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I recently met a guy from another country who found himself a little surprised by what he’d seen in America. People here, he said, spent almost all their time working. In their few free hours Americans watched TV and seemed to believe everything they saw.  In his country, he said, we would go to a cafe and talk about what was on. We would question whether or not we could believe the commentators — then we’d make up our own minds.

Our conversation started because I’d mentioned the frenzy to create more charter schools. President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, created a program called Race to the Top, in which states compete for cash. What states needed to do, apparently, was subscribe to as many unproven educational programs as possible, and the more shots in the dark they took, the more chance they had to win the money.

The jewel on the crown of New York’s monumental struggle to kowtow to the feds was the raising of the charter cap. This was very important to Duncan, even though charters, with fewer English as a Second Language and special education students than those attending neighborhood schools, have still not managed to outperform public schools.

This amazes me because I strongly believe proactive parents to be the number one predictor of academic success, or lack thereof. When I call parents, which I do with great frequency, the ones who react the most vehemently tend to be the ones who effect the quickest changes. That parents could take the time and trouble to research and enroll their kids in any alternate setting is a sure sign they care about their kids. With 100 percent proactive parents, any school ought instantly to rack up better stats than its counterparts.

In any case, the new law says charter schools will have to serve the same population as public schools. After reading false accounts in the New York Times claiming they already do, I’ll believe that when I see it. (more…)

There’s a young teacher I’ve taken under my wing of late. I’ve been trying to help her get her classes under control and she’s made considerable progress in a very short time. But though I’ve got 20+ years of experience on her, the other day she managed to teach me a thing or two. Several of her students had unexpectedly shared their novel cheating strategies with her. Perhaps her youth made her appear more sympathetic than she really was.

She surprised the kids, though, by establishing new and unexpected ground rules for her next test. One of the boys who’d confided in her almost cried when he heard them:

1. No water bottles. It’s fairly easy for a kid to manipulate a water bottle so that the test answers are just a twist away. What teacher would deprive a kid of a swig of water?  Probably one that wants the kid to study rather than cheat.
2. No electronic dictionaries. This one was not news to me. Kids can place as much text as they like on these little things. One year I noticed two identical essays on the English Regents exams, right down to the misspellings. A supervisor called them both in and asked them to reproduce the essays. One wrote nothing, and was disqualified. The other produced the first few sentences from the essay and was allowed to pass. I protested, telling the supervisor I could recite “Annabel Lee“ from memory, but that didn’t make me Edgar Allen Poe. I was overruled. (more…)

One of my personal pet peeves is class size, and as a new chapter leader I thought compliance was quite straightforward — you grieve the oversized classes, and on a bad day you lose and you’re screwed for a term. On a better day you win, kids win, and class sizes are corrected (at least to the extent prescribed by the UFT contract, which still leaves city kids with the highest class sizes in the state).

But I hadn’t counted on fighting City Hall. Whatever City Hall wants, City Hall gets, and unconnected little guys like me, or the 4,500 kids attending our school, are routinely left by the wayside. 

It’s not only the kids, of course. When I became chapter leader I learned our school’s UFT chapter had a soda machine in the check-in room. We made some sort of profit from each can of soda, how much I had no idea. The company that filled the machine was kind of cute — they forgot to send checks when I took over.

We called. Nothing happened. Called again. Another excuse. We finally told our contact, whom we knew only by first name, to send us a check or move the machine out. No response. Then we unplugged the machine. Three days later we got a check. The only way to deal with these folks, I thought, is to make them offers they can’t refuse. But they’re small potatoes.

Both our chapter and the cute company learned that weeks later when City Hall rolled in and took over everything. (more…)

Bill Gates is amazed at what he sees happening at KIPP charter schools. Bill has no idea those same things happen at Francis Lewis High School, and countless other public schools, each and every day. Because Bill believes in the very same “reforms” that have caused Francis Lewis, my school, to balloon to 250 percent capacity, he surreptitiously funded the Learn NY campaign to preserve mayoral control (in practice, mayoral dictatorship). So I don’t trust him, and I don’t think he knows much about education, despite the millions he throws around imposing his pet projects on us. Still, I withheld judgment when he sent his new program to my school. I did not participate, but I said nothing to those who chose otherwise.

