal education, teachers are not to blame for everything, and the public schools are not going to doom this nation.

Condi Rice-Joel Klein report: Not the new ‘A Nation at Risk’

Valerie Strauss takes a quick look at the report.

A new report being officially released today — by a Council of Foreign Relations task force chaired by Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice — seems to want very much to be seen as the new “A Nation at Risk,” the seminal 1983 report that warned that America’s future was threatened by a “rising tide of mediocrity” in the country’s public schools.

It’s a pale imitation.

The U.S. Education Reform and National Security report, to be sure, has some similar language and themes of a Nation at Risk. It says (over and over) that America’s national security is threatened because America’s public schools aren’t adequately preparing young people to “fill the ranks of the Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and the armed forces” (or diplomats, spies and soldiers).

But it takes a very different view of the public education system than the authors of “A Nation at Risk,” who sought to find ways to improve public schools and treat the system as a civic institution. The new report seems to look at public schools as if they are the bad guys that need to be put out of business, with a new business taking over, funded with public dollars.

Best part of ‘schools-threaten-national-security’ report: The dissents

Again Valerie Strauss...in a later post she tells about the dissents to the report from members of the task force.

...there is no consensus among professional educators, academic scholars, or engaged citizens about the net impact of charter schools, vouchers, or other forms of privatization, because empirical evidence is mixed. The report leans heavily toward one side in this contested set of issues, however, thereby encouraging a policy course that could do more harm than good.

The report leans heavily towards the corporate line, ignoring the fact that most charter schools are no better than regular public schools, voucher plans have not helped to improve student learning, testing has not improved learning, teachers are not the cause of the economic mess we're in, teachers unions do not produce poorer schools, and on and on and on.

Dissents from the status quo Council on Foreign Relations report

Parents Across America reports on the dissents to the report as well...

While touting the privatization of schools in New Orleans, the report fails to note that many high-need students have been rejected from charters there, that school exclusion rates are extraordinarily high, and that the Southern Poverty Law Center had to sue on behalf of special education students who were unable to gain admission to public schools. Meanwhile, New Orleans remains the lowest-ranked district in the low-performing state of Louisiana. Similarly, the report neglects to mention the many studies that have failed to find positive outcomes of voucher systems when similar students are compared. Finally, the report ignores the fact that our highest-achieving states have all built high-quality systems without charters, vouchers, educational management companies, or other forms of privatization...

Ignoring the facts about American education

Finally, Stephen Krashen states the facts which the report ignored. The problem is poverty. Krashen reminds readers that evidence is necessary to prove a point and that the evidence does not show that America's public schools are failing.

Sent to the Seattle Times, March 20

The Rice-Klein task force (“Education woes linked to national security,” March 19) ignores the facts about American schools. There is no evidence that American schools are failing. Middle-class American students in well-funded schools score at the top of the world on international tests; our overall scores are unspectacular because we have the highest percentage of children living in poverty among all industrialized countries.

This means that the major problem in American education is not a lack of standards. The major problem is poverty, which means food deprivation, lack of health care, and little access to books. The most ambitious standards, the highest quality teaching and the fanciest technology will have little impact when students are hungry, ill, and have little to read.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus
University of Southern California

sources:
Berliner, D. 2009. Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/poverty-and-potential;
Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23 (2);
Rothstein, R. (2010). How to fix our schools. Economic Policy Institute, Issue Brief #286. http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ib286;
Krashen, S. 1997. Bridging inequity with books. Educational Leadership 55(4): 18-22;

Original article: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2017790002_apuseducationnationalsecurity.html

The attack on public schools continues -- this time the attackers claim that the public schools are a danger to the safety of the nation. Policy makers are looking for someone to blame for their inability to deal with the pervasive poverty and economic uncertainty under which so many people live (22% of all American children live in poverty, the highest among the world's developed nations). Public education, public school teachers, and the public sector in general are the targets.

