It’s interesting that Texas, whose test-based accountability model would serve as the blueprint for No Child Left Behind, would experience such a vocal backlash to its testing blitzkrieg, not to mention that it would cave to public pressure so quickly. The problems with this volume of testing are legion, but chief among them is the absolute hatchet job it would do to elective coursework.  With so many kids struggling to pass five tests every year, the amount of remediation needed on annual basis would necessarily squeeze out the classes that frankly make going to school worth it for many students.

Critics of corporate reform will typically bemoan the limited utility of standardized tests, only to hear as response “But how will you know that kids are learning anything?” How, indeed?

—–

It might come as a total shock to you, but I was editor of my school newspaper when I was a senior(1) in high school. The year prior to that, I was editor of the opinion section(2). Prior to that, I was a scrub staff writer. And as a wee freshman, I was sitting in a Journalism 1 classroom learning the basics.

If you’re keeping track, that’s four years learning to report, interview, do page layouts, edit the writing of others, meet deadlines, sell advertisements, and occasionally meet with school administration regarding the content of your paper.

On top of that, I spent two years in creative writing, the last of which I was also the prose editor of the student literary magazine. The list of competencies needed for the newspaper went double for the lit mag as well on top of needing to evaluate the creativity of others’ writing (as well as one’s own).

There is no multiple choice test that adequately assesses the skills necessary to put together a newspaper or literary magazine. The publication itself is the assessment. It’s an unquantifiable metric of success which data-driven fanatics hate. On top of that, a lot of the work for these things is extracurricular which is something only privileged kids do because they do not have an achievement gap which must be addressed at all times!

I don’t know how to put it in a chart for you. I don’t know how to say “If you invest x number of dollars into this student newspaper, you will close y number of years in the achievement gap.” I don’t know to what degree it really “works” in that sense. What I do know is how critical it is to have multiple avenues for student-led academic pursuits in order to make students care about school and care about getting better at a craft.

—–

My early high school memories were not positive ones. I was depressed and had a difficult time making meaningful friendships. I felt like an outcast at my school. I felt unattractive in large part because I was over 60 pounds heavier than I am today. I had enormous social anxieties. I was suicidal at times. I remember coming home and crying a lot. I was a smart kid, but I don’t remember feeling “successful.” In fact, sophomore year was the first time I ever got an F on my report card(3).

Therapy helped. Meds did, too. So did losing a bunch of weight over the summer. But I think finding writing as a creative and expressive outlet was equally important to keeping my depressive tendencies at arm’s length. And it was the years of practice and collaboration in these extracurricular/elective courses that fueled me to write all the time for fun and develop a voice(4). It was the crucible of many enduring friendships and lasting memories(5).

My creative writing teacher eventually became my senior English teacher. I have kept in touch with him with varying degrees of regularity for the nearly nine years since I graduated high school. This weekend, I discovered an e-mail he sent me the summer after I graduated and it was like discovering a long-lost family heirloom. In it, he told me this:

I mean, is it any wonder I went into college wanting to major in English and be an English teacher? Is it any wonder that I eventually became a teacher and that this is the career I have chosen as my life’s work? If I can be for my students what Mr. Goodyear was for me and countless other classmates, then I know I will have been of service to them.

—–

As an exercise, ask yourself these questions about your state’s standardized exams: Do you think the STAAR test will ever inspire a child to teach? To think creatively? To produce little chapbooks of their own writing, or to write inflammatory editorials, or to produce anything of their own and be able to judge its worthiness for public consumption? Will the STAAR reveal Mark Twain’s genius to a child for the first time? Will the STAAR teach you to be a part of a large-scale project over the course of a year, and encourage you to negotiate social relationships to ensure its successful completion? If a child is taught just enough to pass the STAAR test, are they more or less likely to read for pleasure as an adult? Are they more or less likely to read to their children in the future?

When there is such emphasis on the outcomes of these tests, I’m less interested in what they purport to measure and more so in what they don’t. What standardized tests measure is a debasement of what schools are capable of producing, in fact what they ought to produce and we ought to fight for. Had I gone to a school in constant fear of state intervention due to low-test scores, I would not have the same opportunities to really grow up, to develop an adult brain. It is the students in low-income schools that are most vulnerable to losing these opportunities because of the shortsightedness of our policymakers who believe these kinds of programs(6) to be inessential to learning the three R’s or becoming the workforce of the 21st century or whatever(7). It is why we as teachers ought to continue to push back against the utterly destructive and regressive test-based accountability regime of the last two decades.

NOTES

(1) Technically co-editor in chief. Allie would be mad if I didn’t mention that.

(2) Well, I never! Me, with opinions about stuff?

(3) In AP Computer Science. It was because I never did anything in that class but play Flash games which in 2002 could not have been that fun.

(4) Of course my English teachers made me a better writer, helped me appreciate and understand literature, helped me better understand myself and the perspective of others. I’m sure their input helped me pass the TAAS test, not that they ever stressed about it because this was pre-NCLB. That was before teachers were held accountable for student performance so, you know, they were probably doing a pretty awful job since there was no test to measure what they were doing.

(5) My most cherished high school memories probably came from the student publications trip to Washington DC, so the yearbook, newspaper, and lit mag staffs were all there. We did touristy stuff, we went to some student publications conference, we got to meet then-Justice Sandra Day O’Connor — our school’s namesake — who was totally phoning in her appearance because some of the things she was telling us was verbatim from a video clip of her and the other justices somewhere else playing the background. I remember one outing walking back to the hotel by myself when I got separated from our group and I didn’t have a cell phone at the time to tell them I was leaving and that I got there okay. When they came back, they were upset. Some friends got in some hijiinx that, as a teacher now, would cause me eternal worry or rage. We shared a lot of inside jokes due to the lack of direct adult supervision and hotel cohabitation. I don’t think I appreciated how much fun it was until years later. And I have not appreciated how much trouble that must have been for the teachers until now.