The Measures of Effective Teaching program, sponsored by the Gates Foundation, is now at my school and many others across the city. Teachers were told this study would show what worked and did not work in the classroom. They hoped it would give them ideas on how to reach their students more effectively. How long should you pause after posing a question? Did certain seat arrangements promote more interaction? Is group work always more effective than lecturing?

A young woman from the program came to our school and told our teachers that the study was actually examining newer ways to observe teachers. Traditionally, said she, there’ve been only a few ways to accomplish this. The most popular is the traditional observation, in which a supervisor sits in the classroom and writes up the results. She also cited peer observation, and the notion of test scores being used to determine whether or not lessons are effective.

However, she said, this new study had an entirely new element — the panoramic camera. This camera, specially designed, could observe not only the teacher, but also the students. Are they engaged? Do they understand? Are they texting their girlfriends during the final exam? Should we grant tenure to the teacher in question? Perhaps the camera could tell all, if only they could get it to work properly (there have been issues, and they’re apparently working on a newer version).

Three participants told me that learning about the panoramic camera caused them to question the sincerity of the program’s sponsors. (more…)

What is it good for? Well, war has been around for an awfully long time, and sometimes if you can create the right war, you wag the dog, and no one even needs to win.

If you’re Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein, you find one of the last remnants of vibrant unionism in the center of your fiefdom and ask, “Why should we put up with such nonsense? Unions? We don’t need no stinking unions!” After all, most charter schools don’t have unions, and you can fire teachers simply for telling their colleagues how much UFT teachers earn. You can fire them for hanging Picasso paintings in the classroom. 

So, how do you start this war? Well, a good start is to seek out some nervous and wacky senator facing an uncertain future. If he’s desperate enough for your support, maybe you can persuade him to propose an uphill bill demanding an end to reverse-seniority layoffs. You will demand this only for teachers, not for firefighters, police, or anyone else. After all, you haven’t invested years into sliming them. Also, you’ll insist this bill be restricted to New York City, where you have mayoral control and a fake board of education that votes for absolutely everything the mayor wants. If they don’t, they’re fired on the spot, and teachers should be fired on the spot too, goshdarn it! (more…)

In part one of this series, I described several teaching methods I’ve been encouraged to follow — and then encouraged to discard. All had good qualities, but none was as perfect as promised, and in time, all tended to be rejected, recycled, or forgotten. Yet presenters continue to approach us with new methods and don’t hesitate to introduce them as though they are the Ten Commandments, specifically designed to replace last year’s Ten Commandments.

The possibility that we teachers might be building on something, improving on something, or engaged in a gradual process is never acknowledged. It’s not as sexy as a cure-all, and certainly not likely to make people jump up and down and shout, “Eureka!” But when you’re trying to persuade the public, there’s a need to evoke that reaction, even if it results in a wild goose chase. After all, after this one fails, there are always other wild geese to make us chase around.

For politicians, the latest quick-fix is closing schools. According to them, it’s what we need to do right now to fix everything. Apparently, if we shuffle enough kids around from here to there to who-knows-where, eventually they’ll somehow find themselves in a better place. If their neighborhoods are left without schools, too bad for them. 

Of course, the messy part of closing schools is replacing them. (more…)

Almost once a year for the last 25 years, I’ve listened to some expert or other explain there is one way to teach, only one way to teach, and that anyone who wasn’t teaching that one way was simply not doing things correctly. The new way was far better than every other way, there was no doubt whatsoever, and anyone who questioned the validity of this method had no business pretending to be a teacher.

