When I look back on the educational process that developed my intellect I am amazed that I did not learn more. I cannot think of one teacher that I had that did not have the capacity to teach me more. Of course the ignorance that precedes knowledge at any level leaves an avenue prepared for celebration and adulation over the fulfillment of new found knowledge. I am sure it is a brain chemistry thing like the binging of the cash register every time a sale is rung up. I do not think I ever recall feeling melancholy or angry over adding the least knowledge to my repertoire. I never demanded that a teacher take it back, that I did not want their knowledge. In today’s education reform efforts however I am filled with angst and tribulation for the young learners as I see their excitement peaked as a conditioned response to a minimalistic advancement of their intellect. In short, America has chosen to create a large undereducated working class of people by not raising the bar but lowering it and indoctrinating students with a new goal to pass closely under it and never above it. America will never again be the world leader in intellect and following that many of the comforts we enjoy as citizens will begin to slip from our grasp as well without a significantly different style of education reform.
On September 11, 1973, in Chile, a powerful dictator named Pinochet overthrew the government in a coup. Among the enactments to secure his hold on the country was to utilize soccer stadiums as detainment centers for anyone he thought might be a political dissenter to his regime. Thousands of educators, and students between the ages of 17 and 35, were specifically targeted, gathered and taken to these centers where they were held indefinitely without proper sanitation or necessary provisions. Many of them succumbed to the conditions and many more were just never heard from again by their families and friends. Pinochet’s intent was to wipe out the possibility of development of intellectual ideas that might be in opposition to his own beliefs. The entire event was watched by the world on television. Yet no other nation stepped in and defended against the atrocious human rights violation occurring. Thousands of teachers and students alike were murdered to increase the probability of success of a new political design in which new expectations of subservience and ignorance were desired for a more manageable population.
The international audience again witnessed another event in China as government military armored tanks rolled over and crushed to death, as well as killed by use of other ordinances, hundreds to thousands of student protestors on June 4, 1989 in what has become known at the June 4th incident or perhaps more appropriately the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Exact numbers of casualties are not known due to the media control in China. This is another example of how a powerful leader, Premier Li Peng, used force to dissuade popular liberal reformers from questioning the resolve of the deeply entrenched communist party.
Many of the great philosophers of old were ultimately put to death by rulers whose grasp on their kingdom was brought into question by new ideas of the free thinkers. Thankfully the advent of the Guttenberg Press began to make knowledge available to the masses in their native languages. The Age of Enlightenment was possible because all people could now lean and elevate themselves for a better life. The Age of Enlightenment brought an end to the oppression of the ignorant by the mighty and religious tyranny by the Inquisition of the Holy Roman Church. Of course, not all societies developed as free or democratic societies and neither did all societies develop as wealthy or powerful centers of commerce or strategic importance. Through the development of the western civilized world The United Sates of America emerged as the world leader in all categories by the middle of the twentieth century. The United States of America became the world leader economically and intellectually and retained that position by giving to the rest of the world, not taking, until within the last two decades. In these past twenty years the United States has slowly deteriorated economically and intellectually to nearly rock bottom when compared to the top 32 developed nations. One thing is certain. Our intellectual growth was directly precipitous of our world superiority. Without enlightened individuals working in a free society The United States could not have been responsible for the advances in economics, agriculture, medical research and many other areas that have brought food, shelter, military support and medical aid to millions of people worldwide.
Somehow in the last twenty years The United States has lost her compass and begun to drift far off course. Most curious is why no one realized that a corrective measure was necessary until the deflection was so great that it might mean the complete overhaul of how we as a society administrate education. Indeed, current thinking, mind you generated from what we now claim has been a failing system of instruction, suggests that the entire approach to “traditional” design education is wrong. Current education philosophy from various think tanks and education research foundations suggests that not only is it wrong but the people involved in it or even thought to believe in its precepts and practices are faulty and suspect of being ineffective by association. Remember Pinochet? “New” design education thinkers believe that traditional design education teachers and administrators are intrinsically flawed and lack the cognitive flexibility to be retrained or redirected to produce the desired results. Therefore we are seeing thousands of teachers and administrators forcefully separated from their careers and in many cases publically identified as ineffective educators who will then have a hard time regaining a career position in their field. Many traditional design career educators had received their education foundation during a period of American history when The United States of America was the world leader in intellect. What better time and place to gain knowledge? For close to a hundred years American public education perpetuated the developmental advantage that made this Nation the pinnacle of success. Every student had the opportunity to learn the most advanced and significant information of the time in order to push forward with inspired thoughts theories and concepts of their own. Traditional design teachers were people who were passionate about educating.
Through years of underpaid tireless work traditional design teachers worked daily to insure a brighter future for every student, many times without sufficient classroom supplies, knowing the result would be a stronger future for the entire society. Teachers have a long history of spending a lot of their own income on providing necessary materials for their students. As the world population began to blossom out of control after WW II so did that of The United States of America. This meant more schools, more school supplies and of course more teachers. As can only be expected industry and business attempted to cream the college and graduate school crops of the best and brightest academic performers with ever escalating salaries and benefits which far surpassed those offered by public education boards. This did not stop many who had a great passion for education from entering that field. A passion to educate over entering another vocation should never be thought to be a failure to succeed in another field or be due to lacking intellect compared to someone else who preferred personal monetary gain. This is not to belittle those for whom maximizing personal income potential, or just being terribly passionate about a different career choice, was more important for each has a role in advancement of society as a whole. Eventually teacher unions became necessary just as unions developed in other industries. Teachers too needed protection in their craft as American society became rougher and more robust. Teacher’s training came largely from academia. Development of their skill was the responsibility of their school administration and of courses their own nature to continue to improve upon their professional self as an effective educator. In education the term tenure means that the teacher has performed satisfactorily by standards set usually by the state for a decided period of time, usually three to five years, and has thereby earned the right to be rigorously protected in their job by a union should the need arise. As teacher salaries and benefits became more competitive the need for protection has also become more important. As more teacher candidates graduate from colleges and graduate schools the opportunity for a school administration to replace a highly paid career teacher with a more cost effective new teacher becomes an increasing threat to the career teacher’s hold on their position. This is where the union support for tenured teachers is so important. As in any other business or industry a school administration is constantly looking to fine line the bottom line. In today’s bad economy that threat is even more ominous.
One interesting phenomenon that has also occurred as a result of the decline of intellect, as a result of progressively degenerated educational practices, in the United States of America is the increasing need for educators in certain content areas like mathematics and science. Seemingly the lack of intellectual expression through the bastions of education over the past twenty years has retrograded mathematical and scientific thinking to the point of creating an absence of advancement in those areas based on original and perpetual thinking rather than merely being able to access retained information from computers deemed correct. Remember the Inquisition?
So here we are declaring that the way we educate is at blame and nothing short of a full scale reform will suffice to correct the matter. Out with the old and in with the new as it were. The biggest problem as I see it is that the new, excuse me, the new?... are, at best, nothing more than the product of the failure to succeed to begin with. Without proper training and oversight how can we expect that, essentially the product of a failing system can be put in charge ahead of the current staff of proven ability for a better outcome? The solution to this puzzle is really quite simple. First we turn our back on the “in place” teachers and administrators. Then we cast them aside when financial and job security is at an all time premium. Next we install Trump Apprentice style young and aggressive administrators with autonomy over vast amounts of school budget money to subjectively hire and fire teachers as they choose. We encourage then to recruit the best and the brightest minds by offering overstated merit based pay opportunities appealing to the greedy and self serving. So, we have demigods in charge of mercenaries. Sounds a bit like a coup to me. Where are the unions? In times of economic uncertainty everyone who wants to keep a job does as the leader demands. It sounds a bit communist to me but I think the unions themselves are trying to promote their best deal too by selling out tenured teachers as long as that commodity still holds value with the reformers. In reality all these new design positions are essentially “at will” or “right to work” without protection and at the complete will of the designers, like plankton in the sea. No doubt the new design teachers and administrators can talk about their passion to teach but in reality they do not have the security to demonstrate it long term. Short term gains for which they can claim success are possible but this is no more sustainable than their longevity, again like plankton.
