Tenure Reform's Dubious Promise

As the school year starts, our politicians herald the hard fought tenure reform law now in place. Although I am not opposed to tenure reform, I really feel that the money, time, and resources consumed by this law would have been better spent requiring a clinical supervisor on site for maybe every 50 teachers. If you truly want improvement in teacher performance, having a clinician to provide collaborative or directed supervision is a far more effective means.

While the tenure reform law might seem benign in the area of removing tenure or firing teachers deemed “not proficient,” listening to Governor Christie and other policy makers gives clear indication that a collateral purpose of the legislation is to allow school districts to layoff veteran teachers with seniority rather than younger teachers, assuming all else being equal I would presume.

If I were an older teacher, I would feel justifiably threatened by this law. Teaching is a funny profession in that, unlike physicians, lawyers, or other professions where experience is considered an important quality, older experienced teachers are seen as far more expendable. This is incredible to me. Teaching is the ultimate “learn what works on the job” profession, and experience is inextricably linked to quality. Granted, personality and attention to changes in technology and learning strategies are also needed for experienced and inexperienced teachers alike, but I am convinced that most school districts will be motivated by cost savings and the “prevailing wisdom” that somehow younger teachers are better able to connect to students and provide superior performance. I strenuously disagree.

I am also concerned because experienced teachers are also more likely to be the most vocal among the faculty, willing to express their feelings about discipline, curriculum, policy, and other issues of consequence at the school. This outspokenness almost never goes well with administrators, especially principals, who seem a somewhat insecure lot and who take criticism or critiques of “their” school to be an unacceptable challenge to their authority. I have NO DOUBT that many principals will see this law as an opportunity to move or remove faculty members whose personality they conflict with or whose beliefs are contrary to their own beliefs, policy, or conception of the proper “culture” of the school.  In 21 years of teaching, I found only one administrator that was entirely comfortable as a leader and who did not hold grudges or express judgment against faculty members.

I am not against tenure reform, in fact I believe it is an important step towards performance pay or the creation of performance tiers. I would prefer having clinical supervisors employed throughout the state, but “it is what it is.” But what is important is that there be some in district “counterweight” against the arbitrary and capricious behavior of administrators, a way of impartially reviewing their decisions well before reaching the stage of arbitration. Mandating this oversight should be an important policy priority of the NJEA. I’m sure their files are full of horror stories confirming my contention. Legislative should be drafted and put before education committees. If our legislatures are sincere that their only goal is providing a faculty of exemplary teachers, they should have no trouble supporting legislation protecting experienced teachers, or just wait for that day when the first age discrimination lawsuit is filed.

Colleges are having a Negative Impact on Academic Quality

A recent news story reported how the Bayonne school district is now lowering its standards for passing from a 70 to a 65. Now rather than comment on this clear concession to self-esteem building and social promotion, I’d like to comment on something even more egregious, an issue directly related to the pressures being put on high school from our nation’s colleges and their demand that students take honors and AP courses.

When I left teaching in West Windsor, the procedure for placement in Honors and AP courses was a complete travesty. Although in theory a teacher recommendation was required, there was no other prerequisite whatsoever, and parents were able to override any teacher recommendation. In 11^th grade social studies, there were MORE honors classes than regular track classes. We even had 9^th graders taking AP courses.

Now I realize that West Windsor is an elite public high school, but the impact of this concession to parents and the fact that 60% of students were in honors classes has resulted in a dumbing down of the honors, and by extension the AP curriculums. The students that are suffering by this travesty are the ones that truly deserve to be in these courses. How can you truly call a course Honors if it is essentially open to anybody? I sarcastically suggested to our principal that we just call every course at school honors. An honor is something that is supposed to be reserved by the deserving few.  Students at the school should not compare themselves to kids in other districts as justification for placement in honors, they should be judged against their peers.

But G-d forbid students not have an honors class on their transcript. I feel some sympathy for these parents demanding placement for their kids; it all gets back to the colleges and the pressure they are putting on families and schools to have these courses taken.

 
I’ve been told to “chill out,” that the whole thing is just a “game,” and that it really doesn’t matter. But it does matter. It matters to the teachers that have to now take extra time to provide supplemental instruction to underserving kids placed in these classes, and it matters to our best and brightest students that are being denied the academic challenge that should be offered in honors and AP courses. I sat in on a few of our AP classes, and to say that they are akin to a first year college course is a joke.

