In trying to improve American public schools, educators, policymakers, and philanthropists are overselling the role of the highly skilled individual teacher and undervaluing the benefits that come from teacher collaborations.
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| Fall 2011 16 comments | Comment on this article |
Teaching is one of the most criticized jobs in America. What's up with that?
GIVEN ALL the talk about the importance of education these days, you'd think teaching would be the most revered job in America.
Forget what our CEOs with the seven- and eight-figure salaries do or don't do. When it comes to economic success, our fate seems to rest on our five-figure teachers. If they fail to impart the intricacies of algebra and physics and C++, we'll be overtaken by all those ambitious nations coming up behind us, fast.
It's enough to think we'd have fat bonus checks all written out and ready to shower on the teaching corps' best and brightest. And yet . . .
Teaching is one of the most criticized jobs in America. Our economic malaise? We lay a big chunk of blame
I knew that if I had enough patience the corporate reformers would eventually let slip some data which would prove, once and for all, how unscientific are the metrics they’ve been using to shut down schools.
That day came earlier this week. I’ll encourage anyone to recheck my calculations, just in case, but if I’ve found what I think I’ve found, it will be the ‘death blow’ to the New York City ‘value-added’ model they use to rate and close down schools.
Schools are shut down for getting multiple years of poor progress reports. The progress reports are what give schools their letter grades, A, B, C, D, and F. The way the progress reports are calculated are as follows: 15% is based on school environment, 25% is based on student performance, and the majority 60% is based on something called student progress.
This is defined by the DOE in the guidebook as
I. Student Progress (60 points): measures how individual students’ proficiency on state ELA and math exams has changed in the past year, as they move from one grade to the next. The Progress Report measures individual students’ growth on state English and Math tests using growth percentiles,
Charging that elected parent councils are “window dressing” that allow the city to avoid listening to families, a member of one of them quit publicly last night.
Brian Rafferty, a member of the Community Education Council for District 24, announced his resignation at the council’s meeting by reading a letter of protest he had written to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott.
“The Community Education Council serves no purpose other than to be a shield between the Department of Education and the parents of schoolchildren citywide,” Rafferty wrote in the letter, which he also posted on Facebook.
Rafferty echoed complaints that parents around the city have sounded for years about the weak role of the
Imagine Steve Jobs trying to design the next generation of tablet computers using mainframe hardware from the Eisenhower administration. Or American automakers trying to out-engineer foreign competitors on an assembly line with equipment from the 1960s.
Unfortunately, just such antiquated facilities and barriers to innovation exist today in precisely the institutions that can least afford it: our nation’s public schools. The digital age has now penetrated virtually every nook of American life, with the exception of many public schools.
The average public school building in the United States is more than 40 years old. Nationwide, cash-strapped school districts face an enormous $270 billion backlog of deferred maintenance and repairs.
On Tuesday, President Obama spoke at Abraham Lincoln High School in Denver about the need to urgently modernize public schools, and the importance of keeping teachers in the classroom, instead of in unemployment lines.
In the American Jobs Act, President Obama proposes to invest $30 billion to repair and modernize public schools and community colleges, putting hundreds of thousands of unemployed construction workers, engineers, boiler repairmen, and electrical workers back to work. He proposed an additional $30 billion to keep hundreds of thousands of educators facing potential layoffs and furloughs on the job.
Modernizing and repairing our schools is a classic win-win solution. It benefits everyone — children, communities, and construction workers who need work.
Tragically, children in the nation’s poorest school districts often attend schools with crumbling ceilings, overcrowded classrooms, and facilities that lack basic wiring infrastructure for computers and other modern-day technology. That’s no way to provide a world-class education — and in today’s global economy, a country that out-educates America will out-compete us.
Abraham Lincoln High School opened in 1960. Some of its science labs lack sinks — and have had only minor plumbing renovation in the last 51 years. Despite district and school efforts to upgrade equipment and software, the school’s computer lab — like many in the Denver Public Schools — is not designed to support small-group learning and the acquisition of 21st century skills.
Denver Public Schools has already identified $425 million in major repair and modernization projects districtwide that could be started within the next year, from replacing aging boilers and leaking roofs to improving educational technology.
