More on the 'Waiting for Superman' battleground in the US

This month the articles selected were written by Stan Karp and Richard Rothstein

Richard Rothstein, "How to fix out schools its more complicated and more work than the Klein-Rhee manifesto wants you to believe", Education Policy Institute Issue no 286

This article was written in response to Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who published a "manifesto" in the Washington Post claiming that the difficulty of removing incompetent teachers "has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future." The solution, they say, is to end the "glacial process for removing an incompetent teacher" and give superintendents like themselves the authority to pay higher salaries to teachers whose students do well academically. Otherwise, children will remain "stuck in failing schools" across the country.

Rothstein acknowledges that teacher quality is the single most important in-school factor affecting student learning but he argues that we cant just ignore the other influences  that are the result of greater economic, social and environmental family and community stress

It is true that some studies have found that variation in teacher quality has more of an influence on test scores than do the size of classes or average district-wide per pupil spending. In other words, you are better off having a good teacher in a larger class than a poor teacher in a smaller class. But that's it. It is on this thin reed that Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee are mounting a campaign to make improving teacher quality, and removing teachers whose students' test scores are lower, the centerpiece of national eff orts to improve the life chances of disadvantaged students.

There are plausibly many other in-school factors, not quantified in research,  that could have as much if not more of an influence on student test scores than teacher quality.

Take the quality of school leadership. Would an inspired school principal get better student achievement from a corps of average-quality teachers than a mediocre principal could get from high-quality teachers? Studies of organizations would suggest the answer is yes, but there have been no such studies of school leadership.

Take the quality of the curriculum. Would average teachers given a well-designed curriculum get better achievement from their students than would high-quality teachers with a poor curriculum? A very few research studies in this field suggest the answer might be yes as well.

Or take another in-school factor, teacher collaboration. Even when elementary school students sit in a single classroom for most of the day, several teachers influence their achievement. Teachers can meet to compare lesson plans that worked well and those that didn't. Teachers in lower grades can successfully align their instruction with what will be most helpful for learning in the next grade. Teachers of the arts can reinforce the writing curriculum, and vice-versa. Will average-quality teachers who work well together as a team with the common purpose of raising student achievement get better results than higher-quality teachers working in isolation? Plausibly, the answer is yes.

Will promising to pay individual teachers more if their students get higher test scores than the students of another teacher reduce the incentives for teachers to collaborate? Again, a plausible answer is yes.

Of course, schools should try to recruit better-quality teachers and should remove those who are ineffective. After all, the quality of teachers is an important part of the one-third share of the achievement gap that can be traced to the quality of schools. But before making teacher quality the focus of a national campaign, school systems will have to develop better ways of identifying good and bad teachers. Using students' test scores as the chief marker of teacher quality is terribly dangerous, for a variety of reasons: it encourages a narrowing of the curriculum because only test scores in one or two subjects (math and reading) can be used for this purpose, and teachers who will be evaluated mainly by these test scores will have incentives to minimize attention to other subjects; it creates pressure to "teach to the test," that is, emphasizing topics likely to appear on our existing low-quality standardized tests rather than other equally important but untested topics; and it is likely to misidentify teachers - labeling many good teachers as poor and many poor teachers as good - because test scores can be influenced by so many other factors besides good teaching.

The necessary task of identifying good teachers and removing those who are inadequate requires more than student test score data. It requires a holistic approach, in which qualified experts observe teachers' lessons, evaluate the quality of their instruction, and examine a wide range of their students' work and how teachers respond to it. This requires a bigger investment of qualified supervisory time than most schools are prepared to make. Using student test scores as a shortcut will do great harm to American education.

Making teacher quality the only centerpiece of a reform campaign distracts our attention from other equally and perhaps more important school areas needing improvement, areas such as leadership, curriculum, and practices of collaboration, mentioned above. Blaming teachers is easy. These other areas are more difficult to improve.

But most important, making teacher quality the focus distracts us from the biggest threat to student achievement in the current age: our unprecedented economic catastrophe and its effect on parents and their children's ability to gain from higher-quality schools.

