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.

Are we ready to wade into a chat about Arizona? In case you hadn’t heard, immigration has been an issue on their voters’ minds as of late.

Let’s see if I can try to at least introduce what is going on without inserting any incendiary personal opinions into the conversation at this point.

Then again, do I really need to? Look at what the Wall Street Journal tells us is going on.

Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency
State Pushes School Districts to Reassign Instructors With Heavy Accents or Other Shortcomings in Their English

So what this means is, if I have this correct, is that (I pinched this line from the Huff Post): “the Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with “heavy” or “ungrammatical” accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.”

Can someone please define what an “ungrammatical” accent is for me?

Face it, this thing is going all the way to the Supreme Court.

The law, which makes it a misdemeanor to be in the United States without proper documents and allows law enforcement officers to stop anyone and demand proof of citizenship, was signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer last week.

Jan Brewer has been portrayed as a Nazi and she’s been portrayed as a governor who is right-minded about her approach to immigration policy.

All I know is, if they start going around checking English teachers for ungrammaticalisms, I be thinking me’s might have to start proofing the blog I write for for much more better grammaticalistic correctness than I already has tried to do.

Houston is gonna measure teachers by their test scores — and fire the ones that don’t add up.

Interesting stuff.

I guess we always knew it would come to this, didn’t we? Nobody is questioning the tests; everyone is questioning the teachers that don’t deliver the test scores.

The article is well worth a read. Seems as though they have a sophisticated prognostication thing-ey which can generate a “value-added test score”.

As the article says…

The value-added score, based on a complex statistical formula, is a measure of how much a teacher’s students exceeded expectations on standardized tests (mostly the TAKS: Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills). The formula projects how well students should score based on their own past performance.

If the formula is so good at projecting how well the students should score, then how come the formula can’t discern that there is no formula for knowing where actual live human beings will be 3-4 years down the line?

Can you guess what will happen 3 years from now? Sure you can. Let’s just go back to 2007 and look at some of the most widely held best “guesses” for 2010 from way back then.

The best minds on Wall Street. They took a shot in 2007 on a thing called derivatives. And they have Harvard MBA’s.

Oops. Not so good.

Okay, that’s not fair. I mean who could have predicted credit swap defaults and the recession? Let’s guess about something else. We’ll make it easy. A virtual lock in 2007 to do all sorts of unprecedented, amazing things in 2010. A man who was gonna approach if not break all kinds of records by one Golden Bear.

And the winner is… Tiger Woods.

Whoops! Wrong again.

Sure, we should fire teachers based on not measuring up to their “value-added” scores. Cause three years from now is so easy to predict — especially when it comes to student success — that there is simply no sense even doubting the veracity of this approach to professional evaluation.

Uhm, Houston, we have a problem…

Could we now be entering the age of meaningful work? Goodness, that’d be nice huh.

I mean what the greed and excess has done to our nation, well, we will really have no idea as to the tally of all this mess for quite some time. But if there is a silver lining to this quite dark cloud, might it be that people will stop chasing mere money as their ideal professional aim and instead seek personal meaning in their work? Or at least look at the idea of meaningfulness as a supremely important ingredient to their choice of career.

Personally, meaningfulness was the number one factor for me in determining what I would ultimately do. But I come from a family of lawyers and my dad, though a wicked smart barrister, never really liked the job all that much — so while my grandmother glowed with the idea of one day their being a Sitomer, Sitomer and Sitomer law firm (there was a Sitomer and Sitomer firm already), my dad let me know that doing what really wound my clock was much more important than chasing the illusive cash promised by high white collar career choices and the vacuous promise of offices with nice leather chairs.

My dad had many faults but on this one he was spot on. I had permission to choose, to go where the gravity pulled me and not be tempted by the siren call of material benefits holding more worth than personal fulfillment.

So I became a teacher and a writer. Heck, I always clicked with academics, helping people out made me feel good and I kinda found I had a knack working with, and writing for, kids. The idea that there’s some sort of oath of poverty aspect to our profession kinda rankles me but I also know that when I chat with high end lawyers, real estate richies or whatever, they are kinda rankled by the lack of personal meaning they find in their work. The money fulfills them but not to the top and their souls so, so often cry for “more to this in life, no?”

I believe people need to give. It’s woven into our DNA and quite possibly, our national lack of focus on giving these past few decades (we are a nation of rapacious takers in so, so many ways doing for ourselves first and foremost — might I cite Wall Street, Enron, Wal-Mart, Big Oil, etc…) might prove to be a calamity with a spectacular silver lining.

