We’re looking for new ideas right now in education, right? Well, how about this one: You can’t be an administrator with decision making power over a teacher unless you have once been a teacher yourself.

In the army, you can’t be a general without ever having been a private. In the world of airlines, you can’t be a pilot until you’ve been a co-pilot. In the world of professional coaching, until you’ve been an assistant coach, you can’t bethe head coach.

But in education, the hallowed halls of decision making are littered with people making decisions about our classrooms who have themselves never been in charge of a classroom.

Mr. Arne Duncan, far as I know, has not even spent one year as a classroom teacher yet he is the number one most important classroom policy decision maker in our nation. Sorry, sir, you may have been appointed the U.S. Secretary of Education but from a basic common sense point of view… you are under-qualified.

Cathie Black just recently stepped down as chancellor of New York City schools. (They say she had her hat handed to her.) But Cathie Black came from the world of publishing as an executive. And get this, she had to request a waiver from the state to even accept the position in the first place because she didn’t hold any education credentials.

And we’re shocked that this didn’t work out? Perhaps it didn’t work out because she wasn’t up for the job in the first place… because she was under-qualified to do the job in the first place.

I don’t know if the erasures at Noyes Education Campus which coincided with test scores rising in an explosive, heralded manner and being celebrated by Michelle Rhee with national fanfare, financial bonuses and the such were the result of cheating (but if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…), and while I don’t always agree with Rhee on things, at least she was a classroom teacher, so when she says some of the things she does, it comes from a place of having real perspective as gleaned far from the lights and clean offices of off-site administrative buildings.

Michelle Rhee once ran her own public school classroom. To me, that is the minimal threshold level of qualification one must have in order to have administrative decision making power.

Are the people determining classroom policies actually well-versed in what it’s like to have your own classroom? There’s only one way to qualify: have had your own classroom. If not, then they don’t have the stuff it takes.

IMHO, you gotta walk a mile in a teacher’s moccasins before you can dictate the educational road.

The movies, MSNBC, Congress, and Oprah are beginning to really shine their light on the mess that is public education in the United States. And indeed, it is a mess.

Now let it be known that I am a big fan of us lifting up the rocks and letting the public see the dysfunction that goes on because my feeling is that at the end of the day, parents make the kids and parents make the schools – and until more parents take more of an active role in their local schools and their kids (our country’s kids), things are not going to change.

Educators (like moi) have been squawking as loudly as we can for quite some time saying, “This is SMACKED UP!” But conveniently, we get pigeonholed as whiners by the folks who should be having their feet held to the fire to institute real change.

The truth is, almost all of the most highly functioning schools in our country which have a track record of a decade or more’s worth of Attaboys under their belt (I say let the Honeymoon shine wear off of a place before you crown it king; sustainability is critical) have active and supportive parents. And all the lowest performing schools – places about which I think I know a wee bit – have incredible holes in this area. Now sure, there are anomalies because America is a big place but in large parts, when teachers are forced into playing the role of educator, role model, disciplinarian, tough guy, nice guy, confidante, taskmaster, social worker, and on and on, it sets up problems for the school that are beyond legislating from the state capital, D.C., or Arne Duncan’s desk.

When a child’s very first teacher doesn’t – or can’t – step up to the plate to be the first and primary teacher that a child needs them to be (I am talking about PARENTS!) then a kid is already playing a round of golf without every club they, in an ideal world, should have teed off with in the bag.That stuff catches up when you are educating millions of young people every year.

Of course, on another note, tenure does seem to be broken. That’s clear. However, we need some sort of tenure system because a good teacher at the top end of the salary scale earns as much as 2 1/2 the pay as a new teacher and in this day and age of bean counters pulling all the strings, chopping excellent teaching vets from the payroll to save on school budgets thinking, “Hey, a teacher is a teacher is a teacher, right? So let’s cut that 19 years-of-experience gal cause we are paying almost triple to her what we’d have to pay this only-been-at-it-8-months guy”. I’m not joking either! That’s just the kind of folly that district folks would try to pull if there weren’t protections again such foolishness.

Oh yeah, bubble testing the kids into oblivion is preposterous. That’s clear as well. Yet, we do need some form of assessment. I am not going to deny that. (Project-Based Learning in concert with growth model portfolios anyone? Forget it, I’ll save that for another time.)