Consider the implications of this catastrophe for our aspirations to close the black-white achievement gap. The national unemployment rate remains close to an unacceptably high 10%. But 15% of all black children now have an unemployed parent compared to 8.5% of white children. If we also include children whose parents have become so discouraged that they have given up looking for work, and children whose parents are working part-time because they can't find full-time work, we find that 37% of black children have an unemployed or underemployed parent compared to  23% of white children. Over half of all black children have a parent who has either been unemployed or underemployed during the past year.  336% of black children now live in poverty. The consequences of this social disaster for schools are apparent, and include:

 Greater geographic disruption: Families become more mobile because they can no longer afford to keep up with rent or mortgage payments. They are in overcrowded housing; they often have to double up with relatives in apartments that were already too small. Children have no quiet place to study or do homework. They switch schools more often, fall behind in the curriculum, and lose the connection with teachers who know them well enough to adapt instruction to their individual strengths and weaknesses. Inner-city schools themselves are thrown into turmoil because classes must frequently be reconstituted as enrollment rises and falls with family mobility. Even the highest-quality teachers cannot fully insulate their students from the effects of this disruption.

 Greater hunger and malnutrition: When more parents lose employment, their income plummets and food insecurity grows. More children come to school hungry and/or inadequately nourished and are less able to focus on schoolwork. Attentive teachers realize that one of the best predictors of how their students will perform is what they had for breakfast, if anything at all.

 Greater stress: Families where parents are unemployed are under greater psychological stress. Such parents, no matter how well-intentioned, often become more arbitrary in their discipline and less supportive of their children. Children from families in such stress are more likely to act out in school and are less able to progress academically. The ability to comfort and support such students may be a more important indicator of a teacher's quality than her students' test scores, which may still be lower than the scores of students coming from stable and secure homes.

 Poorer health: Families where parents lose employment are also more likely to lose health insurance. Their children are less likely to get routine and preventive health care and more likely to miss school days because of illness. They are less likely to get symptomatic treatment for illnesses like asthma, the most common cause of chronic school absenteeism. Children with asthma, even when they attend school, are more likely to come to school irritable, having been up at night with breathing difficulty.

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Stan Karp, Who's bashing teachers and public schools, and what can we do about it?", based on a talk given at Jefferson High School, Portland, Oregon and sponsored by the  Portland Association of Teachers.

Extracts  from his talk

I wish I were here today to announce that I had just completed a deal to buy Facebook, the Oprah Winfrey show and Paramount Pictures-since that's where a lot of education policy is apparently being made these days-and was turning them all into publicly accountable institutions devoted to improving education for all kids-and this was the first meeting of the new steering committee.

.....far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools, and we need to give them more homework because very few of them know what they're talking about. And a few need some serious detention.

... the bashing is coming from different places for different reasons. And to respond effectively to the very real attacks that our schools, our profession and our communities face, it's important to pay attention to these differences.

The parent who's angry at the public school system because it's not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience, who couldn't survive in your classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby....and who has the resources to do so because the country's financial and tax systems are broken.

The educators who start a community-based charter school so they can create a collaborative school culture, are not the same as the hedge fund managers or their political allies who invest in charter school franchises because they see an opportunity to turn a profit or want to privatize one of the last the public sector institutions we have left.

The well-meaning college grad who joins a Teach for America program out of an altruistic impulse is not the same as the corporate managers who want to use market reforms to create a less expensive, less secure and less experienced teaching force.

And the hard-pressed taxpayer who directs frustration at teachers struggling to hang on to their health insurance or pensions-which far too few people have at all-is not coming from the same place as those responsible for the obscene economic inequality that is squeezing both.

Stan notes that he has spent a large part of his time as an education activist, criticizing the flawed institutions and policies of public education but  now finds himself spending his time and energy on defending that same system because, he argues, those whose critical voice is loudest today are not trying to fix it but to destroy it.

   .... the increasingly polarized national debate around education policy is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of budget cuts in a society that has its priorities seriously upside down. It's really not even about the hot-button reform issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools. What's ultimately at stake in this debate is much more basic. It's whether the right to a free public education for all children is going to survive as fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide that are going to survive as public institutions, collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or be privatized and commercialized by the corporate interests that increasingly dominate all aspects of our society.

Karp argues that although the common buzz words associated with the current agenda are charter schools, merit pay, and test-based accountability there is a larger agenda at play

But the larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the campaign, is to "burst the dam" that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization (my emphasis).

