Get active...now

The Teachers Letters to Obama would like to encourage you to get your voice heard about the reauthorization of ESEA (No Child Left Behind). The time is NOW. Congress is considering the reauthorization as we speak. Please read the joint statement of the group and then pass it on - to your congressman, to your colleagues. Sign the petition. And then choose any of the bullet points to write about, expressing your experiences as a teacher, parent or grandparent.

Dear President Obama Secretary Duncan and Members of Congress:

Several members of our Teachers' Letters to Obama (TLO) group of educators recently had the honor of sharing with Secretary Duncan our concerns with the direction of federal education reform's Race to the Top initiative.

Subsequently, various publications reported Department of Education assertions that teachers support RTTT. This claim is expressly contrary to this group's position statement and does not reflect the sentiments of thousands of teachers who have reported corresponding with you, Mr. President. We would like to clarify our position as follows:

We believe:

1. Meaningful education reform must embrace a range of assessments. The RTTT emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing necessarily reduces the education of our students to "test prep" focused on passing multiple-choice tests of unproven reliability. We oppose the use of so-called "merit pay" based on standardized test scores.

2. Teachers must be held accountable through rigorous in-classroom evaluations by trained evaluators. Schools must hold teachers to high and meaningful standards of performance.

3. Teachers must work collaboratively to improve pedagogy and create thoughtful curriculum. Basing teacher evaluation on standardized tests is a pseudo-accountability strategy that divides teachers as a result of variables beyond their control and misconstrues how best to motivate them. Teachers must share in the process of defining their own work and accountability should never be arbitrary or divisive.

4. Teachers become invested in their work when they are given the opportunity to participate in school-wide decision-making and to be creative and thoughtful in their classrooms. Many public schools work well and are resources to guide us in the improvement of all schools.

5. Our public school systems must be fully funded. Charter schools must be held accountable to the same regulatory oversight and should not be inequitably funded at the expense of our most challenged public schools.

6. Any vision of effective education reform must assume that skills be taught in a way that induces critical thinking, encourages curiosity, inspires the imagination, and emphasizes discussion. Music, art and technology are an essential part of this vision. Students should love learning, feel empowered by their educations, and should not experience schooling as something punitive.

7. Improvement or “turn-around” programs for struggling schools must be flexible and participatory. Teachers, students, and community members need to be involved in discussions and problem-solving. Moreover, we do not believe the current four options are adequate and recommend instead the strategies in the Strengthening Our Schools proposal now before Congress.

To give all of our children the quality education they deserve, we must honestly confront the challenges of the classroom in a society characterized by deep social and economic inequality. The reality of classrooms and schools is complex and requires the knowledge and expertise of teachers who have the experience to know what works. Curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment are integral to our daily classroom experience and qualify us to help formulate education policy.

Teachers who have participated in TLO want to join with this Administration to implement a progressive vision for education. We want to engage in constructive debate about the best way to teach students and to organize schools. This national discussion needs to move beyond the panaceas and shortcuts that have characterized it thus far.

In this, we ask no less of our political leaders than we ask of our students. We are eager to participate in the hard work of creating great and transformative schools.

Sign the petition here:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/supporteducation

Post your letters of support here:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=166176941518&v=app_2373072738&ref=ts

The Long Goodbye

Few occupations are like teaching. At some point, the work that we do just stops. It is a pleasant experience that other adults likely envy, their work continuing on unabated--only slowing to fit into vacation time, rising and falling in intensity with the seasons of the marketplace or other cyclical demands.

We are at the stopping point now and have shifted into the last ritual of teaching -- saying goodbye.

Besides bidding farewell to students, the last week of school is a season of goodbyes to colleagues who are retiring--often from decades of teaching.

As those who mentored me leave and take their wisdom with them, I suffer. When two or three colleagues leave, hundreds of years of experience goes with them. I'm left wondering who will model the calm efficiency of an art well learned for the newest teaching generation.

Each time one of these seasoned educators leaves the scene, there are fewer and fewer long term educators to take their place. In addition, all that they learned about how to transmit their subject to young people walks out the door with them.

There are few opportunities in the teaching workplace for sharing to go on in a meaningful ways. So while most may think we celebrate our long summer vacations, I often see them as an institutional slap in the face that implies that the work teachers do is not of value to the institution itself. We are dismissed. Any enhancing of our skills is caught on our own, on the fly. I would have liked to learn from those I work with who do it best.