The real stimulus of the stimulus package might be to stimulate people to, as Joseph Campbell once said, “Follow their passion“.

Goodness knows that as a teacher, I try to pass this lesson on to my own students. Be careful what you wish for because if you only chase the money that might be all you end up with. For a kid hypnotized by the bling-bling of life, it’s a tough sell. (Especially, when you work with kids in poverty.) But planting the seed might very well be good enough. I mean I didn’t become a teacher right out of college — I spent years traveling, failing as a writer, drifting and so on. In many ways I was a late bloomer.

But eventually the seed that was once planted saw the light. Following what really drives me has made all the difference to my life.

And I know I am not alone. After all, if you are reading this right now, in some way you are most probably cut from the same philosophical cloth.

Teaching might not balloon your bank account but it can certainly balloon the positive stuff of your soul. And really, who doesn’t like balloons?

When I was named Teacher of the Year for the state of California in 2007 I was given, among other things, a free trip to Princeton, New Jersey to visit the HQ of ETS.

Talk about georgoeus. I mean this place was Shangra-la.

And all I kept asking myself was, “This place is non-profit?” No freakin’ way. They gotta be hauling in money by the truckload.

The SAT. The PSAT. The AP tests. The GRE.

Holy smokes… is anybody doing the math on these guys? That’s all I could think about my entire stay.

Well, someone did do the math.

Read this and tell me that that something isn’t reminiscent of a famous quote from the play Hamlet.

Here are some highlights:

Last year, the SAT cost $45 for the basic test, which 1.5 million U.S. students took. The College Board does not comment on how much revenue each test brings in, but once you factor in the nearly 222,000 students who received fee waivers from the College Board, you can roughly estimate that SAT revenue was at least $58,360,365. I say at least because many students take the test over and over again, trying to refine their scores to get into better colleges. That’s not to mention the litany of extra fees the College Board charges if you get your scores by phone ($12.50), rush the results ($36.50), or ask for a refund ($7). The real revenue is likely to be millions more than $58,360,365, and that’s before you factor in the foreigners who want a piece of an American education ($26 international processing fee; $23 more if you’re taking it in India or Pakistan).

In 2006—the most recent year for which the College Board’s tax returns are available—the College Board brought in a total of $582.9 million of revenue.

Over a half a billion per year for the bubble test industry? When people cry out for change, we have to realize the forces which are in opposition to this change.

And the forces of opposition will always be the folks who are raking in the serious cash. Heck, I’m scared that I’m gonna get a poison blow dart in my neck simply from typing this type of post.

You think Wall Street is worthy of investigation and re-thinking? Might I suggest… twwwppp!

There’s the blowdart!

Seems as though a total collapse of the free world’s financial markets has a silver lining: that kids are thinking twice before dropping out because there are no jobs for them if A) they leave school early and B) are citizens who do not have any sort of formal education. As this article points out, every crisis has a silver lining, right?

Seems to me that America has become far too much of a country that requires a crisis before taking intelligent action to deal with the circumstances BEFORE matters escalate to the level of calamity. From New Orleans and the levees to Wall Street and the financial market/housing bubble crisis to gangs in the inner city to the dropout crisis becoming an absolute economic and social albatross for our nation, we are, in far too many ways, a nation of reactors instead of proactive problem solvers.

And we pay for it each and every time.

As a parent, I don’t allow my 2 year old daughter to cut herself with a sharp kitchen knife before I take the knife away from her. My daughter doesn’t get access to knives of any sort in the first place. But as a country, we allow ourselves to play with fire time and time again, much to our detriment.

When it comes to students, being proactive about matters is one of the best lessons I think I can ever hope to teach them. Fixing the mentality of our entire nation might be a bit ambitious but today, Earth Day, it might be time to think about becoming just a wee bit more green, don’t ya think?

Check out this story about the coming tsunami for education that was splashed today. They literally titled it, “A ‘tsunami’ of Boomer teacher retirements is on the horizon.”

