April 9, 2009--Reading, ‘Riting, and Data
Harvey was saying the other morning that of all the outrageous things going on, the failure of our public schools to provide a good education is the most egregious. Maybe he didn’t use the word “egregious,” but if he had thought about it another minute he would have.
I said to him, that though we don’t agree about a lot of things, about this we are in complete agreement. “Maybe, though,” I added, “we don’t have the same view about why this is true.”
“Try me,” he said.
I took another sip of coffee and tried. “There are actually a lot of reasons why the schools are not as good as they used to be. To begin with, in the past teachers were trained to teach. Now they're educated to do so. They used to go to Normal Schools or Teacher Training Institutes; now they go to Colleges of Education. They used to learn practical methods of instruction; now they spend a lot of time on theory.”
“And,” Rona leaned over to add, “they are now encouraged to be creative in the classroom rather than employing methods and techniques that work.”
“Also,” I said, “though it may not be politically correct to say this, in the past when talented women did not have that many career options as they do today, those who wanted careers were directed toward teaching and many of them turned out to be exceptional.”
“Look, I started this,” Harvey jumped in to interrupt Rona and me before we got fully on a roll, “so let me add something that I’m sure you don’t agree with.”
“Go on.”
“A lot of the failures of our schools are the fault of the unions. They care more about protecting teacher’s prerogatives than student achievement. I have a friend who was a high school teacher and he invited me to a union meeting and I didn’t hear one word there about students. All they spoke about was their salaries and working conditions. I used to think of teaching as a calling. People entered the profession knowing they wouldn’t get rich but because they were dedicated to the education of young people. Much of that has changed, and not for the better.”
“Well, it may surprise you,” I took the floor back because Harvey was beginning to get all worked up, “but essentially I agree with you. I’m quite a liberal, as you know,” he stopped gulping down his eggs to nod his head so vigorously that I was concerned he might choke, “Teachers are entitled to a living wage and good working conditions and their unions have helped with this, but they need to be at least as concerned about the welfare and progress of their students as their prep time and the length of the school day. In New York City, for example . . .”
“Ugh, New York, union central,” Harvey blurted out.
“Indeed,” I said, “There the collective bargaining contract between the union and the city runs to many hundreds of pages and almost all of them are devoted to governance issues such as who has the power to assign teachers to classes and the number of hours and even minutes teachers are required to spend in the classroom.”
“Let me tell you what happened to my teacher friend,” Harvey said, “He tried to restrain a 9th grader who was threatening his classmates. To do this, he put a hand on his shoulder and asked him to stop and sit down. When he wouldn’t, he told him to leave and report to the principal’s office. To make a long story short,” which for Harvey is a bit of an unusual offer, “the boy’s mother complained and my friend was made to apologize to the student for touching him ‘inappropriately.’ As you might imagine, after that he lost his sense of mission for teaching and soon thereafter quit and went into commercial banking.”
“Incredible,” Rona jumped in again, “I’ve heard a lot of those kinds of stories. Another problem is that too many teachers want to do their own thing, no matter how well or poorly it works, rather than be required to use effective methods—techniques that have been measurably proven to work. And to be held accountable for how well their students perform.”
We were all nodding in rare agreement and decided to pay our checks and leave the Green Owl before we found something about which to disagree. Tomorrow for that would be soon enough.
Back home there happened to be an article in the New York Times (linked below) that could have served as a text for our discussion. It reported about how Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that nearly half of the economic stimulus money designated for public schools will be doled out to the states if and only if they provide accurate data about the academic achievement of their students. Data, however, that are likely to prove embarrassing.
This is because many of the quantifiable failures of public education are routinely hidden from public view since school administrators, including at the state level, routinely obscure the true nature and extent of the problems (which is a polite way to say they “lie”) in the methodology they employ.
For example, before releasing federal money to the states, among other things, Duncan is requiring that they report about the number of students, high school by high school, who enter, graduate, and complete at least a year’s worth of college credit.
This sounds pretty simple for state commissioners to do—push a few buttons on computers in Sacramento and Albany and the data will pop out.
Wouldn’t it be nice if this were true? Instead, we have 50 methods of keeping track of these kinds of data, including many different ways of defining who in fact is a high school graduate. In some states a graduate is defined as a student who begins the senior year and graduates a few months later, ignoring all who dropped out earlier. Other states create their databases by counting only those who graduate after beginning their junior year, also ignoring dropouts. These deceptive methods present a much more positive picture than would be the case if all who begin high school were counted. And, to make matters worse, virtually no states have integrated data systems that track high school graduates who go on to college. Incredibly, not all school districts, even fairly large ones, keep their records electronically. To monitor student progress they have to do it manually, paper transcript by transcript.
All of this is not just the result of incompetence. Much of it is designed to hide the truth of school failure from the public. Now that’s what I call egregious.