(6) You can include in this list UIL, Academic Decathlon, student publications, forensics, or any other academic pursuit that doesn’t take place with 30 kids and a teacher in a room with desks and a projector.

(7) Or at least does not consider them worth the expense because we should value efficiency above all else, after all.

1. Delivering well-prepared teachers to the classroom – D
2. Identifying effective teachers – D+
3. Retaining effective teachers – C-
4. Exiting ineffective teachers (author’s emphasis added) – D+
5. Expanding the pool of teachers – C-

If you bother reading beyond the report card summary, you will find in the national and state reports in-depth only on the first category: “Delivering well-prepared teachers to the classroom.” In citing the mediocre grades of this report, the author is hoping to prove that it does not matter what preparation route you go through, that both traditional and alternate routes have their warts so there is no use fretting over the merits or faults of one pathway or the other.  However, a deeper investigation of the NCTQ report raises more questions for me than it settles. First, let’s examine what this report says.

The NCTQ has a checklist of priorities it looks for as it makes its grades in this category:

1. Raise admission standards - The NCTQ wants states to require teaching candidates to pass a basic math, writing, and reading test as a means for admission into teacher preparation programs and they want that test to be standardized and “normed to the general college-bound population.”
2. Align teacher preparation with Common Core State Standards - Their three criterion in this category deal with elementary teachers. Namely, they seek for all elementary teacher coursework and subject-testing to be aligned with Common Core, all teachers should pass a rigorous assessment on reading instruction, and that elementary teachers be provided content on math instruction specifically for elementary.
3. Improve clinical preparation - Cooperating teachers must demonstrate effectiveness as measured by “student learning.”(2)  The NCTQ also would like all teachers to complete at least 10 weeks of full-time student teaching. Interesting idea, that.
4. Raise licensing standards - This subcategory seeks the elimination of the K-8 Generalist credential and the requirement for subject-matter testing for all middle and high school subject areas.
5. Don’t lower the bar for special education teachers - In other words, you need subject-specific testing on top of a special education credential.
6. Hold teacher preparation programs accountable - In short, collect data on student standardized test scores, tie them to the preparation programs, set a minimum standard, and grade the programs accordingly.

Of these six subcategories, four are at least someway related to the tests that teachers take to gain certification. The other two have criterion tied to student performance on standardized tests. The one thing I liked from this is the demand that there be a minimum of 10 weeks of full-time student teaching. Other than that, the NCTQ is preoccupied with the myths that traditionally-certified teachers are often a bunch of dummies that need to be weeded out and that we can only measure a teacher’s effectiveness by student standardized test scores.

So, we have a report fraught with problematic assumptions about what a teacher preparation ought to prioritize (testing and more testing) being used to defend TFA’s woefully inadequate teacher preparation requirements:

“All across the country, TFA corps members experience a backlash from policy makers and other educators who insist that Teach for America’s alternative path to the classroom is the main pipeline pushing horribly unprepared teachers into schools. But it actually turns out that underpreparing teachers is a national problem, including most traditional undergraduate and graduate education programs.”

This false equivocation provides fleeting comfort for the underprepared and overwhelmed corps member. But this misses the overarching complaint with TFA. Not only are teachers coming through TFA underprepared, but they are recruited and cultivated with the explicit purpose of doing something else in a few years thus ensuring a cycle of undertrained novices in perpetuity and thus denying low-income students the opportunity to have experienced educators dedicated to teaching as a career and not as a stepping stone to some other preferred career path.

In a pique of self-pity, the author continues:

But corps members are still experiencing harsh words from colleagues, administration, and the media insisting that TFA teachers aren’t as qualified to work in schools…aren’t trained to work in high-needs communities…the list goes on. It’s an issue that many of us have grappled with at some point. I had more than my share of tense encounters that kept me awake at night and tied my stomach up in knots. I knew I was putting in the late-night hours, jumping through the same administrative and state-mandated hoops that my colleagues were, and sacrificing my weekend freedom to construct innovative lessons for my students. But instead of feeling supported and encouraged in my work, I was flooded with continuous self-doubt. And in the eyes of my critics, I would forever be a second-rate teacher because of the way I’d gotten my teaching certificate, regardless of the quality of my work.

Note to new corps members: if you are not prepared to face an avalanche of criticism for being — for all intents and purposes — scab labor, then you need to find something else to do. The reason you will be considered a second-rate teacher is not just the path your chose for certification, but because you will probably not be a very good teacher until you’ve done this job for a few years. And fair or not, when you join Teach for America, the assumption is you will not stick around long enough to gain the experience needed to be a good teacher. You’re guilty until proven innocent in many people’s eyes. If you’re secure enough to deal with that and are committed to becoming that experienced teacher anyway, you should be okay! Mostly.

To be clear, I think traditional preparation programs ought to do more to prepare teaching candidates for the practical realities of the classroom, particularly in low-income schools. Nor is this an attempt to categorically declare one brand of first-year teachers superior to the other. There is no substitute for being a lead teacher in terms of experience. However, traditional certification programs have the most rigorous pre-service clinical experience requirements compared to alternate route programs, particularly in Texas where pre-service experience is virtually not required at all for alternatively-certified candidates. And since the explicit purpose of traditional certification programs is to produce career teachers, traditionally-certified teachers are more likely to have the confidence and desire to get through those difficult first few years and develop the acumen of an effective teacher over the course of a years-long career.

The author concludes with this: “And maybe eventually, as a nation, we can stop arguing over which certification path put a dedicated teacher into a classroom, and instead build supportive networks, mentorship programs, and teaching communities to better train and support them once they get there.” I disagree. We should be arguing about this a lot more given the clear evidence of higher attrition rates for alternatively-certified teachers and their increasing share of new teacher hires. We should argue about this because low-income schools bear the largest brunt of this revolving door of teachers, particularly alternatively-certified ones. If we are serious about improving low-income schools, we ought to be having discussions about how we can get the best-trained, most-experienced teachers to staff them and less about how we can make our temporary band-aids better.

Or, are we to accept the future of teaching as an entry-level, temporary profession as unalterable and try to manage this dire reality as best we can?