Especially worrisome is the quandary over areas of need. There is no escaping that there are just not enough really good teachers. Certain subject areas are especially in demand, such as science and mathematics. Other special needs and English language areas are also suffering shortages. I thought I was very secure as a chemistry teacher but found myself displaced by persons actually relocated to the United States from India by my school system. I have been out of work for two years and have learned that my former employer has been using these visiting teachers, teacher interns from the “Corps” and substitutes to teach chemistry as well as other area of need science and mathematics classes. Students in that school system are getting credits toward graduation as college ready product. That’s credits from totally disjointed and unproven teaching practices. There is also a shift in teaching style to a more student directed format and curricula are written in which the teacher is more of a docent standing by while the students explore the subject. That’s really like putting jellybeans and brussel sprouts on a student’s lunch plate and seeing which one disappears first. Learning little due to teaching little gets a high percentage score while learning much of a whole lot gets a somewhat lower score and learning some of a vast amount could be a poor score, but what if the some of a vast amount is more than the all of a little? Strong instructional skills and practices utilized by passionate teachers with strong curricular foundations can produce the best results. As our Nation has declined in its ability to produce a strong intellectual product, over the past twenty years, the numbers of individuals exercising their potential in what have become areas of need in education is resultant of the inability of an educational system to sustain its mission. Therefore the latest products are potentially the most flawed. Not flawed due to personal attributes but certainly flawed in their readiness preparation and their desire to achieve beyond the boundaries. Largely new design educators in mathematics and sciences rely too heavily on a homeostasis of thought brought about by a dependence on technology rather than embracing the creativity of imagination and the natural empiricism that it generates.
In total, the new education reform architects are creating a system that conditions students and their parents to perform on cue and claim success in closing the achievement gap based on subjectivised assessments where the tasks are lowered to the ability rather than the students held accountable to reaching high expectations. The latter is possible and far preferred. It requires an educational design that utilizes the most experienced and the most passionate, the most knowledgeable and the most technological and holds to the standards, privileges and rights all individuals are afford as members of the American society. The hope is education in America can regain its position of world supremacy not as an indictment of lesser nations but because America has the resources to do the most for other nations in need. If the educational product of America fails to sustain itself as the world leader in intellect then the opportunities to utilize the resources of this country will also diminish and like muscles that are not used those resources will atrophy and eventually fail to support the needs of the people. Brussel sprouts may be less preferred than jellybeans but they are far better for you. Being great requires being strong and having faith that what you do is helping others more than yourself. The hope is that America can regain her compass and get back on track providing and producing the world’s greatest education and greatest people to benefit all people.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Whitewashing of the Education Debacle (PART 8)
The United States has gone from being a world leader in education to having one of the worst education ratings in the world in less than 20 years. It is irresponsible to think that blaming someone could possibly help improve the dilemma. American Democracy has been called a governmental experiment for more than two centuries. It has been a good experiment thus far based on the product, a free self governing nation that has risen to global superiority in every assessable way. The separate entities that comprise Federal Government and the sovereignty that is afforded each state have yielded the same opportunity for success to every citizen. It has not been perfect, or fair, or ideal for everyone all the time but it has consistently improved upon itself and is of the people and for the people. Based upon the Constitution of the United States of America and through judicial action the people of this country have produced laws that protect every benefit achieved through every struggle endured to create a brighter tomorrow from every yesterday. The struggles and partnerships of brothers, sisters, neighbors and strangers have produced a unity of citizens that share opportunities through education based on their desire and will to succeed. It has not been an easy road but one that is shared and has constantly improved for all. Why then shall we now accept an opportunity to throw away the dream and begin a different path that by all reasonable expectation will force our students, our future, to accept a second class education that will merely prepare them for a second class life? New school and education reform is creating an unprotected at work at will venue for teachers out of what once was a distinguished career pathway for those wishing to perpetuate the dream.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Witewashing of the Education Debacle (PART 7)
Most jobs and especially career positions have an evaluation process to insure productivity and accountability by the employee. This process is not absent in education. Although parents may not realize it their children’s teachers undergo rigorous evaluations and are held accountable for earning professional development continuing education credits. This is not new. New teachers in CT are deemed at will employees, meaning they can be dismissed at any time without cause, until they have worked successfully for 40 consecutive months, excluding summer work opportunities, in a single district. By CT State Statute they then have attained “Tenure” earning the right to full protection in their job by a union. After all, if we are doing a good job we all want the security and compensation our contract promises? Teachers are, even after attaining tenure, heavily scrutinized through rigorous objective evaluation processes by school administrations. The process also requires the school administrators to provide the necessary training, support and corrective measures for any teachers not performing sufficiently. Don’t let stories in the media tell you education unions and tenure protects bad or ineffective teachers. A poor administration that fails to perform its contractual obligations for training, support and correction of developing teachers is more than at fault for enabling and empowering such teachers to remain in service. Teachers are after all human beings and subject to all if not more stresses than many people in other industries. There is no formula to calculate why or when anyone in any vocation may suddenly become bad or ineffective at a task. That is why accountability is so important. As for the “new teachers”, they too are only human. Although we have been able to map out the entire human genome I am completely unaware that the new teacher failsafe gene has been identified.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Effective Teachers
The original construct of the "Whitewashing of the Education Debacle" may have been somewhat more fluid. Being unable to have the entire essay published as an editorial opinion I have had to chunk it up into 300 word segments just to get one small regional weekly publication to print it. I have mixed emotions about the situation however the chunking has permitted me to be in print and on topic before an audience for an extended duration, a situation I feel I shall try my utmost to perpetuate. To that end I would like to elaborate on the concepts of Teacher Design and teacher effectiveness.
In the past couple of years there has been created a schism between two identical doctrines. How could this be, if the doctrines are identical there can be no schism? The twist is perception, like the transitive and intransitive use of a verb. The doctrines are "Traditional Design" and "New Design" Education. According to experienced teachers new design educated teachers are more or less new teachers who will through time and development become good teachers or move on to more desirable vocational conditions. Experienced teachers do not necessarily see themselves as "Traditional Design" because that label was created for the "New Design" teachers. It was created to ostracize, stereotype, profile and discriminate against teachers that they are being groomed to replace. It was not their goal but the goal of a new breed of education doctrine developers. New design teachers are indoctrinated to believe that they are able to turn around failing schools because they are full of vim and vigor, they are youthful and in touch and they possess more current and applicable intellect than the older, complacent, lazy and intellectually stale ineffective traditional design teachers. What are we? The Yugo of the Borg? The idea crossed my mind that the same people teach new designers as taught Traditionalers. What about them? Has it just turned out that they were installing bad processors before? No Recall? All those poor unfortunate people, like me, who based their career, their American dream, on a costly and hard worked for graduate education that would prepare them for job stability, are suddenly identified as "ineffective" and the education institutions can suddenly install the new improved processors to create the ideal replacements. So what is that new replacement like? They supposedly possess high technological skills, show enthusiasm for all children to be successful and have a unique awareness which allows them to connect the learning objectives to all of their student’s real world associations with efficiency and unequivocal mutual synchronicity.
