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
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
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
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
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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