NOTES

(1) In the interest of disclosure, I was approached about writing for Teacherpop a while back.  I was kind of skeptical because a lot of the content seemed pretty fluffy. Plus, I think I was only asked because I had indicated in my application to TFA that I had been involved with student publications before.  I told the editor that I blogged already and sent him some links to this page to see what he thought.  I never heard back from them after that.

(2) Read: “student standardized test performance” because that is what they actually mean.

(3) I guess this depends on where you are placed. In an at-will state like Texas with a robust private-sector alternative certification market, many if not most of the teachers at low-income schools are alternatively-certified. In fact, many of them have even less training than TFA teachers do.  This used to be reason enough for me to support TFA, as a lesser of two evils. Now I have learned that two wrongs don’t make a right. Only took me 27 years.

Prior to the baby, I operated on razor-time margins. A day goes well when I get up by 5, get to school at 7, get my room ready for class while tutoring or chatting with early-bird students, getting copies made on one of our school’s fickle and temperamental Xerox machines. My conference period is typically swallowed whole by UIL housekeeping, debate team, ARD Progress Reports, meeting with administrators to discuss benchmark data(2), attendance verification logs(3), meeting with or calling parents(4), or once in a blue moon if I’m feeling indulgent, going to the bathroom. If something fell through the cracks during the day, I’d always have after school or the following morning. Now that I’m operating on a shoestring time budget that has been reapportioned for a hefty domestic load, that razor-thin margin is utterly decimated.

This has meant that my teaching practice suffered as the time I’ve used in the past to add language objectives or think more deliberately about modifications is gone.  Now I’m lucky to get my copying done in time for 1st period on some days.

While I’m at school, I have had what I can only describe as depressive episodes. I feel stranded at school, set adrift from my wife and son who need me as a caretaker.  Being away from home 12 hours each weekday feels like a dereliction of my responsibilities as a father.  And while I’m at school, I’m similarly drowning in obligations.  I don’t have the energy to tackle many of them.  When I get home, it’s time to get dinner on the table, change diapers, possibly do another load of laundry, feed the dogs, wash the dishes, give him a bath, take the dogs out again, change another diaper, carry him around and make motorboat noises while my wife finally has a chance to get cleaned up, change another diaper, change his clothes because he peed all over them while I was changing his diaper.  On weekends, add grading to this for several hours.  At some point we’ll drift into the bedroom and I’ll pass out next to my wife while he’s feeding.  If I’m lucky he’ll sleep through the next 5 hours until I get up and do it all over again.

This experience has confirmed for me the pitiful inadequacy(5) of this country’s family leave policies. The Family Medical Leave Act entitles families to up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave in the case of select medical and baby-related reasons.  This puts families in challenging positions: do you do what you think is best and stay home with your child as long as possible, knowing how important developing the bonding time is?  Or, will you be too economically vulnerable to risk not getting paid for such an extended period of time?

My wife has chosen to stay home until April but I know that if we had the option and the pay, we’d both be home for a lot longer than that.  Instead, we’ll need to put our son in day care in a couple of months until summertime when we’ll both have the opportunity to be home(6).  I’ve gained a new appreciation for stay-at-home parents.  The work of raising a child is strenuous but infinitely rewarding.  If I lived in Sweden, I’d take a year off in a second.  Even still I’ve considered it.

I’ve thought a lot about my students who have kids or having them soon.  A couple had their baby girl about two weeks before ours.  We talk about parenting and how our babies growing and how they’re hitting their milestones and the endless comedy of getting peed on.  They both seem to be handling the transition okay, but I know there are other family members helping to take care of her while they’re at school.

I think about how challenging this is as a grown, married man with a good job and health insurance.  How stressful must this be when you’re stil a child yourself, or when you’re on the outs with the child’s father, or when you’re uninsured and getting hospital bills every week(7)?  I can’t imagine studying for an exam while my child is looking me dead in the eyes and screaming inconsolably.  I can’t imagine feeling anything but heart-wrenched having to be away from my child all day.

Ideally, our policies would reflect the lip-service we pay towards the importance of family.  Other than the child tax credit, though, there really isn’t very much support for families as they’re starting out.  As is the case in many areas of public life, American citizens are very much on their own.

In the meantime, I’ll have to make do with the photos and videos my wife sends me while I’m at work,  I just hope I don’t miss too much while I’m out.

PS – My wife read this and commented “Uh, this is really self-centered.”  Totally boneheaded on my part.  Let me add that everything I do at home she does many times over each day in addition to nursing him all day and taking him to appointments and that my list of things to do is for a brief window in the evening and that she has this same list all day and did I mention that I basically think of her as superhuman?  Because she is.  I already thought she was an extraordinary person before, and now she is an extraordinary mother, too.

NOTES

(1) Read: saved-up personal days.

(2) More on this in a future post, but suffice to say that the 10th grade teachers — math in particular — are feeling some substantial pressure for our kids to perform on the STAAR end-of-course exams since ours is the grade he state uses to determine a high school’s accountability rankings.

(3) Since schools lose money from low attendance, our school has been printing reams of attendance reports so that we can correct for any mismarked absences of students who had excuses or were actually tardy. Fortunately I keep a manual record of attendance in addition to the required online attendance, but this is nevertheless a time-intensive chore.

(4) This has truly been one of my weak areas in my first year of general ed. I think I took for granted how easy it is by comparison to stay in touch 20-something families as a case manager when you have designated periods for such contact. Now I have 140-plus families and maybe 14 seconds to get ahold of them if need be. It’s an adjustment for which I don’t think I adequately prepared myself.

(5) Money quote: “And the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that doesn’t mandate that parents of newborns get paid leave.”  Not to mention the many developing countries that still ensure paid maternity leave.  This feels so monumentally unfair I could scream.

(6) For this I am so grateful that we both work in schools and have extended periods of time off to be home.

(7) This has been a treat, really.  God bless the market.

My son Ben — all 10 pounds, 4 ounces, and 22 inches of him — joined our family.