This is not a partisan issue. The physical conditions at some aging schools today are unacceptable. They are no place for children to learn.
The president’s jobs bill would modernize at least 35,000 schools, or about one out of every three public schools in the United States. In Colorado, the jobs bill would provide $265 million to put as many as 3,400 construction workers back on the job modernizing Colorado’s schools. Denver Public Schools alone would receive up to $75.5 million.
Nationwide, $25 billion would go to upgrading existing public school facilities (including charter schools), with $5 billion invested in modernizing community colleges. The federal government will not fund new construction or pick the schools to modernize. Those decisions will be left entirely to states and districts with knowledge of local needs.
Projections from proposals similar to the president’s plan suggest it could create as many as 300,000 jobs in the construction trades nationwide.
While modernization could put a small army of Americans back to work rebuilding and upgrading our schools, looming teacher layoffs could have a devastating impact in the classroom.
As many as 280,000 education jobs may be on the chopping block in the upcoming school year due to multibillion-dollar state and local budget shortfalls. But under the jobs bill, Colorado would receive $478 million to support and protect up to 7,000 educator jobs.
As the bar for educational success rises worldwide in the knowledge economy, this is no time to be laying off scores of teachers and early childhood educators.
Already, financially pinched school districts are reducing class time, shortening the school calendar, cutting after-school programs and early childhood education, and reducing top-notch arts and music instruction.
President Obama recently shared the story of Jason Chuong, a Philadelphia music teacher who uses plastic buckets to teach his students to play percussion — because he only has a $100 out-of-pocket budget to cover music instruction at seven schools.
The path to prosperity, the way to win the future, is to invest wisely in schools, remembering that children get only one chance at an education.
That’s why the president’s plan to modernize our schools for the 21st century and minimize teacher layoffs is the right plan, at the right time. We cannot afford to do less.
Arne Duncan is the U.S. Secretary of Education.
The following op-ed appeared in the Denver Post on September 28.
Marchers against Senate Bill 5 march through Columbus and deliver petitions.COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A left-leaning think tank released a "hypocrisy database" today to highlight the pay and benefits of elected officials who have supported Senate Bill 5, the new collective bargaining law that is subject to a voter referendum on Nov. 8.
The online database, produced by Innovation Ohio, of Columbus, shows the base salary and perks — such as retirement benefits and car allowances — provided to Republican Gov. John Kasich, his administration and Republican state lawmakers who voted for SB 5.
SB 5 restricts the collective bargainin
For those who don’t remember the Bobby Ewing letdown in the Dallastelevision series, let me summarize: Back in the 1980s, the actor who played Bobby left the show and his character was killed, presenting a problem a year later when he decided to return. The writers dealt with the dilemma by declaring the entire 1985-86 season of storylines a dream sequence. In other words: Never mind.
That’s what came to mind when I got to the last chapter of Steven Brill’sbook “Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, ” which has received a lot of attention in school reform circles because Brill — an author, entrepreneur and founder of the Yale (University) Journalism Initiative — is a significant presence in that world and because his
by Frederick M. Hess • Sep 28, 2011 at 7:58 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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Am out in Seattle, where I had the honor last night of emceeing the first inaugural Eddies! Awards for the Policy Innovators in Education Network. It was a terrific time with a bunch of smart and inspiring people. With social media playing an increasingly noteworthy role in the school reform effort, I thought I'd share one of the invaluable contributions from my emceeing gig--my list of the top ten school reform tweets of 2011.
10: @Brilldude- Unions bad. Reformers good. I heart Jon Schnur. Buy my book.
9: @DFERboss- Unions bad. LIFO bad. But not as bad as GOP governors. Walker, no soup for you!
8: @AnyonymousRavitchHater- STOP the presses! Ravitch really, really, really bad. And she overcharges for speeches. I'll speak for free.
7: @ThisWeekinEducation- Breaking news. New Chinese premiere to be TFA alum. Chinese to launch first TFAer in space. TFA hails new asteroid region. UPDATE: NEA denounces asteroids as anti-teacher.
6: @LDH/StanfordStrong- I heart Finland
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