So what can be done? In West Windsor, nothing I’m sure. I do hear that other districts do put prerequisites on entrance into these courses, and I applaud them for that. But I also think that those won’t last long as the competitive pressures of college begin to weigh down on them. Will it dawn on colleges that in the long run they are really only hurting their own academic standards by doing this. I doubt it.

Tenure Reform, the Need for Supervision, Montgomery Teachers, and News About Charters

The news has been filled with a variety of articles on education, all indicative of some seemingly intractable problems facing the “business.” By far the most prominent stories have featured the new tenure reform bill. As much as I am all in favor of the reform, and think it will lead us towards a system of performance pay or performance tiers, those who see it as a panacea for urban schools are kidding themselves and misleading the public. It will do little to compel teachers performing at the minimum to vastly improve their work product. The problem I do have with the bill, and with many of the people that pushed for its passage, is this belief that older teachers are somehow an impediment to educational gains. It’s funny how, in other professions, we look to those with experience as preferred, but in education somehow it is our senior teachers that pose a problem. My own experience is that I am more suspect of newer teachers than I am of veteran teachers. I am suspect because I have real questions about what motivates a lot of younger teachers to enter the profession, while I have no doubt that our more experienced teachers are from a generation that were deeply committed to the profession and to the kids. I have come to know way too many young teachers that seemed to value the “lifestyle” to teaching more than the actual job they are entrusted to perform. I deplore the attacks on seniority, although I will admit there are some burned out older teachers and although I completely oppose the system of remuneration that makes years of experience the sole criteria for pay. The issue should be teacher quality and nothing more.

As for teacher quality, once again a summer went by where there was not even one job posting for a clinical supervisor; a person whose sole responsibility is to provide practical supervision of new and at risk teachers. I was especially disturbed about this in this particular year because we do have new legislation in place and a new emphasis on raising teacher quality and performance. On site clinical supervisors represent the single best way to insure improved performance, and the unwillingness of districts to hire such professionals shows, to me, enormous insincerity towards this goal. I keep wondering why districts are so reluctant to hire these people, and I’ve come to the conclusion it is because current supervisors and administrators think that they are capable of providing adequate supervision, and that is so far from the truth as to be laughable, if the issue weren’t so serious. These self -serving administrators, most of whom lack the vision and leadership needed to create a true culture of learning, are a greater impediment to “great schools” than deficient teachers.

In other news, teachers in Montgomery are resisting efforts to require having 18 more minutes added to the school day. Are they kidding? Do they realize how this is being perceived, at a time when citizens, worn down by the recession, are in no mood to support people seen as being lazy. I’m not sure how Montgomery constructs its school schedule, but we are talking about adding on average 2 – 5 minutes to each class period. Suck it up Montgomery teachers, your profession cannot afford being perceived as greedy and selfish, which is exactly the vibe you are giving off to the hard working people of your Township.

And finally, a new Rand study reports that charter schools are in fact a huge drain on the financial resources of public schools, and that this problem is being made worse not because public school students are migrating to charter schools, but because private school students are. Remember it’s not the private school that has to provide the per pupil funding, it’s the public district, so already drained public schools are now in essence paying for private school students, whose parents see these charter schools as a means to get a quality education without having to pay private school fees anymore. So now charter schools are not only putting financial pressure on public schools, but now they are putting private schools under pressure as well. Some have in fact closed.

This is troubling news for me. Philosophically, I support the idea of charter schools as “laboratories” for change, a venue for trying innovative ideas that might then be integrated into our public schools. This was their original intent, and this is how I view them. But charter schools have begun to grow, with very mixed results, and are now even appearing in suburban districts where there is absolutely no need for them to exist. Charter schools have become an “industry,” and I am truly concerned that the sense of “mission” has been lost and that they are becoming problematic. This recent news story means that another group of people, namely private school leaders, has become animated in halting their growth. As these private school leaders align with suburban parents alarmed with their spread, powerful political forces opposed to charters are now being energized to push back against them. I hate to say it, but this may be a good thing, if as a result the spread of charters is slowed. As their growth is paused, maybe we can refocus on the true purpose of these schools and reestablish the important connection that should exist between the urban public and charter schools.