I visited several New York City public schools this past summer in my employment search and found several Smart Boards in classrooms covered with posters and lacking peripherals. This was in classrooms that were in use. At the Bronx High School of Science I was told that projection would be available for my interview demo lesson. I was interviewed by an assistant principal and fellow staff member. The AP told me on the telephone she had my resume from their recruiters and all I needed to do was to show up, create and deliver a lesson demo and participate in a panel interview. I brought my resume on a flash drive nonetheless. Sure enough she did not have my resume. I offered her my interview flash drive, which contains all the pertinent information as well as supplemental materials for the application and interview process, and she did not know where to put the flash drive in to her CPU or access files in order to print a copy of my resume. Then during the demo there were only wires hanging from the ceiling where a projector should have been, and again, no peripherals. I had my laptop in my briefcase but after the flash drive incident was reluctant to do anything other than bang a few rocks together to create fire for fear it might upset their obvious geocentrism. I am sure that New Designers know how to text their CPUs off and use all the latest social networking skill based platforms, but are they equipped to teach? Children are still children cognitively at their respective levels. Meeting them where learning can happen requires a bit more prowess and experience than comes readymade through a teacher preparation pathway where the applicant is told they are the best and the brightest and they are the hope tomorrow hangs on. I am sure the only thing they are certainly not taught in their preparation is that they are part of an elaborate social experiment, one in which they are merely a variable.
I concede that not all new design preparation teachers are young although the overwhelming majority is. Even those that are entering teaching as a career change are rarely leaving positions of authority and stability. On the contrary many are victims of downsizing in other industries or switching to teaching as an opportunity to escape graduate study programs for which the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned out to save on oil. Too often I hear the term “recruiting” used when a school system is looking to attract these new design teachers to stave off the vultures of failure. This is not recruitment. It is preying on the desperation of people who are willing to become reprogrammed, promoting in them a false sense of identity, so that they will eagerly present themselves to school administrations as “supermen and superwomen” willing to work longer hours and through the summers, even teaching classes in multiple content areas to get a job. Simply put, teaching is rigorous enough without wantonly trying to hurt yourself. Rule #1 in Lifesaving is to never put yourself at greater risk than the person you are trying to save. The term burnout in teaching means that the teacher is at risk. For any number of reasons a teacher can become detached from their mission and be at risk, like a lifeguard who plunges into a swollen and rushing river without a lifeline. For many of the New Designers the motivation is a Masters Degree, paid for in trade, and a promise of job placement with security. For that price they are willing to overlook the need of a lifeline. A traditional design teacher sees their contract as their lifeline and their union as their support team. Teachers with experience can tell you all the horror stories you would ever want to hear about colleagues that tried to do too much and were not able to keep their grip on their mission. Yet, new design administration willingly and deceitfully cajoles unwitting New Designers to take the plunge, cheering them against the turbulence that will take its toll. Unfortunately, today’s economy is generating a fodder of new design teaching candidates that silences the cries of desperation from students and new teachers alike that are lost in the current.
Another incentive in the New Designer marketplace is merit based pay. There are two camps on how this is done. On one hand a teacher is told they will receive healthy bonuses if their students meet benchmarks set by administrators. Well, first you have to understand that these New Designers did not go to law school and if they did they did not get a good grade in contract law because they do not realize that the benchmarks are predominantly subjective in the administrators favor or due to the class schedules there can be little specific evidence that one teacher or another made the difference in the student’s overall scores. Although having every teacher working hard to outdo every other teacher to receive a bonus would be beneficial in a sprinting race it creates a suicide situation in a marathon, once again putting teachers at risk for burnout. The second spin on merit based pay is to offer the teacher an enormous salary up front. The catch is you have to keep up the pace you are hired for until you drop dead. At best merit based pay for teachers will create a sudden agitation in the perceived abilities and stamina of the new design teachers. The obvious long-term effect is most apt to be mediocre at best at the price of destroying many good traditional design teacher’s careers, providing a disjointed and transient instructional experience for the students and disrupting the method by which education has created the promise of success to Americans for over 100 years and sustained this Nation as the world’s leader in achievement and development.
Another item that came to mind as I was filling out an application for a position this morning was that the online application asked if “you a member of the Teach for America Corps?” I have to really laugh having been a Marine Brat all my life. To be a member of the “Corps”, to “fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause”… what are they thinking? Do TFAs actually march? Let’s get our feet on the same rock shall we? The failure in our school systems is not a demonic fistula or manifestation of extraterrestrial subjugation. It is a symptom that our social values have eroded to mob rule mentality giving way to a hedonistic popular rule belief system largely fueled by drug and human trafficking and other illicit activities strongly associated with illegal alien movements within our borders that our government seems happy to let fester in urban areas rather than invest the money and sacrifice the manpower to demonstrate that our municipal police agencies are out manned and out armed by persons with seemingly limitless cash and weapon reserves. The student’s lives focus on their insight that “the man” is a target and an annoyance to what they perceive their existence to be about. Can the “Corps” change that?
The solution does not reside in a holy expectation or delusion of grandeur as it seems the New Designers are puffed up to believe they can provide. I have seen them. For the most part they are young and surprisingly naive about what really makes their protagonists tick. Most that I have met have a romantic notion about how they are going to provide the panacea for the illness in our education industry. Good teachers have always been on the ground in this battle and they have learned to be effective in ways pedagogy doesn’t begin to approach. The new paradigm is merely using smoke and mirrors to redirect attention to a different perception of achievement. I am sure positive results are recognizable but they will be short term and in fact the potential was there all along, they were masked behind other assessment data and the cloak of desperation our urban youth reside in; not just in their neighborhoods but in their minds, hearts and souls. After the novelty of the changes ware off and the students tire of their new teachers who begin to stress out over a year or two or become nameless and faceless due to the revolving merit based pay door, the short term successes in achievement will regress. The total lack of transparency holds true here as well. The data picture is a shell game where standard deviations and numerical anomalies are relied upon to create false hope and misdirect anyone who is not versed in applied probability and statistical modeling for assessment design and interpretation. Those credentials are far and few between. I really do not think that the members of the “Corps” have that kind of actuarial expertise. Nor do I think many traditional design teachers have and that makes them easy prey for manipulation by the new design administration. Most unfortunately the parents of the students don’t know it is all a fabrication to redirect teacher salaries into discretionary spending that lines the pockets of new design school system administrators that risks their children’s futures. It is an elaborate dog and pony show. Most importantly it requires the dismissal or total subjugation of effective teachers that would not stand for the criminality and unethical reality that is being perpetrated in the name of public education.