This is not some secret conspiracy. It's a multi-sided political campaign funded by wealthy financial interests like hedge fund superstar Whitney Tilson and rich private foundations like Gates, Broad & Walton. And it's important to keep this big picture in mind, even as we talk about specifics like merit pay and charters because, in a sense, they have become the dynamite charges being put in place to burst the dam.

Karp goes on to say that although this in itself is disturbing, the most insidious aspect of the movement is that it claims to be driven by a passion for equity 

 What is really new and alarming-and what makes a film like WfS [Waiting for Superman] so insidious-are the large strides that those promoting business models and market reforms as the key to solving educational problems have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system.

That's why when Rethinking Schools initiated a NOT Waiting for Superman campaign last September to talk back to the film and its message, it drew over 15,000 positive responses in two weeks. Educators and activists were responding not just to the movie, but to more than a decade of destructive policies and political rhetoric that the movie promotes and that teachers know from direct experience is hurting our schools, our students and our communities.

One of the reasons why this movement has been so powerful, argues Karp , is that the role of federal government  has shifted in very significant ways,

A good example of how federal ed policy has gone off the rails came last Feb. when the President and his Education Sec. Duncan hailed the firing of the entire staff of a high school in Central Falls, RI because it had low test scores. They said it was a "courageous" act that was "right for kids." A model of "accountability" that the Administration wants to repeat in thousands of schools over the next few years. Duncan has talked about closing "the bottom 1 percent of the nation's portfolio"-like the CEO of a runaway multinational corporation.

Neither the President nor his Education Secretary mentioned that the school was the only high school in the poorest city in the state. Or that 65% of the students were ELL learners or that parents, students and alumni loudly protested the plans to fire the whole staff. They didn't explain that the wholesale firings were made possible by changes in federal Title I regulations proposed by the administration or that the state supt. pushing the plan was part of the Broad Foundation's growing national network of pro-privatization, anti-union school administrators.

Instead the President mentioned the low percentage of the students who passed the state math test. That was the sole justification for supporting the wholesale staff firings. And it's the kind of punitive test-driven policy that the Administration is proposing to impose on over 5000 schools in the nation's poorest communities.

This is happening in the name of poor black, Hispanic and English Language learners but at the same time when the Wake County, North Carolina school board voted 5-4 to end the one of the country's most successful "diversity" plans that limited the number of poor students at any one school.  The President has so far remained silent about this initiative.

Sec. Duncan repeatedly calls education the "civil rights issue of the 21st century," and even called the release of Waiting for "Superman" a "Rosa Parks moment." But the federal government has completely retreated from the educational equity agenda that emerged from the civil rights movement that Rosa Parks helped launch.

Instead, the Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans and building on the test and punish approach of the Bush years. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home to me when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Governor Christie, the most anti-public education governor NJ has ever had, quoted as saying "This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform."

Test score gaps have been used to label schools as failures without providing the resources and strategies needed to eliminate the gaps. Over 25,000 schools, nearly 30% of all schools in the US failed to meet NCLB's adequate yearly progress requirements last year, and that number will jump dramatically as the law's unreachable benchmarks ratchet up towards 100% by 2014.

Today a deepening corporate/foundation/political alliance is using this same test-based accountability to drill down further into the fabric of public education to close schools, transform the teaching profession, and increase the authority of mayors and managers while decreasing the power of educators.

What we're facing is a policy environment where bad ideas nurtured for years in conservative think tanks and private foundations have taken root in Congress, the White House and the federal education department, and are now aligned with powerful national and state campaigns fueled with unprecedented amounts of both public and private dollars.

Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access & outcomes for the many.

The corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as "education reformers." If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you're a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining and control of school policy by educators, you're a defender of the status quo. This is hardly a surprise in a media culture that allows FOX News to call itself "fair and balanced," but it does make intelligent debate about education policy more difficult.

Karp also makes the point that this debate is changing the way in which the whole issues of poverty and inequality is framed and understood.

Serving schools with high numbers of students in poverty is no excuse for bad teaching, poor curriculum, massive dropout rates or year after year of lousy school outcomes. We do need accountability systems that put pressure on schools to respond effectively to the communities they serve. And in my experience, parents are the key to creating that pressure and teachers are the key to implementing the changes needed to address it. Finding ways to promote a kind of collaborative tension and partnership between these groups is one of the keys to school improvement.