I cannot describe the feeling of seeing him for the first time. And I cannot express enough the gratitude for my wife who carried him for over 40 weeks and labored for 20 hours to bring him here. I am eternally in her debt, and I will try — pitifully — to pay her back for th rest of my life.

I still plan to update this blog, but understand that if I go a long time without saying anything, I’m joyfully preoccupied.

What I’ve done with this post is explore the conflict behind the corporate reformers and the educators they seek to impose their will over.  In it, I hope to prove that the aims of corporate reformers and those of educators are necessarily at odds with one another.

Introduction to Market-Based Reformers

The corporate reform movement is an attempt by a group of wealthy philanthropists to impose market forces where there had previously been none or had protections against them.  The policy instruments they support are: data-driven management designed to weed out undesirable employees and reward superstars; school choice models(1) designed to foster competition for student enrollment and their tax dollars to bring down costs and improve customer satisfaction(2); weakening teacher unions to allow for greater labor market flexibility(3).

This tribe of reformers resolves that market-oriented reforms will offer a better, more varied and customer-pleasing product.  Or, it will deliver at least the same quality of product for less money.  And, in doing so, these reforms will yield a more equitable education for children in low-income households because parents will not be forced to send their kids to the substandard schools available in their neighborhood.

The Intentionality of Disruption

The argument that such reforms will be disruptive, lead to job loss, would cause total havoc to the education system as a whole falls on deaf ears.  One of the staggering capabilities of markets is their capacity for creative destruction, a term popularized by the economist Joseph Schumpeter.  Because of the efficiency of markets to adapt to consumer demands, the products, services, and firms of one era will almost certainly fall prey to the changing needs of the markets.  One company rises (Microsoft), another falls (IBM).  An innovation captures the imaginations of millions one generation only to crumble mere decades later (Polaroid).  This is good for us because we reap the benefits of this relentless creative thrust.  Things get better, faster, and cheaper, and our lives are made easier and more fun.

For market-based reformers, the destruction of public education is not a bug; it’s a feature.  Like a phoenix out of the ashes, a new, robust, monetized educational system is something to be desired so that — finally — schools can harness the awesome power of private markets.

In order for markets to work and not descend into some corporatist public-private hybrid, the role of the entrepreneur is essential.  They are the risk-takers.  They strategically gamble on the novelty of their ideas, on the notion that there is a group of people out there who want what they can provide and that no one else is providing what they’ve got.  In the last half-century, these are the Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerbergs of the world, risking the security of a sure-thing job at an established firm for the possibility of striking gold on your own.  This risk is what makes innovation possible and is what drives the dynamism of markets.

My question is this: are the roles of educator and entrepreneur mutually compatible?  Can one be both risk-taker and caretaker?

Risk-taker v. Caretaker

As a caretaker, I value stability, engendering trust, meeting the needs of someone else before my own, and cooperation.  The risk-taker values reward, self-interest, recognition, and accomplishment.  I think a Venn diagram between the two roles would show an intersection for things like cooperation, recognition, and accomplishment.  But I think of cooperation as an end for the caretaker and a means to an end for a risk-taker.  For accomplishment and recognition, it’s vice versa.  My interest in personal accomplishment is a means to the end of improving the lives of my students.

I feel that the corporate reform movement doesn’t value things like trust or stability or meeting others’ needs because they are very difficult to quantify.  Note the reforms they support in the introduction: employee management based on test data, competition in school markets, labor flexibility.  All of these things can be measured using dollars, student enrollment numbers, or standardized test data.

How do I know my school is successful?  The caretaker will talk to you about conversations they have had with parents and students, the sense of joy and love they have in their work, the great progress their students have made towards adulthood which may or may not be college-focused.  The risk-taker will point to their numbers: test scores went up, student enrollment went up, revenues went up.

This poses an interesting challenge for the market-based approach to schools.  If we measure schools on their metrics alone, where do we find the market winners and losers?  In other words, where are the good schools and bad schools in a market system?

Good schools v. Bad schools

Let’s take a look at students who move frequently versus those who stay put in one location.  The creative destruction of markets means schools will open and close with fluidity.  The bad ones won’t have enough customers, the good ones will open up more campuses or expand existing ones to meet consumer demand.  There will be students who find themselves in the middle of this tumult more so than others.  Those students will also be bouncing between teachers and their different teaching styles, perhaps different curricula, different sets of rules and consequences, different peers and friends(4).  Because the schools don’t have to keep them, kids with behavior challenges will bounce more than anyone.  The public schools will become the last bastion for these students and others with special needs.  Those who have a stable school home will have better social and better academic outcomes and these will often be the children of parents who can afford the “good” schools much like the parents who can afford “nice” homes today.

My guess is the “bad schools” in the market will often be located near the “bad schools” of today.  This is because the supposed goodness or badness of schools has less to do with the staff or administration or innovations like long hours and days and years, or with some magical properties of the school building itself.  No, school quality comes down to peer effects.  This is how it works when we describe “nice” neighborhoods or churches or grocery stores.  You want to know what makes the “nice” HEB so nice, why the store is cleaner, why it offers a greater diversity of products that are healthier than the HEB down the street from my school?  Give me a minute…do you think it’s because its customer base is wealthier?  You mean, it’s not because the store managers or cashiers are less capable or because the west side HEB patrons just aren’t motivated enough to want 75 varieties of hummus(5)?  Of course not.  This is just the market at work.  The market doesn’t care about equity, period.  The market responds to the demands of its consumers.

Contrary to the wishful thinking of education reformer grandpappy Milton Friedman, if the market demands even more segregation than is currently available in government schools, then so be it(6).

If a neighborhood has “bad schools,” they’ll just have to adapt by getting rid of low-performing teachers and students until they are good.  And those low performers will be thrust back into the marketplace to find a new home, even though every other school will succumb to the same pressures.  The public school will necessarily become the dumping ground for the most challenging or expensive to teach students.