One year, a woman came and explained to us that portfolios were going to revolutionize schools. The kids would do work, it would all be placed in portfolios, and the portfolios would be available, right there in the classroom, for anyone who needed to see them. Anytime you wanted to check the progress of any kids, you could simply look in their portfolios, and there it would be. What more could anyone ask?

The following year, the same woman came around and raved about cooperative learning. The students would work in groups and help one another. Every day would be a marathon of learning. A teacher asked whether this involved portfolios. “Portfolios are out,” the woman responded curtly. Several months later, some Very Important People came to my classroom and noticed my kids were sharing books. They complimented me profusely on my use of cooperative learning, and I decided it was best to thank them without explaining why I’d embraced this particular methodology. Actually, I only had 15 books for my 34 kids and was doing the best I could under the circumstances. (more…)

I was at parent-teacher conferences when one of my very best students walked in with her mom. I can’t speak Chinese, but a former student of mine, also from China, was in the room and volunteered to translate for me. I told Mom her daughter was wonderful, that she was learning fast and doing great. I told her if she were my daughter I’d be very proud. 

But Mom was not happy.

She asked, through my ex-student, why I didn’t teach like they did in China. Why wasn’t I giving extensive vocabulary lists for her daughter to memorize? Why wasn’t I giving her daughter the SAT words she’d be tested on? Why wasn’t I giving books full of those words? Well, I said, she’s only just arrived here, and I don’t think that’s what she needs just now. 

“You can’t tell Chinese parents anything,” confided my young translator, her hand covering her mouth. (more…)

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” It is, frankly, a revelation, and anyone interested in education, particularly New York City education, needs to read it right now.

For anyone who’s wondered where on earth Joel Klein dreamed up his “reforms,” look no further. A substantial source of inspiration appears to be a three-stage process — a New York City experiment that gave a false impression of success, a San Diego experiment that eluded success altogether, and a stubborn determination to replicate both in overdrive.

As both Bloomberg and Klein were business experts using business models, they used a “corporate model of tightly centralized, hierarchal, top-down control, with all decisions made at Tweed and strict supervision of every classroom to make sure the orders flowing from headquarters were precisely implemented,” Ravitch writes. It appears they didn’t squander their valuable time on troublesome input from teachers, parents, or any contradictory voices whatsoever. In fact, Ravitch points out that though the mayor had promised increased parental involvement, it was actually reduced. Parent coordinators were hired, but in fact, they actually “worked for the principal, not for parents.” (more…)

I’m marginally astonished at the city’s contract demands, the ones that Mayor Bloomberg says are not demands. As I review the demands that are not demands, the one that really jumps out at me is the lowering of standards for dismissing teachers. Apparently, the city now has to show “just cause” but wishes to lower the standard to “arbitrary and capricious.”

One of the social studies teachers in my school, trained as a lawyer, could not believe I’d gotten the term right. But there it is, in GothamSchools, the most reliable source for education news and opinion in the known universe. So basically, they can fire you for stealing pencils, and you’d have to prove to them that you didn’t do it. After all, it’s “Children First” in New York City. So if you’re an adult, falsely accused, too bad. No salary or health benefits for you. And when the children who “came first” grow up, the hell with them too. They get the same 19th-century-style jobs we just took away from their parents.

The DOE, of course, is now two years into its quest to fire more teachers. So far, they’ve only been able to build successful cases against three. It’s remarkable that, led by a noted attorney, that’s as far as they got. I’m sure they could’ve done better if they weren’t expending so much energy on personal vendettas and utter nonsense. Still, you’d think someone who so reveres accountability and spurns excuses, like Chancellor Klein, would have a better explanation than the one he’s got — that the rules and regulations are neither arbitrary nor capricious enough. But those are the sort of results you can expect when you send people to the rubber room for bringing plants to school or reporting administrative malfeasance. I personally worked with someone who spent time there largely for the offense of not wearing a tie.

As a chapter leader, I’m particularly fascinated by the clause demanding that chapter leaders do all their work outside school hours. (more…)