In conclusion, effectiveness in a teacher is a context, not a data point. Not every student has the same life, focus or goals so there will be variation in achievement outcome. Environmental factors in a student’s life play a big role in their meeting their potential. There are some things even an effective teacher cannot override in a student’s developmental pathway. An effective teacher cannot take away the neurological damage or other health related issues endured by a student born to a crack cocaine addict or HIV positive mother. An effective teacher cannot prevent the sexual abuse committed against young girls or the handling of weapons by young boys in their own homes let alone on the streets. An effective teacher is a good teacher who teaches to every student, encouraging them and nurturing their learning abilities in the hope that they will develop a sense of awareness past their own social dilemma. An effective teacher is a person who takes their job seriously and strives to their best ability to provide a safe and engaging classroom experience where positive social and civic values are held to high standards and modeled without fault. An effective teacher is someone who provides an unwavering sense of reliability and trustworthiness as a role model and mentor to their students. An effective teacher is a professional archivist of their students’ achievements and a professional employee with respect to the school’s mission, curriculum and practices. An effective teacher is an extension of the school to the family and the family to the student. An effective teacher helps build accountability between the student and the family for positive reinforcement of learning expectations. Effective, being a context, cannot be limited in duration. It is a process over time which requires stability and reliability. Effective teachers are career professional people, not soldiers of a corps prancing around fighting windmills. A new teacher may be effective but for how long? An effective teacher is someone who has an established record of results. New design paradigm teachers and especially those operating under merit based compensation are no more effective than a new teacher ever was and their proof is realistically prohibited by their risky exuberance to do too much too fast, throwing themselves in the rushing current without the lifeline, and for what? A free master’s degree in education or a promise of extravagant earnings beyond which no effective traditional design teacher ever hoped to achieve? It is time to stop the charade of new design education practices before we lose the identity and purpose of what American Public Education is and the ability to regain the standard it once held.
In the past couple of years there has been created a schism between two identical doctrines. How could this be, if the doctrines are identical there can be no schism? The twist is perception, like the transitive and intransitive use of a verb. The doctrines are "Traditional Design" and "New Design" Education. According to experienced teachers new design educated teachers are more or less new teachers who will through time and development become good teachers or move on to more desirable vocational conditions. Experienced teachers do not necessarily see themselves as "Traditional Design" because that label was created for the "New Design" teachers. It was created to ostracize, stereotype, profile and discriminate against teachers that they are being groomed to replace. It was not their goal but the goal of a new breed of education doctrine developers. New design teachers are indoctrinated to believe that they are able to turn around failing schools because they are full of vim and vigor, they are youthful and in touch and they possess more current and applicable intellect than the older, complacent, lazy and intellectually stale ineffective traditional design teachers. What are we? The Yugo of the Borg? The idea crossed my mind that the same people teach new designers as taught Traditionalers. What about them? Has it just turned out that they were installing bad processors before? No Recall? All those poor unfortunate people, like me, who based their career, their American dream, on a costly and hard worked for graduate education that would prepare them for job stability, are suddenly identified as "ineffective" and the education institutions can suddenly install the new improved processors to create the ideal replacements. So what is that new replacement like? They supposedly possess high technological skills, show enthusiasm for all children to be successful and have a unique awareness which allows them to connect the learning objectives to all of their student’s real world associations with efficiency and unequivocal mutual synchronicity.
I visited several New York City public schools this past summer in my employment search and found several Smart Boards in classrooms covered with posters and lacking peripherals. This was in classrooms that were in use. At the Bronx High School of Science I was told that projection would be available for my interview demo lesson. I was interviewed by an assistant principal and fellow staff member. The AP told me on the telephone she had my resume from their recruiters and all I needed to do was to show up, create and deliver a lesson demo and participate in a panel interview. I brought my resume on a flash drive nonetheless. Sure enough she did not have my resume. I offered her my interview flash drive, which contains all the pertinent information as well as supplemental materials for the application and interview process, and she did not know where to put the flash drive in to her CPU or access files in order to print a copy of my resume. Then during the demo there were only wires hanging from the ceiling where a projector should have been, and again, no peripherals. I had my laptop in my briefcase but after the flash drive incident was reluctant to do anything other than bang a few rocks together to create fire for fear it might upset their obvious geocentrism. I am sure that New Designers know how to text their CPUs off and use all the latest social networking skill based platforms, but are they equipped to teach? Children are still children cognitively at their respective levels. Meeting them where learning can happen requires a bit more prowess and experience than comes readymade through a teacher preparation pathway where the applicant is told they are the best and the brightest and they are the hope tomorrow hangs on. I am sure the only thing they are certainly not taught in their preparation is that they are part of an elaborate social experiment, one in which they are merely a variable.
I concede that not all new design preparation teachers are young although the overwhelming majority is. Even those that are entering teaching as a career change are rarely leaving positions of authority and stability. On the contrary many are victims of downsizing in other industries or switching to teaching as an opportunity to escape graduate study programs for which the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned out to save on oil. Too often I hear the term “recruiting” used when a school system is looking to attract these new design teachers to stave off the vultures of failure. This is not recruitment. It is preying on the desperation of people who are willing to become reprogrammed, promoting in them a false sense of identity, so that they will eagerly present themselves to school administrations as “supermen and superwomen” willing to work longer hours and through the summers, even teaching classes in multiple content areas to get a job. Simply put, teaching is rigorous enough without wantonly trying to hurt yourself. Rule #1 in Lifesaving is to never put yourself at greater risk than the person you are trying to save. The term burnout in teaching means that the teacher is at risk. For any number of reasons a teacher can become detached from their mission and be at risk, like a lifeguard who plunges into a swollen and rushing river without a lifeline. For many of the New Designers the motivation is a Masters Degree, paid for in trade, and a promise of job placement with security. For that price they are willing to overlook the need of a lifeline. A traditional design teacher sees their contract as their lifeline and their union as their support team. Teachers with experience can tell you all the horror stories you would ever want to hear about colleagues that tried to do too much and were not able to keep their grip on their mission. Yet, new design administration willingly and deceitfully cajoles unwitting New Designers to take the plunge, cheering them against the turbulence that will take its toll. Unfortunately, today’s economy is generating a fodder of new design teaching candidates that silences the cries of desperation from students and new teachers alike that are lost in the current.
Another incentive in the New Designer marketplace is merit based pay. There are two camps on how this is done. On one hand a teacher is told they will receive healthy bonuses if their students meet benchmarks set by administrators. Well, first you have to understand that these New Designers did not go to law school and if they did they did not get a good grade in contract law because they do not realize that the benchmarks are predominantly subjective in the administrators favor or due to the class schedules there can be little specific evidence that one teacher or another made the difference in the student’s overall scores. Although having every teacher working hard to outdo every other teacher to receive a bonus would be beneficial in a sprinting race it creates a suicide situation in a marathon, once again putting teachers at risk for burnout. The second spin on merit based pay is to offer the teacher an enormous salary up front. The catch is you have to keep up the pace you are hired for until you drop dead. At best merit based pay for teachers will create a sudden agitation in the perceived abilities and stamina of the new design teachers. The obvious long-term effect is most apt to be mediocre at best at the price of destroying many good traditional design teacher’s careers, providing a disjointed and transient instructional experience for the students and disrupting the method by which education has created the promise of success to Americans for over 100 years and sustained this Nation as the world’s leader in achievement and development.
Another item that came to mind as I was filling out an application for a position this morning was that the online application asked if “you a member of the Teach for America Corps?” I have to really laugh having been a Marine Brat all my life. To be a member of the “Corps”, to “fight for the right without question or pause, to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause”… what are they thinking? Do TFAs actually march? Let’s get our feet on the same rock shall we? The failure in our school systems is not a demonic fistula or manifestation of extraterrestrial subjugation. It is a symptom that our social values have eroded to mob rule mentality giving way to a hedonistic popular rule belief system largely fueled by drug and human trafficking and other illicit activities strongly associated with illegal alien movements within our borders that our government seems happy to let fester in urban areas rather than invest the money and sacrifice the manpower to demonstrate that our municipal police agencies are out manned and out armed by persons with seemingly limitless cash and weapon reserves. The student’s lives focus on their insight that “the man” is a target and an annoyance to what they perceive their existence to be about. Can the “Corps” change that?