Contrary to the theoretical model put forth by free-market ideologues, markets do not yield more equitable results.  The gulf between the “good” and “bad” schools widens because of the inherent segregating properties of market forces.

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Creative Destruction in Education

Let’s think about what is lost in this creative destruction.

• First and foremost, kids lose.  Since charters are not public schools, they will lose their constitutional rights.  Many more kids will lose art, physical education, music, journalism, debate, dance, creative writing, a variety of foreign languages, and any other class that is not tested, not considered “essential.”  Students will profound special needs will be further segregated from non-disabled peers because so few schools will want to take on the additional responsibility.  Students with language needs will languish trying to find a school that will take them and meet their needs appropriately.
• Parents lose their voice.  They are granted a voice as customers, but this is illusory.  They are subject to the availability of what the market provides.  If they are dissatisfied, they move to another school.  This is rough on the kid and on the parents who now have to shop for this other school, possibly in a neighborhood they of their child can’t get to easily.  If the school is not satisfied with the student, the student can be booted out in spite of parental protest.
• Teachers lose their voice.  As labor participants, we are given a choice of where we want to work, but without organized labor to speak on behalf of workers, the market will dictate wages and hours.  The private school, either for-profit or not, will have incentive to remain competitive, trimming the fat wherever possible.  The bulk of a school’s operating cost goes to personnel.  This means teachers get their salaries cut and their hours extended.  And when that happens, it’s our fault because these are the schools we chose to work in.  This is what we signed up for.

The Future of Education Reform

How should we proceed then, as caretakers or risk-takers?  What do we value in schools and from teachers?  It is my view now that these roles are inherently opposed to each other.  If we are to seek equity, social justice, and equality of opportunity for children of lesser means, then we should reject the suggestions and impositions of the corporate reform movement steadfastly.  We ought to limit the influence of misleading or useless metrics such as census standardized test scores and recognize the folly of competitive markets when what is at risk is not mere capital but human beings with complex lives.  We ought to push for reforms that empower all families to be involved in their children’s education and success in schools, that seek a level playing field, that work to integrate all walks of life into a community of equals.

The risks are too great to pursue the destructive ends a market will wreak.  The stakes are far too high to pursue anything less than equity for our kids.

NOTES

(1) Charters schools and voucher programs.

(2) Ostensibly parents and children.

(3) Including, but not limited to, diminishing or eliminating the importance or necessity of licensure.  Hence preferences for TFA, alternative certification programs, and charters, all of which circumvent the market artifice of traditional teacher certification.

(4) Assuming the gubmint keeps their dirty hands off standards altogether.  Oops, sorry libertarians, this one is not coming close to happening.

(5) DING DING DING!  For getting this question correctly, you get a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for Pita Pal-brand hummus.

(6) The late free-market guru Milton Friedman fretted that no true universal voucher program had ever been instituted in the United States and therefore no real reform would occur.  He also believed that such a voucher system would allow parents to get their kids out of low-performing schools and improve the education of those students.  Well, Chile has had a universal voucher system and, quelle surprise, the vouchers have “exacerbated segregation between schools and between types of schools.”

(7) To be denied decades of government largesse only to suddenly be afforded access to millions of kids with shiny golden tickets in their hands worth $5000 a piece…you know the investment world is salivating at the opportunity.

For those of you who are not teaching in the once proud nation of Texas(1), you may not know about our testapalooza for our high schoolers, but here was the original plan in its inception:

• All high schoolers planning to graduate on non-minimum graduation plans would need to pass six exams for English (I, II, III for Reading and Writing), and three exams  for Social Studies (World Geography, World History, US History), Science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics), and Mathematics (Algebra I and II, Geometry).
• Your EOC score was to account for 15% of your final average(2).
• The passing standard was unknown.
• Last year, TEA released 15 sample questions for each of the tests to be administered.
• Students must pass all 15 of these tests to graduate.  Failure to do so means that students will take and re-take the failed tests until they have passed them, regardless of performance in the actual class(3).

NOTES

(1) A fact our proud would-be secessionists will point out to you whenever they get the opportunity.  It’s true, Texas was a sovereign nation for 9 years, but we were basically in escrow to be annexed into the United States for the purpose of expanding slave territory.  EVERYTHING’S BIGGER IN TEXAS, Y’ALL.

(2) AKA the one that appears on your GPA; AKA the one that really counts.

(3) The exceptions to this now as it was with TAKS are students who receive modified instruction or have an alternate curriculum in accordance with their IEP.   The state of Texas says that only 2% of a district’s students may receive modifications and 1% receive an alternate curriculum.  Anything in excess of this would be counted automatically as failures for the district’s accountability ratings.  This does not stop many schools from placing an untoward number of students on modified plans so they can escape the rigors and requirements of the regular tests.  And thus another poison pill is slipped into the educational system as teachers, parents, and administrators scramble to make the right choice on behalf of the child due to our undying fealty to the Standardized Crown.

(4) I prefer “articulating my grievances.”

• TFA is no longer addressing teaching shortages as initially envisioned.
• Parachuting mostly white 22-year-olds into communities they don’t know working a job they are not adequately prepared for is not the best way to achieve transformational change in low-income neighborhoods.
• Congruent with its Americorps affiliation, TFA needs to get into the service game.

So, rather than be a total Debbie Downer, I’ve thought about what my version of TFA might look like if I transported myself into Wendy Kopp, Malkovich-style, and wrote my senior thesis at Princeton to create  Teach for America.  To avoid any confusion, I will refer to this dream organization as Bizarro TFA.  I would hate for some poor Googler to find this page and believe every word of it.

