I voted for Obama and worked hard for his election. I am still glad he was elected and not McCain. But one reason I campaigned for him was because I thought he would bring some sanity back to education. I knew he supported charter schools, which I think are the biggest con to be rolled on board since war was declared on public education with "A Nation at Risk," but I thought perhaps he wouldn’t be so thrilled about cramming them down America’s throat as Bush was.
Not only was I wrong about that, I was also wrong about bringing sanity back. "No Child Left Behind" will be dead in name only as the reauthorization of ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act), the original name for NCLB, rolls forward. Most of the major provisions of NCLB will stay in place: standardized testing (called "better assessments" in the new "Blueprint"), rewards and punishments (so that the rich stay rich and the poor get closed and shuffled around), but now there is even greater emphasis on blaming teachers.
Three of the four "intervention" models for low-performing schools (meaning schools full of kids with families in crisis) require that all the teachers be fired and pray to get their jobs back, somewhere, anywhere. Here are the four models, straight from the newly released "A Blueprint for Reform":
▶▶Transformation model: Replace the principal, strengthen staffing, implement a re¬search-based instructional program, provide extended learning time, and imple¬ment new governance and flexibility.
▶▶Turnaround model: Replace the principal and rehire no more than 50 percent of the school staff, implement a research-based instructional program, provide ex¬tended learning time, and implement new governance structure.
▶▶Restart model: Convert or close and reopen the school under the management of an effective charter operator, charter management organization, or education management organization.
▶▶School closure model: Close the school and enroll students who attended it in other, higher-performing schools in the district.
Please note that when a district uses the "Restart Model" they do not have to "implement a research-based instructional program" (whatever that is and, of course, assuming that the school didn’t already have one) or "provide extended learning time" (which in the Rhode Island case was requiring the teachers do this for free or get their school closed). Apparently the magic of calling the reopened school a "charter" will improve things so much that a research-based program won’t be needed.
There are some underlying forces at work here that need to be looked at. First, much of this "intervention" is a disguise for breaking the teachers unions. That effort is based on the idea that all of the problems in education come from the "stranglehold" of the unions on...something. If it weren’t for the unions, I suppose, the teachers could be required to work extra hours without pay. That would be a good thing. One article I read assumed that the unions had control over the textbooks, which is utter nonsense. You know the other horror stories about unions protecting bad teachers...oh, that’s right, someone accused of being a bad teacher shouldn’t have the right to defend herself. Sorry.
Another force at work is the businesses world concept that destroying an organization and rebuilding it will make it better. CEOs sometimes fire everyone in sight and downsize or turnaround their businesses in order to make things better, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. It all depends on that theoretical restructure. What we do know is that it ruins the lives of a whole lot of working people and, in the case of schools, disruptive of the lives of children.
Look, we’ve been churning the school system for 30 years by making it the battleground for competing political ideologies masked as reform, and privatization efforts masked as charter schools. People also make big money touting the latest curricular reforms that then lead to endless math and English wars as new curriculums are adopted, rejected, and sometimes fought out in state legislators. I remember in 1998 watching our state legislators debate forcing a particular phonics system into the schools in the name of "back to basics." My primary thought was that these amateurs had no business trying to figure out what schools should be doing since not one of them had ever been a teacher.
But everyone knows how to fix education. Heck, I’ve had cabdrivers, insurance salesmen, waitresses, realtors, bankers, doctors, plumbers...the list goes on and one...tell me what should be done about education once they found out I was connected to it. These folks are all well-meaning and sincere but mostly so far off the mark that when this happens I can’t figure out how to continue the conversation. I have to go into lecture mode and give lots of data and realty checks before I can even point out how their idea might work if....
"If" usually has to do with more money. Firing teachers and telling whoever gets hired instead to teach in this different way (whatever it is) is cheap. Putting programs into communities that reach out to parents to teach them how to help their children and to help them out of poverty is expensive. Firing teachers is cheap. Providing them with very high-quality professional development and more classroom support is expensive.
Meanwhile urban school districts are eroding not because of poor teachers, but because of dysfunctional school boards and insane reform schemes. Kansas City isn’t closing half its schools because of poor teachers. It’s because they decided to charterize some time ago rather than face the hard problems of their system. They went for the cheap route but doing so defunded their schools. Their school board had no vision, no accountability, and dithered for decades. Perhaps Obama’s new blueprint should abolish elected school boards.
When charter schools are better than comparable public schools there are two forces at work: better funding and a special vision. Most charter schools are not better than comparable public schools and some are worse. Some of New Orleans charter schools are doing well, but they get TWICE more funding than the public schools they replaced. They are also highly selective so that N.O. schools are becoming more divided by race and class.
What other forces are at work? Send the old teachers to the pasture? The common wisdom is that they are burned out and resistant to change. It will be interesting to see the age rehiring patterns as the administration’s educational Armageddon sweeps the country. Since they are using the carrot of billions of dollars to get what they want, Rhode Island was just the first round in what’s to come. Right now there are schools suffering "intervention" across the country in order to get the grants currently on the table. Much more teacher blood will be shed—oh, I should say "older teacher blood" because, after all, it is the union seniority systems that have caused this problem. Since administrators can’t figure out how to encourage poor performing teachers out of the system though programs like peer mentoring and review, let’s just fire them all and hire back those who are under 50 or something. And all those young ones will instantly become excellent teachers because we’ll incentivize them with merit pay. If we don’t do that, of course, all of them will become as bad as those old teachers we got rid of.
The only intervention model that respects the professionalism of teachers, aids, and other school employees is the transformation model. Many schools have done this already, within very limited funds, and their scores and performance do improve. Transformation, with decent funding, should be the first choice of every superintendent. But even then, the principal should be fired only when he or she has been in place for some time. I heard of a principal being fired this year who was in place for only two years and was starting to turn the school around. But for the school to get the current grant money (from ARRA funds), the person had to go.
There is so much to say and not enough space to say it. My most fervent hope is that the administration will allow significant changes to its blueprint and open up the transformational model while de-emphasizing the destructive models. I also hope that the administration will not continue to press for bipartisanship in this arena. Opening up the playing field farther for the bitterest of political warfare over the lives of the country’s children is the biggest mistake he could make. Our schools need a rest from "reform," not more churning and burning.