The solution does not reside in a holy expectation or delusion of grandeur as it seems the New Designers are puffed up to believe they can provide. I have seen them. For the most part they are young and surprisingly naive about what really makes their protagonists tick. Most that I have met have a romantic notion about how they are going to provide the panacea for the illness in our education industry. Good teachers have always been on the ground in this battle and they have learned to be effective in ways pedagogy doesn’t begin to approach. The new paradigm is merely using smoke and mirrors to redirect attention to a different perception of achievement. I am sure positive results are recognizable but they will be short term and in fact the potential was there all along, they were masked behind other assessment data and the cloak of desperation our urban youth reside in; not just in their neighborhoods but in their minds, hearts and souls. After the novelty of the changes ware off and the students tire of their new teachers who begin to stress out over a year or two or become nameless and faceless due to the revolving merit based pay door, the short term successes in achievement will regress. The total lack of transparency holds true here as well. The data picture is a shell game where standard deviations and numerical anomalies are relied upon to create false hope and misdirect anyone who is not versed in applied probability and statistical modeling for assessment design and interpretation. Those credentials are far and few between. I really do not think that the members of the “Corps” have that kind of actuarial expertise. Nor do I think many traditional design teachers have and that makes them easy prey for manipulation by the new design administration. Most unfortunately the parents of the students don’t know it is all a fabrication to redirect teacher salaries into discretionary spending that lines the pockets of new design school system administrators that risks their children’s futures. It is an elaborate dog and pony show. Most importantly it requires the dismissal or total subjugation of effective teachers that would not stand for the criminality and unethical reality that is being perpetrated in the name of public education.
In conclusion, effectiveness in a teacher is a context, not a data point. Not every student has the same life, focus or goals so there will be variation in achievement outcome. Environmental factors in a student’s life play a big role in their meeting their potential. There are some things even an effective teacher cannot override in a student’s developmental pathway. An effective teacher cannot take away the neurological damage or other health related issues endured by a student born to a crack cocaine addict or HIV positive mother. An effective teacher cannot prevent the sexual abuse committed against young girls or the handling of weapons by young boys in their own homes let alone on the streets. An effective teacher is a good teacher who teaches to every student, encouraging them and nurturing their learning abilities in the hope that they will develop a sense of awareness past their own social dilemma. An effective teacher is a person who takes their job seriously and strives to their best ability to provide a safe and engaging classroom experience where positive social and civic values are held to high standards and modeled without fault. An effective teacher is someone who provides an unwavering sense of reliability and trustworthiness as a role model and mentor to their students. An effective teacher is a professional archivist of their students’ achievements and a professional employee with respect to the school’s mission, curriculum and practices. An effective teacher is an extension of the school to the family and the family to the student. An effective teacher helps build accountability between the student and the family for positive reinforcement of learning expectations. Effective, being a context, cannot be limited in duration. It is a process over time which requires stability and reliability. Effective teachers are career professional people, not soldiers of a corps prancing around fighting windmills. A new teacher may be effective but for how long? An effective teacher is someone who has an established record of results. New design paradigm teachers and especially those operating under merit based compensation are no more effective than a new teacher ever was and their proof is realistically prohibited by their risky exuberance to do too much too fast, throwing themselves in the rushing current without the lifeline, and for what? A free master’s degree in education or a promise of extravagant earnings beyond which no effective traditional design teacher ever hoped to achieve? It is time to stop the charade of new design education practices before we lose the identity and purpose of what American Public Education is and the ability to regain the standard it once held.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Whitewashing of the Education Debacle (PARTS 3 through 6)
(PART 3)
The stories of Pygmalion, The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes were among the tales that I was told as a child by my parents and grandparents, presumably to prepare me for rational thinking and sound decision making skills as I would grow up and inevitably be faced by less kind individuals with self serving goals who would seek to take advantage of me. This great Nation’s current path of searching for a new super spiffy initiative through which to teach our students is a certain slope of intellectual subjugation and opportunistic segregation against which the Civil Rights Movement has been struggling since 1954 with the breakout case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. Schools of choice and theme based educational models may show an ability to produce heightened student achievement, albeit short term and largely subjective, but blatantly risk denying all students their 14th Amendment protected right to equal protection under the law for an appropriate education. We know this but when do the students understand it? Although the developers of every new small design academy style school claim it provides a rigorous curriculum for college preparedness they by nature provide an unequal, different, look at the world which may not stigmatize the students’ outlook but deprive it of the variety our total society thereby creating a segregated environment.
Having been high school chemistry/biology teacher in Hartford, CT for six years I have seen the product of Sheff v. O’Neill, the need for positive change and the promise of it. In reform, I have seen students jumbled, grades fixed to promote and graduate students, special needs students neglected and students in magnet schools left unattended by staff. What exactly is being reformed in our schools?
(PART 4)
Several months ago at a Connecticut Forum event panelist Joel Klein, the outgoing Chancellor of Education in New York City, stated that smaller class sizes are optimal for learning. He also touted Hartford’s Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven Adamowski, as a wonder child of school redesign. Having begun my career in education in Hartford, CT as a chemistry teacher in 2003 and working continuously in the system until my contract was inappropriately non renewed in August of 2009 for erroneous reasons after I declined to cave to extortive tactics meant to elicit my voluntary resignation in the good name of budgetary reduction in force, I fail to see the rationale of the new design as anything that resembles effective or economically sound education administration. The autonomy granted these new education paradigm administrators in the name of saving our schools is an unleashed petard that is destroying talented teacher’s careers and demolishing hope for a bright future for our students. Many teachers such as me are being forced into unemployment while demigod administrators rape the tax coffers with their grotesque salaries and unwarranted bonuses. Additionally they dole out excessive consulting fees to cronies in an abusive misuse of the public trust. Money that did pay many great teachers well deserved salaries is now being converted for discretionary spending purposes by administrators that do not deserve to be called superintendents. The term carpetbagger comes to mind. What is transparency when you are not told the truth? How is bridging the projected school budget shortfall related to bridging the student achievement gap when the financial deficit is a theoretical contrivance presented without a fully understandable or supported explanation and assessment data is distributed for which there is no corroborating evidence other than subjective posturing by administrators who have no direct classroom connection?
(PART 5)
As a result of school redesign in many school systems students endure overcrowded classes, lack of critical materials and a revolving door approach to teacher and administrator supply which includes education interns, long term substitutes, outsourced tutors and even individuals brought here from other countries, such as India, on temporary “visiting” teacher credentials. Who should be glad they have this? Disjointed educational experiences are the greatest deterrent to achievement possible and yet this is largely the mainstream reality of the new design of education in many communities. Any parent and every student are, of course, excited on graduation day but the value of the learning behind the diploma is more important than having the diploma in hand. Greatness will never be achieved by a piece of paper. It is the inspired work of individuals that have learned the necessary skills to advance themselves and their societies beyond their dreams that have created the country we live in and nothing less will sustain it. Acceptance of mediocrity and abject complacency were not the goals of the framers of this country, Civil Rights Movement or our more recent traditional education model and should be something we all fight against daily.
