I know a teacher named Ms. Katz. She is my son’s teacher. A passionate professional who has helped my son to love learning the way I had always hoped he would.

Ms. Katz is goofy. She has one of those smiles that lets the kids know that every single one of them is in on the joke. I have known her for about 12 years since I taught a digital camera and iMovie class through our school system. Recently she told me that she used what she learned then to document an educational trip to Italy. She used the work she did there to teach my own son about the Roman Empire.

 That is what teacher appreciation is about for me. Honoring teachers who go out every day and do their damnedest to make a difference. I never thought that what I was teaching in those technology classes would come back to benefit the child I love. She inspires my son and she inspires me. I wanted to share a poem I wrote for Ms. Katz. Painted over Ms. Katz’ door is the word unless. It is a guiding principle for her and it might just be the most important word in education today.

Happy teacher appreciation to Ms. Katz and every teacher who makes a difference.

Unless Teachers…

Unless teachers use our voice to change education we are complicit

Unless teachers speak up with their minds and their hearts, our children will walk mediocrity and disadvantage.

Unless teachers tell the stories that happen everyday we prop up the cardboard image that teachers are failing. Failing by whose definition?

Unless we stop buying into spin we verify the story that corporations will save education.

Unless we say something we will lose our children to them.

Young minds will be grist as the mega-foundations bend the ears of our president and his cabinet with races, and ladders, and tests, and preparations. For what?

Life is education.

What is the value-added to the life of a child if the value is calculated in dollars not sense?

What is the value in being examined if what is found missing won’t help at all.

Knowledge is at our fingertips.

Learning is not the same. With the advent of Google everything changed.

We no longer need to memorize unless

it is to tell a story, solve a problem,  create an answer, not pass a test.

The answer is not on the test.

The multiple choice, to close schools or not, will not improve scores on any assessment, not by a long shot.

Unless we listen to teachers who say, “We can do better than this.”

Our schools are not failing. We are failing our schools.

Fire the teachers! Fire the teachers! Fire the teachers!

“Fire!” The teachers say, “Is what we make every day.”

The fire of learning is born from the spark. The spark is the connection between humans in a class, molecules of care ping ponging so fast, a light bulb comes on and burns bright to last

as each student walks down THEIR path.

CanGgoogle teach how to communicate when you are so mad you want to knock down a wall? No. Thats what teachers do

Can Youtube teach you to take another’s perspective, imagine their position, walk in their shoes? No. Thats what teachers do

Can Wikipedia teach you to see through the slanting and bending of facts by our leaders? No. Thats what teachers do.

Can the internet teach you to create something new?

No. That’s what teachers do.

Unless teachers help us see

schools are not consumer factories

and teachers aren’t widgets

that do only one thing, prep prep prep, prep

Unless we see teachers don’t really teach to the test.

They teach democracy, possibility, humanity.

Teachers teach UNLESS

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,

Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – Dr. Seuss

Jose-

Thanks for your last two posts on testing and accountability. I have so many feelings about the effects of high stakes testing. My strongest feeling is this, the real reasons we test and our very core mission in public school seems to be at odds. By measuring students and teachers and putting school leaders in the role of accountability for increases we are measuring ourselves into an ever expanding mediocrity. Teachers are in the business of creating possibilities for students. You can’t measure possibility. First I offer you the quote below, since I know we are both sideways fans of sports analogies in education debate. Check this out.

…I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered.

This analogy comes from a heartbreaking letter from social studies teacher, Jerri Conti, in Massachusetts. The teacher with 27 years experience has decided to retire early because, it appears, he has had his love of teaching history beaten out of him by the high stakes testing system you described.  I struggled while reading his letter because, I emphasize with his frustration but, I feel like I, we, you, us, teachers, students, parents, administrators, can still halt this runaway train if we start to collaborate.

What I have learned over the past couple years about testing is that it is being used for means other than to measure student success. If that were its only goal we would not share student scores of schools or teachers in news papers or real estate magazines. Testing is being used to quantify teaching  so that a financial reward system can be applied to it. This way of creating productivity is based on a business model. Except, it has been outdated for years, at least according to experts at the Harvard Business school.