 

The Urgent Need to Create a Department of Urban Education

I took a little hiatus from writing. Quite frankly I’ve just been frustrated that there is SO MUCH to do with New Jersey’s urban schools, and all I see are politicians and education leaders patting themselves on the back for a tenure reform bill that, to me, simply illustrates how disengaged our leaders are from understanding the urgency to reform our schools.

I just read longitudinal graphs of NJ HSPA test scores, more specifically the proficiency gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged districts, and sad to say over the last ten years the gap has in some cases widened and in other cases stayed about the same. Clearly, whatever is being done in New Jersey right now is a complete an utter failure, and tenure reform is going to do little if anything to rectify the situation.

It is time for our State to literally declare a state of emergency in urban education, and commit the same relative time and resources to our schools and cities that we would if there were a natural disaster, epidemic, or other devastating event occurring.

Although some may insinuate from what I am about to say that I am somehow acknowledging failure, what it is instead is a realization that urban education is fundamentally different from suburban education, that the issues they face are fundamentally different, that their needs are fundamentally different, and that the solutions to their condition are fundamentally different from suburban schools.

What I am calling for, at least theoretically, is to create two distinct Departments of Education, one for urban schools and one for everyone else. I believe that urban schools should have a completely distinct set of Core Curriculum Content Standards and a completely distinct graduation exam. It is obvious from the nature of the current HSPA and statements from our education leaders and politicians that they see the CCCS and HSPA as designed not so much as a test to prepare students for life beyond high school but as a preparation test for college. Quite frankly, such tests already exist in the SAT and Achievement Tests. The DOE and our leaders have lost their sense of mission. For many if not most urban students, college is not “the next step” after high school, and judging from the drop-out rate from community colleges and for profit colleges, we are failing our urban students by  promoting college as their primary and essential path. I really am tired of hearing people say that college is now essential for all high school graduates. First of all, we are barely graduating half of our urban students, and secondly, the failure of our State to provide meaningful options in artisanship and trades is tragic.

What I would like is for all urban public high schools to be “emancipated” from state mandates and control and to in essence be turned into charter schools. We need to get rid of every bureaucratically minded administrator at the school level and replace them with visionary leaders that are free to design “independent” schools with a culture of learning that is challenging, safe, and student centered. Urban teachers should be guided by a contract that rewards exemplary performance based on metrics that provide teachers with enormous intellectual freedom to design new courses. Leaders of urban schools should be encouraged to develop comprehensive programs that integrate the business community, professionals, unions, and non-profit organizations into their fold. Incentives should be offered to parents to draw them into the schools and into their children’s lives.

Assume that no child is required to attend school, and then design a school that they would choose to go to each and every day when they get up in the morning. I think everyone needs to read the report by Civic Enterprises entitled: “The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Drop Outs.” This insightful report, which I’ll discuss in detail in my next posting, makes it clear that the reasons students drop out of school are complex AND easily addressed by schools that are free to design programs that connect to the young people in their community.

It is time for our leaders to wake up and get to work on fixing our urban schools. Money is important, but it is not the most critical factor. There has to be a realization in New Jersey that our urban schools and our suburban schools should not operate under the same rules. I am in no way saying that the standards in our urban schools should be lessened, only that they should be different. I hope I’m not the only that sees this; it is time for someone in our government or at the NJEA to admit to this reality and call for the kind of radical reform that is needed. There is no more urgent matter facing our State.

Scrap the HSPA and CCCS

Identifying factors that contribute to the horrible, and what I believe to be immoral inequities in our public education system can be exhausting. Blame can be spread around, from the culture of the schools to the quality of instruction to the guidance of parents to the quality of life in the communities to the policies of our political and educational leaders. Let’s not forget to include the business and non-profit communities as well. No one can truly escape scrutiny. The one factor I would like to address today is the role of the State, in particular the High School Proficiency Assessment and the Core Content Curriculum Standards.

To begin with, I think we need to acknowledge that there are actually two distinct types of school systems in the State: the urban and the suburban (we could add rural schools to the mix as well). I would argue that the difference between these type of districts is so profound, the performance chasm so great, that we literally need to have two distinct HSPAs. Personally, I think the HSPA is a fraud, a test completely detached from reality, and that we should take the opportunity to device a new assessment for graduation, using the urban schools as the “testing ground.”

Let’s first think about the rationale for the HSPA, which also asks us to question the rationale for high school. Has high school come to be seen as preparation for college, or preparation for life in a democratic, free market society? There is a difference. Are we testing what kids learned in high school, or are we testing what they should know in preparation for college. They are NOT the same thing.

