On Science

In the wake of Mr. Obama's attention to scientific matters (see video below), I thought I would post an article I wrote last summer. It was originally written for a contest hosted by Seed Magazine, the topic of which was "What is most significant force working against science today?" The article apparently got lost in hyperspace, and so was never considered for the contest. This is too bad, from my point of view, but does mean that I can publish it here, as there is no danger of duplicate publication! For the science lovers among you: enjoy!


On Yucca Moths and Noah’s Flood

Last year, my husband and I toured a cave in Alabama. During the tour, the guide, Kerri, confidently announced that “Our cave will tell you the truth that other caves will not tell you: other caves say that caves are millions of years old, but the truth is all caves were formed 4,000 years ago by Noah’s Flood.” Her statement epitomizes what many would readily identify as the most significant force acting against science in society today: fundamentalist religious fervor; however, the real enemy to science is not the noisy clamor over the truth of the creation of the earth or Kerri the Cave-Girl’s championing of Noah in head-to-head competition with Geology, but rather in the unheeded and unchecked decay of rigorous intellectual investigation, of which religious fanaticism is only one symptom.

Science requires the antithesis of unreasoning acceptance: in 1970, my father, an entomologist, collected some Yucca pods in Nevada and took them back to his lab in Berkeley where he proceeded to monitor them for the emergence of Prodoxus Y-inversus, moths with a parasitic relationship to Yucca plants. There were about a dozen pods, and when only about a dozen moths emerged during the first half-dozen years, most entomologists would have discarded the pods, having reached the known limit of diapause. Instead, my father continued to monitor the pods until a mass emergence of yucca moths occurred in 1985. By then, of course, the fact that they emerged at all, sixteen years after the larvae entered diapause, was a paradigm-shattering event that led to a hypothesis about the relationship between winter-spring temperature differential and the disruption of diapause. Dad spent the next decade and a half demonstrating that his hypothesis was viable by controlling the temperatures to which the pods were subjected and, thereby, orchestrating mass emergences at 20, 25 and 30 years (Powell). My sister was seven when Dad collected the Yucca pods; her youngest son was eight when the last moths emerged, in 2000.

My father’s Yucca Moth experiment was quintessentially scientific. Science requires patience. It requires flexibility. In science, the willingness to “flip-flop” is not a sign of weakness; rather, scientific endeavor mandates “flip-flopping” whenever a new fact throws previous understanding into question. Above all, science requires as a starting point the basic assumption that what we think we know (“Yucca moths will emerge from diapause by the end of six years or not at all”) could be wrong. My father believes that his yucca pods are now empty of larvae and that, therefore, no more yucca moths will ever emerge, but he continues to monitor them this year, the 38th, just in case.

Science requires humility.

By contrast, we live in a sound-byte world whose most insistent message is that definitive answers are possible in a few minutes, sentences, or keystrokes. Network news gives us the Presidential election in one-minute snippets. “In-depth coverage” lasts ten minutes. News consists of facts and speculation both presented as unassailable truth. Mit Romney pronounced, during a recent television interview, that had Barack Obama been President a year ago, Al-Qeada would now be launching attacks at the U.S. from inside Iraq (Bell). His assertion was not challenged. He was not requested to identify his assumptions, verify the validity or relevance of his facts, elucidate the reasoning behind his allegation, or adhere to standards of clarity, relevance, or fairness. Collectively, we are content to accept as fact an endless series of ill-formed and premature ideas. We do not, collectively, look for substantive truth to emerge from the diapause of ignorance and uncertainty about our presumptive Presidential candidates, their views, their intentions, or their characters.

The confident assertion of unsubstantiated alternate political realities is quintessentially unscientific. The soulless discourse surrounding the upcoming Presidential election is the inevitable product of a culture in which both rigorous evaluation of facts and imaginative positing of potential implications have withered nearly away. We point fingers and say that politicians won’t tell the truth or that the press engages in a conspiracy to throw the election, but the simpler truth is that, especially in a world in which news is paid for by profit-making conglomerates, we get what we pay for. If the public demanded intellectual investigation of issues, detailed reporting, and vigorous debate of real ideas, and if that same public flatly refused to watch news programs that offered anything less, we’d get what we wanted; instead, we throw away the yucca pods of every learning situation without waiting for larvae to develop and emerge.

We are, as a culture, content with sound-bytes. We shoe-horn our current events education between 50-hour-a-week jobs, a complicated logistical choreography of getting children to school, soccer games, piano lessons, and doctor’s appointments, and our three-hours-a-week Pilates class. We live gerbil-wheel lives that don’t allow time for the discomfort that results from struggling doggedly with complex ideas. In a world in which relationships can be reduced to five-keystroke text messages— “I<3u2”—science is simply far too much trouble.

There are no sound-byte solutions to this problem. Science—like all intellectual endeavor—flourishes in an age of enlightenment, and it requires, therefore, a cultural medium in which patience, doubt, and persistence, rather than haste, complacency, and blind acceptance direct the pursuit of knowledge.

One strategy for creating such a cultural medium would be to free our public school system from the stultifying bonds of No Child Left Behind, which rests on the presumption that education can be sorted, filtered, reduced, and compacted into the passing of a limited number of tests. In Virginia, for instance, the contemporary mark of a “standard” high school education is that students can pass six tests, all but one of which is multiple-choice. An “advanced” education requires that students pass nine of those tests. To ensure those goals, teachers are now required to engage in lock-step lesson delivery, administering identical tests every few days to track progress. Such a system can ensure that “no child is left behind” in the sense that every extraordinary—even foolhardy—effort is expended to ensure that every child knows an identically narrow set of factual information, but such a system limits knowledge, opportunity, and creativity. Such a system suggests not only that it is possible to know with certainty what everyone needs to know, but also that the only important questions have certain answers.

Despite this reductionism, science perseveres. A significant number of people still inquire, investigate, challenge, elucidate, question, and revise their thinking; those same people demand the same of others. We can reinvigorate science by expanding the pool of skeptics, increasing the number of people who would rather assume that the emergence of Prodoxus Y-inversus from a yucca pod is possible even 38 years after diapause began and be wrong than assume that no further emergence is possible and be right. We have, in our school system, a structure which ensures that every person in America experiences a systematic effort to shape knowledge, so we have in place a structure capable of enacting the change in cultural attitude toward knowledge that we need. For that to happen, however, we need a national standard for education that demands a much higher expectation for learning than federal law currently requires.

Works Cited

Bell, Jim (Producer), and Matt Lauer (Co-Anchor). 2008. Today. July 18, 2008. KNTV San Francisco: TV 11.

Powell, J.A. “Longest insect dormancy: Yucca moth larvae (Lepidoptera: Prodoxidae) metamorphose after 20, 25, and 30 years in diapause.” (2001). Annual of the Entomological Society of America, Vol. 94, 2001. 677-680.

Wishing You This Much Joy

Dear Mr. Education Secretary-Nominate, Mr. Duncan:

I am writing to offer you my congratulations on having been chosen to serve Mr. Obama and the American people as the Secretary of Education. I am pleased that Mr. Obama has selected for such an important position someone who is not a politician, someone who is, instead, a genuine educator, and, moreover, an educator who has already shown that he can implement strategies that change the climate of schools and ensure that more children and teachers succeed. I am dismayed, however, by the fact that so many of my colleagues (and I am a teacher of 25 years’ experience myself), people whose talents and judgments I respect, have received the news of your appointment with something more like despair than the hope for the future that I would like your appointment to represent. The discouragement I have observed among my colleagues is directly due to the fact that some of your more radical and controversial policies suggest that you might be just one more anti-teacher establishmentarian.

If you are going to be successful in any degree in solving the myriad and colossal problems that weigh upon American public education today, you need teachers on your side. Education without teachers is a ridiculous oxymoronic fantasy, though the policies of the outgoing administration have clearly been aimed at achieving just that. You need teachers to believe in you and your judgment. Your advance press suggests that you have been able to work with your teaching constituency in Chicago to implement some of those red-flag policies with their support, rather than over their objections; I would like to see you do the same on the national stage, and I would like to suggest that you would serve yourself and the country’s educational institutions well if you begin immediately by introducing yourself to your now-much-bigger constituency by publicizing your philosophy, not just your policy. I would like to suggest that you begin with the issue that has been, amongst my acquaintance, the hot-button policy, the one which, based on my observations of the teachers of my acquaintance has already begun to wither your credibility before you even have a chance to get yourself established: paying students for good grades.