I am at the young end of the baby boomers and see a gulf between my age group and the next group of educators in the system. In a few short years, young teachers will not have professional models of a life built in education. Teaching to the test, following a curriculum in lockstep is going to soon look like the norm, not a dangerous exception.

Just as I feel the pressure of time to get certain skills and dispositions in place for my students in the time I have with them, I am getting a rising sense of panic as more and more trusted educators get fed up, walk out, and leave the rest of us stranded.

Brooks Celebrates a Race to Nowhere

David Brooks' recent Op-Ed Race to Sanity underscores again his enthusiastic support of using the models of big business to reform our public schools.

As a former Wall Street Journal opinion writer, it isn't surprising to find him aligning himself with the only paradigm he can wrap his head around: Competition Makes Everything Better.

But competition really only makes things better for those who are already starting out well ahead, and therein lies the problem with treating Education to a heavy helping of free-market group-think.

The ones who will benefit from this program are sure to get more, better, best--while those without resources are being promised nothing but punishment (again).

What is wrong with competition in schools? After all, it already exists to some degree. Don't we celebrate our Valedictorians? Our top athletes?

Brooks' argument appeals to the practical nature of many. He celebrates the Duncan plan which dangles RttT Funds in front of states competing to meet qualifying "scores" on a scorecard devised by the DOE. Clear "winners" and "losers" will be identified and then the top states win bucket-o-money to enact the reforms.

It appears to be working.

States are lining up to lap at the trough of education reform dollars.

So what is the problem?

The problem is the scorecard devised by the DOE. It includes ideas that are unproven and even dangerous for the children in our classrooms.

Take Pay for Performance for instance. Brooks justifies this process with the hollow statement: "In every other job in this country, people are measured by whether they produce results." In light of the recent banking failures which were followed by bonuses, and the huge national disaster in the Gulf brought on by BP executives entrenched in their own mindless Race to the Top in Profits, this is the most ridiculous claim I have ever read in print.

Give me a break!

But regardless, paying teachers based on their students' performance in a given year, besides being statistically difficult to prove, would bring a climate of competition into the classroom which would be decidedly unhealthy and counter-productive to the central role of teachers - supporting and extending the learning of every child, no matter where they begin their own particular race for a better life.

Imagine the world from a child's point of view if the adults in their lives begin looking at them as possible bonus checks versus a spot in the unemployment line.

Imagine teachers fighting over resources, access to materials, students who perform better than others. Imagine those who might consider cheating, brow-beating, spending inordinate amounts of time teaching to the final test so that scores go up, regardless of whether it is what is best for the children in the room.

In short, imagine the cut-throat world of business --which created the motivation to take short cuts in order to realize deep-water drilling designed to amass big profits, for instance -- transferred into the lives of our youngest citizens.

What should we do instead?

Teaching needs to be a collaborative effort. Rather than competing for ideas, we need to be sharing what works. Our charge is to educate all children. We need to work together on this goal.

Rather than pitting one state against another, one district against another, we need to ensure that all students have equal access to all the methods and supports of good teaching and learning. In other words, the federal government should be helping to level the playing field in terms of access to quality teachers and materials.

Rather than filling teaching slots with short-term "volunteers" or concentrating on developing assessments, we need to spend resources on building a professional, well-educated and mentored teaching profession. When the quality of teaching is assured the rest will follow.

My dream school would be year-round, with short breaks throughout the year. (If we want real reform, why haven't we started with throwing out the antiquated agrarian calendar that suggests learning is a part-time occupation and that results in documented learning-loss year after year for the least able?) Students who come from limited resource homes could spend some of those short breaks in enrichment activities (museum trips, book clubs, video production courses, art programs, civic outreach and volunteer programs, internships, intensive sporting programs etc. etc.) while still gaining access to important nutrition programs. And why have a break at all? Children, and adults too for that matter, gain from periods of play. Structuring some of this time for students who lack resources would overcome some of those learning losses now well documented.

In addition, teachers could engage in the professional development needed to keep classroom practice fresh and in line with the latest research. Rather than sending the "13th Grade" home for months at a time, teachers would be considered part of the leadership of every school, helping to shape policy and curriculum for the school. Usually, teachers are dismissed along with the students and have no part in recommended changes for the next school year. A waste of energy and talent in most schools.

And speaking of research, most of the initiatives in RttT are unproven, untested, or failed practices. Do we really want to race into uncharted waters and risk the development of another generation of children?

Why aren't we spending federal dollars on Research and Development?

If you want to read some real common-sense on education, look at the comments posted after Brooks' editorial.

And don't buy into this quick fix. It could spell more years of damaging practices enacted on our children.