Parents need to hold their child’s education system accountable for providing an appropriate education that will help the students have the opportunities that this Nation can provide. Accepting anything less than the highest accountability of an education system is shameful. Parents and community members alike need to visit schools while in session and attend school board meetings. Parents need to develop personal accountability relationships with the administrators and teachers who are responsible for their child and not accept mass produced emails from school computer servers as parent-teacher contact opportunities. Fight for a great education. Saving great teachers is saving a great education.
(PART 6)
New design education paradigm administration wants parents and politicians to believe that “Traditional Design” education professionals, teachers, are intrinsically bad, greedy, stale and lazy. The notion that teachers are overpaid is a bad notion. Teaching has been a profession in which an individual can expect to have a career with reasonable compensation, benefits and retirement. This was the reasonable goal of Lech Walesa in his fight for solidarity in Poland. Have we forgotten that the United States set the bar for fair treatment of workers? If a teacher wants to relax while the students have summer vacation, so be it. I do not think that anyone who would want to become a teacher just to have the summer off would think it a fair trade when they found out what they had to do for the rest of the year. Besides, having vacations and summers off when the schools are out is bad timing for good ticket prices. The truth is many teachers work through the summer. When was the last time you heard an infomercial about becoming a millionaire by teaching and having the summer off to count your money?
Another tremendous misconception regarding the education design that worked is that teacher unions protect bad teachers. It is the fundamental duty of administrators to identify teachers lacking in skill or ability and then work to correct the teacher’s deficit through support, guidance and training before the teacher reaches tenure. Unions tend to ignore fighting for non tenured teachers because their contract is essential at will and administration can terminate them without cause at any time. So, isn’t it pretty clear that bad administrators create and empower bad and ineffective teachers that unions must protect? The new education administration paradigm is a gamble and hardly worth a pair of nickels.
The stories of Pygmalion, The Pied Piper and The Emperor’s New Clothes were among the tales that I was told as a child by my parents and grandparents, presumably to prepare me for rational thinking and sound decision making skills as I would grow up and inevitably be faced by less kind individuals with self serving goals who would seek to take advantage of me. This great Nation’s current path of searching for a new super spiffy initiative through which to teach our students is a certain slope of intellectual subjugation and opportunistic segregation against which the Civil Rights Movement has been struggling since 1954 with the breakout case Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka. Schools of choice and theme based educational models may show an ability to produce heightened student achievement, albeit short term and largely subjective, but blatantly risk denying all students their 14th Amendment protected right to equal protection under the law for an appropriate education. We know this but when do the students understand it? Although the developers of every new small design academy style school claim it provides a rigorous curriculum for college preparedness they by nature provide an unequal, different, look at the world which may not stigmatize the students’ outlook but deprive it of the variety our total society thereby creating a segregated environment.
Having been high school chemistry/biology teacher in Hartford, CT for six years I have seen the product of Sheff v. O’Neill, the need for positive change and the promise of it. In reform, I have seen students jumbled, grades fixed to promote and graduate students, special needs students neglected and students in magnet schools left unattended by staff. What exactly is being reformed in our schools?
(PART 4)
Several months ago at a Connecticut Forum event panelist Joel Klein, the outgoing Chancellor of Education in New York City, stated that smaller class sizes are optimal for learning. He also touted Hartford’s Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Steven Adamowski, as a wonder child of school redesign. Having begun my career in education in Hartford, CT as a chemistry teacher in 2003 and working continuously in the system until my contract was inappropriately non renewed in August of 2009 for erroneous reasons after I declined to cave to extortive tactics meant to elicit my voluntary resignation in the good name of budgetary reduction in force, I fail to see the rationale of the new design as anything that resembles effective or economically sound education administration. The autonomy granted these new education paradigm administrators in the name of saving our schools is an unleashed petard that is destroying talented teacher’s careers and demolishing hope for a bright future for our students. Many teachers such as me are being forced into unemployment while demigod administrators rape the tax coffers with their grotesque salaries and unwarranted bonuses. Additionally they dole out excessive consulting fees to cronies in an abusive misuse of the public trust. Money that did pay many great teachers well deserved salaries is now being converted for discretionary spending purposes by administrators that do not deserve to be called superintendents. The term carpetbagger comes to mind. What is transparency when you are not told the truth? How is bridging the projected school budget shortfall related to bridging the student achievement gap when the financial deficit is a theoretical contrivance presented without a fully understandable or supported explanation and assessment data is distributed for which there is no corroborating evidence other than subjective posturing by administrators who have no direct classroom connection?
(PART 5)
As a result of school redesign in many school systems students endure overcrowded classes, lack of critical materials and a revolving door approach to teacher and administrator supply which includes education interns, long term substitutes, outsourced tutors and even individuals brought here from other countries, such as India, on temporary “visiting” teacher credentials. Who should be glad they have this? Disjointed educational experiences are the greatest deterrent to achievement possible and yet this is largely the mainstream reality of the new design of education in many communities. Any parent and every student are, of course, excited on graduation day but the value of the learning behind the diploma is more important than having the diploma in hand. Greatness will never be achieved by a piece of paper. It is the inspired work of individuals that have learned the necessary skills to advance themselves and their societies beyond their dreams that have created the country we live in and nothing less will sustain it. Acceptance of mediocrity and abject complacency were not the goals of the framers of this country, Civil Rights Movement or our more recent traditional education model and should be something we all fight against daily.
Parents need to hold their child’s education system accountable for providing an appropriate education that will help the students have the opportunities that this Nation can provide. Accepting anything less than the highest accountability of an education system is shameful. Parents and community members alike need to visit schools while in session and attend school board meetings. Parents need to develop personal accountability relationships with the administrators and teachers who are responsible for their child and not accept mass produced emails from school computer servers as parent-teacher contact opportunities. Fight for a great education. Saving great teachers is saving a great education.
(PART 6)
New design education paradigm administration wants parents and politicians to believe that “Traditional Design” education professionals, teachers, are intrinsically bad, greedy, stale and lazy. The notion that teachers are overpaid is a bad notion. Teaching has been a profession in which an individual can expect to have a career with reasonable compensation, benefits and retirement. This was the reasonable goal of Lech Walesa in his fight for solidarity in Poland. Have we forgotten that the United States set the bar for fair treatment of workers? If a teacher wants to relax while the students have summer vacation, so be it. I do not think that anyone who would want to become a teacher just to have the summer off would think it a fair trade when they found out what they had to do for the rest of the year. Besides, having vacations and summers off when the schools are out is bad timing for good ticket prices. The truth is many teachers work through the summer. When was the last time you heard an infomercial about becoming a millionaire by teaching and having the summer off to count your money?
Another tremendous misconception regarding the education design that worked is that teacher unions protect bad teachers. It is the fundamental duty of administrators to identify teachers lacking in skill or ability and then work to correct the teacher’s deficit through support, guidance and training before the teacher reaches tenure. Unions tend to ignore fighting for non tenured teachers because their contract is essential at will and administration can terminate them without cause at any time. So, isn’t it pretty clear that bad administrators create and empower bad and ineffective teachers that unions must protect? The new education administration paradigm is a gamble and hardly worth a pair of nickels.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Attending a Forum on Education Reform
Several months ago I had attended an education reform event by the Connecticut Forum at the Bushnell Theater in Hartford, CT. Among the panelists to speak were Joel Klein, who has or will soon be leaving his post as the Chancellor of Education in New York City, and Davis Guggenheim, the Director of the movie Waiting for Superman. From advertisements I understood there to be the opportunity to email advance questions for the panelists as well as the opportunity to submit them during the intermission before the Q&A segment of the event. I emailed several well thought out and constructive questions ahead of time and developed several more during the intermission which specifically and directly pertained to statements made by individual panelists. Sadly, not one of my questions was remotely addressed. I left the event feeling melancholy, not because I felt ignored but because the event seemed more like a propaganda maneuver to support the current education reform paradigm initiative than a forum to discuss the problems currently contributing to our failing education systems and develop strategies to compensate for them while establishing mechanisms to correct the situation on a long term, permanent, basis.