• What is Bizarro TFA and what does Bizarro Teach for America do?  It is a service organization dedicated to offering resources and support to low-income neighborhoods seeking to ameliorate the challenges facing children before, during, and after they progress through Pre K-12th grade public education.  Bizarro TFA recruits corps members for three-year commitments as either teaching corps members (veterans and novices) or community corps members.
• Who are Bizarro TFA corps members?  They are citizens of a city or region seeking the resources to redress the social ills which perpetuate poverty and deny children in low-income neighborhoods pathways to the middle class.  They may be veteran teachers, new teachers, or non-teaching professionals committed to a cause which affects our kids and their education.
• Does Bizarro TFA create new teachers?  There are some, but that is not our primary focus.  TFA believes the problem facing low-income neighborhoods is not a shortage of dedicated teachers.  Our experience tells us otherwise.  What we have noticed, however, is that many traditionally-certified teachers prefer to work in middle and upper-income neighborhoods.  It is our mission to find talented educators who dedicate their lives to teaching and offer them resources(1) that will empower them to commit to schools in low-income neighborhoods.  Our goal is not just to get teachers to commit temporarily to low-income neighborhood schools; we want more teachers to commit their careers in service of these schools.  We can use our philanthropic largesse to equalize salaries so that teachers have greater incentives to teach in urban and rural school districts, and we can relay the lessons we have learned from our experience working in our neighborhoods to ensure that our teaching corps members are approaching their students and families with the humility our kids need from their teachers.
• So, Bizarro TFA doesn’t train teachers?  Corps members who are on a new teacher track join their senior year of college.  They go through a one-year Institute on top of their undergraduate coursework and also serve a student teaching commitment before teaching full-time.  During this one-year Institute, corps members also volunteer in the community for service projects related to school improvement.  Our Institutes are run in conjunction with our host universities’ departments of education around the country.  We do provide continuous mentoring for teachers in their first 3 years and ongoing professional development for teachers of all levels of experience.
• Why would a veteran teacher join Bizarro TFA?  Who better to lead the way for positive change for students than the teachers who have stuck by them for years and years?  Their  experience in our schools and in our neighborhoods gives them a more detailed perspective of what is needed in their specific communities.  And, these teachers could use the resources that TFA has at its disposal to become master teachers, school administrators, department chairs, counselors, social workers, school psychologists, or any position of leadership necessary for a well-functioning school.
• Does Bizarro TFA partner with charter schools?  No.  Due to the pull of resources away from neighborhood schools that charter schools represent and due to their selectivity of students, we believe the best way forward to eliminating educational inequity is to ensure that each child may succeed in a school where their parents and their teachers have a voice in the direction of their schools.  We believe education is a true public good and a social responsibility that should not be abdicated to private, monied interests and we also believe a school has a moral and legal obligation to serve students with a full range of disabilities and language skills.
• What do the non-teaching corps members of Bizarro TFA do?  We have had so many talented young people apply to our program with a limited educational background and a limited interest in teaching as a career.  That’s okay.  Not everyone is cut out for this work.  But there is no sense in pouring thousands of dollars per year into developing a teacher who doesn’t want to teach and then repeating the process thousands of times over per year.  But, we recognize that if the educational system is to be truly equitable, the scourge of poverty must be fought from every angle.  So, for those who are working in policy or law, or those who work for non-profits, or whatever, their three-year commitment requires an extensive internship on behalf of their schools and linkage institutes(2).  For example, say you are placed as a community organizer at Sample HS.  You might be in charge of coordinating a college night, establishing work-study programs with local employers, working with public transportation officials to make bus lines run more frequently and to more stops, or partnering with a local non-profit combating teen pregnancy to provide community education.
• Does Bizarro TFA do a big summer Institute?  No.  Children in summer school do not need to be experimented on by total novices and the necessary skills of teaching cannot possibly be passed down in a single month.  New teachers must either be traditionally-certified before joining TFA or complete the one-year Institute with student teaching and observations.
• Where do you recruit corps members for Bizarro TFA?   We do continue to recruit at universities, but we have concentrated more of our efforts in our partner districts.  Each application round, we look for teachers with a record of accomplishment and a dedication to social justice.  This record of accomplishment is not limited to test scores and can include notable service projects completed with the school, or starting and sponsoring student organizations.  We need to find teachers who have already made their careers about the lives of their children and equip them with the resources to multiply their efforts.
• Does Bizarro TFA pursue big-money philanthropic donations?  Sure!  If any obscenely wealthy group of individuals wants to cut us a check, who are we to complain?  They should just be forewarned that we will listen to absolutely nothing they have to say on education just like they would absolutely not listen to a word we would have to say about managing a hedge fund, monopolizing a market for the better part of a decade, or stifling labor movements.  Your donation to Bizarro TFA is your special free-speech way of saying, “I like what your organization is doing for kids; please keep doing that.”  Nothing more.
• Does Bizarro TFA place new teachers in regions with no shortages?  Nope.
• Does Bizarro TFA champion its alumni who champion privatization efforts?  When we see these people in the hall, we avoid eye contact and walk very briskly past them.  They are pariahs and they don’t get invited to our parties.
• Since all of this is true, we are clearly on an alien planet.  How much do you weigh with this altered gravitational pull?  I don’t know, I haven’t checked.  But I can finally dunk on a 10-foot hoop, if that helps any.

NOTES

(1) Americorps award, ongoing professional development and mentorships.

(2) To be frank, this is my least developed idea, but the one with the most room to grow.  I feel like there are so many really talented people in TFA who are just not that interested in teaching as a job that could be afforded some opportunity to serve the community in a way that better suits their talents and interests.  Maybe internship is the wrong tack, or maybe that’s an incomplete picture.  Perhaps some measure of job placement in the non-profit world.  I just the get the impression that we are operating with the vestiges of TFA’s original plan which was to address teacher shortages.  We aren’t doing that anymore.  We don’t need so many of these corps members to be teaching.  So why are we trying to fit square pegs into round holes?  Why are we holding corps members accountable for two years as a classroom teacher and then letting loose the reins once the non-teachers have fled the field?  The whole enterprise lacks a sense of deliberateness and most of the investment dollars put into these two-and-done teachers is sunk.

