I have in the past week or so written a number of times on various topics of education. That includes several pieces before Education Nation began on Sunday and my reaction to the Teacher Town Hall, and a response to the first of several episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show offered by Gene Carter, the executive director of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
This diary is going to share and point you at the reactions of several others to some of the events of the ongoing attacks on public schools and teachers. I will point you at and quote from a reaction to "Waiting for Superman" by Rick Ayers, a blog post by a teacher from the first panel at the Teacher Town Hall who now regrets his participation, and the complete letter by Gene Carter in response to the 2nd Oprah Winfrey show.
I will of course also a few words, observations and reactions of my own.
I invite you to keep reading.
Rick Ayers is, according to his bio at Huffington Post, an Adjunct Professor in education at University of San Francisco who also teaches at UC Berkeley. He is a PhD candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education. He is the younger brother of the well-known Bill Ayers. He has written several pieces about "Waiting for Superman", the first titled An Inconvenient Superman: Davis Guggenheim’s new film hijacks school reform, which got a lot of attention when it came out two weeks ago, and the second, which appeared in The Answer Sheet blog of Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, which is titled What "Superman got wrong - point by point. To give you a sense of this latter piece, let me quote only two of the points he covers.
*Waiting for Superman says that lack of money is not the problem in education.
Yet the exclusive charter schools featured in the film receive large private subsidies. Two-thirds of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone funding comes from private sources, effectively making the charter school he runs in the zone a highly resourced private school. Promise Academy is in many ways an excellent school, but it is dishonest for the filmmakers to say nothing about the funds it took to create it and the extensive social supports including free medical care and counseling provided by the zone.
In New Jersey, where court decisions mandated similar programs, such as high quality pre-kindergarten classes and extended school days and social services in the poorest urban districts, achievement and graduation rates increased while gaps started to close. But public funding for those programs is now being cut and progress is being eroded. Money matters! Of course, money will not solve all problems (because the problems are more systemic than the resources of any given school) – but the off-handed rejection of a discussion of resources is misleading.
*Waiting for Superman says teachers’ unions are the problem.
Of course unions need to be improved – more transparent, more accountable, more democratic and participatory – but before teachers unionized, the disparity in pay between men and women was disgraceful and the arbitrary power of school boards to dismiss teachers or raise class size without any resistance was endemic.
Unions have historically played leading roles in improving public education, and most nations with strong public educational systems have strong teacher unions.
According to this piece in The Nation, "In the Finnish education system, much cited in the film as the best in the world, teachers are – gasp! – unionized and granted tenure, and families benefit from a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that includes universal daycare, preschool and health care, all of which are proven to help children achieve better results in school."
In fact, even student teachers have a union in Finland and, overall, nearly 90% of the Finnish labor force is unionized.
The demonization of unions ignores the real evidence.
The other points are equally well-rebutted. The piece is well worth reading, and bookmarking for future reference.
Steven Lazar is a teacher and blogger from New York City. He was on-stage with Brian Williams in the first group of 3 teachers at the Teacher Town Hall, along with Monica Graves, the young KIPP Dean from Atlanta who had previously as a beginning teacher had allowed NBC to film in her classroom, and Bonnee Breeze, a Philadelphia teacher who Lazar thinks is well connected with the national American Federation of Teachers. Lazar titles his blog post Education Nation: I Should Have Known Better. He recounts his involvement, which includes the time before they went on the stage with William, the time on the stage, and his subsequent participation as someone from the audience in a later panel and his brief conversation with Geoffrey Canada. The panel was moderated by Stephen Brill, whose background in education is limited to writing attack pieces, including a book on the "rubber rooms" in New York City schools. It is incredibly worthwhile to read about the experiences of someone who participated in a semi-significant way in the NBC events to understand what was actually going on. I want to quote his final three paragraphs (before he provides a link to watch the Townhall online):
I admit, I should have known better than to expect anything positive to come out of NBC’s Education Nation. It became abundantly clear that while well intentioned, NBC really knew very little about the topic they decided to cover, and instead of any real conversation or reporting, relied on the most famous faces in education to argue over the same old points that get us nowhere. I hoped the conversation would change, but with the people they had involved, I should have known there was little hope for that.