One thing that said “Old Boy” like nothing else was when Joel Klein portrayed Dr. Steven Adamowski, the also recently or nearly intending to do so departing Superintendent of Schools in Hartford, CT., as a wonder child of school redesign to overcome failing status. There are really two issues here. One is if these individuals are the men on white horses who have come to save us, why are they going away so soon? I know Hartford has been looking for a good Superintendent for many years. I am sure that if they found one they would do anything to keep him at their helm short of strapping him to his horse like El Sid. But no, these head administrators have turned their systems inside out, redistributed the administrative hierarchy and funding avenues and corrupted the assessment and accountability processes for teachers by circumventing their professional resources and union protection affiliations to the point that there is no semblance of the prior system or access to it as a lifeline. The result is mass confusion, carnage of educational property, devaluation of teachers and their intellectual properties, ineffective distribution of curriculum and squanderous spending of the budget without effective oversight. While everyone’s head is still spinning and no one is certain what is working if it is and if it is not, what’s not or why not because there is no actual architecture to these plans. There are only endless irreconcilable directions which further contort and twist the vortex that has been initiated. Then the masters of the design say… “I’m going to leave now.” However they leave someone whom they have groomed in charge or move on in some other capacity that offers high personal return for their influence and association with education all the time claiming it is all about the children. The successor head administrator has one go to if faced with questions of situations beyond their immediate grasp, their groomer/predecessor who I am sure will remain at their service on an as needed consulting basis. That would be a considerably well paid basis I assure you. It seems it is all about the dollar at the expense of the children who do not understand the reality yet due to their cognitive stage and experiences. This is the very reason we educate. So, what you are seeing is a monumental perpetual drain on school budgets that are already strained, no long term guarantees on fixing the original problem and a case Humpty Dumpty concerning trying to turn back and regroup.
A second remarkable incident occurred when Davis Guggenheim responded to a question about education methods and strategies. He commented that he witnessed, while directing Waiting for Superman, an innovative, exciting, revolutionary and effective thing happening in schools in NYC that was developed by Joel Klein and differed to him to expound on it. I was flabbergasted when Joel Klein said it was something he called differentiated instruction. Folks, I do not recall from my Master’s Degree program in Secondary Science Education, professional development opportunities while teaching or any other source that Joel Klein developed differentiated instruction. I know from my teaching experiences dating just several years prior to his ascension to his position in the NYC school system that differentiated instruction has been a known education methodology since before he became involved in the industry and take great disgust at his allowing Davis Guggenheim, the Connecticut Forum, the audience and anyone else to believe, even if by omission of clarification, that he single handedly developed differentiated instruction. He exuded tremendous confidence as he sat in his chair and elaborated on his conceiving the notion and incorporating it into his redesign format for schools in NYC. My maternal grandmother was a teacher in Appalachia in the 1920’s and I know she did it even if she didn’t know it would be given a name 80 years later. It is more than just good teaching but Joel Klein did not discover it in the past couple of years.
Much of the rest of the event was a series of volleys between panelists that took aim at “traditional design” teachers as being inherently bad and cowering under the protection granted by tenure and protected by unions while lauding the promise of “new design” teachers being actively recruited for Teach for America to replace “ineffective teachers who should get out and go do something else.” This remark was made and defended by several panelists. The term “ineffective teacher” also seemed to reflect any teacher the new design empowered supervising administrators did not want to keep without preference. This means someone with minimal classroom experience can be made a principal of a new design school and determine effectiveness by their own whim because their authority supersedes previous teacher assessment systems because, oh yes, they too are bad.
In total I found the evening to be enlightening. It showed me how deeply in trouble our education systems are. Not deep in trouble because of the long road to failure they are deemed to suffer from but deep in trouble because the new education paradigm is like Grant’s Total War. It is not reinventing the wheel but it is destroying the framework. In building renovation it’s called “good bones”. Basically a renovator looks at the fundamental structure for flaws. If the fundamental structure is sound the interior, utilities, trim, appliances, trim and landscaping can all be gutted, removed and replaced with quality materials using a skilled workforce to produce a good building. Only when the fundamental structure is not viable is demolition an option and that too has a cost. Just because you tear down a building does not mean it is a cost free initiative without risk to the environment or community. In American education today we are seeing the seemingly effortless and cost free demolition of school entities and career educators’ livelihoods, some of whom would have gone on to become administrators and superintendents, to create an infrastructure wasteland where businessmen with self serving agenda can propagate their own version of lesser quality education services with autonomy over the tax budget money to create outlandish personal revenue streams for themselves. The winners: Them. The losers: The students.
So, perhaps yes, it is all about the children. It just is not about their benefit. The path we are on will almost certainly provide our students with an amazing and inspired, second class at best, educational opportunity while destructively draining the school budgets, destroying the careers of truly compassionate educators and flooding the workplaces and post secondary education institutions with graduates who are actually less prepared than ever before for the next step. Just because a new design administrator says scores and graduation rates are up while dropout rates and grade retentions are down does not mean that the problem is solved. Sixty percent up also means forty percent away from where it should be and you still do not know what you are actually measuring. Ask a high school student to spell a word or count you change on a purchase? I know it sounds archaic but in general, using random populations, I think the results will astound you. Recently American Education was reported to rank 24th out of 30 some developed nations. The slide from the #1 spot has occurred over the past 20 years. If the fix is so certainly the intellectual product of these wonder child administrators why are their tenures so short? Why do we not make then stay and finish the job? Why do we pay them so highly for this product? It seems that they should pay us, our children, to experiment with their lives and futures.
I will generate another post soon about my attempt to become certified in New York State and my job hunt in NYC.
One thing that said “Old Boy” like nothing else was when Joel Klein portrayed Dr. Steven Adamowski, the also recently or nearly intending to do so departing Superintendent of Schools in Hartford, CT., as a wonder child of school redesign to overcome failing status. There are really two issues here. One is if these individuals are the men on white horses who have come to save us, why are they going away so soon? I know Hartford has been looking for a good Superintendent for many years. I am sure that if they found one they would do anything to keep him at their helm short of strapping him to his horse like El Sid. But no, these head administrators have turned their systems inside out, redistributed the administrative hierarchy and funding avenues and corrupted the assessment and accountability processes for teachers by circumventing their professional resources and union protection affiliations to the point that there is no semblance of the prior system or access to it as a lifeline. The result is mass confusion, carnage of educational property, devaluation of teachers and their intellectual properties, ineffective distribution of curriculum and squanderous spending of the budget without effective oversight. While everyone’s head is still spinning and no one is certain what is working if it is and if it is not, what’s not or why not because there is no actual architecture to these plans. There are only endless irreconcilable directions which further contort and twist the vortex that has been initiated. Then the masters of the design say… “I’m going to leave now.” However they leave someone whom they have groomed in charge or move on in some other capacity that offers high personal return for their influence and association with education all the time claiming it is all about the children. The successor head administrator has one go to if faced with questions of situations beyond their immediate grasp, their groomer/predecessor who I am sure will remain at their service on an as needed consulting basis. That would be a considerably well paid basis I assure you. It seems it is all about the dollar at the expense of the children who do not understand the reality yet due to their cognitive stage and experiences. This is the very reason we educate. So, what you are seeing is a monumental perpetual drain on school budgets that are already strained, no long term guarantees on fixing the original problem and a case Humpty Dumpty concerning trying to turn back and regroup.