Given that the HSPA does not test in areas other than math and language arts, it seems fair to conclude that the test is not designed to assess what kids should have been taught in high school; there is too much left out. My sense, both from experience as a teacher and as an observer of debate in academia and in the political arena, is that the test is geared towards college. But we already have the SAT and a host of achievement tests that college bound kids take in preparation for college. Given that a large percentage of students, especially those in the inner city, do not go on to college, it is important to see the HSPA solely as a test of the knowledge and skills acquired in high school. More to the point, the HSPA should assess how well prepared our high school graduates are for participation in American society. This would include an understanding of politics, economics, law, health and nutrition, culture, the environment, basic math, and financial literacy.

Unfortunately, the Core Content Curriculum Standards are so far off the mark in this respect as to be completely irrelevant. Let’s face it, the CCCS are written by smart people, academics in their particular field, and as such they are going to see much of their field as important to know. But these smart people need to think like the “average” person, the guy who may grow up to be a laborer, or a salesman, or a retail manager, not necessarily the guy that is going to college and perhaps graduate school. If a teacher actually teach all that they were required to teach under the CCCS, I would argue that most of what they taught was not learned. The science of learning simply does not comport with the enormous quantity of information required to be taught. It may be taught, but it is not learned, and it certainly is not remembered years after graduation.

Most adults forget most of what they learned in high school unless it is directly tied to their life and career choice, so it is important to at least try to limit requirements to those things that students will actually use in adult life.

 Given this, New Jersey’s CCCS should be very narrowly tailored, limited to those aforementioned topics. If our teachers, in collaboration with parents, do an effective job at creating perspicacious, intellectually curious students, then they will be equipped to pursue on their own any information they may want to explore in more detail. That detail should not be built into the CCCS.

Right now there is a movement for a national core curriculum, which New Jersey seems poised to adopt. That core curriculum is skill based rather than content based, and I definitely believe that we need to find a way to integrate that skill based core curriculum into our high school assessment. At the same time, we need to scrap and completely rewrite our core content standards and then redesign the HSPA to cover the national skills standards and content that draws from a broad segment of high school instruction, not just math and language arts.

Now let me get back to the inner city schools. Inner city students are failing to meet even minimal levels of competency in shockingly high numbers. If this were a discrimination case I would argue that the test is “guilty” of disparate treatment. There is no way that in the near future our inner city students will ever demonstrate the progress needed to make differences between urban and suburban schools indiscernible, and if you think about it shouldn’t that be the case?

I believe that we need to rethink the way we approach education in the State, and device a completely distinct “action plan” for our urban schools that includes a new core curriculum and a new HSPA. New Jersey is a “tale of two cities,” in the sense that the performance of these schools is nowhere near the performance of suburban schools. Because they are so different, they must be approached differently, and yes that may mean a different curriculum and a different HSPA. Nowhere am I arguing that it should be “easier,” just that it should be different.

Once we accept the reality that these differences exist, that these differences necessitate a different approach, and that the current CCCS and HSPA are inappropriate for our urban schools, we can move forward to create a culture of learning that prepares urban students for life beyond high school, regardless of whether they choose to enter the workforce, enroll in a trade school, go to college, or enter the military. Ironically, our educational leaders fail to see that urban school students actually have more choices than suburban students, who are pretty much told by their parents that they are going to college. Our suburban schools are “college prep factories,” or inner city schools are not. The graduation test should reflect that variety of directions by focusing on the one commonality shared by these students; they will need to understand our culture, participate in the political process, be civic minded, healthy, aware of their environment, and possess the legal, economic, and financial literacy needed to function independently as citizens. If the HSPA does not address this reality, then it fails to perform as a valid assessment and will continue to be the fraud that it is today.

The Solutions Noone Wants to Discuss

Almost everything I read in the area of education reform seems directed at efforts to reform the schools themselves. The “solutions” invariably focus on ways to improve the performance of teachers. I certainly don’t disparage these efforts, as teachers in the inner city are often "cheated" out of having quality administrators or appropriate professional development to improve their performance. Given that empirical data indicate most of our teachers have come from the lowest quartiles of college graduates, and that the best of these graduates seem to gravitate to our better suburban districts, anything that can be done- short of a complete turnover of a school’s faculty and administration- would be a step in the right direction.