Of course, just because we know about the problem, doesn’t mean we are going to do anything about it. America has turned — much to our discredit — into a nation of reaction instead of proactivity. (I blame George Bush’s short-sighted mentality about proper management of things for much of this right now. To wit, I cite the pouring ga-zillions of dollars into a red-herring chase for drummed-up charges of WMD’s in Iraq instead of recognizing that we had things at home that could have been proactively dealt with before they became a calamity like the housing crisis, banking mess, Wall Street rapaciousness, Louisiana levees, deteriorating schools, the need for green energy, and so on. Anyway…)

Right now, it seems to me that we have to find a way to get our best and brightest to actively choose the profession of education. Currently, the top — and even the middle range of college graduates — are heading into things like business and law, jobs that chase the money (and feed the rat race). I’ve said this before, but when is the last time the Harvard valedictorian stood up and said, “I am going to be a middle school English teacher for the next 35 years.” And meant it.

The crowd would groan conveying the sentiment, “But why? You could be so much more.”

This stigma is very dangerous. People view the profession of teaching as a second rate career. I, for one, will disagree to my last breath but still, how do you change the perception of a culture?

Boomers are retiring. God bless them for their service. But it’s clear that we need an infusion of new educators and I think it’s going to take a national bill — like the GI Bill or something — because American education needs an overhaul. In many ways, we are looking like GM, once the model and envy of the world, now a… well, I’ll let you fill in the blank.

Check out my sweatshirt today. It’s Spirit Day, purple and gold for the Lynwood Knights. How many folks are actually proud to be an American teacher these days? I am, but when I travel the country and speak to others, so many, many of them seem demoralized.

We have to CHANGE THE GAME, FLIP THE SCRIPT, TURN THE PAGE… and avoid cliches as we do so.

I adore Obama and feel that he is spot on in so many ways when it comes to moving education forward in America to better meet the demands of the next generation.

However, I keep hearing him say “we need to do a better job of rewarding talented teachers” but I don’t believe that the key to national success and achieving our educational aims preeminently lies in figuring out a way to pay good teachers more money. In fact, I believe that we can make our biggest and best strides by simply better empowering our nation’s best educators. What we want are tools, resources, some personal freedom to use our own professional discretion as to how and when to apply our craft and not to have the penultimate evaluation of our school or our own individual competence as educators be determined by preposterous bubble tests.

Do I want more money? Of course I do. But if that was my sole driving force I never would have entered into this field. (I’d have become a Wall Street investment banker — soulless, rapaciously greedy, ridiculously over-compensated and self-righteous enough to believe that I deserve to make in one year what it takes the average American teacher, firefighter, nurse, or cop to make in 25 years).

Will better compensation help? Yes. I think the answer is self-evident. Right now our best and brightest aren’t choosing to go into the field of schooling after college and low pay is certainly a factor in this decision making. However, I never hear anybody voice the opinion, “Ya know, if my school district paid me more, I’d work harder.” What I do hear is people griping about how they are handcuffed by this overwhelmingly silly mandate to utilize one-size-fits-all materials (can ya hear me textbooks and scripted curriculums?!) and how they pretty much hate the bubble tests, finding them to be a waste of time, of little or no authentic assessment use for improving true, meaningful achievement with real, individual kids, and how they’d love to have some really good professional development that assisted them in improving their craft.

We want to get better. There are ways to get better. But, as all teachers know, the only way to get better is through more schooling and if there is one truism about all good teachers it’s that they understand the value of perpetually being a learner. We never know it all.

Empower us, Mr. Obama. And don’t let merit pay become a red herring.

So much talk goes on about improving education but what is an educated person in society today? I mean, what constitutes smart? Intelligent? Worthy of admiration?

Is “smart” a person with a graduate degree from an Ivy League School? What about the Ivy League graduate who cheats on his wife, drinks and drives, evades paying taxes and gets in trouble with the law for things like embezzlement?

Do we consider the high school dropout who works 3 jobs for near minimum wage intelligent? What about if he puts food in his the mouths of his kids, coaches pee wee soccer, attends PTA meetings even when it might cost him wages and always stays on the right side of the law when it comes to being a part of America’s citizenry?

Have we not muddled our interpretation of these ideas?

Does character education not play an important role in school education? Does it not need to play a more important role?

These days I really wonder, is a Wall Street scoundrel who bilks investors out of millions, stealing life’s savings from the unsuspecting, any more or less contemptible than a gun-toting car-jacker?

Would I rather have students well educated in terms of character with low academics or students well educated in terms of academics but of poor character?

The answer seems self-evident (if it’s an either/or choice). Yet character education is completely NOT A PART of the way in which my school is evaluated. I mean why isn’t there some sort of standardized test for this aspect of school? While there are numerous ways we, in the world of public education, seem to be failing our kids, it seems to me that the neglect of this arena of school might end up being the most calamitous.