A second remarkable incident occurred when Davis Guggenheim responded to a question about education methods and strategies. He commented that he witnessed, while directing Waiting for Superman, an innovative, exciting, revolutionary and effective thing happening in schools in NYC that was developed by Joel Klein and differed to him to expound on it. I was flabbergasted when Joel Klein said it was something he called differentiated instruction. Folks, I do not recall from my Master’s Degree program in Secondary Science Education, professional development opportunities while teaching or any other source that Joel Klein developed differentiated instruction. I know from my teaching experiences dating just several years prior to his ascension to his position in the NYC school system that differentiated instruction has been a known education methodology since before he became involved in the industry and take great disgust at his allowing Davis Guggenheim, the Connecticut Forum, the audience and anyone else to believe, even if by omission of clarification, that he single handedly developed differentiated instruction. He exuded tremendous confidence as he sat in his chair and elaborated on his conceiving the notion and incorporating it into his redesign format for schools in NYC. My maternal grandmother was a teacher in Appalachia in the 1920’s and I know she did it even if she didn’t know it would be given a name 80 years later. It is more than just good teaching but Joel Klein did not discover it in the past couple of years.
Much of the rest of the event was a series of volleys between panelists that took aim at “traditional design” teachers as being inherently bad and cowering under the protection granted by tenure and protected by unions while lauding the promise of “new design” teachers being actively recruited for Teach for America to replace “ineffective teachers who should get out and go do something else.” This remark was made and defended by several panelists. The term “ineffective teacher” also seemed to reflect any teacher the new design empowered supervising administrators did not want to keep without preference. This means someone with minimal classroom experience can be made a principal of a new design school and determine effectiveness by their own whim because their authority supersedes previous teacher assessment systems because, oh yes, they too are bad.
In total I found the evening to be enlightening. It showed me how deeply in trouble our education systems are. Not deep in trouble because of the long road to failure they are deemed to suffer from but deep in trouble because the new education paradigm is like Grant’s Total War. It is not reinventing the wheel but it is destroying the framework. In building renovation it’s called “good bones”. Basically a renovator looks at the fundamental structure for flaws. If the fundamental structure is sound the interior, utilities, trim, appliances, trim and landscaping can all be gutted, removed and replaced with quality materials using a skilled workforce to produce a good building. Only when the fundamental structure is not viable is demolition an option and that too has a cost. Just because you tear down a building does not mean it is a cost free initiative without risk to the environment or community. In American education today we are seeing the seemingly effortless and cost free demolition of school entities and career educators’ livelihoods, some of whom would have gone on to become administrators and superintendents, to create an infrastructure wasteland where businessmen with self serving agenda can propagate their own version of lesser quality education services with autonomy over the tax budget money to create outlandish personal revenue streams for themselves. The winners: Them. The losers: The students.
So, perhaps yes, it is all about the children. It just is not about their benefit. The path we are on will almost certainly provide our students with an amazing and inspired, second class at best, educational opportunity while destructively draining the school budgets, destroying the careers of truly compassionate educators and flooding the workplaces and post secondary education institutions with graduates who are actually less prepared than ever before for the next step. Just because a new design administrator says scores and graduation rates are up while dropout rates and grade retentions are down does not mean that the problem is solved. Sixty percent up also means forty percent away from where it should be and you still do not know what you are actually measuring. Ask a high school student to spell a word or count you change on a purchase? I know it sounds archaic but in general, using random populations, I think the results will astound you. Recently American Education was reported to rank 24th out of 30 some developed nations. The slide from the #1 spot has occurred over the past 20 years. If the fix is so certainly the intellectual product of these wonder child administrators why are their tenures so short? Why do we not make then stay and finish the job? Why do we pay them so highly for this product? It seems that they should pay us, our children, to experiment with their lives and futures.
I will generate another post soon about my attempt to become certified in New York State and my job hunt in NYC.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
The Culture of Science
I frequently tell my students that studying science is like visiting a distant and exotic location. Preparing for the trip should include learning some simple phrases and important words of the language to help attain lodging, meals, transportation and negotiate the currency for an equitable experience. I tell them this is what lecture and homework is in science. Laboratory on the other hand I tell them is all about the culture. It is about how to have a good time and how to move about effortlessly in a different society even if you do not speak the language fluently. It is about respect and friendship of another people, their place and their culture. Although I try and make it seem like a vacation to be enjoyed I know it is not all easy. I enjoyed Physical Chemistry in college although it was third degree sunburn, Malaria laden mosquito bites and limb consuming shark attacks all wrapped up together for some students. I remember the horrifying tales of infectious opportunities told by my Parasitology professor. Sometimes I feel I am beguiling my students to become contestants on "Outbreak Island"! All in all respect for the unexpected and an ability to remain focused in the face of extreme adversity should be a part of the science learning curriculum of any school or institution. For that reason I am offering extra credit opportunities to my current students pertaining to the presently unfolding circumstances in Japan. The loss of life is staggering but the effects are potentially of epic proportion especially due to the nuclear power plant component. I am excited when my students freely approach me to talk about the latest episode of Amazing Race, Big Bang or Fringe where for the first time they felt connected to the program due to a scientific point that otherwise would have flown right past them. Now they have a real scenario to assimilate to, hopefully that will captivate their hearts and their minds simultaneously and give them a greater connectedness to education than they have ever known before. One of the factors educators struggle with is that our society has grown corpulent and fuzzy around the facts, relying too heavily on the omniscience of Dell, Apple, HP et al for the important stuff, not understanding the difference between the hammer and the home, the black box and the mind. As I take up my sword daily I fight this battle to overcome the complacency and lethargy of the mind that afflicts our potential as an advanced society and to develop an awareness and appetite for "what next?"
Here is PART 2 of Whitewashing of the Education Debacle:
Here is PART 2 of Whitewashing of the Education Debacle:
As a teacher, I cannot think of one colleague that does not hold ethical behavior as sacred in the classroom. These teachers take full ownership of being mandated reporters and having the responsibility of protecting every one of their students’ morally, ethically, emotionally and physically which all goes well beyond classroom content instruction. This is because these teachers are descent, respectable citizens who know how to avoid harm by thinking first about what they are going to say and how they are going to say it. Being a popular media personality, like Scott Haney of Channel 3, does not carry an exception to that responsibility. Yet media has a pronounced influence on how people act and what they believe. I have a great fear that many new education design produced teachers, that are flooding in behind the disenfranchised, older, ineffective, traditional education design teachers, like myself, are deemed the best and the brightest by the media because of their perceived talents or youthful exuberance, not their experience, patience or ability to separate their personal agenda from their vocational responsibilities. The new approach to education empowerment is using budgetary issues and erroneous assessment data as a smokescreen to disinherit highly qualified, intelligent, compassionate career educators to make room for a new form of classroom instruction that is no more than a social experiment created to divert attention from the largest scam on record, defrauding the taxpayer of their hard earned money intended to be spent on quality education instruction of our youth. In the end it really seems that the main question is where did all the tax dollars that used to be teacher’s salaries actually go? It sure didn’t go to the new teachers and notice how many top education administrators leave their post before their redesigns actually produce results.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)