There is plenty of precedent to suggest that such an idea is not only ideologically unsound, but is also logistically untenable—even harmful. For instance: my school, a mostly-urban public high school of nearly 2000 students, which teeters every year on the edge of losing accreditation, and which regularly fails to meet Annual Yearly Progress for No Child Left Behind, largely due to attendance problems, recently looked into a grant program that offers to pay students and teachers for passing grades on Advanced Placement (AP) exams. The program, from the National Math and Science Initiative, rests on the belief that teachers and students will try harder if there is money at stake, more students will sign up for AP classes and AP exams—or will be allowed to sign up for AP classes—and more students will put in the real effort required in order to pass those exams. On the surface, it sounds like an idea with some potential for exerting a positive influence on the academic profile of a school like ours: we have an open-enrollment policy for AP, so there are no barriers that might make such a program favor students who already achieve at high levels over others who do not; our AP exam scores tend to be disappointingly low, and one of the (many) reasons for that is the struggle we have every year with trying to get students to accept the reality of the amount of work required for success in such a demanding course, so offering an incentive of a cash reward at the end might help with the motivational piece, and participation in the program requires extensive vertical-team training, so that teachers beginning in grade 6 are working effectively to help prepare more students for the rigors of the AP course. Upon closer examination, however, the program as it has been conceived by those who developed it (a group of businesses, as I understand it), while it might ultimately result in a few more passing scores in some AP subjects, would at the same time create tremendous inequities and would almost certainly result in divisiveness among students and faculty that would make it vastly more difficult to achieve our other myriad educational goals.

As it turns out, the program is only available for AP courses in English, Math, and Science. In our school, that is five courses of one section each, so five of our approximately 130 teachers would get an opportunity to earn extra pay, with no opportunity for others to opt in. That might be justifiable if that were simply a feature of the role, so that any teacher who teaches an advanced course with high stakes testing got extra pay as a matter of course, but this would not be the case. We offer AP courses in five other subjects, for one thing, and those teachers would not be eligible for any extra pay. In addition, we have an International Baccalaureate (IB)Diploma Programme, and none of those students or teachers would be eligible for the bonus pay—even though many of our IB students take the AP exams in English, math and science and pass them. Finally, despite the insistence of the grant program itself on the importance of vertical team preparation for AP exams, the reward money would go directly and only to the teacher of the course from which the exam would be taken, so the work done by those teachers in that subject in the preparatory grades would go unacknowledged and unrewarded.

Given all those conditions, the most easily predictable negative outcomes of implementing this program would be:

1. The justifiable resentment of most of the faculty toward the few teachers who would benefit financially from this program. I taught 21 IB English students last year; 20 of them passed the IB exam. That would have been $2000—nearly the equivalent of my National Board Stipend. (This was unusual; most years I have a 100% pass rate; my record is 113/117 since the inception of the program--$11,300 worth of bonuses that I would not get under the pay-for-grades system, while colleagues with much lower pass rates would get bonuses.) Assuming that this program did succeed eventually in inspiring more students to take on AP, a teacher could have anywhere between 50 and 100 students pass the AP exam—on the extreme end, that would be a $10,000 bonus, just about 1/3 of a starting teacher’s salary in our county. Everybody can do that math, and those teachers who would have to sit back and watch while others took advantage of an opportunity that simply was not available to everyone would inevitably, and quite reasonably, resent it. It’s one thing to offer an opportunity—like National Board Certification—that carries a substantive financial reward that every teacher can undertake if he or she chooses, and which is attainable by anyone willing to do what it takes to develop and demonstrate the necessary skills. (In Virginia, where I teach, there has been a $5000 bonus upon earning the certificate and an additional $2500 per year for the ten-year life of the certificate; whether that survives next year’s $400 million education budget cut remains to be seen.) It is something else altogether to offer even more substantive rewards to a select few who, by virtue of their chosen subject, are privileged over those who happen to teach another subject, such as American History, or US Government, or Spanish, or Music or Computer Programming. One might, I suppose, try to make the argument that anyone could have chosen to be an English teacher or a Biology teacher or a Calculus teacher, but I don’t think anyone would be willing to defend as a serious stance the idea that what we need in the United States is an educational system in which, by offering higher financial reward for teaching select subjects, we systematically encourage everyone to become English, math, or science teachers.

2. An even more understandable resentment on the part of those teachers of students in grades 6-11 who would be required, by the terms of the program, to invest time on weekends and during the summer to implement significant changes to their teaching in order to better prepare their students for those classes in which the students and those five lucky teachers would reap the benefits of all that preparation. It does not require significant powers of prognostication to predict that getting and keeping the cooperation of those teachers who are to do the work without the reward would pose a significant challenge; thus, we can expect that the introduction of reward money for those teachers at the end of the sequence would create divisiveness where unity is needed.

3. The immediate demise of our IB program. Since our IB students are the very students who are most likely to pass our AP exams, they would be the first to benefit from the reward money, and they would be those capable of earning the greatest quantity of it. For a wide variety of reasons, which I will detail elsewhere (but which include teacher training, curricular integrity, program oversight, and assessment feedback), I am fully convinced that the education a student gets by completing the two-year IB Diploma Programme is vastly more rigorous, vastly more complex, and vastly superior to that that he or she can get from taking a battery of independently conceived, non-programmatic, AP classes. Paying students in our building to take AP exams would actually lower the quality of those students’ overall education, and this outcome is virtually certain if the money comes into play.

4. Immediate complaints from students and parents about inequities. The potential logistical problems arising from a system of reward for performance for only a few select courses are mind-boggling; I will list only a few: how do we ensure that every student has equal access to courses that offer pay-for-performance? Creating a master schedule is tricky enough as it is; many students are forced to choose between, say, AP English literature and taking a special program at the county’s technical center, because the two conflict. If we are forcing students to make that choice in an environment where potential cash is available for the AP classes, the potential for anger over having to make that choice increases dramatically. What do we do when there are 37 students requesting AP Calculus and our budget simply does not allow for two sections under 20 students each? Which students are told “no”? Does the teacher have to try to teach college-level Calculus to 37 students at once? The larger class size reduces the probability of success for everyone—especially in a building such as ours where the students tend to have significant gaps in preparation, support from home, learning strategies, and time-management skills, and so require significant individual attention from the teacher. What happens if the demand for the courses with financial rewards rises so dramatically (whether the students are sufficiently prepared or not) that the school cannot provide enough qualified teachers to teach the curriculum? Do we place teachers who lack sufficient content knowledge? Do we refuse places to large numbers of students? One of the most common fallacies about the teaching of college level courses is that anybody can do it; in fact, those courses require content knowledge far beyond the level required for high school level courses. What structures will we put in place to ensure that we have the qualified faculty we need? Entrée into the program for more teachers would presumably be a good thing, in that it could help mitigate the resentment of being shut out of the opportunity, but where those who are assigned the courses cannot produce the result for which the reward is paid, another whole range of problems will arise—including, potentially, lawsuits from parents’ whose students did not earn the money while students in other sections, with more qualified teachers, did. And so on.

I spent some time hunting around the Internet, trying to find a detailed description of your pay-for-performance programs, and while the references to those programs are legion, description, assessment, justification and analysis are completely missing. In the absence of those, America’s teachers are left to make assumptions about your motives and your practices, and, if my friends’ reactions are any indication, teachers are making those assumptions based on their past experience with ill-formed, badly-implemented programs imposed upon the teaching profession by outsiders who actually know virtually nothing about what they hubristicly propose to solve. This may not be a reasonable reaction, but it is understandable, given the recent historical pattern of blaming teachers for the ills of education. You can head off these fears and begin to build your coalition if you will make yourself a very visible presence. You could begin with an article in the nation’s major newspapers laying out your philosophical justification for pay-for-performance—tackle the problem at the sorest spot and convince the teachers you need as allies that your policies are not just another depressing indicator that you are yet another one of those administrators who thinks “these teachers” are the source of the problem and that solving the problem involves measures that reduce the effect of teachers on students down to the minimum possible degree. I would love to know your solutions to these problems. I would love to read an article in which you detail your Pay-for-Performance program and answer such questions as:

• Under what circumstances do you see Pay-for-Performance as a necessary strategy?
• What grades earn what amounts of money, and what structures do you put in place in order to ensure that the grades issued are fair and equitable?
• Are there cash rewards for all students in all subjects? For all teachers? Or only a select few?
• What support do you provide for teachers by way of setting expectations and holding to them, so that grades do not become absurdly inflated—either by way of increasing rewards or by way of avoiding parental wrath when students do not earn the cash reward?
• Once Pay-for-Performance is implemented, is it permanent for those students, so that they continue to get cash rewards through to the end of their public schooling?
• Where does the money come from? What other programs must be cut in order to fund this program?
• Do you advocate this program as a potential nation-wide change to public education?
• How fast do you anticipate implementing this program on a large scale?