I got to play with my school’s band during their holiday concert!  It was the first time in 10 years I had picked up a euphonium and boy did it SHOW.  I used to be all-area, and now the old man can barely keep his embouchure tight. I managed to practice enough to knock the rust off and basically sight-read a holiday medley in front of current and former students(3) and families (and fellow band nerds!)  The next day, a handful of my students were like I SAW YOU LAST NIGHT and I’m like I KNOW, DUDE!  It was a blast and definitely an experience I would seek to duplicate in the coming years(4).

Before I know it, I’m going to blink and we will be thrust into competition season for UIL in January.  I need more time with my CX Debate kids, but I’m only going to get two weeks.  Thankfully we have until March for everything else.

Oh, I can’t forget: my son is going to decide when he wants to be born any day now.  It’s all I’m thinking about.  This break is not long enough.

NOTES

(1) Close to a dozen black bean, a dozen cream cheese and spinach or cream cheese and jalapeño, a few pumpkin spice.  Still lots more in the fridge.  Louis CK is right: you don’t eat until you’re full, you eat until you hate yourself.

(2) About enough Twizzlers to go the distance of my intestinal tract laid end-to-end, a half-pound of dark chocolate of various flavors, a whole bag of ginger candies, and a sleeve of these.

(3) This was such a trip!  One of my debate teamers was back in town from Alaska and his first semester sounded pretty cool (apparently Alaska is a lot like Texas, go figure).  Another alum I worked with in UIL was down from Texas A&M and got hit pretty rough by a really rigorous-sounding first semester.  By his admission, he came in kind of arrogantly and not prepared for the intensity of the courses he was taking.  For me, this was  a reminder that even those best-suited for college from any background may not always be 100% emotionally prepared for it!  I know he’s making the adjustments he needs to do well, though.

(4) Fun fact: I went to high school with the assistant band director at my school.

A huge part of what rankles me about TFA nationally is my feeling that the organization is castling in a fight against public education.  If you will forgive a chess metaphor, castling is a move in chess which shelters the king in a corner of the board, typically behind a row of pawns, and frees the rook to attack.  I see TFA as the rook in this game, affording the king (corporate reformers writ large) some cover to advance their agenda on more favorable terms(1).

I had no reason to believe that our local group was making any inroads of this sort if only because Texas is already an at-will, right-to-work state, so it’s not like we could have made things any worse for teachers’ rights(2).  But then I came across the news that the George W. Brackenridge Foundation is trying to fund-raise $50 million to increase the number of students enrolled in a charter school by 80,000 by adding 145 new charter schools.  To give you some perspective, if we were to treat the students enrolled in charter schools as a single district, they would be the second largest school district in Bexar County to Northside ISD(3).

The George W. Brackenridge Foundation, like many big-money education philanthropists, is a benefactor of Teach for America.  The board of the George W. Brackenridge: chairwoman Victoria Rico also serves on the boards of IDEA and BASIS Texas charter schools(4); trustee Randy Boatwright “is the founder and owner of Boatright Oil & Gas Properties”; trustee David H.O. Roth(5) “is a Shareholder at Cox Smith Attorneys where he heads the firm’s Energy Industry Taskforce.”  Not exactly the first three people I’d choose to be at the forefront of transformative educational change.

I have made an about-face on charters.  Before I began teaching, I admired what schools like KIPP were advertising: take the “same kids” as low-performing urban public schools and get better results.  The extended school day/week/year, the 24-hour availability of the teachers by phone, the well-developed culture of discipline; all of this sounded like what kids need to overcome an achievement gap.

Then I started teaching in a traditional public school.  I was faced with the intense rigor and commitment of the job and came to appreciate the healthy balance I could achieve by keeping work and home comfortably at arm’s length.  I felt the drain of a 7 AM to 6 PM work schedule, not because my school asked me to work those hours, but because I wanted to do everything within my power to do better for my students.  I could not imagine this daily schedule being a mandate and not a choice.

I am dismayed that charters have become the raison d’être of education reformers in San Antonio, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised as it’s quite clear this is trend throughout the country.

I do not think KIPP or IDEA are “bad” schools.  I think they do right by some of their kids.  The problems I have with charters, “high-performing” or otherwise, are:

• Exclusivity – Charters do not have to keep all students.  What invariably happens as a result is that the least desirable students are weeded out of high-performing charter schools like KIPP and IDEA.  This includes students with severe to moderate disabilities and students who are Limited English Proficient.  The effect is known as “cream skimming” in which the students with the easiest to serve needs remain and the ones with the most challenging needs are sent back to their district schools or perhaps a “second-chance charter.”  This is in opposition to the philosophy of “One day, all children…” espoused by the TFA organization.  What this means in practical terms is that the students served by charters are not apples to be compared to the apples of traditional public schools given that their demographic make-up is decidedly less poor, less disabled, and less limited in English language skills.  This tells me the methods used by “high-performing” charter schools are not meeting the needs of our kids who have the most needs, most likely because they hire the least-experienced and least-equipped to handle these higher needs.
• Unreasonable working conditions – The high-pressure, high-workload expectations of teachers at KIPP and other charter schools is not good for professional development, leads to high levels of attrition, and fosters an environment for teachers to burn out quickly.  Who would want to work for 20 years in a school which has them on call nearly all year at a job in which they are at school nearly all day?  When are teachers supposed to have families of their own?  Not to mention these teachers are working for salaries less than their public school peers are earning.  I fear this model is what corporate reformers truly desire: more work for less pay.  As long as charters cream skim, it will appear this model gets “better results” and this will build greater public support for charter school expansion, despite the long term perils of a teaching profession defined by a revolving door of energetic young people stopping in for a few years before moving onto a job with better pay and working conditions.  This leads to…
• Deprofessionalizing of the teaching profession – If we continue forward in the expansion of charter school networks, professional educators, knowing their market value, will be less likely to serve students in low-income communities knowing that suburban school districts will provide better pay and working conditions.  This will leave the students served by the melange of charters to be taught by less-credentialed, less-experienced, and less-trained teachers, many of whom will no doubt be TFA corps members as they are today.  I imagine TFA’s San Antonio presence will be bolstered significantly by an expansion of charter networks founded by TFA alumni.  And they will teach for 2 or 3 years and then leave only to be replaced by another TFA corps member who will teach for 2 or 3 years and you get it.  All this despite years of research and evidence pointing to the increased effectiveness of veteran career teachers who get to year 5 or so.  Oh well, can’t let a little empiricism get in the way of change, I guess.
• Segregation – How funny that the solution to the “civil rights issue of our time” is to put kids in schools with even greater racial segregation than their neighborhood schools.  But charters and privatization do exactly that.
• Perverse incentives – Investors can make a mint off the construction of new charter schools.  The profit motive is an insufficient justification for the expansion of charter schools.
• Charters represent an abandonment of the public sphere – There is something sacred to me about what public schools represent.  It is accountable to its community in a democratic way.  Its function is, at its heart, about producing tomorrow’s citizens.  The corporate reform movement is less interested in that.  It is myopically focused on a narrow vision of academic achievement as measured by standardized tests.  It is less interested in producing citizens and more so in producing good workers.  They’ll crow about decreased competitiveness with Asian tigers as they have done for decades despite no ill effects to American economic competitiveness from supposed Japanese/Singaporean/S. Korean et al. superiority in math testing(6).  And they will use this rationale to support policies which strip teachers of their voices, of their rights as stakeholders in the education of their students.  The school choice model means parents are customers who must air their grievances in the marketplace.   If a customer is dissatisfied, she takes her business elsewhere.  And if the market doesn’t meet your needs?  Well, there isn’t a big enough market for what you want to be cost-effective or profitable.  You’re a passive participant voting with the dollars your child nets the school where she attends.  You don’t vote for your school board members.  I think I am struggling to articulate why this bothers me as much as it does, but life is long and I’m sure I will talk about it again in the future.

