Bouncing Around The Room, Part II

"Critics are so intent on exposing the racism and obtuseness of the teacher that it is difficult to understand her view of the world. Like welfare workers and police, teachers in the urban colonies of the poor are part of a social system that shapes their behavior, too. It is more important to expose and correct the injustice of the social system than to scold its agents. Indeed, one of the chief reasons for the failures of educational reforms of the past has been precisely that they called for a change of philosophy or tactics on the part of the individual school employee rather than systemic change-and concurrent transformations in the distribution of power and wealth in the society as a whole."

-David B. Tyack, The One Best System, 1974

Spot on, 35 years later (charges of whole-scale racism, I think, notwithstanding). Blaming teachers simultaneously absolves the non-teaching public of all responsibility for educating poor people and also strokes its ego. Yes, schools can be fixed, if only we could fire the bad teachers! No further public obligation required! And yes, while I may occasionally face problems in my own life, at least I'm not a stupid teacher!

I believe that we're better off doing everything we can to improve the teachers we've got and at the very least, offering them incentive to stay where they are. Teaching poor students is, I will maintain, the hardest job in America, but also one of the most widely misunderstood. Given the hours required outside of the classroom for student feedback, parent contact, careful planning and assessment, why don't we lighten teaching loads to two periods a day for teachers in Title I schools? Why don't we change school funding rules so that NYC principals aren't forced to hire an uncertified rookie instead of a veteran in order to cut costs?

And when will we see that the biggest obstacle to poor children's success in school isn't incompetent teachers, the student-laptop ratio, lack of school choice, or governance issues, but rather deeply ingrained hopelessness quite rationally wrought by economic realities?

Bouncing Around The Room

This week The New Yorker weighs in on school "reform" with Steven Brill's piece, "The Rubber Room". Inflammatorily subtitled, "The battle over New York City's worst teachers," the article treats its audience to a slice of the much-decried bureaucracy of teaching in the city, while more acutely making residents of the Temporary Reassignment Center (TRC) (a.k.a., the Rubber Room) look dumb. Like, really dumb.

“Before Bloomberg and Klein, everyone knew that an incompetent teacher would realize it and leave on their own,” pronounces Brandi Scheiner, the first individual Brill permits to wholly embarrass herself before a national readership of hundreds of thousands. It is hard to imagine how silly this must sound to anyone that has never met a dyed-in-the-wool union stalwart. Later, from an unnamed TRC denizen: “We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.” I'm sure this comment resonates strongly with the lawyers, doctors, and private sector employees that have contracts relying heavily on their ability to self-evaluate. Brill's pièce de résistance, however, is his recounting of the story of "Patricia Adams", a pseudonym for a Rubber Room defendant who eventually returned to the job and was lionized by the UFT. “Bravo!,” reads the union website where she is described returning to work, and the reader is allowed perhaps a twinge of sympathy, until the truth is revealed: Ms. Adams was an alcoholic who was sent to the TRC for being found “'in an unconscious state' in her classroom," leaving 34 students unsupervised. Yes, drunk and asleep on the job. With tenure, one can only assume.

The Rubber Room was introduced to most non-teachers through an engaging and well-produced piece on Ira Glass's "This American Life". While Glass's treatment presented sob stories of teachers, lives thrown into turmoil through seemingly harsh accusations and the inhumane conditions of the TRC, Brill doesn't concern himself with such trivialities. The Rubber Room is an unquestionably necessary, if unfortunate, reality, as he posits, "The stated rationale for the reassignment centers is unassailable: Get these people away from children, even if tenure rules require that they continue to be paid." This is not all Brill presents as unassailable; at various points he deems due process as overly expensive and gratuitous, Obama's "Race To The Top" money as a necessary, coveted prize, and ATR teachers as lazy and unemployable.

Detailed presentations of teaching, particularly teaching in urban, low-income settings, are rare in high-profile publications like The New Yorker. As infrequent as they are, they are astoundingly important to the national discussion about education in America. The New Yorker's wealthy, liberal audience is a powerful force when it comes time to vote, donate money to non-profits and candidates, and generally weigh in on domestic policy. To present a view of New York City's teachers by focusing on the less than 1% that are so grossly incompetent as to be drunk on the job,to nickname a student "the enforcer" and put him in charge of discipline, and to make sweeping, nonsensical generalizations about teaching as a job that only requires loving children, is irresponsible.

In order to advance the cause of education for all in this country, we need high-circulation publications to present the real "battles" that confront high-poverty teachers: teaching deep concepts vs. teaching what's on the test, devoting 80 hours per week to give impoverished students the support they require vs. having a family and life outside of the workplace, charter schools vs. public schools, staying in an inner-city classroom for low pay vs. teaching in the suburbs for more, and the list goes on. So few in the non-teaching public have a true understanding of these issues, and yet they represent the truly important debates that need to be had.