These are all essentially logistical problems, of course, and if those were the only objections, one can imagine that it would be possible, situation by situation, to wrestle through them and create functional systems of cash reward that reduced the anger and resentment to a workable level. These are not, however, the main worries that cause my friends and colleagues to point to your pay-for-performance program as an indicator that you are one more anti-teacher administrator looking for ways to increase student achievement despite bad teaching. The vastly more important problem arises from not knowing what the educational philosophy is that underpins your idea of paying students for good grades. The idea that students should trained to believe that they don’t have to learn unless they get paid for it is anathema to every teacher who came to education—and there are many—out of a deeply-held belief in the ideal of education as the means by which we make ourselves free.

The justification, in the current state of our culture, for paying adults for a job and not paying students to go to school is that we don’t consider student engagement in school as a job. The benefit that accrues to the student from his or her education is that the student gains the skills and knowledge that he or she needs in order to have power over his or her life. It is education that provides an individual with the ability to choose well, and it is freedom of choice that makes a life worthwhile, in the context of the American vision, as set out by Thomas Jefferson. It is education that provides a person with the ability to shape a life as close as possible to his own terms because it is through education that one learns to think, to judge, to assess reality, to predict plausible and likely outcomes, and to recoup when a decision goes wrong.

Education is, furthermore, the place wherein we instill many of the values that we must have in order for a society to survive: generosity, caring, pride in work and accomplishment, self-direction, self-motivation, and a commitment to doing what needs to be done, whether one wants to do it or not. There is nothing more valuable to a life or to a society than an education; to suggest that children should see it in terms of cash, to suggest that teachers do nothing more than sell a product on which a price can be put is not only deeply offensive, but also deeply disturbing. A world in which we see education as nothing more than a means to an immediate financial end, the gains of which will be instantly converted to Mp3 players, cell phones, and expensive tennis shoes is a world greatly weakened by the loss of intrinsic value. A society in which children are taught that the only reason to put forth effort is for personal short-term gain is a society which has lost an important element of its humanity.

This is the fear that we need you to address in detail and as soon as possible. I make this request in part because I believe the issue itself is important, and I believe that your effort to sell the program that appears to be the most controversial of your policies amongst those who have neither personal nor professional experience of you will make a difference in the amount and kind of support you get for this and other educational programs. More importantly, though, your willingness to engage in public debate, to explain your philosophy to the nation’s teachers, would create an environment in which you could to win their support because you earned their respect as a thinker and problem-solver. We are used to policy-makers in Washington, D.C. who presume they know better than we do. We are used to policy-makers who see no need for explaining the thinking behind their decisions, because they consider teachers unworthy of time or respect. We are used to authoritarian policy-making that insults our intelligence and our professionalism, that disregards our expertise, and that dismisses our experience. I ask you to begin by speaking up about your more controversial policies because doing so will demonstrate that you do not subscribe to the idea that justification is not required for politicians’ ideas because those ideas are somehow above scrutiny. I ask you to talk to us, because in talking you will change the way educational policy is made in this country.

Sincerely yours, & etc.

Dear Mr. President-Elect Week 3: On No Child Left Behind

Dear Mr. President-Elect Obama:

This week, I offer what will no doubt be the first of many commentaries on No Child Left Behind. This week’s thoughts have been provoked by David Brooks, whose column in Friday’s New York Times (12/5/08) seems to me to typify the attitude among those who have no experience with education towards those of us who have spent our lives working in the field and the significant and widespread problems we face. Mr. Brooks opens his column with this:

“As in many other areas, the biggest education debates are happening within the Democratic Party. On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms.”

Rhetorical problems with that statement abound; primarily, he offers a vastly over-simplified dichotomy suggesting that all Democratic viewpoints can be fairly distilled into these two positions. He does not take the time to explain that the two positions are not mutually exclusive, and so are not dichotomous, and, indeed, it would not suit his purpose to do so. Equally misleading is the lumping together of all people involved in teachers’ unions and members of schools of education, the implication being that all members of teachers’ unions are of one opinion about what should be done to improve education, as are all members of all schools of education. Mr. Brooks would even have it that all members of teachers’ unions and all members of the “Ed School establishment” are of a single mind. If Mr. Brooks is to be believed, there is not a single member of a teacher’s union nor a single member of a school of education who supports either merit pay, charter schools, or tough accountability standards. Mr. Brooks’ most egregious oversimplification is his use of the term “superficial reforms,” which he does not detail. The word “superficial” is deliberately loaded to suggest that those people with whom Mr. Brooks disagrees are not serious thinkers, do not seriously care about education or the students in their care, and are too lazy, foolish and irresponsible to support any initiative that could actually result in substantive improvement in education in America.

Mr. Brooks intended, of course, to write an opinion piece, and he is entitled to his opinion, but opinions carry a great deal more conviction when they rest upon carefully delineated facts and an equally carefully explained line of reasoning. In relying on this collocation of cheap linguistic manipulations to reduce widely varied and complex attitudes to monolithic follies, Mr. Brooks treats a wide range of professionals with a contempt that they do not deserve.

I wish to ask you not to do the same.

The remainder of Brooks’ argument rests on a string of additional unsubstantiated claims: Linda Darling-Hammond promotes “weaker reforms” (no details supplied; no validation of the claim that her positions are “weaker”—not even any specification as to what positions are stronger), for instance. Brooks also makes the sweeping claim that “For the first time in decades, there is real momentum for reform.” He does not provide any evidence of this momentum, nor does he specify what he means by reform, though toward the end of the article, he offers what appears to be his definition:

“No Child Left Behind is about to be reauthorized. Everyone has reservations about that law, but it is the glaring spotlight that reveals and pierces the complacency at mediocre schools. If accountability standards are watered down, as the establishment wants, then real reform will fade.”

I deduce, then, that for Mr. Brooks, “real reform” is synonymous with the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, and that it is, indeed, No Child Left Behind which is responsible for this momentum for reform he wishes to see propogated.

I have worked in education for decades, and I have to say that for many—perhaps even most—of us who work in the field, Brooks’ claim appears to be nothing more than the most fanciful of pipe dreams. Where I go to work every day, in a public high school, we see no sign of a momentum for reform. On the contrary: the people I work with labor under the burden of a fading hope that things will get better that amounts very nearly to despair. Rather than real movement toward improvement, we see, instead, a momentum, spawned by No Child Left Behind, driving public education inexorably toward complete collapse.

Here is just one example of the problems schools are trying to solve as a result of sincere efforts to comply with No Child Left Behind. In order to try to ensure that every student gets every chance to pass the battery of Virginia’s mandatory tests, the Standards of Learning (SOLs), we must implement an extensive program of remediation for students who have failed required tests. That process looks like this: I sat in a meeting for an hour last week during which all the department chairs of our school worked with the administration to try to come up with some plan to provide a large number of seniors who need to pass one or more (in some cases as many as five) of the SOL tests that they need for graduation the opportunity to do so. The problem we were struggling with was trying to come up with a mechanism that would ensure that these students, most of whom have a long history of non-attendance to either school or testing, are actually present for remediation and testing.

One suggestion was to offer a four-day two-hour-a-day after-school academy (for which teachers would not be paid) to provide students with an intensive review in one or two subjects prior to testing. Another suggestion was that we use our daily 40-minute tutoring period to provide review time. The former solution was acknowledged to be problematic, as these are the very students who would not be likely to attend such an academy, as failure to attend during the regular school day is the source of most of their problems to begin with. The latter was acknowledged unlikely to be effective because if the students actually participated, the time would be too short for any real learning to take place. This strategy was tried, furthermore, last year, and we found that students sent passes to attend a test review during the Self-Directed Study period (SDS) chose not to go—took the pass and then wandered the halls—requiring teachers and administrators to hunt them down and escort them to the tutoring session. This naturally used up most or all of the potential review session.

Another suggestion was that we take a week in January during which we would split up all the existing classes, removing from the classroom all those students who do not need to retake tests (sending them off to be supervised by another teacher for the week to do, say, an enrichment project) and keeping all those who do need testing in class for a review. This would have the advantage of not having to chase the students down, since they would, if actually at school, already be in the room, and it would provide longer blocks of time (90 minutes) for remediation than the 40-minute SDS period would allow. But it would have the completely unacceptable disadvantage of effectively halting instruction for a week for the vast majority of students who had already done what they were supposed to do while we concentrated on those who had not. That idea was countered with an idea that teachers could give up their plan periods to tutor these students (again without remuneration for the teachers), which would solve the problem of our tutoring period being too short, but which would reinstate the problem of getting students actually to report to the tutoring room.

None of these seemed satisfactory.