But the idea that schools alone can make up for the inequality and poverty that exists all around them has increasingly become part of the "No Excuses" drumbeat used to impose reforms that have no record of success as school improvement strategies and in fact are not educational strategies at all, but political strategies designed to bring market reform to public education. In the past, we used to hear that the "single most important school-based factor" in student achievement was the quality of the teacher. Now even the school-based qualification is being left out. Instead we're hearing absurd claims about how super-teachers can eliminate achievement gaps in two or three years with scripted curricula handed down from above, and how the real problem in schools is not the country's shameful 23% child poverty rate or underfunded schools, instead it is bad teachers.

Now it's absolutely true that effective teachers and good schools can make an enormous difference in the life chances of children. And it's also true that struggling teachers who don't or won't improve even after they've been given the support and opportunities to do so, need to go manage hedge funds or enter some other less important line of work.

But when it comes to student achievement-and especially the narrow kind of culturally-slanted, pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores-there is no evidence that the test score gaps you read about constantly in the papers can be traced to bad teaching, and there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.

... Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too, and reformers who discount facts like 44% of Oregon's students qualify for free or reduced lunch programs are actually the ones making excuses; excuses for their failure to make poverty reduction and adequate and equitable school funding a central part of school improvement efforts.

We are now starting to here the reform movement talking about education cuts, the unjustifiable waste of money in public education and doing more with less says Karp

 ... for Secretary Duncan and Bill Gates cutting education budgets is not a problem, it's an opportunity. They are now going around the country proposing that schools save money by increasing class sizes, ending the practice of paying teachers for advanced degrees, closing and consolidating schools, and replacing live teachers with online computer programs.

At the same time they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create more tests based on the new common core standards and use those tests to implement merit pay plans.

Now at this point spending more money on standardized tests to track academic achievement gaps is like passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic. People need better health care, more hospitals, and better trained doctors, they don't need more thermometers.

Things are also moving fast on the merit pay based on test score side of things too according to Karp.

For example, in Montgomery County, Maryland, the Montgomery County Education Association negotiated a professional growth system that included test scores as one part of a comprehensive teacher evaluation process that looks at student outcomes, classroom performance, professional responsibilities, advanced degrees and other factors. The process requires all new teachers and teachers who've been identified as struggling to work with well-trained teacher coaches over a two-year period to improve their practice and results. The system has resulted in a significant increase in teacher quality, including decisions, jointly supported by the union and administration, to remove several hundred teachers from the classroom over a period of years. But this year Md. won a Race to The Top Grant that, under federal pressure, requires that 50% of teacher evaluation be based strictly on test scores. The grant threatens to destroy a successful system developed by collective bargaining that actually works to improve results for teachers and students.

The real impact of test-based merit pay plans will be to weaken school-based collaboration and move decision-making to external bureaucracies and managers. Last week, the NY Times described a multi-city plan funded by the Gates Foundation to combine test-based teacher evaluation with the videotaping of classroom lessons. By next June, Gates researchers will have 24,000 videotaped lessons totaling 64,000 hours of classroom video. The plan is to have these videos evaluated by people who have never visited the school and don't have any kind of relationship with the teacher, and rate them using checklists. It's like the grading for standardized tests by the temporary employees of commercial testing vendors.

And of course there's a contractor providing the necessary equipment. The Teachscape company is providing cameras, software, and other services at estimated first-year startup costs of about $1.5 million per district.

In conclusion he writes that

It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. It took campaigns against child labor, crusades for public taxation, struggles against fear and discrimination directed at immigrants, historic movements for civil rights against legally sanctioned separate and unequal schooling, movements for equal rights and educational access for women, and in more recent decades sustained drives for the rights of special education students, gay and lesbian students, bilingual students and native American students. These campaigns are all unfinished and the gains they've made are uneven and fragile. But they have made public schools one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose.

In some respects public education is the most successful democratic institution we have and has done far more to reduce inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country's financial, economic, political, and media institutions.

But its Achilles heel continues to be acute racial and class inequality, which in fact is the Achilles heel of the whole society.

Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have, as I've noted, made strides in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of communities who have been poorly served by the current system. But their agenda does not represent the real needs or the real desires of these communities:

It does not include all children and all families
It does not include adequate, equitable and sustainable funding
It does not include transparent public accountability
It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well
It doesn't address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.

Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to re-invent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible, democratic alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.

Because in the final analysis what we need to reclaim is not just our schools, but our political process, our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. In short, we don't only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.

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