As a direct supplier of teachers to charter schools and a direct beneficiary of the expansion of charter schools in San Antonio, TFA’s mission to improve public education in San Antonio is fatally compromised.  I do not believe that traditional public schools and charter schools will mutually benefit from the expansion of charters given the funding implications of student enrollment.

Again, I question neither the sincerity nor the talents of TFA as a whole, but at this juncture in the game, the very talented rooks are moving into position to protect the king and advance a privatization agenda that is not in the best interests of the students we serve.

NOTES

(1) If you’d care to extend the metaphor, let’s call the pawns “school children in low-income neighborhoods” many of whom will be sacrificed in service of the king.

(2) Cue ominous music.

(3) Enrollment: ~97,000 and the district in which I was educated from K through 12.

(4) If you read the Texas Observer link in the second paragraph, you will see that these two charter networks are among the ones targeted to expand under the Brackenridge plan.

(5) What a total bummer this isn’t David Lee Roth, he could champion the death of public schools while doing acrobatic bicycle kicks in a lycra jumpsuit and I would totally be on board with it.

(6) And, in spite of our inferiority complex, East Asian countries are equally insecure about their capability to produce children who exhibit creativity and risk-taking the way we do.

• So, in short, the people working in this organization are super organized and professional and are tirelessly working to make my city’s educational landscape better.  I’m happy to be a part of it at the end of the day in spite of my misgivings about the organization as a whole.
• Without TFA, Texas schools will have to staff many of their high-needs areas with teacher candidates with even less training, less screening for quality, and not even a two-year commitment (many are lucky to stick around past Year 1).  At the very least, TFA represents a lesser of two evils.

I’ve got another year of teaching, blogging, and TFA experiences now. I looked back and thought about if those statements hold true for me.  I’ll say mostly yes, but with some important caveats.

Regarding the first statement, I still think TFA is super organized and professional and I believe they are sincerely working tirelessly to make my city’s educational landscape better.  Caveat 1: I don’t think they are actually making my city’s educational landscape better and I will go into greater details in future posts.  Caveat 2: I wouldn’t describe myself as happy to be a part of TFA anymore.  I wouldn’t say unhappy, either.  But I have a lot of ambivalence about what I have personally gained from the distinction of being a TFA corps member. 

Regarding the second statement, TFA is still a lesser evil than Texas Teachers and other for-profit alternative certification programs.  Caveat 3: TFA perversely benefits from high attrition in the same way that for-profit ACP’s do and suffer many of the same problems (scant training, short commitment).

I feel like these early posts about why I joined TFA in the first place either tell an incomplete story (part 1) or relate to some oblique policy gripe that isn’t especially relevant to my personal story (part 2).  I feel a measure of guilt to admit this publicly, but a huge reason I joined TFA was the pedigree and prestige.  I was already a teacher by the time I formally accepted, and lord knows I could have used the summer off instead of going to Institute(1).  But, to have the chance to be selected to an elite association as someone who underachieved in high school and attended a lower-tier university flattered and validated me in ways that I don’t think I could have predicted.  I was reasonably proud of the things I had accomplished to date, but I think getting accepted made me feel I had earned some manner of respect in high-achieving circles which was huge considering I had been fired from my job days before I applied. 

I have had some reservations posting this confession, but I think it’s an important consideration for prospective applicants.  If what you seek is status or a leg-up on grad school applications or an Americorps grant for said grad school, then Teach for America is a wonderful opportunity for you to do something meaningful for two years.  If you come into this wanting to make a difference in education, your experience with TFA may prove chastening(2). 

I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the intents of others who have joined or to suggest that what they have chosen to do with their lives is less meaningful than my own choices.  I think TFA’s mission is built on a sound premise: that true change will come when there is change happening in all walks of life, in and out of schools.  I’m not even saying the reasons why I joined are bad ones!  We take jobs all the time because we need to provide for ourselves and our families.  But I am being less magnanimous towards myself now because I feel that I have personally gained a lot more than my kids have from my involvement with TFA.  I’m not sorry I joined, but it remains to be seen if this calculus will change over time as I continue in this work.

NOTES

(1) Which was a good professional development opportunity, just not exactly the most cost-effective thing to do.

(2) Or, it might be exactly what you were looking for and you will be super psyched about your experience!  But, probably not if you think corporate influence is poisoning education right now.