When it was pointed out that all of these solutions require effort and sacrifice on the part of teachers, who would be expending extraordinary effort trying to help these students graduate, while concurrently teaching these students that they do not need to make any extra effort or sacrifice because we will chase them down wherever they are and do our best to make sure that they graduate, we were reminded of the sad fact that given the requirements of No Child Left Behind, we cannot afford to let these students fail, even if that is what they prefer, because we need every passing number we can get in order to retain accreditation. When I pointed out that every one of these short-term solutions, though it may, indeed, scrape us a few more passing scores and keep us barely in the black on the pass/fail budget, feeds the long-term problem, because none of these efforts does anything to teach students what we really want them to learn in order to be successful in life--to be responsible for their own actions and choices--my remarks were met with a sort of bemused silence, as no one has any answer for that problem. The pressure is for us to get X number of students to pass the test, no matter how hard we have to work to get it; there is no pressure to help students actually learn, or mature, or take charge of their own destiny.

Keep in mind that for this particular test retake session we were talking exclusively about seniors who must pass these exams to graduate from high school. When this was pointed out, however, and it was suggested that under those circumstances a requirement that these students attend free after-school tutoring for a week was not an unreasonable expectation, we were again reminded that we can’t let students fail. If neither they nor their parents care enough to put in eight extra hours after school to try to ensure their own graduation, in other words, we have to care enough in their place to find some way to force their attendance and participation in both remediation and testing, even if it means engaging in efforts we don’t believe will succeed and inconveniencing the larger majority of students who chose to cooperate with state and local testing expectations. That these efforts are not necessarily efficacious is demonstrated by the fact that, as one department chairperson told me, of approximately 65 retake tests that were given for her department last year, following a similar massive effort of requiring remediation, approximately 10 students passed. No one bothers, in these circumstances, to point out that even if we are successful at somehow beguiling, forcing, or tricking these students into attending tutoring and testing, we cannot actually force them to learn something, nor can we coerce them to give their very best effort when they do actually take the test.

This meeting went on for another hour after I left to go teach my class, and several department chairs met for nearly two hours again Monday morning, manually going through the lists of students, trying to identify which students might respond to which strategies, and trying to develop a remediation plan that would, in fact, increase those students’ chances. So far, that I know about, that’s approximately 28 hours of adult work time expended on just this one retake session, and that does not count the hours that the testing coordinator and the guidance counselors have spent meticulously going through the records, identifying which students need which exams to graduate and crafting individual graduation plans (with which the students will be presented on Wednesday). Include the tutoring and the actual testing, and we can estimate that approximately 40 adults will invest approximately 100 man hours trying to ensure that students have a chance to pass this test. Keep in mind, further, that this will be one cycle of four times over the course of the year when the whole exercise will be repeated. For each of those cycles, there is an additional make-up period for those who were absent during testing and an additional “expedited retake” cycle so that those students who failed the test during the regular administration will get another immediate chance to try again.

Between SOL regular administrations, make-up administrations, and expedited re-take administrations, Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and college admissions tests, along with the county-mandated benchmark testing (designed to check how well teachers are sticking to pacing guides for SOL preparation) and semester and final exams, we will have standardized testing going on in the building for more than 60 student attendance days this year—just over 1/3 of the school year. Naturally the testing on any given day does not involve every student and teacher, but on the vast majority of days (say, 50), instruction is disrupted in some significant way: the computer labs or library (usually both) are not available for instruction, there is a change to the bell schedule so that some classes don’t meet or some meet for less time than usual, and some or all students are pulled from a large number of classes for testing.

This is what Mr. Brooks wishes to call educational reform, and this is what he vilifies professionals for opposing.

Mr. Brooks is wrong. No Child Left Behind does not represent momentum toward change. It does not reveal and pierce “the complacency at mediocre schools.” While I might be willing to believe, because in a large and varied world most dynamics manifest somewhere, that there are, among the approximately 90,000 public schools in the country, a very small handful in which the mediocrity of the teachers combines with a complacency widespread enough that none—no teacher, no building administrator, no Central Office administrator—cares enough to try to do a better job tomorrow than they are doing today. But I simply do not believe that there are more of those than you could count on one hand, a tiny fraction, in other words, of one percent. Rather, what No Child Left Behind really does spotlight is all those schools which struggle mightily every day to teach children, and do so in a context of a wide array of circumstances many of which are completely beyond the control of those schools. Given that reality, Mr. Brooks’ smug condescension is deeply offensive, particularly coming, as it does, from someone who has never, so far as I was able to ascertain from reading his biography on the New York Times, spent a single day teaching or administering educational programs. He makes uninformed pronouncements about right and wrong, competence and incompetence, passion and indifference, and in so doing, he denigrates literally thousands of decent, hard-working, committed people he never met.

I wish to ask you not to do the same.

I urge you to visit schools and send your team into schools to spend meaningful amounts of time observing classes and talking with those who are out there trying to do the job. I renew my invitation to you to send someone to my school to find out the real effect on instruction of trying to implement No Child Left Behind, and I encourage you most urgently to supply your appointees to the Department of Education with direct and ongoing access to input from qualified practitioners, still active in the field, who really do know, unlike Mr. Brooks, what No Child Left Behind is costing the people of the United States.

Sincerely yours, & etc.

Addendum: When the numbers finally came out, it turned out that there are 88 seniors for whom all those retesting preparations are being made. The total school population is approximately 2000 students.

Dear Mr. President-Elect Week 2: On Teacher Preparation

In response to your request for recommendations and feedback regarding your stated plans for programs to be enacted during your presidency, I offer you the second in my series of reflections on your education platform. This week, I have undertaken to examine in detail the implications of your proposals related to the problem of teacher preparation. Though teacher preparation is undeniably a critical factor in ensuring quality education, and though almost certainly improvements could be made to teacher education, the proposals offered by the Obama-Biden platform, as published on your transition website, have very little chance of effecting substantive improvement either specifically to teacher education or public education in general. Your published platform offers these promises for reforming teacher preparation:

Prepare Teachers: Obama and Biden will require all schools of education to be accredited. Obama and Biden will also create a voluntary national performance assessment so we can be sure that every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively. Obama and Biden will also create Teacher Residency Programs that will supply 30,000 exceptionally well-prepared recruits to high-need schools.

I will address the accreditation and Residency Program recommendations on another occasion. For this week, I would like to consider in detail the assumptions underlying your idea that a voluntary national performance assessment will increase teacher readiness and ensure that every new educator can start teaching effectively from day one of his or her career. Seen in its worst light, this recommendation implies that a significant number of teachers are not being properly prepared for teaching, that schools of education are certifying as prepared teachers who are not, in fact, prepared, and that the problem is widespread enough that there is a need for a mechanism which will set a higher standard of readiness, allow the government to monitor actual achievement, and give government the authority to ensure that the judgment of readiness is not left in the hands of those professional educators who have, evidently, left to their own devices, been operating unreliable teacher education programs. I don’t, in fact, believe that such a level of distrust in teacher education is warranted; however, even assuming that it were, or taking the recommendation in its best possible light, as an effort to standardize all teacher preparation at a minimum high level of readiness, implementation of a national examination to determine teacher efficacy is fraught with problems that render it useless.

Taking in turn four flawed assumptions implied by the recommendation:

Assumption 1: The preparation of teachers to begin teaching effectively day one of their career can and should be accomplished solely within the confines of the programs provided by schools of education.

Such a goal is fruitless, as much of what needs to be learned in order to be a truly effective teacher can only be learned on the job, and your stated intention in another plank of the platform to provide mentoring to beginning teachers acknowledges this. My statement, as much as yours, of course, depends on the definition of “teaching effectively” as envisioned by each of us. I have no idea what your concept of effective teaching from day one entails, other than that you suggest it is something testable in a concrete way. I could, of course, speculate at length about what you consider to be the set of skills and knowledge requisite for effective teaching, but whatever I guessed would be only that, a guess, and as such not very useful for analysis. A detailed understanding of your concept of effective teaching is not really necessary, however, because whatever your beliefs on the subject, your proposed solution stands very little chance of helping solve the problem, for the simple reason that the assessment of teacher readiness is already part of the function of teacher education programs. Assuming that the skills you intend your national assessment to assess are those quantifiable skills related to content area knowledge, knowledge of pedagogical theory and practice, knowledge of state law governing education, and the demonstration of the possession of a battery of teaching strategies that can be employed in a variety of learning situations, then these skills are already thoroughly assessed by colleges of education through a variety of measures: exams, papers, research projects, student teaching evaluations, portfolios, and so on. Unless you do intend to posit that those programs regularly certify, willy-nilly, teachers who have failed those assessments, or unless you posit, instead, that the schools of education are incapable of accurately identifying and assessing those skills, we have nothing to gain by adding an additional layer of assessment before certifying teachers to teach.

