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I’ve been relatively quiet in the ongoing debate about how best to evaluate teachers in New York City and across New York State. I’m not close to the negotiations and can claim no expertise on the political machinations outside of public view. At its heart, this seems to me a dispute over jurisdiction: Who has the legitimate authority to regulate the work of an occupation that seeks the status of a profession—but one that is in a labor-management relationship?

The laws of New York recognize the labor-management fault line, but they do little to guide a collective-bargaining process toward agreements in the many districts in which teacher-evaluation systems are contested. Each side brings a powerful public value to bear on the disagreement.

For the employers, it’s all about efficiency. It’s in the public interest, they argue, to recruit, retain and reward the best teachers, in order to maximize the collective achievement of students. A teacher-evaluation system that fails to identify those teachers who are effective, and those who are ineffective, can neither weed out consistent low-performers nor target those who might best benefit from intensive help. Rewarding high-performing teachers can, in the short run, help keep them in their classrooms, they claim, and, in the long run, can help expand the pool of talented individuals who enter the occupation. (more…)

What makes a great teacher? To a lot of people, the answer seems simple enough: a great teacher is one whose students achieve. For the most part these days, student success is measured with test scores. Logically then, a great teacher is one whose students perform well on tests.

Let’s take it a step further: what makes a great school? Again, the same basic logic applies: great schools are ones that produce the highest proportion of students who perform well on tests. The role of the school, in other words, is to produce students successful according to test proficiency.

Perhaps this framework appears overly simplistic, but it’s the framework that currently directs our efforts to improve public schools. Schools are knowledge-manufacturing facilities, with students being their products. This framework has led school reformers to advocate for accountability systems, human capital mechanisms, and other private sector management tools in public school reform.

Not surprisingly, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is an aggressive proponent of this business framework. The mayor’s private sector management approach recently led him to propose a “turnaround” program at 33 city schools that would require replacing half of those school’s teachers. Not happy with the product? Fire experienced workers and bring in cheaper, lower skilled replacements.

This framework is not just a New York thing. All across the country, school districts are being pushed, by influential figures like U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Calif. Secretary of Education Bonnie Reiss, to evaluate teachers based on a “value-added” analysis. What does this mean? It’s a kind of metaphor: students are raw natural resources; unprocessed, they contribute little to the economy and thus possess little value. If teachers process them effectively, however, their value increases.

Let’s leave aside our gut reactions to talking about children this way. The real problem with this framework is that it’s been a dead end. For the most part, debates about how to produce better students have led to discord within the field of education, while demonstrating little significant impact. (more…)

“Ball so hard, let’s get graded/Don’t get me? I’ll elucidate/A-D/Won’t fool me/Check my score and validate it.”

I recited those lyrics — an adaptation of a Watch the Throne song that I called “Regents in Paris” — over the public address system at my school last week. Teachers and students danced in the hallway chanting in time “Let’s do this test/Let’s pass this test.” It was an absurd scene that fit with the absurd scenario: Students’ reading/writing ability was about to be “officially” assessed in the form of a three-hour-long onslaught of mundane, out-of-context passages that students were supposed to care about enough to analyze in short snippets of writing.

Yes, it was time for the January Regents exams. I had asked half of my junior class to sit for the English Regents even though they did not need to pass it until June. The plan was that we could get the test out of the way for them. The other half of the group took a mock Regents exam to prepare for the June test, and I took it with them. I wanted to understand the test-taking experience more genuinely.

Before I could get to the Regents exams, though, I had to review students’ final papers for my English class. I spent the beginning of the week doing just that. Though the students’ work had some internal inconsistencies and plenty of room for growth, these essays showed that they had successfully analyzed novels through the lens of gender identity and gender socialization. The essays were well structured, validated by quotations, and genuinely interesting to read. (more…)

I remember the moment I stopped resenting the deduction in my paychecks that went to my union. It took me three years, and happened suddenly.

Halfway through my third year of teaching music, in 2007, administrators in my St. Louis district decided to cut student time in the arts by 64 percent at the middle-school level as part of a plan to improve student test-scores. Appalled, I sent an email to my fellow arts teachers across the district asking what we were going to do.

The response from my colleagues? There is nothing you can do; this has been happening for the past 20 years. Nonetheless, unwilling to let the arts programs go quietly, I circulated petitions among staff, acquiring signatures from several hundred teachers—arts and non-arts teachers alike. It didn’t do anything.