With that said, I’ve had a lot educators, in person and online, say to me things like "That’s why I didn’t bother watching or participating." I don’t think that those of us who are good, committed, public educators can afford to do that. It would make us just like the teachers who say, "These students can’t learn, so what’s the point of engaging them?" Despite my despair at the end, I know those of us who are actually in real schools everyday can’t stop talking about what we need to improve and what we know works, in hopes that, just like our students who almost always come around in the end, eventually people will listen and realize that we are already the change they have been waiting for.
And if absolutely nothing else, it made my students’ day to see their teacher on TV. My students aren’t dumb, they know that with 25-30% annual turnover they’re not always getting the most highly desired teachers. It was good for them to see that we are all good enough to have a national news anchor ask us what we think. I might have sacrificed some dignity to be NBC’s pawn and a good proportion of what little innocence I had left, but it was good for my students, which at the end of the day, is all that matters.
And here is Gene <Carter's letter in its entirety: </p>
ASCD Statement on the Oprah Winfrey Show's "The Reaction"Episode
Statement from Gene R. Carter, Executive Director, ASCD
September 24, 2010
On September 21, 2010, ASCD Executive Director Gene R. Carter wrote an open letter to Oprah Winfrey explaining ASCD's response to the September 20 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show about the movie Waiting for "Superman." On September 24, the Oprah Winfrey Show aired an episode detailing the reaction from parents, educators, and politicians. ASCD's response to this follow-up episode is below.
Today's Oprah Winfrey Show, a follow-up to Monday's "Waiting for 'Superman'" episode, acknowledged the need for civil action to further education reform. However, through her choice of guests, Winfrey continued to ignore the fact that thoughtful change must involve not only our political leaders, but also working educators and the wider community. Even more disappointing was the panel's failure to articulate that what's best for kids is proven, methodical transformation that emphasizes meaningful support for educators.
As I watched today's program, I began to wonder if democracy is viewed as moving too slowly to save our children. One child drops out of school every 26 seconds, and there is no doubt an absolute urgency to improve our country's education system. But I offer a cautionary note: Inventing products and testing marketing theories are altogether different than the business of educating people. We cannot allow our impatience to compromise comprehensive and collaborative change that improves everything from teacher preparation and student supports to parent involvement and better assessments.
During today's show, Winfrey repeatedly referred to Geoffrey Canada as the real Superman, but unlike our traditional conceptions of a superhero, he hasn’t saved the world (or even Harlem) in a day with a simple swirl of his cape. We should not forget that he has toiled for 20 years to make Harlem Children's Zone the success story it is today. And he hasn’t done it alone; the children of central Harlem are succeeding because Canada has collaborated with multiple facets of the community to provide them with aligned education, social, and medical services from birth to college.
Significant members of this community are the teachers on the front lines of education. Just as important as great leaders are the steps we take to prepare, support, and measure our teachers' effectiveness. It's only when we provide this professional development framework that we are giving teachers the respect we so often say they deserve. We applaud one of Oprah's guests, Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker, for denouncing the blame game against teachers, and we hope his reform efforts will match his encouraging words.
As a voice for ASCD’s 160,000 educator members, I anticipate that this week of national discussion on education will not be not our last. But I hope it is our last week of education discussion that largely ignores the very people charged with helping our students become the leaders and learners of tomorrow.
Now a few comments/observations/reactions from your diarist.
When I was thinking about people and a topic for the education panel at the first Yearly Kos in Las Vegas back in 2006, Gina suggested I take a look at Geoffrey Canada. I have paid attention to Harlem Children's Zone since, a period of almost 5 years. I am not going to criticize his work there, which I think is commendable. But I want to remind people of something Gene Carter wrote in the letter above:
the children of central Harlem are succeeding because Canada has collaborated with multiple facets of the community to provide them with aligned education, social, and medical services from birth to college
From birth to college - the kinds of intervention and social support to which EVERY child ought to be entitled. One reason so many of children of lesser means struggle in school is because they lack these things. One might argue that the actual structure of the school as school is far less important that providing an environment in which children and the community in which they live know those children are valued, and see it demonstrated with proper medical and community support.