I wrote about the joint op-ed by NEA President Dennis Van Roekel and TFA CEO Wendy Kopp on December 26, 2011 and again on January 5, 2012. Today, others have also commented about Van Roekel's collaboration with Wendy Kopp and the refusal of Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Matt Damon to allow themselves to be nominated for the NEA's Friend of Education Award.

from the Huffington Post
Matt Damon, Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Decline Education Award Nomination Over USA Today Op-Ed

The NEA and TFA have had a historically strained relationship as the NEA, the country's largest teachers union, has long opposed TFA and its practices. In July, the group collectively accused TFA of placing its corps members in areas where there are no teacher shortages, robbing educators of jobs in communities where those positions are already hard to come by. They said some TFA contracts could be used to "bust unions," Education Week reported.

The teachers' group has also criticized TFA's general concept: Recent college graduates are trained over the summer to teach two years in some of the country's most challenging classrooms -- in hopes of helping close a still-wide achievement gap. But because TFA corps members are only committed to two years of teaching, many leave teaching after the experience. By contrast, the NEA and American Federation of Teachers believe that seasoned veteran educators and quality training are key to boosting test scores, graduation rates and improving American education overall.

Van Roekel has taken some heat since the op-ed's publication. Education blogger Anthony Cody wrote on Education Week that Roekel is sending mixed messages about teacher preparation, pointing out that the NEA president writes in his USA Today piece that "not all teachers are getting the high-quality preparation they need to excel with students in the classroom."

from Living in Dialogue by Anthony Cody
NEA Stance on Teach For America Continues to Raise Questions

I do, however, wonder about the substance of his agreement with Ms Kopp regarding teacher recruitment and preparation. Specifically, does Mr. Van Roekel agree that it is a good idea to recruit people who have no desire or intention to become teachers for a two year commitment? Research has revealed that 57% of the people who enter Teach For America do not intend to become teachers, and lo and behold, three years after they start, 75% of them are gone. [Be aware that TFA fudges these numbers by tracking the number who remain "in education," which includes the many TFAers who become staff members or work in other parts of the non-profit and for-profit educational landscape.]

I wonder how it is possible to fight vigorously for a minimum one-year residency program and simultaneously praise someone whose recruitment model features a five week summer training course, and targets people who do not even wish to become teachers?

from Fred Klonsky's Blog
Van Roekel’s date with Kopp and Duncan not going over too well.

When the 10,000 delegates to last summer’s NEA RA passed a critical New Business Item about Teach For America and another one sharply critical of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, few of us thought that meant for IEA President Dennis Van Roekel to arrange a lunch date with both.

I guess he did.

And it’s not going so well for Dennis...Some might say that DVR’s meet up with Duncan and Kopp went worse. The three appeared together at a meeting on teacher training (something Kopp’s TFA pays scant attention to). Duncan then spent most of the time gushing over Wendy, claiming nobody has done more to get great teachers into classrooms than she has.

from The Answer Sheet
Has the NEA warmed up to Teach for America?

The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, which combined have more than 4 million members, have long opposed the 20-year-old Teach for America. TFA recruits newly minted college graduates who are not education majors and gives them five weeks of summer training before placing them in classrooms in high-poverty schools. Recruits are asked to commit to only two years of teaching. The unions have argued that the country’s neediest students need highly trained teachers committed to the profession.

Van Roekel appeared in late September with Kopp at an event along with Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and more recently co-authored an op-ed with Kopp in USA Today about the best way to prepare teachers.Van Roekel issued a statement Thursday about the Carlsson-Paige letter that says:

“I respect Matt Damon and thank him for his support of public education. I believe NEA should talk to those who support public education, even if we don’t agree on everything, and work together to serve students. Wendy Kopp and I agree that students will benefit from stronger recruiting and teacher preparation. NEA isn’t going to quit fighting for students and our members, or for stronger teacher preparation. In fact, better teacher preparation is part of our 3-point plan on Leading the Profession that was released last month.”

It isn’t clear just how much Van Roekel has ruffled feathers in his union but some educators have written that they feel he has undercut efforts to expose Teach for America’s deficiencies and perhaps get it to change.

...I asked Van Roekel this week if he has warmed up to Teach for America.

He said “no” and still opposes the short training period given to TFA recruits. But he also said he has over time “learned some things” from the way that TFA operates and that “there are some things that I see a little differently.”