Gales of reformist destruction

GothamSchools reports that the New York City Dept of Education has announced a new round of school closings.  Diane Ravitch has this to say ("Obama and Duncan Launch NCLB 2.0"):

What we are witnessing now is the culmination of the plans of the education entrepreneurs who are driving national education policy at the highest levels. They are not educators. They do not understand how to help or support a school, so their first instinct is to close it down and start over. I think that is called creative destruction.

This is exactly right.  One sees the paradigm shift unfolding everywhere.  Whether it truly represents a regress or not is hard to say, because it would be difficult to conclude that many bureaucratic school overlords of yore were actually much help.  So if they now admit that it is their job to destroy schools, at least they are coming clean about it.

Yet the new "reformers" whose aim is to transform our urban school district in market-like ecosystems have their own hypocrisy.  However much they admire the market mechanism as a means of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, they do not actually like how the market mechanism works when it comes to schools.  They discover that parents and children are not, in their view, sufficiently discerning consumers.  The schools that they think should disappear do not disappear.  Their favored new schools do not get the massive influx of kids.  So they have to make what they call "tough decisions" -- meaning the decisions for others who they believe are incapable of making the right ones themselves.  That ugly old school gets closed, leaving the kids nowhere to go but the new one.

The result is a top-down, bureaucracy-driven system no different in any way that matters from the one it is replacing.

Rhee takes credit for improved NAEP scores, bashes teachers

In a news conference at the National Press Club on the release of the district-level NAEP math results, Michelle Rhee took the opportunity to crow about the wonderful results for DC (big improvement in 4th grade, some improvement in 8th).  Rhee's bit comes around the 46th minute.  (It will be worth several vomit-inducing moments if you watch long enough to see Michelle choke on a question from a WaPo reporter around minute 50.)

It's a bizarre performance.  She leads with some advice she received from Warren Buffet: that the way to improve urban public education would be to eliminate private schools and assign all kids to public schools by lottery.  There's something to that, of course, although it would mostly start a stampede of well-heeled white families out of cities -- the few that are left -- and into priveleged suburban enclaves, but Rhee somehow twists into a story, not of race and class segregation, but of adults failing to cooperate.

She seques from that non-sequitur into a riff about the need for using test scores to hold teachers accountable:

[When I came to DC, it] was showing only 8 percent of students performing at grade level in mathematics, if you were to look at the performance evaluations for the adults, you would have seen that the overwhelming majority of them were rated as doing an excellent job, exceeding expectations.

How can you have that kind of disconnect — when only 8 percent of students are at grade level and the adults are running around thinking they are doing an excellent job?

Well, here's how: on the NAEP, considered the gold standard of educational assessment, DC NAEP scores have been consistently improving since 2003.  Michelle, it seems like DC teachers have been doing a great job, yet you never seem to tire of spouting off about how they suck.  How can you have that kind of disconnect?

Adults vs. Kids

The always perceptive Claus von Zastrow comments today on the common refrain of education deformers that they are doing what is in the best interests of kids, not adults. 

I was struck by that line when I first heard it after I crossed industries and got into education a few years back because, obviously, the interests of kids and the adults who work with them are not irreconciably opposed.  Common sense dictates that if you want adults to put their hearts into their jobs, you've got to treat them decently, which means compensating them fairly and treating them with respect.

I think almost everybody who gets into education does so mostly for idealistic reasons.  It's not hard to make money if that's what you mostly care about.  But it's a stupendously boring way to live one's life, which may explain why billionaires like Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and  Bill Gates turn their attention to "public service" after many years of chasing the almighty buck.  What they and their ilk probably don't realize is that lots of people never saw the romance of making lots of money to begin with.

At any rate, the point is that the idea that most teachers are mostly interested in protecting themselves is ludicrous on its face.  If they weren't genuinely interested in leaving a better world behind than the one they stepped into, they'd be in a different profession.  What possible credibility can anyone give to the likes of Broad, Bloomberg, Gates, Gerstener -- who spend virtually all of their adult lives amassing their own personal fortunes -- that they somehow care more about kids than the rank-and-file teacher who actually stands in front of a classroom every day?

I'd love to hear how that crowd would squeal if the government stepped in and confiscated their billions and turned it over to programs serving underpriveleged kids.  Undoubtedly, we'd hear vocal protestations about how they were entitled to their loot.

"It should not, however, be an occasion for gloating,"

opines the Washington Post with respect to the D.C. Superior Court's judgement on the legality of Michelle Rhee's recent firing of some 300 teachers to close an "unanticipated" budget gap.  The Post agrees with Peter Nickles that the judgement constitutes a "slam dunk" for the city, but tempers it's enthusiasm with the recognition that the layoffs were "disruptive."

The mere fact that the Post felt tempted to gloat over the matter, and apparently feels that its readers may have been similarly inclined, tells us for whom it is writing: the business crowd that would dearly love to see all unions destroyed.   For this group, any victory over unions -- no matter how harmful to children, and no matter how damaging to the morale of those to whom these children are entrusted -- is an occassion to celebrate.

The Court held merely that Rhee's actions were legal, not that she handled the situation well.  And by any objective standard, she did not handle the situation well at all.  By this action she has further poisoned the already toxic atmosphere in DC public schools.  Any teacher who can will now flee.  Others, whose family or other commitments tie them to the community, will batten down the hatches and dispiritedly go into work every day, waiting for the evil wind to pass.