Oh yeah, what about trying to turn the screws on teachers without holding admins to the same level of scrutiny, a HUGE issue, no? Has anyone seen how poorly run some of our nation’s schools are? Has anyone seen how poorly run some our nation’s school district offices are? (For instance, go ahead, blame the teachers when some schools have been in session for almost four weeks and the master schedule still is not yet set. Sheesh!)

But the schools that are NOT poorly run, what’s their common thread?

Parents. Active, involved, informed parents. When parents partner with the local school the school achieves at a much higher level than when parents abdicate the responsibility of their children’s education to the people that work for the local district.

This is not to slam the working poor. They are the ones who are oh-so-often on the wrong end of finding “good” schools for their kids. (Tough to go to a Back-to-School Night when you are trying to hold down two or three jobs and all of them a hourly wage positions. I’ve seen this for a long, ling time.) So really, while I am trying to remain compassionate, the fact is capitalism is a culprit here and a sad by-product of living in a land of Haves is also seeing the impact that this has on the Have Nots. By talking about parents I am not accusing anyone. (Well, maybe I am a little… cause some parents simply STINK!) But really, I am just calling a pink elephant a pink elephant. Parents are the common link.

Gotta say, this makes for good television though.

I just got a message from Arne Duncan. An email actually. Here’s what he sent to me:

As our nation observes Teacher Appreciation Week, I am pleased to send this message to recent Teachers of the Year, to make sure that you know how much we at the U.S. Department of Education value your extraordinary commitment and service to our nation’s students.

All teachers deserve honor and thanks on a daily basis for all they do to nurture their students’ academic and personal growth, help them to achieve, and prepare them for the future.

Teachers of the Year admirably represent the entire teaching profession, and I am especially grateful for the leadership and good examples they provide.

I salute you for all of your accomplishments, and I thank you for your enduring dedication to America’s students.

–Arne Duncan

At first, I thought it was a hoax. I thought I was going to open the email and POOF! my computer was going to disintegrate while an evil teen cackled from half-way across the world screaming, “I hate and am not liking subject verb agreement always!”

But alas, it really was from Mr. Duncan. And then, once my initial cynicism subsided, I realized, “Hey, that was pretty cool. Nice gesture, Mr. Secretary of Education.”

I mean the guy obviously can’t be everywhere doing everything trying to meet everyone. But at least he wrote me an email.

Or had a secretary write it.

Or ordered a secretary to have an intern write it.

Or ordered a secretary to have an intern who had a mother who was once a teacher write it. (Look at the proper use of those apostrophes… you know that if you’re gonna send an email out to teachers, as Secretary of Education, you better get both Strunk and White to sign off on that bad boy! However, I think I could take issue with his parallelism if I were to get persnickety but alas, he’s a busy guy so I am not gonna hit him with the fine tooth comb.)

Arne, I agree with you on one hell of a big point: our schools need to change. And I do salute the fact that you are a person who believes that if you’re going to make an educational omelet, you gotta break some schoolhouse eggs. (BTW, if you ever need a fire and brimstone speechwriter, I can be bought!)

Now of course, I might quibble over the eggs you are choosing to smash – or not choosing, as well (like bubble tests!) – yet, at the end of the day, I think the jury is still out on you. Being that you’re still relatively new at the job, and still learning the ropes, I think you deserve more time before you become the next marshmallow on my blogfire.

And you’ve done some good already as well. Those coupla billion you scrounged up to keep the universe afloat while Wall Street was playing 3 card monty with our national banking system really did prevent a calamity.

Yet, we ain’t out of the woods yet. Please don’t forget that.

All in all, thanks for the note last week – and right back at ya, Dude! Teacher of the Year wnners do work hard. But please know that there are hundreds of thousands of teachers in California and millions of teachers across the country that would really like to feel your love as well.

Now sure, some teachers stink and should be run from the profession, but their numbers are infinitesimal as compared to the number of those who simply do right by America. Remember, more time out of the Beltway will always be a good thing to show you just that. And if you want to come to Lynwood, we’d love to have you.

Oh yeah, feel free to bring Barry, too. It’ be a genuine honor.