Out of ideas, and with no sense of what it might accomplish, I called my union. The response was immediate: The union would help mobilize teachers and parents opposed to the planned cuts.

In the end, the union’s role in the struggle was minimal. But at that moment when I felt ready to give up, its contribution was decisive: It rejected the powerlessness that my colleagues had articulated, and affirmed my professional convictions about the centrality of the arts in public education. With renewed confidence, several of my colleagues and I began to organize, and following a large outcry from parents and teachers, the administration ultimately reversed its decision.

Flash forward to today. I am in my sixth year of teaching, now in New York City, and what bothered me then in St. Louis bothers me even more now. (more…)

Classroom management is usually at the top of the new teacher’s list of concerns. Excellent classroom management often takes years to master, and the only way to get there is through experience, largely because it’s nuanced. The things that disrupt your instruction in one classroom aren’t always the things that will disrupt it in another. Sometimes it’s the students’ attitudes; sometimes it’s a poorly planned lesson; sometimes it’s a fire drill; and sometimes it’s a pigeon flying around your classroom, pooping on desks.

It was a day in late March and I had planned a lesson to prepare my students for the Regents exam in USand Global History. The lesson involved a simple strategy for teaching students to find success on the document-based question (DBQ) essay. With pressure to prepare students for the exams increasing, I accepted teaching test-prep lessons, but my heart wasn’t entirely in it. This would not be a “Stand and Deliver”-style lesson.

I arrived to school sweaty and frustrated after having stood for over an hour on two trains and a bus to get to the school in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx from my apartment in Washington Heights. After passing students waiting in line to go through the metal detector, I turned the corner of the building and was blasted by a wave of hot air upon opening the door. I immediately took off my backpack, jacket, and hat.

“Why do they keep running the heat when it’s warm outside,” I had once asked.

“The budget for next year’s heat is based on the amount of fuel used this year,” another teacher had told me. Of course.

After gathering attendance and making copies, I pushed through the heaviest door in the building to enter the first of four classrooms I would teach in that day. (more…)

Critical thinking —  “reasonable reflective thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or do”  — is embraced by education reformers as key to fixing our schools. Having learned that simply graduating from high school does not ensure success, city officials now hope that by implementing the Common Core standards our students will gain this fundamental skill, and their college readiness will soar.

I’m one of those New Yorkers lucky enough to send his kids to solid public schools with involved parents and committed teachers. A recent social studies test given at one of my kid’s schools shows how hard it is to teach critical thinking when we adults struggle to model it ourselves.

Having studied early colonization in America for about two months, my middle school child came home with a “study sheet” for an upcoming test. The questions and the “right” answers, all bullet points, were listed. “All I have to do is memorize this,” my child explained. (more…)

I work at one of the 33 schools Mayor Bloomberg has publicly stated that he wants to “turn around” — or close. As part of this plan, he is also seeking to replace up to 50 percent of the teachers at each of the schools, including mine.

I have worked in the same school for the past nine years. I can dismiss the sensationalistic claim from Bloomberg that 50 percent of teachers are ineffective, because it is simply not true. Likewise, when I hear defenders of educators claim that all teachers do great work, I know this is not correct either. The answer lies somewhere in between — in the case of my school, much closer to the defenders of teachers.

I want to describe the thankless service being done everyday by my colleagues and mentors. It is my hope that readers might share these personal profiles with friends, family, colleagues, and politicians to spread the word about the great work being done by educators in the schools the mayor has targeted.

At my school — labeled “persistently low-achieving” and slated for possible closure — there are several teachers with doctoral degrees. They could have pursued careers at selective high schools or even at colleges but chose to work at our school. Most have dedicated 10+ years to the school and are respected as the academic authorities in our building by both students and staff. They are able to translate their advanced content knowledge and make it relevant and exciting for our students. (more…)

My whole life I’ve known I wanted to be a teacher, and for most of it I’ve known I have a passion for working with students who face an uphill climb to success. Six years ago, I started my teaching career in Washington, D.C., and moved to New York shortly afterward. By the time I left New York in 2011 for the Seattle area, where I’m teaching now, my understanding of the teaching profession and of public schools had been turned on its head. In a series of posts, I will share some of my experiences. My goal is to inform people who have never worked in schools — including those who make decisions about how schools should work — and to give the public a glimpse into the challenges committed teachers face on a daily basis. 

The assistant principal’s office is crammed into the corner of the second floor of the nearly 90-year-old James Monroe Building in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. Behind me is the door into the hallway, an opening into the dizzying array of students from different schools and languages from different countries. Before me sits the instructional coach our administration hired to help us make sense of outcomes-based teaching.