If the problem is the former, then it is possible that a test administered by an external agency would, in fact, uncover fraudulent or incompetent certification practices on the part of teacher preparation programs. I find it extremely difficult to believe, however, that the practice of knowingly certifying unqualified teachers is widespread enough to warrant, in and of itself, national systematic testing intended to counteract it; nor do I believe that many or most teacher education programs are ineffectual. If, however, we do, in fact, believe that a significant number of our teacher education programs suffer from entrenched and systematic ethical violations or rampant incompetence, then the solution is not the implementation of an external assessment, but rather a direct action involving those schools to weed out incompetence and fraud, and to rebuild those programs from the inside. In such a case, leaving inadequate programs intact and counting on a test to catch the unready teachers and weed them out would be unconscionable, if only for the massive waste of time, energy, and resources that would occur if we allowed ensuing classes of students to graduate from mediocre or bad programs, knowing that the test will eventually prove them to be unprepared and thus consign them either back to school or on to another profession.

Frankly, I believe the proposition is absurd. I believe that, just as in our public schools the vast majority of teachers are doing their level best to deliver quality education, in the vast majority of our teacher preparation programs the professors are struggling mightily to ensure that every student learns content, masters skills, and dedicates him or herself to doing a good job. A barrier test will not resolve or eliminate the problems that keep teacher preparation programs from being able to accomplish those goals.

If the problem is not rampant fraud, but rather a matter of the difficulty of determining the degree to which any given teacher candidate has mastered the skills needed to be an effective teacher, then the likelihood of a national test-making agency’s being able to accomplish, working outside of the educational system, what colleges of education have failed to accomplish in the centuries of their existence, seems very small.

If, on the other hand, the set of skills you envision are NOT those skills already being purveyed and assessed by teacher preparation programs, if, instead, the skills you are talking about are those more nebulous abilities to manage classrooms, to establish working relationships with students, and to motivate, then those skills are not likely to be measurable in any quantifiable assessment such as the sort of thing that might be implemented as a national test, which leads me to the next assumption that underlies this proposed solution to our problems of public education:

Assumption 2: We can define and quantify the concept of “effective” teaching sufficiently well that “effectiveness” can be assessed by a concrete assessment.

While there is certainly an identifiable set of skills and knowledge necessary for a teacher to be effective and which should be mastered prior to entering the classroom, truly effective teaching requires a whole complex of abilities derived from experience that cannot be developed by the time a teacher starts teaching—at least not within the existing time frame for teacher preparation. As an English teacher, for instance, I must certainly be able to write well, to interpret literature with insight, and to use language precisely. I must know a considerable amount of content in terms of literary theory, grammatical terminology and function, baseline familiarity with plot, theme, and historical significance of a range of works of literature from a variety of cultures and time periods, and so on. I must also have knowledge of pedagogy for teaching writing and the reading of literature: use of writing workshops, current theory on writing process, strategies for revision, application of narrative theory, critical thinking development, pre-reading strategies, structure of analysis, and so on. I must also have some knowledge of strategies for managing a classroom—effective seating arrangements, strategies for dealing with difficult and non-compliant students, strategies for diffusing confrontation, strategies for communicating with parents and so on. Another set of skills and knowledge involves understanding of legal obligations regarding Special Education students, students with particular health problems, sexual harassment, and child abuse. These skills can be assessed via any of a variety of instruments.

One difficulty, however, for anyone trying to create such an instrument to use as a national assessment of teaching readiness, is determining how much knowledge of this type anyone needs in order to be “effective” from the beginning of his or her career. Another is trying to determine exactly which set of facts, theories, skills and so on are needed. Do I need to know all of Shakespeare’s plays? Or just those I am likely to have to teach? Do I need to know The Canterbury Tales? The Odyssey? The poetry of Derek Walcott, a Caribbean writer who won the Nobel Prize in 1992? The collected works of Richard Powers, the 2006 National Book Award winner? If I know the six steps of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, is that sufficient, or do I need a working knowledge of a critical thinking framework, such as that provided by the Foundation for Critical Thinking, so that I can implement critical thinking strategies as an active part of instruction and assessment? Can I teach effectively right from the start if I am familiar with Cooperative Learning but not with Howard Gardiner’s Multiple Intelligences? In part, the answers to these questions will depend upon what my teaching assignment for that first day actually turns out to be: if I get assigned to teach British Literature, then Shakespeare is more important than Powers, and if I get assigned to a 9^th grade genre study course, then knowledge of the Freytag model of plot structure is likely to be more important than knowledge of the sympathetic, supernatural, and actant functions of setting.

The difficulties of determining which of these skills are necessary for which teachers are legion; a fact which is not suggested by the simplistic statement on the platform.

Assumption 3: A national one-size-fits-all assessment can be designed that will effectively identify those teachers who are ready to be effective from day one and those who are not.

I have shown that the idea that we can develop a single test to ascertain readiness to teach in the whole range of possible teaching assignments is a flawed proposition right from the start; thus, any national assessment would actually have to be a range of assessments, each one designed for a specific working situation—elementary school, high school math, middle school science, and so on. New versions of each test would have to be developed and tested every year, so that test security is not compromised. Implementing a national assessment for teaching readiness would not, therefore, be a matter of a one-time developmental process, but rather the creation of an industry that would be able to develop, field test, administer, and score the assessments on an ongoing basis. The proposed project would actually require something on the scale of an entire new division of the Educational Testing Service.

Those problems of identification and scale are only exacerbated when we try to add to the calculation the less quantifiable skills I mentioned above. Truly effective teaching requires an ability to assert one’s authority without being repressive. Truly effective teaching requires an ability to make accurate assessments about the legitimacy of student complaints, so that one can determine whether one’s requirements are, indeed, unreasonable in some way, or whether, contrariwise, the students’ objections are a sign that the demands being made on them are appropriate, and generating complaints because the students have been pushed out of their comfort zone and into the arena of real learning, which is always difficult and which most students will naturally resist because it’s hard. Truly effective teaching requires a pretty thorough understanding of human psychology, so that the teacher can read her students’ behavior and determine whether the student’s failure to perform is due to a home situation, a learning disability, a lack of understanding about what is required, ineffective preparation from previous classes, or one of any number of other possible causes, so that some determination can be made as to whether a given student will respond better to pushing or to coaxing, to cooperation or to competition, or whether the student needs help from a school psychologist, social worker, or other professional to resolve significant extra-curricular problems before learning can begin to take place.

Truly effective teaching requires that the teacher be alert, insightful, hard-working, endlessly patient, imaginative, patient enough to repeat herself over and over, self-confident enough to be able to put student learning ahead of her own desire to be liked, and the ability to admit when she is wrong so that she can start over again with a new strategy. Students know instantly when a teacher tries to scam them into believing that the teacher knows something she doesn’t actually know, or when the teacher asks her students to do something that she can’t or won’t do herself. A teacher who has shown herself a fraud has no influence on students, regardless of whether she can articulate a cerebral knowledge of facts, figures, theories, and strategies. These personal skills develop over time and only in the context in which they are needed.

This reality is reflected in the existing exemplary model for assessing mastery of the wide range of skills needed for teaching: National Board Certification. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has already developed sophisticated and broad standards for teacher excellence, and they have implemented a complex assessment procedure to determine which teachers have met those standards. The assessment of effectiveness takes the best part of a year, and involves a range of assessment instruments, including written analyses with supporting documentation of claims, video taped lessons with accompanying analysis, and timed written content examinations. Research has substantiated the correlation between teachers who earn National Board Certification and student achievement; thus, the National Board assessments already function as a successful means of identifying those teachers who are most likely to be effective in the classroom. The NBPTS has implicitly acknowledged that teachers require significant time to learn to function effectively in the classroom before they can possibly establish themselves as master teachers, and teachers are not permitted to undertake these exams until they have taught for three years.

We might extrapolate, then, that if we want to use a sophisticated system similar to the National Board Certification process in order to ensure a high level of teacher effectiveness before the teacher enters the classroom, we must add a three-year full-time apprenticeship to the teacher preparation program. Since the stated objective in the platform is that all teachers are effective from the beginning of their career, then it follows that we would not charge these teachers with full responsibility for a classroom until the end of the three-year apprenticeship, which means that we must pay for a master teacher to bear the full responsibility of the education of the students in the apprentice classrooms. Requiring teachers-in-preparation to extend their education an additional three years, postponing the attainment of full professional status and authority, and possibly even postponing marriage and family until full independence is achieved, would necessitate a correspondent increase in salary. If we are going to demand of teachers the same level of professional preparation and qualification as we demand of doctors, for instance, we must pay them the same as well.

If we are unprepared to do that, and if we cannot expect teachers in preparation to achieve mastery of their craft prior to beginning their teaching career, and I do not see how such an expectation is even remotely reasonable, then we must acknowledge that “effective” teaching happens at a level somewhere below “mastery.” This of course means that we can absolve ourselves of the problems of trying to develop a national assessment that will have the capacity to determine whether prospective teachers have developed these skills to the level that will allow us to call them “masters” from the beginning of their careers, but it also means that we must define “effectiveness,” so far as this recovery strategy is concerned, to mean something less than truly effective, and settle for subject area and pedagogical competency, all of which takes us back to the original point that an additional assessment can provide nothing but the appearance of an effort to raise standards; it cannot in and of itself actually ensure substantive improvement in teacher readiness.