So here’s an article where the doomsday scenario of teacher cuts is illuminated in big, bold print for all the world to see. We are talking about, by some estimates, 100,000 – 300,000 educators losing their jobs (those are Arne Duncan’s words) in the next few months.

In California, we pink-slipped something like 22,000 teachers. And everyone is befuddled as to an answer to help stave off this nightmare scenario.

I blogged about it last week, but let me suggest it again, this time with some math behind it. Let’s just pink slip the tests instead of the professionals.

In the state of California, for example, bubble tests are everywhere. I mean everywhere. Approximately 5 million students will be taking the CST exam for NCLB over the next month.

How much do we pay for each test? (I don’t know, but I wish someone would answer that for all of us.)

I’ll low-ball my guesstimates just to make the bigger point (i.e. of let’s just pink slip the tests instead of the professionals.)

I’ve heard there are over 6 million kids in California schools. Let’s toss out a million of them and posit that we’re only gonna pay ETS for 5 million tests.

How much does each test cost? According to the College Board website, the SAT costs $45 per test.
The College Board charges $86 per test for the AP exams, according to their site.
Being that the CST is for English, Math, History and Science – and being that I want to give the test makers a fair shake, let’s say they only charge 2/3 of the cost of an SAT for a more complex, longer, more broad in scope CST exam.

By that I mean, I’ll do the math at $30 per kid tested. (If AP are $86 per test, I find it hard to imagine that CST’s for NCLB are a 1/3 of the price for something that requires differentiation at every grade level, but like I said, let’s be fair and try to underestimate the fee they charge our schools for testing.)

So I underestimate the amount of kids taking the test at 5,000,000 and I underestimate the cost per test at $30 and that means that when I say that the number is $150,000,000.00 to test our state’s kids — that’s 150 million dollars — I think I am being conservative.

And we test them year after year after year. To put it in perspective,4 years of high school = 600 million dollars in testing.

So let’s say we actually took that $150 million for next year’s tests and put it on the table and asked ourselves, “Where could we get more bang for our buck?”

And by bang for our buck I mean, where will the money best be spent directly helping the kids of the 2010/2011 school year?

Should we spend $150,000,000 on bubble tests for our students or should we spend $150,000,000 on teachers for the students in the classrooms?

The answer to me, well… it seems self evident.

So I gotta hand it to Arne Duncan cause the man is not afraid to use pointed words and ruffle some feathers. His latest spear is aimed at teacher training programs. (BTW, I do not say “spears” in a condescending manner because when you look at the state of education today, you gotta admit, we need some “new stuff” and unless you are willing to break some eggs you’re not going to be able to make a new educational omelet — so a part of me salutes Arne Duncan in a BIG Ol’ WAY simply for calling a pink elephant a pink elephant.)

Check it out, Mr. Duncan is letting ‘er rip against our teacher training programs.

He calls for “revolutionary change”. On one hand, it’s a bit of a political platitude but on the other hand, he’s right. We do need MAJOR change. And why? Well, as Arne points out, many, many new teachers, “…say they did not get the hands-on teacher training about managing the classroom that they needed, especially for high-needs students.”

I am not sure if there are going to be too many folks that disagree with this statement. I mean look, right now we pretty much throw new teachers to the wolves (that’s a figure of speech, btw… well, kind of… kidding!) and the ones that survive the first three years are the ones that get to be part of the “club”.

And the ones that shuffle away, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes, are the ones that got body slammed one time too often in the WWE of NCLB and the DOE.

Matter of fact, there are droves of these body-slam victims. I can’t tell you how many people I know that hung up their spurs within the first few years absolutely baffled by the reality of being a teacher — even after having earned a graduate degree to pursue this professional aim.

It’s absolutely crazy. Too many teacher programs have devolved in far too many ways into mere classes on theory where book study and hypothetical scenarios are the foremost way an aspiring teacher learns about their craft.

You wanna learn what it’s like to be a teacher in a “high needs” school — and come on, we all know that the phrase “high needs” is a code word for low income, under-resourced, quite often high minority population institutions with all kinds of serious problems going on — then you have to step inside a classroom.