Steven Brill presents a cogent, strong article that does let the public know about a process that is overly expensive and wasteful. Additionally, the UFT is rightly chastised for standing up for teachers that have no business being in the classroom. Unfortunately, too many people already believe that the majority, rather than the minority, of teachers have no business in the classroom, and this piece is only fueling that fire. Let's hope in the future The New Yorker and other publications will feature battles being fought by the best, rather than the worst, teachers in New York City.

Can I deal with this confluence of facts?

Five years ago I decided I wanted to be a teacher. There were, I felt, lots of reasons. I liked math. I liked kids. I had enjoyed the time I spent volunteering in some urban elementary schools. I wanted a job. Teach For America gave me the hard sell. I enjoyed tutoring college kids. But, mainly, I wanted to do something about poverty. I wanted to do something about widening inequality, and it seemed schools were the obvious answer.

I was beyond naive. "Sure, I thought, teach the kids, they pass the test, do well on their SATs, "stay of the street," they can go to college, get a good job, get rich, problem solved. Inequality is a problem that is to be solved by our schools."

I've come to see this as a distinctly American, if factually inaccurate, view. Only in America would we have such a thin belief in public institutions. Only in America would we leave the impoverished to fend for themselves, and lean so heavily on under-resourced schools to overcome generations and cultures of poverty through 8 hours of daily instruction (and yes, Arne, you could change that to 10 or 12 and I'm not convinced it would make a difference).

So now, four years later, I'm trying to come to terms with three major realizations.

1) Schools are not the solution to poverty.

2) Poverty is the result of the machinations of our political and economic systems.

3) The job of a teacher is extraordinarily difficult: it is to develop meaningful lessons that cause students to learn to think for themselves.

Not sure where it all leaves me...

Do you have one of these in your neighborhood?

Because my school does. So please, before you say that you understand growing up in an impoverished community, agree that we just need to fire the bad teachers, and mail your check to the Manhattan Institute, try to consider growing up with a gigantic police watchtower keeping your neighborhood under surveillance.

In the latest TAP: Widening Inequality + Locally Funded Schools = Credit Crunch

The American Prospect is growing on me. Founder Robert Reich is one of my intellectual heroes and TAP is an intelligent, unapologetic source of progressive ideas.

The latest has a good summary piece on the national education debate, although for my tastes it is too willing to paint Rhee, Klein, et al. as "reformers". This is the sort of David Brooksian nonsense that too much of the public, and even our President, has bought into. Painting the debate as one that pits these "reformers" against Randi and the union is a gross oversimplification.

It also, unsurprisingly, has a lot concerning the stimulus package and current economics. The cover story by Cornell economist Robert H. Frank, explains how widening inequality and property tax-funded schools contribute to overspending by the middle class:

Additional spending by the rich shifts the frame of reference for those just below the near rich, and so on, all the way down the income ladder. Such expenditure cascades help explain why the median new house build in the U.S. is now about 50% larger than its counterpart from 30 years ago, even though the median real wage has risen little since then. Higher spending by middle-income families is driven less by a desire to keep up with the Joneses than by the simple fact that the ability to achieve important goals often depends on relative spending. Because of the link between housing prices and neighborhood school quality, for example, the median family would have to send its children to below-average schools if it failed to match the spending of its peers on housing. Instead, middle-income families have opted to save less, borrow more, work longer hours, and commute longer distances than ever before, all in an effort to keep pace with escalating consumption standards. (Bold added)

The connection between property values and local school quality has been a long-standing and well-recognized obstacle to true equity. Frank's point stretches beyond the traditional egalitarian argument and shows how the connection between property values and school quality has actually fueled our crazed consumption, thirst for credit, and massive mortgages that are beyond our means.

All of this, of course, makes me want to become an economist.

So does reading this. Seriously, a must-read.

John Dewey

Had a lot of awesome things to say. And much of it rings true today, 100 years later. Most important, I think we're at place today where so many people that talk, write, and make decisions about education are not educators. Dewey was an educator, and it comes through in everything he writes. While the non-educator crowd will continue to push for pencil-and-paper tests that ask for regurgitation of simple facts and not understand how anything else could be important to learning, Dewey speaks the language of educators in his push for more thought and thinking in education:

"[A]ny habit of teaching which encourages the pupil for the sake of a successful recitation or of a display of memorized information glide over the thin ice of genuine problems reverses the true method of mind training."

-from How We Think, 1910

I agree, and at this point wonder what this looks like in 2009. Who are the teachers and schools that are doing this? What does it look like, especially in low-income communities? Can this kind of teaching and learning be reconciled with pencil-and-paper tests? Can it be made politically popular enough to be put into practice anywhere?

race and the election

Via Edwize, a cool video that shows that there is something special going on this time around.