The problem, however, is that even though exemplary teachers can provide some appreciable improvement in student performance, they can only do so much. The real solution to student performance has to do with the students themselves; what we need is a complete transformation of the demographics in the inner city with the goal of increasing the diversity- cultural, socioeconomic, and racial- of families in our urban areas.

To me the “beginning of the end” in urban education began in the late 1950’s with the development of our interstate system. A consequence of this massive public project was the flight of middle and upper class families out of the inner city to the safety and tranquility of the suburbs, which at that time was essentially a new addition to our nation’s landscape. This socioeconomic flight, first undertaken by whites but now including minorities, has devastated our cities. When you combine this flight with the appearance in our suburbs of new middle class citizens, what you have left in the city is a preponderance of working poor and poor that are essentially dependents on the State. One important fact about poverty among minorities is that it is highly concentrated, much less diffuse than with whites.

This flight to the suburbs has been compounded by another enormous societal shift, first identified by Senator Daniel Moynihan in the late 1960’s, in the composition of families in America. The stigma attached to single parent families has all but disappeared in the US, and now the percent of “non-traditional” households now outnumbers the so-called traditional nuclear family. There is no doubt in my mind- and I will gather the empirical evidence- that these two shifts have helped decimate the inner city schools.

There are a plethora of ancillary and tangential issues that exist as a result of these shifts, including those dealing with home ownership, the presence of neighborhood role models, and the at-home support given to children living in the inner city. Programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone seem to acknowledge and affirm these problems.

I will touch on these issues in more details in subsequent posts, but there can be no doubt that unless we treat the situation in the inner city as no less than a domestic threat to our national security, we will never be able to make the inroads we need to change the outcomes produced by our schools. I’m not suggesting that we “get rid” of the students attending our schools and the families that rely on these schools, but I am suggesting that we need to add to the population, essentially “flipping” suburban flight on its head. It is only then that we will have the type of change that will best assure that our youngest citizens will have true opportunities to improve their lives.

Dangers in the New Teacher Evaluation System

The recent vote in the legislature to introduce a new teacher evaluation system is long overdue. The current system and metrics have failed to have any noticeable impact on teacher performance and was an inadequate system for identifying subpar teachers and acknowledging exemplary work. Hopefully the new metrics will serve as a precursor to creation of a new system of remuneration based on performance rather than years of service. However, before our political and education leaders start patting themselves on the back over this new law, there is one great danger and one potential unintended consequence of the legislation that must be considered.

I am extremely skeptical and concerned about the power given to principals in this new evaluation system. Schools, like most other workplaces I suspect, are full of drama, and principals, being human (at least we assume so) are just as prone as others to be driven by emotion and prone to making decisions based on personality and their own perception of what makes a good teacher, even though my experience and conversations with other teachers confirms my belief that many principals were not particularly good teachers, hence their interest to go into administration. With tenure now tethered to the outcome of performance reviews that were once perfunctory but now extremely consequential, the lack of any real countervailing power to that of principals should raise a red flag to any outspoken, unconventional, or “different” teacher that does not “fit the mold” in the eyes of the principal.

This leads me to a second concern, which is the risk aversive nature of the new evaluation system. I am extremely concerned that the new system will discourage innovation and risk taking on the part of teachers, especially in the inner city where such behaviors are needed but where the pressure on principals to “catch” poor teachers is extremely high. What if the attempt at “trying something new” doesn’t have the payoff the teacher intended? He or she will certainly learn from the experience, but why take the risk of getting a bad evaluation, which will trigger even greater scrutiny and place the teacher on a path to tenure revocation? Without some affirmation from principals that innovation and risk taking are to be encouraged and supported, I suspect that most teachers will refrain from such actions.

It is critical that principals set clear expectations for the faculty, and that it be made clear those teachers will not be punished for trying new things- as long as they have valid educational objectives- in the classroom. I would also hope that principals, will, on their own initiative, will create a framework for evaluation at their school which voluntarily sets up a “check” on their evaluations so that teachers are not intimidated and otherwise discouraged from taking risks, being outspoken, or just “being themselves” because it doesn’t comport to what the principal sees as being the “proper kind” of teacher.

It’s great that we are moving forward in the area of evaluation and accountability, but let’s not be too sanguine. There is great potential for missteps.