There is simply no other way to prepare for the job of working in a “high needs” school without actually working in a “high needs” school.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Mike Tyson quotes of all time. Once, in his heyday, when asked to respond to the apparently smart and well-thought out pre-fight strategy illuminated by a forthcoming opponent (i.e. the guy had laid out his very tactically sound plan to defeat Iron Mike when Tyson was in his prime) Mike Tyson glibly responded, “Look, everybody’s got a plan until they get hit.”

And ain’t that how it is for these new teachers? They come in with seating plans and behavior management plans and disciplinary plans and lesson plans and all sorts of plans… and then they get “hit”.

• “Hit” by the reality of kids dropping f-bombs in the middle of class.
• “Hit” by the reality of having 39 kids in a room with only 33 desks.
• “Hit” by the reality of being charged with raising the literacy levels of students that come into their 10 grade classes with 4rth grade reading levels.
• “Hit” by the reality of low socioeconomic home lives, transience, absenteeism, violence, alcohol, sex, drugs and so on.

That’s why I just love Iron Mike the philosopher… “Everybody’s gotta plan until they get hit.” Well, in “high needs” schools they do get hit…and nobody is properly preparing them for the inevitable kidney punches.

Come on, basically we are sending in an army of coddled, young, idealistic theorists into these “high-needs” places under the delusion that if a kid talks too loudly or profanely in class, you can actually send them to the principal.

HA!

Wait til they call a parent to discuss how “the poor linguistic choices of a student can be rectified” and the parent starts using more profanity than the kid ever did and thinks you, the teacher, are the real problem in the equation — and not their little angel.

It’ll make your head spin… especially if no one warned you (back in graduate school during your teacher training, of course) that it was coming.

Give a kid a book on riding a bike and have him study and study and study… it’s not going to matter. Until that kid actually rides the bike, he is not qualified to call himself a “bike rider”.

It’s why the GRE’s and such are simply preposterous. Has anyone looked at the subject area test for the GRE’s lately? (I’ll save that for another post.) Lu-di-crous!!

But ETS is on the job so no worries folks, right? (Garsh, do they irk me — the tail that wags our educational dog on so many fronts and yet, who calls them out on it? Sheesh!!!)

look, you have to find your own sense of inner balance, whether it’s bike riding or teaching — and without real time in a real classroom saddle to do so, it’s no wonder our national attrition rate in these “high needs” schools are so astronomical.

I just wonder why it’s taken so long for Washington D.C. to recognize what appears to me to be a pandemic problem?

However, let’s be honest — to properly train new teachers we are going to have to elevate spending. The fact is, professional development is under seige at the same time that classes are swelling, money for academic resources are dwindling and teachers, who already struggle to make ends meet financially in their personal lives, are taking pay cuts all across the country. Me, I took a 3% cut this year and some furlough days… to work with more students with less supplies… but you can see why people would be beating down the door to jump on the this career train right?

Fact is, people become teachers because they want to give and because they want to teach. Educating others is a form of service to the community and dorky as it sounds, it just feels good for the soul. I mean if money was the foremost reason these people were in grad school, they’d head to Wall Street instead where a person who loses billions for their company gets rewarded with hundreds of millions in pay. (Because there’s a limited talent pool, of course, for people with the deft skills to keenly navigate such elite waters. HA!)

I’d love to see a reinvention of teaching training programs because when I look out on the horizon and see how these places operate, I see that they are filled with scores of good, smart people who are fossilized and politicized.

Who is putting the kids first? And since so many of our “high needs” school can’t seem to do that, why in the world did we ever expect to look up and discover that our farm system for teachers (the teacher training programs) were doing it excellently well?

I applaud your intent, Mr. Duncan. But platitudes don’t feed the bulldog. We are gonna need to see action.

What we need are programs that are, first and foremost, about the K-12 students

There is most certainly a very interesting tidal wave on the horizon. And in the mighty seas that are swirling these days in education, that’s no small feat (to create a potential tsunami that is teacher evaluation, that is. See here for the Obama chides California article which this blog post references).

Now, I have no problem with accountability. And no one is above it. I do have a problem, however, with evaluating a professional based on what I consider to be a weak, and quite possibly, inadequate means of assessment to make one’s decision… but I am holding back judgement right now on this Arne Duncan/Obama plan.