This shell game has been going on for decades so good luck Arne Duncan.
I said to him, that though we don’t agree about a lot of things, about this we are in complete agreement. “Maybe, though,” I added, “we don’t have the same view about why this is true.”
“Try me,” he said.
I took another sip of coffee and tried. “There are actually a lot of reasons why the schools are not as good as they used to be. To begin with, in the past teachers were trained to teach. Now they're educated to do so. They used to go to Normal Schools or Teacher Training Institutes; now they go to Colleges of Education. They used to learn practical methods of instruction; now they spend a lot of time on theory.”
“And,” Rona leaned over to add, “they are now encouraged to be creative in the classroom rather than employing methods and techniques that work.”
“Also,” I said, “though it may not be politically correct to say this, in the past when talented women did not have that many career options as they do today, those who wanted careers were directed toward teaching and many of them turned out to be exceptional.”
“Look, I started this,” Harvey jumped in to interrupt Rona and me before we got fully on a roll, “so let me add something that I’m sure you don’t agree with.”
“Go on.”
“A lot of the failures of our schools are the fault of the unions. They care more about protecting teacher’s prerogatives than student achievement. I have a friend who was a high school teacher and he invited me to a union meeting and I didn’t hear one word there about students. All they spoke about was their salaries and working conditions. I used to think of teaching as a calling. People entered the profession knowing they wouldn’t get rich but because they were dedicated to the education of young people. Much of that has changed, and not for the better.”
“Well, it may surprise you,” I took the floor back because Harvey was beginning to get all worked up, “but essentially I agree with you. I’m quite a liberal, as you know,” he stopped gulping down his eggs to nod his head so vigorously that I was concerned he might choke, “Teachers are entitled to a living wage and good working conditions and their unions have helped with this, but they need to be at least as concerned about the welfare and progress of their students as their prep time and the length of the school day. In New York City, for example . . .”
“Ugh, New York, union central,” Harvey blurted out.
“Indeed,” I said, “There the collective bargaining contract between the union and the city runs to many hundreds of pages and almost all of them are devoted to governance issues such as who has the power to assign teachers to classes and the number of hours and even minutes teachers are required to spend in the classroom.”
“Let me tell you what happened to my teacher friend,” Harvey said, “He tried to restrain a 9th grader who was threatening his classmates. To do this, he put a hand on his shoulder and asked him to stop and sit down. When he wouldn’t, he told him to leave and report to the principal’s office. To make a long story short,” which for Harvey is a bit of an unusual offer, “the boy’s mother complained and my friend was made to apologize to the student for touching him ‘inappropriately.’ As you might imagine, after that he lost his sense of mission for teaching and soon thereafter quit and went into commercial banking.”
“Incredible,” Rona jumped in again, “I’ve heard a lot of those kinds of stories. Another problem is that too many teachers want to do their own thing, no matter how well or poorly it works, rather than be required to use effective methods—techniques that have been measurably proven to work. And to be held accountable for how well their students perform.”
We were all nodding in rare agreement and decided to pay our checks and leave the Green Owl before we found something about which to disagree. Tomorrow for that would be soon enough.
Back home there happened to be an article in the New York Times (linked below) that could have served as a text for our discussion. It reported about how Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that nearly half of the economic stimulus money designated for public schools will be doled out to the states if and only if they provide accurate data about the academic achievement of their students. Data, however, that are likely to prove embarrassing.
This is because many of the quantifiable failures of public education are routinely hidden from public view since school administrators, including at the state level, routinely obscure the true nature and extent of the problems (which is a polite way to say they “lie”) in the methodology they employ.
For example, before releasing federal money to the states, among other things, Duncan is requiring that they report about the number of students, high school by high school, who enter, graduate, and complete at least a year’s worth of college credit.
This sounds pretty simple for state commissioners to do—push a few buttons on computers in Sacramento and Albany and the data will pop out.
Wouldn’t it be nice if this were true? Instead, we have 50 methods of keeping track of these kinds of data, including many different ways of defining who in fact is a high school graduate. In some states a graduate is defined as a student who begins the senior year and graduates a few months later, ignoring all who dropped out earlier. Other states create their databases by counting only those who graduate after beginning their junior year, also ignoring dropouts. These deceptive methods present a much more positive picture than would be the case if all who begin high school were counted. And, to make matters worse, virtually no states have integrated data systems that track high school graduates who go on to college. Incredibly, not all school districts, even fairly large ones, keep their records electronically. To monitor student progress they have to do it manually, paper transcript by transcript.
All of this is not just the result of incompetence. Much of it is designed to hide the truth of school failure from the public. Now that’s what I call egregious.
This shell game has been going on for decades so good luck Arne Duncan.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
7:00 AM
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