How Peter Nickles and the Washington Post editorialist can view this as a "slam dunk" is beyond me.  It is only a slam dunk for those who believe that teachers' energy, creativity, and enthusiasm are worthless, and that the teaching craft requires no more talent than assembling widgets.  But that does seem to be pretty much how teaching is viewed by the business crowd.

Interesting article, two quotes

"If you look at the big cities that are really moving educationally, Chicago comes to mind, New York comes to mind, and Washington DC comes to mind," says Duncan.  "What do they have in common?  Mayoral control.   Then you have a city like Los Angeles which frankly has not come to mind in a number of years.  Los Angeles is an outlier."

Huh??  Only in America could they put an illiterate goon in charge of education. On the other hand...

"Too much of this depends on who the mayor is," says Bryant.  "One mayor will be great, but the next mayor could undo the progress.  Or, you end up with an autocratic situation like New York where parents honestly feel like they don't know what's going on and all they get is a cotton candy spin machine."

Anne Bryant is exec director of the National School Boards Assn.  Cotton candy spin machine.  Very good.

Both quotes from Lesli Maxwell, 'Education Secretary Leading Chorus Calling for Big City-Hall Role."  EdWeek 29(7) 14 Oct 2009.

A Washington teacher cries out

The Washington Post's Bill Turque reported on the silly new teacher evaluation system pushed out by Michelle Rhee today.  A teacher commenting under the moniker "Urban Dweller" merits quoting in full:

I teach in DCPS and was one of those career switchers several years ago. I work hard, all of my students, every year, go up on their standardized test scores. I'm not bragging, just being honest. I was fed a bunch of garbage when I came into the system by those recruiting us about how bad the teachers are. There are some bad ones--as there are ineffective folks in every profession. I have learned how to be an effective instructor from the veteran teachers who amaze me that they have been able to work 25 or 30 years and survive in such a dysfunctional institution with incompetent and rude administrators and a majority of students who are complacent and don't care about their education--and their parents are the same. To base a teacher's evaluation solely on student achievement is ridiculous. These kids come to us with a host of social ills which we are not equipped to deal with and which impedes their learning. Over the course of my professional life, I have worked for a lobbyist, in corporate America and ran a non-profit. I have never seen such a ridiculous evaluation system as IMPACT. Furthermore, as one who used to evaluate employees and administer performance appraisals, I would have never rolled out a new evaluation system on a Friday and then fully implemented it on the following Monday as Michelle Rhee did. That's poor management and total disrespect for your employees. The Teaching & Learning Framework which was rolled out in August was enough in itself for us to work with this year. DCPS' recent history is one riddled with a number of superintendents who all roll out their own plans and changes. It's amazing there are any veteran teachers left at all. Most teachers are exhausted from years of dysfunction and change. However, they are still great teachers but fed up with the top-down approach they've been subjected to for years. Rhee says the Teaching & Learning Framework and IMPACT came about from meetings with teachers and input from them. I don't believe one word she says. She, like Fenty, is an autocrat who imposes her ideas and will on her employees. I've never in my professional life seen a more ineffective and incompetent leader. I'm looking for another job now out of education and hope to leave before the end of the school year. I will miss my students tremendously. I love them and I love teaching but I'm tired of the disrespect and the gross mismanagement and the lack of appreciation from her administration. She may be getting rid of the ineffective teachers but she's also pushing good ones out the door in droves. The real losers are the students and that is a crying shame. Great job Michelle!

Rhee's blindness

Courtesy of the Washington Post, Steve Pearlstein interviews Michelle Rhee on her failed gambit to get teachers to give up tenure protections in exchange for a chance to make more money.   It shines an interesting light on how Rhee thinks.  She completely fails to understand why teachers rejected her ideas -- namely that they distrust her personally, that money by itself is not the strongest motivator of most teachers (else they would be in different professions), and that any teacher who accepted Rhee's "green plan" would be breaking ranks with her fellow teachers, thereby putting herself in an uncomfortable and possibly precarious situation.

Instead, Rhee offers two explanations.  First, a lack of communication, which enabled "misinformation" about the plan to take root.  Second, that a rank-and-file contingent (the leadership is written off) she expected as vocal supporters of the plan failed to materialize.  Pearlstein helpfully offers a "Gresham's Law" (bad money drives out the good) interpretation of the latter, and Rhee riffs on that, bringing us back to her favorite good teacher/bad teacher theme.  The bad teachers (in her view) were the vocal activists at union meetings who fought against the plan, while the good teachers who, Rhee is certain, favored the plan were too busy at home working on the next day's lesson to come out in support.

In other words, Rhee remains convinced that she is right: if teachers actually understoond the plan and could have democratically expressed their preference, they would have endorsed it.  Not for a moment does she consider that teachers might have legitimate reasons for opposition to her plan, and Pearlstein smiles and probes not.  By (again) mobilizing the good teacher/bad teacher schtick, she demonstrates that she fails to understand how offensive this is to ALL teachers because it only serves to fuel the deep anti-teacher sentiment so rife these days.   And that this offensiveness breeds loathing and distrust.