See, I think the tests are flawed to a degree. I believe we need growth model assessments to see how much kids learn over the course of the year under the direction of an educator in order to be able to fairly evaluate that educator. Otherwise, by comparing this year’s students to last year’s kids, it’s really apples to oranges (as I have said many times). How my 10 graders measure up this year should be based on where their skills were when they started the year with me — and then we can see their “growth” (there’s that word again). However, to evaluate my 10th graders this year against my 10 graders last year is practically an arbitrary comparison. All kids are different and if we can’t agree on that, then we can’t agree on much at all.

Additionally, my hope is that in this plan comes a recogniztion that there are a few different criteria to “evaluate” teachers — and please tell me that there are more tricks up their sleeves than the simple “kids taking bubble tests in May” approach which so often favor the upper socio-economic areas of our nation.

For example, a teacher who works in a suburban school with a population of kids where 98% of their parents went to college is, if we use our present data system, going to have students that (for the most part) outperform students where greater than 50% of the kids are English language learners.

Sure there might be some anomalies but for the most part this data holds true. The more wealth and education that the parents own in a community, the higher the test scores.

But, does this mean that the teachers who work in elevated socioeconomic areas are “better” teachers than those who do not?

Really… I question it. Because as of right now, I do not see how the teacher evaluation system that is being proposed does not seem to slant towards this end result. (Yet, I am trying to be patient, reserve judgement and wait to see what is actually on the table for all of this.)

But if it does end up that the teacher evaluation system slopes towards this end result, it’s almost un-American.

Two scenarios: Teacher 1 in the suburbs with kids who get high test scores. Teacher 2 in a Title 1 school with all the problems that run attendant to our nation’s lowest performing academic institutions.

Test time comes and the students of Teacher 1 outperform the students of Teacher 2. No one is shocked by the way by the result of their bubble tests.

Now, does this mean that the teacher in scenario 1 in the suburbs is a “better” teacher? Does it mean that the teacher in scenario #2, if the kids struggle to even read the tests, is a worse teacher? See this is where the problem exists for so many. And for me, I don’t want to stop working with the Title I population in inner city Los Angeles.

I LOVE IT!! However, I also don’t want the tests to demonize me as not measuring up because on the whole, my students do not score on these bubble tests at the same level of proficiency as kids who have lawyers, doctors and MBAs for parents.

American society is bifurcated along socioeconomic/class divides and while we all want to be rich, the truth is, all of us are not… and there are a great many of us striving to do 10 dollars worth of work with 5 dollars worth of resources.

My fear is that, unless these teacher evaluations take into consideration all the other mitigating factors that go into making for a really “great professional” what we are going to see is that folks who work in areas where the families have solid educational backgrounds and deep financial pockets are going to be rewarded while the folks who work in our more “troubled areas” are going to inevitably thrown under the bus.

And that is, as I have said many times before, un-American. Accountability is fine as long as it is not used as a weapon and if this plan is going to chase everyone to pursue jobs where the kids are already high-performers even before the school year starts, then we are going to do a disservice to the kids who most need our attention, care, solid efforts and skills.

On this night, after having read this interview, I became an official Arne Duncan fan.

And I am wearing my hoodie up because I am only hoping that I don’t have to hide my head underneath a full bag at some point in the future regretting the day that I made this proclamation forevermore to be referenced by the digital literati.

But he won me over. I believe his actions will follow his intentions and American education will be better off, will turn a new leaf with this man in charge.

Besides, sitting on the fence reserving judgement is something that doesn’t suit me well. We need change, we need action, we need to re-shuffle the deck (and not view it as deck chairs on the Titanic). And so, I am staking my claim as an official supporter.

As you know, I was never a fan of Spellings and felt that she was a calamity for public education. Then again, I felt that way about Dubya as well. But Mr. Duncan has just won my support and I will now feel comfy to tell all I know that he has earned it. And why?

Well, if you read the aforementioned interview, one thing is quite clear… HE GETS IT!

Now, the question becomes, can he remediate it? Well, he’s gonna need help from teachers, from people like me, if he is gonna be successful.

So here we go. God’s speed, Arne. God’s speed.