Too many of the young people in this country still lack that kind of support. They come to school hungry, they do not get the vision and hearing screening that would identify problems that can interfere with learning, they lack the medical and dental care that can prevent the conditions that further interfere with learning and with life.
What if EVERY child got the kind of support that HCZ is able to provide? Would the issue be one of teachers' unions, of charters versus non-charter public schools? In comparing what Canada has achieved to school settings without such additional support are we making a fair comparison? What about the additional funds expended that are in fact in support of learning?
Additional funds - an issue that Ayers explores.
What about honest and open conversation - was either the Oprah show to which Carter's second letter responded or the events at NBC in which Lazar participated really open dialog, or were they - like the movie - intended to push one point of view to the exclusion of any other, thereby creating a situation of propagandizing rather than truly informing?
Monday I attended my first County-wide union meeting. Yesterday I held my first FAC (Faculty Advisory Council) meeting in the building. In both I heard palpable teacher anger and frustration. Some of it has very local causes and function, many stemming from the severe financial situation of our school system, which as bad as it is now (my own pay this year looks to be $7,700 than it should have been) is poised to become far worse next year (how do we make up for $78 million that propped us up this year but which is not available next year? how many additional teachers will lose their jobs?). But I also heard anger at how teachers are being portrayed.
And as I looked around at the people in my room yesterday, these by and large were the kind of people who did not get involved in union affairs. Most are relatively young - 10 years or less of teaching. They are dynamic, hard-working, committed to their students. Their anger is because they see so much of what is happening not only hurting them personally, but interfering with their ability to do their best for their students - I heard about more than 40 student desks in a room because of having that many in one ENGLISH class, and we all recognize that class sizes will almost certainly go up again next year. To deal with that, then turn on the tv and find oneself yet again under attack is demoralizing, and it takes a strong person to go on despite that: the temptation is to find some other kind of work that pays better and does not take so much out of you. Believe me, I understand those feelings.
I post a diary like this because I want people to understand that the collection of ideas being pushed as reform, and how the discussion is being framed by the concerted effort of the likes of NBC, TIME, Oprah, Davis Guggenheim, etc., is not going to be quietly accepted.
I remember hearing someone in a think tank very well connected with the Democrats in the House suggesting that Democratic candidates might well consider pushing back against the administration on its educational plans and activating the teachers who would then support them. I know the county-wide union meeting was in part devoted to how we ensure that those friendly to education win in the forthcoming elections, now less than 5 weeks away.
It is the administration that is also becoming a target. It is increasingly not only Arne Duncan, but the President himself. He did himself few favors with teachers with his remarks to Matt Lauer.
It is also increasingly parents who are angry, who feel their voices are being excluded from the discussion. Last night I participated in a webinar with around 60 people, most of whom were classroom educators, but also some folks from universities, and a couple of parent activists, all of us seeking to find ways to work effectively on behalf of our schools and our students, to ensure that whatever happens not damage the public schooling on which so many will continue to depend despite the efforts of some in "reform" to effectively do away with public education as we know it.
If people honestly knew about the nations with which we are "competing" (although that is a false framing) would the discussion be as it is? If Finland is such a shining example, why are we not paying attention to their entire structure? One of our speakers last night was Lily Eskelsen, VP of the National Education Association, who has had extensive conversations with people in Finland (and who continues to teach part-time even as she does her union responsibilities). She said that when she raised the question of "accountability" with a major figure in Finnish education she was told they don't use that term, they prefer "responsibility." She also noted that they have done away with their high stakes structure.
The debate on education must continue. We cannot allow the current thrust to be a steamroller that runs over everything, that the voices we are constantly hearing drown out any other voice, including the voices of those who dedicate their working lives to the benefit of the children in their care.
That is why I wrote this diary. That is why I will continue to try to inform people of the true and complete picture of education in America.
Our schools need a lot of change. The "reforms" being suggested have in most cases already been tried and found wanting - as of yet they have not demonstrated success. Why then are some so willing to place all our educational eggs in such a basket? Why are they so unwilling to listen to those who can offer other approaches? Why do they pick and choose, whether about HCZ or Finland, in the arguments they make?
I do not know. I only know that I have learned enough about these things to know the damage they will do to the learning of the children in my care. Which is why I will continue to write and speak and argue and work against this notion of "reform."
Peace.