I sit in tennis shoes, jeans, a flannel shirt, and keys hanging from my three-year-old caribiner attached to my right belt loop. My unshaven face pushes against my right hand pushes against my elbow pushes against the desk frustrated. Not frustrated because of my missed planning period, nor the student I chased down for stealing breakfast that morning. Not because stacks of papers loom over us on both sides of the desk we’re working at like Manhattan skyscrapers, nor because boxes of books and newly ordered materials touch nearly every floor tile, making the movement from one corner of the office to another a journey four times longer than it would otherwise take. Frustrated for a different reason.

Peggy and I stare at the plan I’ve created. “These outcomes are really nice, very impressive. I’m just worried you may be overestimating the students’ ability levels. This looks like something you’d do in freshman-level college course.”

How would you know if I’m overestimating their ability? They’re my students. … is my thought, but only fleeting. A brief ego shield that quickly melts away under the heat of reality.

It’s so easy to fantasize about teaching the really interesting things about history and social studies that require the background knowledge they don’t yet have to really engage in, to expose them to rigorous standards and high expectations that you know you don’t have time uphold. (more…)

It’s cold out now, but my thoughts have lately taken me to last summer, when I lounged in Madison Square Park with my class’s first-trimester novel and thought big about the upcoming year. Summer-Hilary organized with Grassroots Education Movement and the New Teacher Underground to remind herself of the political reasons she’s in education. She slept and ate well. She spent plenty of time with the family and friends who keep her well-fed emotionally. Fueled by all that self-care, I was able to imagine the highest possible expectations for my students and use those expectations as my only compass and my only ceiling.

The unit plan I made last summer was far from perfect, but it was a beautiful reflection of the perceptions of Kurt Hahn students—subtle and profound — that I have assimilated over the last two years, of what I’ve come to love about them as individuals and as a collective. It’s a reflection, too, of my best self: the teacher I dream myself to be when I am fully energized and fully focused on my students’ literary and literacy progress.

When I return to it now — halfway through the school year — that airy summer musing already feels light-years away. I have had to adjust the pace and the sheer multitude of work I assign, not because of my students’ capacity but because of my own. The rigorous assignments I came up with require twice the rigor from me: I have to complete models and rubrics of each so that I can demonstrate to students what I’m looking for. I have to be ready to grade and hand back drafts at a rapid pace. Meanwhile, I have to keep up with the not-technically-contractual-but-crucial-for-everything-else-to-work responsibilities of my small school: an 11th-grade advisory who are starting to think about what they’ll need to graduate on time, collaboration with a first-year global studies teacher, the small writing workshop I launched to help students meet the Common Core standards.

I could do all of this if I were, you know, one of those teachers: the kind I always envision making the cut for Teach for America or one of the leading charters, who can pull full days of teaching and full nights of work, who don’t need much sleep or can function without it until a free weekend comes along. I can give maybe one-week of high intensity, dawn-to-dusk work, and then I crash. (more…)

2011 was a wild year for New York City teachers. Cathie Black’s brief reign, the mayor’s aggressive layoff threats, attacks on tenure and seniority, and the the continued push to shut down public schools often left us stressed, confused, and paranoid. Given all this, as 2011 moved towards its conclusion, I felt like I’d grown a pretty thick skin. There was nothing anybody could say about teachers that would upset me.

In late November, however, Mayor Bloomberg proved me wrong. Speaking at a conference at MIT, Bloomberg said that if he could, he would get rid of half of New York City’s teachers. Why? For starters, we are apparently not that bright. Bloomberg explained, “We don’t hire the people who are at the top of their class anymore. … In America, [teachers] come from the bottom 20 percent and not of the best schools.”

I know this quote is old news, but the “bottom 20 percent” claim really stuck with me. I’m used to being attacked for my exorbitant salary, cushy benefits, and lavish lifestyle. I’m not used to being ridiculed because of my poor academic skills or below-average intelligence.

Like a lot of teachers, I’ve got a bit of a chip on my shoulder. When I heard Bloomberg’s comment, I got defensive. How dare he attack my credentials? What does he know about where I went to school, or what kind of grades I got? What does he know about anything?

Then I calmed down; I thought about what it would mean to be a part of this “bottom 20 percent.” I’m a special education teacher. Many of my students are in the bottom 20 percent of their high school classes. This isn’t a criticism; it’s an observation about how these students perform academically. (more…)