Here is a little history to help guide the way.

In the 1920′s Western Electric Company did a study at their Hawthorne Works facility. They found that workers increased productivity if the the building were illuminated brighter, at least for a while. They also found that workers increased their productivity if the lights were dimmed. Again, the increase was short lived. In 1939 Fritz J. Roethlisberger documented the results of the Hawthorne Studies in Management and the Worker. His conclusions were contrary to the popular perceptions at the time that financial reward increased worker productivity. What he found instead was that when management made employees feel that their concerns and ideas were important and that they were valued productivity increased.

This seemed to be what Jerri Conti is expressing in his letter when he said,

Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian. This situation has been exacerbated by other actions of the administration, in either refusing to call open forum meetings to discuss these pressing issues, or by so constraining the time limits of such meetings that little more than a conveying of information could take place.

What we really need to do is start to talk about what what great leadership and great teaching really is and use that as our measure. The truly great schools and leaders know this.

In their article,  A New Vision Michel Anteby and Rakesh Khurana explain the Hawthorne Studies :

The economic rewards of work were potentially picayune compared to the feeling of solidarity and worth created among individuals working together toward a common end. A manager’s effectiveness, therefore, could be measured on the extent to which those in the organization internalized a common purpose and perceived the connection between their actions and the organization’s ability to fulfill this common purpose. Management, then, was not about controlling human behavior but unleashing human possibility.

Now, check out this Thomas Friedman article about John Schnur’s recent project to create accurate international  comparisons.   We hear all the time that American schools are falling behind but some schools (including my wife’s high school alma mater Woodson) is outpacing almost every country in the world in it’s student achievement. And how is it doing it?

It’s that there is no secret. The best schools, the study found, have strong fundamentals and cultures that believe anything is possible with any student: They “work hard to choose strong teachers with good content knowledge and dedication to continuous improvement.” They are “data-driven and transparent, not only around learning outcomes, but also around soft skills like completing work on time, resilience, perseverance — and punctuality.” And they promote “the active engagement of our parents and families.”

I think the most important idea in Friedman’s article is not that these schools compare competitively with other schools around the globe, its that they are about creating unlimited possibilities for students, not test scores.

Image: http://studentlinc.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/06/demotivat...

Hey John,

In the first of this two-part series (OK, a longer essay that I wanted to split up in two), I wondered why Bill Gates would go to great lengths to establish why students should get assessed and, from that, formulate an argument for why teachers should, too. I obviously had serious contentions about his argument, but I left something out there, too.

You, however, hit the nail on the head. How much does all of this cost?

I mean, if you watch the video again:

You’ll notice just how many conditions Gates puts for the “right” teacher evaluation. The list practically runs through the gamut of all the evaluation solutions set forth in the last decade. Looking at test scores, having periodic visitations and observations, and taking the pulse of students’ satisfaction with their learning in the classroom are just some of the things we know to work in combination with each other.

This would take tremendous amounts of money and proper funding in districts that lack the funds to create this paradigm and do it appropriately. With the cost of such a dense teacher evaluation program, one has to wonder if people in Bill Gates’ pantheon understand that they’ve made the same argument their critics have made for some time: resources matter. A lot.

If the aim of this interview is to demonstrate how all vested parties need to band together to create a better school system from the ground up, I could see that. But this sounds akin to something you’ve said: we need a teacher evaluation system to keep the ducks in a row, a top-down vision of management for a job requiring of much more than a few vignettes dedicated to their specialties.

Hey John,

Watch this until 3:15 first.

Yes, it’s Bill Gates, doing an interview with the Washington Post. Obviously, he has a lot to say, but he makes a few arguments that made me go “Hmmph” loudly. While I’ve voiced my displeasure with his position in education more often than not, I also want to work with the arguments he’s making. For the purposes of this specific arguments, I’ll just focus on his first comparison of student assessment and teacher assessment.