Assumption 4: Since the proposed assessment is voluntary, but the goal is to ensure that “every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively,” the assumption is that all teacher candidates will voluntarily participate in the assessment.

Widespread participation in a voluntary assessment might be presumed to occur only if successful completion of the assessment carries with it substantive reward, or if the assessment becomes so powerful that failure to take it, or failure to pass it, becomes a barrier to getting hired. In the former case, we have again the model of National Board Certification as a guide to predicting the likelihood of that happening. In my state, for example, the monetary incentive for achieving National Board Certification is substantial: $30,000 over the ten-year life of the certificate. Despite this, only a relatively small percentage of teachers has so far volunteered to undertake the certification process. As of the 2007-08 school year, for example, 412 Virginia teachers have earned National Board Certification. There are approximately 90,000 full-time teachers in Virginia, so only about half a percent of teachers have earned National Board Certification. Since approximately half of those attempting NBC earn it, we can estimate that approximately 1% of teachers in Virginia have attempted National Board Certification (NBC). The percentage would be higher if we consider those actually eligible, by virtue of having taught for at least three years; nevertheless, it is clear that the cadre of willing participants is small. This is in part due to the cost, which is significant, $2565, and which often must be paid by the candidate.

Taking the NBC model as an indicator, we can forecast that a similarly small percentage of prospective teachers will voluntarily undergo an assessment of their skills, even with the promise of financial reward for achievement at certain levels. This would be true unless the national teacher readiness assessment acquires sufficient prestige that teachers who haven’t taken it cannot get hired. In that case, however, the assessment would be de facto a mandatory assessment, and calling it voluntary would be merely disingenuous. A proposition to implement a mandatory national teacher assessment would bring with it a whole different set of assumptions and problems, none of which it is my intention to address at this time, since such a proposal has not been made.

A claim that the implementation of a national assessment of teaching qualification can ensure that all teachers are effective from their first day on the job is at best an overly simplistic representation of the real situation. My questions for you, therefore, are:

• What skills do you expect teachers to have developed by day one that will qualify them as “effective” right from the beginning?
• What will this assessment need to comprise in order to assess the qualities that you named above? Can those skills be demonstrated in a written test? Or will the assessment need to include a variety of activities in other formats?
• If the test is not merely a written test, but rather includes a demonstration of skills in some format (video-taped lessons, portfolio of lesson plans, interview with teacher candidates, direct observation of candidates and so on), who will develop the standards of assessment, identify and train the examiners, and certify consistent application of those standards to the assessment?
• How will this assessment be scored? Who will score it? Will the judgment of readiness be left to the individual teacher preparation programs which have a stake in finding that their students are qualified? Or will there be some sort of independent body that develops, administers and scores the assessment to ensure lack of bias?
• What will be the effect of the implementation of such an examining system? If it is rigorous enough to ensure actual accomplishment, what percentage of those undertaking it are likely to fail?
• What potential is there for the test actually reducing the number of qualified teachers rather than increasing it? If that potential is realized, what other solutions will be enacted to ensure that a more qualified set of candidates undertakes teacher education so that sufficient people DO pass the test that we can keep our schools supplied with the teachers they need?
• What will the program cost, both for development and implementation of the testing and to the candidates themselves? Who will pay those costs? Is the problem the solution is designed to solve significant enough to warrant that cost?

As described above, we could probably develop a whole series of national tests that would accurately identify whether prospective teachers have developed a set of minimal competencies; however, as we have seen with schools’ efforts to prepare students for minimum competency testing in their efforts to comply with NCLB, when a minimum competency test becomes the driving force in any educational program, it becomes the focus of that program and so, in effect, it becomes the maximum standard of achievement for that program. If we impose a national standards assessment for all teachers and that assessment proves to have the kind of accountability teeth that one assumes you intend it to have, that test will also become the target toward which all teacher preparation programs aim. Since the assessment must be general enough to account for the baseline needs of a variety of educational situations, it will necessarily not reflect nuanced or sophisticated knowledge or skills, which may very well mean that we will find that although we are able to identify teachers who do and do not meet those minimum competencies, we not only do not identify those who can vastly surpass that minimum level, but we will also effectively discourage teacher preparation programs from expending energy on pushing students to develop more specialized and complex skill sets, because the stake in ensuring that their candidates passed that national test would be extremely high.

Implementation of a voluntary national teaching readiness assessment would amount to implementation of a process that mirrors the NCLB requirements for students. The thinking is the same: there is a set of identifiable skills in every arena that can be tested through a single assessment (or a series thereof), and passage of that assessment (or the series) will ensure that the person taking the test has mastered all the skills needed in order to function effectively in the next phase of one’s academic or professional career. The only difference is that you are calling your teacher assessment voluntary, while the student assessments, such as the Virginia Standards of Learning (aptly and ironically known as the SOLs), are mandatory. Even that won’t save the program from sinking under the unwieldy burden of all the same problems students and schools struggle with as a result of the de facto reduction of all schooling into the items on the test; if the assessment you envision is significant enough to force change, it will represent very high stakes for all teacher preparation programs, which will, inevitably, reshape their programs so that their students can pass the test, and the test will in turn inevitably become the driving force for teacher preparation in this country, just as state testing programs under NCLB have become the driving force of public education. No test is sufficient for such a burden.

This point of your education platform dealing with teacher preparation is particularly disappointing in that it compresses of a massively complex undertaking into a statement that glibly suggests that a simple solution awaits. The recommendation appears to be the result of insufficient thoughtful consideration of insufficient information. You and your transition team have garnered much praise for the Obama administration appointments you have made so far. One main reason for the high praise is that, unlike your predecessor, you are making for yourself a reputation of not wanting yes-men, of preferring, instead, to surround yourself with people who will offer you insights and information that you do not already have, so that you can make better informed decisions. I would like to urge you to take care to do the same in your appointments to the Department of Education. Choose, among your appointees, people who do not see the problem of education in this country in the same simplistic light as those who advised you on the development of the education platform for your campaign appear to have done. Choose people who will help you see where your assumptions and understanding are insufficient, and who can, therefore, help you to develop improvements to our educational system that will result in lasting and substantive change.

My letters to you regarding your education platform are published weekly on my blog, and can be read in their entirety there (http://my2sense2008.blogspot.com/).

Respectfully yours & etc.

Dear Mr. President-Elect Obama

I am writing in response to your Weekly Address from November 21.  While I very much appreciate your willingness to communicate your ideas and plans to your constituency, and to solicit the same from us, I must object strenuously to your thoughtless use of language that vilifies schools and promotes the already-destructive but largely unacknowledged societal belief that the full responsibility for ensuring that students get a thorough, wide-ranging, world-class education belongs to schools.  When you use a phrase such as:  “…schools that are failing our children,” as you did in this week’s address, you imply that it is schools which are to solely blame for all the problems of contemporary education.  While there is no doubt that there is much to be improved and corrected within the public school system itself, and while no one rational would argue that every school and every teacher is exemplary, to carelessly suggest that all we have to do is fix what’s wrong inside the system and the problem will be solved is not only offensive to the many thousands of dedicated, qualified, and skilled educators who are breaking their hearts trying to educate children, it is also grossly misleading, and sets up a dangerous expectation in the public mind that no one outside the system needs to change or sacrifice or offer service in the effort to raise the level of excellence of public education to the level where all of us would like it to be.

 

Your choice of phrasing beats a popular drum, and no doubt it plays well with many people, most of them outside of education, who want for our schools to be better, and who know virtually nothing about what the problem really is, but it indicates a quite astonishingly superficial attention to nuance on your part, and suggests that you, too, are as much in ignorance of the real situation in schools as the vast majority of the population is. 

 

I have read your plan for improving education in the United States (at least I have read what is available on your website, Change.gov), and the seventeen-point platform suggests to me that you and your advisors are operating within the commonly accepted framework that the people inside of education are so incompetent that only people outside of education are qualified to make suggestions and offer solutions.  The seventeen points taken together imply a commitment to the idea that we can patch up the schools by improving teachers and offering more—more teachers, more programs, more resources.  Certainly those things are needed, but they will fail to solve the problem unless we also address the cultural ills that make it profoundly difficult for even the best qualified and most dedicated teachers to make significant inroads into the lack of preparedness and the lack of public and parental support that drags down student achievement.  The solutions your team has come up with are commonplace.  They would no doubt work to some degree in some situations and make some relatively small difference for some relatively short period of time; but all seventeen of the recommendations offered are designed to treat symptoms, rather than to cure the disease itself, and just as pain-killers won’t cure a broken arm, strategies that fail to eradicate the underlying structural failure in American cultural attitudes toward education will provide only temporary respite.

 

I will be writing a series of columns for my blog over the next few weeks addressing some of your other recommendations, one at a time, but, as an example of what I mean by suggesting that your proposals will prove to be only minimally efficacious, I will elucidate just one point from your education platform:

 

Retain Teachers: To support our teachers, the Obama-Biden plan will expand mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new recruits. They will also provide incentives to give teachers paid common planning time so they can collaborate to share best practices.

 

The two concrete suggestions provided, providing mentors for new recruits and providing shared plan time are both specifically and solely directed at helping less knowledgeable and less skilled teachers learn from others who are presumably more knowledgeable and more skilled.  These programs sound quite reasonable, but could make a substantive difference in teacher retention ONLY if a number of unstated assumptions are true.  I will examine three key, and flawed, assumptions:

 

Assumption One:  The people who are choosing to go into teaching are people who will willingly and gladly accept mentoring from other teachers.

 

Some of the young people going into teaching are smart, highly motivated, unselfconscious people willing and eager to learn as much as they can from older, more experienced teachers.  A distressing reality, however, is that many young teachers despise older teachers, disregard their experience, and consider themselves to be possessed of superior skills to those of teachers who have been in the profession a long while.  This is due in part to the fact that the tenure system does, in fact, protect all tenured teachers from being fired, which means that it inevitably protects some incompetent teachers.  Human nature being what it is, bad news makes for a better story than good, and so the whole of the teaching profession is tarnished by this fact.  Attitudes of all those from the outside—including young teachers who have just come into the profession—are formed on the false impression that tenure has corrupted teaching, that bad teaching is rampant and ineradicable, and that any teacher who has been around for a long time must be lazy, jaded, burnt out, and, therefore, a bad role model.  It is perhaps surprising, but quite a few young teachers look down on older teachers, and when assigned a mentor, tolerate that person’s advice as a necessary evil, rather than learning from it. 

 

Another factor that contributes to the failure of mentoring systems is that many teachers fear any suggestion that they are not competent enough; thus, highly qualified teachers—those who have National Board Certification or other professional accomplishments, for instance—are often, sadly, resented rather than revered. That dynamic has been dramatically exacerbated in recent years with the rise of high-stakes testing and publication of student scores attached to the name of the last teacher who taught those students before the test.  It might seem logical that in such a situation teachers with students who tend to make lower scores might be eager to learn from teachers with higher scores, but what happens in reality, especially because teachers with low scores so often—and often rightly so—feel themselves powerless to make rapid substantive change, is a familiar syndrome to anyone who went through public school:  the smart people are blamed for ruining the curve, and so are resented and avoided. 

 

A third factor that contributes to the presumption that teaching ability has nothing to do with learned skills is that increases in teacher pay are almost exclusively due to longevity.  Inherent in this system is the unstated assumption that all teachers are equally qualified, talented, and effective, and thus deserve identical pay, differentiated only by seniority.  This is an insidious foolishness that suggests to inexperienced teachers that they have no reason to think that they can benefit from the leadership or expertise of older teachers.  Indeed, a common cultural perception is that the young teachers, just out of college, are the cadre possessed of the most modern, effective techniques, while the older, experienced teachers, long out of training programs, are wedded to antiquated ideas and strategies which may once have been effective but which should now be jettisoned.  The unspoken assumption that there is nothing to be learned by actually working with students, so that teachers simply stagnate once they enter the classroom, also works against any automatic, open, and willing acceptance of mentoring.

 

Mentoring, under these conditions, tends to devolve into a sort of helpful-neighbor model, in which the mentor serves as a guide through the logistical morass of the year, showing the new teacher how to negotiate logging into the grading system, filling out forms, and implementing various logistical policies of the particular school. 

 

Certainly, better models are out there, and I imagine that you and your team envision that your plan will focus on those longer-term, more substantive peer-coaching systems, such as that promoted by San Jose State University, but even those can only work if we can overcome all of the prejudices I detailed above, and, if we do, there is yet one more problem to be dealt with:  learning to be a better teacher requires the capacity and the self-confidence for self-reflection.  Some people have that as a natural feature of their personalities; some people apparently do not.  Those who do not have it do not learn from mentors or peer groups.  Very often it is the youngest, least experienced teachers who lack that capacity; paradoxically, self-reflection is a skill that tends to develop alongside self-confidence, which means that often the people most responsive to mentoring and peer coaching are those who can offer a certain amount of expertise in return.  It’s a lot easier to accept criticism in one area when one knows that one can excel in another.  This means that very often mentoring and peer coaching have the best chance of succeeding when they are enacted over long periods of time and not just for a single school year, or when teachers with some years’ experience have a chance to engage in peer coaching.  Since we lose approximately half of all teachers within the first five years, many people leave the profession before they have the opportunity to develop the very skills that would make them best able to benefit in lasting and substantive ways from the kinds of programs this particular point of the plan promises to implement.

 

In order for mentoring and peer coaching programs to function in the way that one might imagine they could, there needs to be a significant change in the cultural attitude toward experienced teachers.  Young teachers need to be trained with an expectation that they will find, when they enter the work place, people from whom they can and should learn.

 

Assumption Two:  There are enough skilled teachers willing and able to serve as mentors.

 

Teaching new teachers to respect the wisdom of their more experienced colleagues can only work if there are, in fact, significantly more wise and effective experienced colleagues than there are jaded, burned out, and ineffective ones.  Given the difficulty in hiring and keeping qualified teachers, this is not necessarily so in every school, and is the least likely to be so in the schools most desperately in need of systematic efforts to improve instruction.  The shortage of highly qualified math and science teachers in the United States has been a problem long enough to be common knowledge; what is less well known is that the teacher shortage has expanded dramatically to all areas, including English, which used to be overrun with people looking for work.  In 1988, when I applied for a job in suburban St. Louis, there were more than forty applicants for one position.  This past year, we hired several provisionally licensed English teachers at our school in suburban Richmond because there were simply not enough applicants who were fully licensed to fill the empty slots in the region. 

 

I recently read an opinion piece that claims that the real blame for the apparently growing proliferation of incompetent or unskilled or unqualified teachers lies at the doorstep of principals, rather than unions, because principals are the people who first hire and then fail to fire those incompetent teachers before they earn tenure.  There is a certain legitimacy to that point; I have seen an administrator grant tenure to a blatantly incompetent teacher because the administrator simply lacked the gumption necessary for whatever confrontation would be involved in releasing her, but far and away the most common reason that unlicensed, provisionally licensed, untrained, incompetent, or mediocre teachers are hired and retained is that principals do not have the option of not hiring someone.  The students will come to school whether the school is fully staffed or not; schools can’t cancel classes and send students home because they don’t have enough teachers.  Principals hold out as long as they can, hoping that a highly qualified, experienced, and energetic teacher will walk through the door, and sometimes they are lucky and one does.  But when they are not lucky, they ultimately hire the person who does walk through the door, prepared and qualified or not. 

 

Assumption Three:  The primary—if not the only—reason for high teacher turnover and attrition is lack of skill. 

 

The teachers most likely to leave the profession, in fact, are not, in my experience, the unskilled, ineffective ones.  Teachers who are ineffective tend to be ineffective because they are unknowledgeable, unskilled, and unreflective.  They are, in short, content with their ineffectiveness.  Highly motivated teachers, those who want most badly to do a good job, who evaluate themselves ruthlessly, who try new strategies, and who hold themselves to the highest standards of performance are the ones who ultimately, and often rapidly, reach a level of intolerable frustration which drives them out of education.  These teachers know they are not doing a good job, they know themselves powerless to change many of the forces which keep them from doing a good job, they can’t live with their own failure, for which they are inclined to take too much credit, and so they leave.

 

The whole system, then, spirals downward.  The more qualified teachers who leave, the fewer there are to serve as mentors.  The fewer there are to serve as mentors and role-models, the harder it is for beginning teachers to develop into skilled teachers, the less likely they are to want or be able to learn from those who have been there longer, and the more likely they are to leave. The more teachers who leave, the more desperate schools are for warm bodies to provide supervision for the students who turn up, and the more likely they are to settle for unqualified people.

 

Simply providing money to pay for more mentors and shared planning time will not fix the underlying problem of the fact that the working conditions and the lack of professional pay ensure that the most hard-working, talented, educated, determined, and self-reflective people choose other professions.