He is correct in stating that students get evaluated all the time, from the first time they enter a classroom all the way through college and beyond. Getting a degree demands having plenty of tests getting thrown at you, high-stakes or otherwise. These tests often determine if you achieve the next level or not, and whether we like them or not. That’s our current education system, so ramping up the amount of tests only perpetuates the status quo. I’m not in the camp that says, “Teachers shouldn’t get evaluated, but students should.” Professionals get evaluations all the time.

I just can’t help but wonder if we actually evaluate students the right way, and if the measure we currently have for student achievement helps determine success in life after college. One should argue that far too many factors come into play when looking on a case-by-case basis.

Bill Gates is often called the exception that proves the rule: he couldn’t care less about graduating from college and he’s had a longstanding seat at making decisions about education from a wealth amassed from not getting any degrees.

Conversely, we’ve seen a growing trend of intellectually capable poor students not get into college and driven college students stay unemployed for longer periods of time due to a stingy and inward-looking job market. Our supposed meritocracy isn’t that fair.

Thus, if student assessment as it currently stands isn’t the only driver for student achievement, then how can teacher assessment modeled after his student argument be trusted as a viable measure for determining student achievement? It’s odd.

*** photo courtesy of: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1630529,00.html ***

Mario Batali

Hey John,

I have another confession to make: I’m a bit of a K-12 snob.

I mean, when I refer to “teachers,” I more often than not think about the thousands of K-12 practitioners from Pre-Kindergarten all the way through senior year of high school, inclusive of all subjects and types of schools (alternative transfer high schools look a little different, but still have a “senior year,” right?). The term “educator,” on the other hand, works for everyone such as professors, principals, and anyone directly charged with the learning of our children.

This came up because Robert Pondiscio, former VP of Core Knowledge, changed his Facebook status to the following:

Make a list of celebrity chefs. 2. Make a list of celebrity teachers. 3. Compare.

From there, a few of us chimed into the discussion, opining aloud who fits the mold of “celebrity teacher.” People like Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Melissa Harris-Perry come off the list because, you guessed it, none of them work K-12, and, as much as some of us hate to admit it, college professors get a much higher level of respect from our society than local teachers do in terms of expertise. Even people like Diane Ravitch, Pedro Noguera, and Linda Darling-Hammond, professors focused on education, come off the list for the same reason.

Not K-12, not applicable.

Then, I ran down the list quickly and thought of Jaime Escalante, Joe Clark, and Erin Gruwell, of Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, and Freedom Writers fame respectively. Then Rob reminded me that it’s been more than twenty years since Escalante’s star turn, about 20 years since Joe Clark’s turn, and about seven since Erin Grunwell’s 15 minutes. Ron Clark, the Oprah-celebrated teacher who taught in both North Carolina and Harlem in New York, was certainly popular, but how quickly would he garner real attention from the average American?

Deborah Meier and Robert Moses were MacArthur geniuses, and actually have a verified Wikipedia page, but they’re so selfless that the organizations they represent have gotten way more attention than their own works.

The term “celebrity teacher” is such a difficult one too, because it presumes that the spotlight should focus strictly on the teacher and not on the ways in which that teacher helps students. The profession doesn’t lend itself to alpha dogs and sunbathers of the egoistic type. Yet, I have a hard time with the idea that, in a landscape with people so replete with opinions about our profession, that we shouldn’t have the same viability when we speak about it ourselves.

Hate to say it, but, as much as I appreciate allies, colleagues, and anyone willing to lend a voice to a whole-child, solutions-oriented movement, I can’t sit back and wonder how long it will take before we have professional autonomy. We have to learn how to craft our voices such that we can have celebrity teachers, individuals who speak to the collective conscience of the educational experience with our own agency, not the wills of others, no matter how well-meaning.
Someone will eventually fight me on this, but I hope you smell what I’m cooking.

*** photo courtesy of http://www.hauteliving.com/2012/08/top-5-celebrity-chefs-new-york/310945... ***