 

I offer myself as an expert of a sort in identifying contributing factors of educational failure because I have more than 20 years’ experience as a teacher in public schools in three different states.  I have taught in a high school that is frequently ranked among the best in the country, but I have spent most of my career teaching in schools that typify the problems so often bemoaned in the press.  I am currently in my fourteenth year of teaching at an almost-urban school just outside of Richmond, Virginia.  We are a county school, rather than a city school, but we have many features of an inner city school.  My school can provide you with a unique look at the potential for the success of some of your suggestions, as, like a city school, we have a population of students comprising a wide range of diverse features along many continua:  race, nationality, language facility, income, motivation, academic preparation, and aspirations. 

 

The largest segment of our student body of nearly 2000 students is African American; the second-largest segment is Hispanic, and the third-largest is white.  Most of our students come from lower middle class families; many come from single-parent families and/or families where the parent(s) must work more than one job.  We have a large population of immigrant students, and though the number varies a bit from year to year, our student body includes speakers roughly 50 different native languages.  We have a faculty which has suffered from high turnover during the past eight years; in the past two, roughly 40% of the faculty is new.  The English department, in which I teach, has seven new teachers this year—roughly half the staff.  Some of those are provisionally licensed; many are in their first year of teaching.  Administration has been no more stable than the teaching staff; we’ve had approximately 38 different administrators on staff in the past ten years.  Our current administration includes a first-year principal, one assistant principal who is new to the building (though experienced elsewhere), and the remaining administrators are in their second year.

 

Despite all that, most of the teachers and administrators in our building mean nothing but good and are working extremely hard to do everything that is asked of them.  We have implemented a wide range of programs in an effort to meet the needs of the wide range of students.  We have the county’s largest Special Education program, the county’s first and now largest English as a Second Language program, the county’s first JROTC program, both the International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement programs, and a dual enrollment program in association with the local junior college.  We send students to a county Technical Center which offers a variety of programs ranging from Auto Mechanics to Cosmetology to Pre-Veterinary preparation.  We offer online courses, night school, and daily structured tutoring built into the school day so that students who have no means of transportation other than the school bus can get extra help without having to stay after school.

 

We have a Chemistry teacher who comes back every Thursday night to tutor students in AP Chemistry, because those students lack the proper knowledge base to handle the course.  She does this without additional pay, and she provides the students with dinner paid for out of her own pocket.  She will also run a series of Saturday workshops for students to do labs that cannot be completed during the time allotted during the school day.  We have a media teacher who stays at school until late into the evening at least four days a week and who often comes back on one of the weekend days to allow students access to our video editing equipment, so that she can help these students produce work that is of exemplary quality, work which ultimately becomes a portfolio that will provide the students with entrée to top quality programs in the field of communication.  We have three National Board Certified Teachers on staff (we used to have five), and we have at least three county Teachers of the Year (there are 58 buildings in our county), two of whom have also been Regional Teachers of the Year.  Our Director of School Counselors spends an inordinate amount of time and effort arranging for test preparation academies on Saturdays to help students who have repeatedly failed our state mandated tests (those that fulfill the NCLB requirement) to remediate enough to pass those tests and graduate. 

 

I could go on for some time with more examples.

Despite those efforts and others like them, our school is perpetually on the verge of losing accreditation, and we have failed to meet the standard for Adequate Yearly Progress as outlined in NCLB for several straight years.   

 

I am sure we have some teachers who don’t know their subject area well enough.  I am sure we have some teachers who aren’t willing to do “whatever it takes,” as our current school motto runs.  I am sure we have some problems due to lack of books, maps, equipment, and other resources.  But those alone do not keep our school from being a mostly spectacularly successful school.  Along with whatever failings it is fair to lay at our door as professionals and as a professional organization, we struggle with the failings of a community that does not value education enough and which does not see itself as owning any of the responsibility for ensuring that the children of that community learn.  We have an absurd number of young men, for example, who cannot carry books and pencils to class because they need both hands to hold onto their pants, which they wear several sizes too large and which, if they do not hang onto them, would fall literally to the floor.  We have a significant number of students who miss more than 40 days of school each year.  Forty days is eight weeks—nearly ¼ of the school year.  We have parents who come up and berate administrators for taking away their children’s cell phone, regardless of the fact that the children were talking on those phones in the hallways or bathrooms rather than sitting in class where they were supposed to be.  Among the most common reasons for a parent phone call to me is the complaint that I’m too demanding and that the student’s grades are too low because my expectations are unreasonable.

 

I had a parent last year come to school demanding that her son be called away from his Advanced Placement exam so that he could go home and babysit his younger sister.  I had a parent several years ago who, when confronted with the fact that his sixteen-year-old son could not read, requested to allow testing for eligibility for special education services, and asked to move his son to a different English class for other students who were working well below grade level, told us that his son was old enough to decide for himself what education he wanted, and since the boy wanted to stay where he was, that was what would happen.  The boy finished the year having earned something like 12% of the possible points.  I had another student who was suspended for some infraction outside of my class.  When told he could not return until his grandmother, the boy’s legal guardian, came to school for a conference, the grandmother informed the principal that she would come in two weeks, after her regular appointment with her hair stylist, because she simply does not go out in public without her hair done.  I’ve had a parent tell me that she can’t keep her son from playing video games all night long, even though it means that he sleeps in almost every class during the day.  We had a mother call a guidance counselor demanding that the counselor come make her daughter go to school because the daughter had locked herself in her bedroom and wouldn’t come out.  We had a teacher resign this year after a student, angry at having been referred to the administrator for disciplinary action, returned to the classroom and punched the teacher in the face.  We routinely have students call teachers foul names, throw things in anger in classrooms, and flatly refuse to comply with teacher instructions on the grounds that “You can’t tell me what to do.”  A discouraging number of these students have parents who come roaring down to the principal demanding that their child’s rights have been violated because the child was suspended for school for any number of infractions from fighting to profane insubordination.  We have been instructed never to lay a hand on a student because we’re open to lawsuits by students and parents who will misrepresent a hand on an arm to get a child’s attention as an assault.  Parents sometimes turn up to meetings with principals with their lawyers in tow. 

 

These parents and students have already internalized the Bush educational doctrine, as embodied in NCLB:  schools, and only schools, are responsible for educating children, and they are expected to accomplish that despite any obstacle that families and society put in the way.  Schools are regularly excoriated for their inability to do so, and when you add your powerfully influential voice to the chorus of those blaming schools for the failure of education in this country, you give permission for all Americans to continue excoriating educators for failings that are not all their fault.

 

I challenge you to abandon the glib patter that arises from lack of real, detailed, nuanced knowledge.  I do not, however, ask you to take my word about the false reality implied by your seventeen-point education platform.  Instead, I ask you to send your team to find out first-hand what goes on in public schools, rather than relying solely on faceless reports and numbers.  Reports and numbers may be accurate in a purely technical sense, but they fail utterly to convey any sense of why those numbers are what they are.  That is true both of numbers that suggest the scope of problems and studies that suggest certain solutions.  Unless you know the underlying causes, you can’t know why solutions work, which means you also cannot know that they will only work under certain conditions.  I am telling you what many thousand other teachers working in situations similar to mine will tell you:  your solutions will not work in my situation, because the social and situational forces that might make those solutions functional do not exist in my situation, and unless and until we have solutions that will create the requisite social and situational forces, we cannot count on those solutions for any substantive improvement. 

 

I ask you, therefore, to find out what the reports and numbers do not reveal.  You cannot come yourself, without altering the climate of the building too much for reliable information, so I ask you to send someone to substitute in my school for two days to find out what it’s like to try to work with the students who come through our door every day, and then have a team of three or four visit for another week, meeting with staff members, talking with teachers, parents, students, and administrators, and observe for yourself what the real challenges are, without the preconception that the primary problem is as simple as teachers who don’t know what they are doing so that more training and more resources alone will solve the problem. Come yourself at the end and meet some of the people you claimed yesterday are “failing our children.”  Our situation means that we face many of the most difficult challenges schools face, but it also means that we do it in a context in which we have more resources than many of the most severely disadvantaged city schools have.  Seeing how much we are able—or unable—to accomplish under fairly good conditions will give you some idea of why simplistic solutions will not work.

 

Regardless of whether you are willing or able to engage in this kind of first-hand research, I ask you to consider what I have said and, in the absence of corroborating evidence, hold off, until you can learn more, on using language which promotes and validates ill-informed public attitudes toward education which are already far too widespread, and which only work against any effort on the part of educators to solve the problems with which they are faced.

 

I thank you for your kind attention to this matter.

Note: I must apologize for the week-long hiatus, as it hardly counts as "Weekly Words" when I skip a week; I bit off rather more than I could chew with all I have to say about Mr. Obama's education plan, and until he provided a focus for discussion with yesterday's Weekly Address, I had begun my posting three different times, only to find that I was getting nowhere in trying to sort it all out. This posting is a copy of the letter I sent to Mr. Obama and his transition team in response to his request for feedback.

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