Join Teachers' Letters to Obama to join other teachers nationwide in creating a NewPrint to counter the DOE Blueprint for Reform.

Taking off the gloves...

Sometimes you just have to pay attention to your gut. When you think you have been played, maybe you have.

Read this compilation of moves by Arne Duncan and the DOE to avoid actual listening and learning while he is on his Listening and Learning Tour.

The "conversation" described by Stephen Krashen and the NCTE could have been the exact same one I joined through NBPTS for NBCTs interested in sharing concerns about the Blueprint. No opportunity to talk, an interactive webinar with no interaction, questions selected from a big pile by the speaker Judy Wortzel. Adherence to a strict 30 minutes where 15 minutes is taken up covering ground that the well-informed listeners are already familiar with. Blah, blah.

Time to step over the DOE and go straight to Congress otherwise we are going to get even more of the worst of the worst.

The secretive nature of the activities of the DOE sound a lot like Dick Cheney's "energy talks." Talking with who knows who about who knows what behind closed doors.

Please get informed and get vocal. If you don't know what to do, get on Teachers' Letters to Obama. Big noise is the only way to get attention.

There's three million of us. We could make a really big noise.

Leaving no Multiple Choice Footprint Behind

Friday, before the memorial weekend holiday, my students posted their "Footprints" outside our room.

My co-teacher had taught the poem "Psalm of Life" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and invited them to write for a few minutes about what they hoped they would be leaving behind as their own "footprint in the sands of time." Then he read their visions aloud, without naming names, to the entire group.

The class reacted with spontaneous applause. There were sighs. Exclamations of "I agree!" or "Oh, that's sweet."

The class decided that the messages were so inspiring that they wanted to share them with the school, so they went up on the wall outside of our class, "walking" down the hallway in a footprint graphic I quickly located and printed for them so they could revise and post their footprint the next day.
The lesson was on poetry, and we also learned the literary terms for the upcoming reading test. But that was just the smallest part. The biggest part, reflecting on what they hope their life will mean to others, will not be tested on June 10.

This sort of decision-making - quickly shifting a lesson based on student behaviors - goes on all the time. It is teaching based on affect - helping students learn through personal connections to the material.

What is wrong with testing?

Nothing.

I test my students regularly. I need to know what they learned, what they still have to learn, or what mis-conceptions they have. I assess my students daily through a variety of means - sometimes just by looking over their shoulder, sometimes through questioning, sometimes in the letters we write back and forth, sometimes more formally through a quiz or essay.

I also teach them how to assess themselves. They set goals for themselves and match their goals against their achievements. They even have to write about it at the end of the course in a Change paper.

And then there's the "TESTS" provided by an outside authority, asking questions I do not prepare, choosing reading my students have a hard time caring about, distilling all their thinking and questioning down into four multiple choice answers often devised in language that flummoxes them, and providing results that aren't particularly helpful in reaching their goals or even in gaining the skills they need to know NOW.

For example, I have remediated ESL students for our reading test. It is an exercise in frustration for all of us. Most of the ESL students who struggle with the reading tests do not have cognitive issues. They are quite bright and adaptable. But they do have language issues.

Example: In reviewing an ESL students' answers to a test, we looked at a poem. She had the main idea question wrong. When I asked her if she knew what the poem was about she said: "I knew the poem was about fall, but I could not find the answer [in the multiple choice selections]" So she took a wild guess. Of course the answer WAS there. One of the choices was autumn, an English word she did not know. In a simple one-minute conversation I had assessed my student's reading comprehension in an oral interchange. She had understood what she read.

This is just a small example of being constrained to the test. I have many more (just try to teach a literary allusion to a newcomer. The vast cultural literacy required for the one answer would take a half-hour to explain. I know. I've done it. It is an exercise in futility since I have no way of prediciting what literary allusion my students will be asked to respond to since I DID NOT MAKE THE TEST and do not know what they will be asked.

How can I prepare them?

Is this fair?

Our school is in danger of falling into the realm of failing schools. The stakes are getting higher. The distraction of preparing students for these tests consumes more and more instructional time.

It will only get worse if teachers are assessed on how well students do on these assessments.

Imagine beginning of the year benchmark tests, mid-year predictor tests, final high stakes tests in every year of a student's life. Ugh. It might just make a student want to drop out.

There are better ways to teach children and to identify effective teachers.

Join the conversation at Teachers Letters to Obama. The month of June will feature discussions and webinars focused on this and other issues. We are determined to get our voices heard and affect policy for the better. Please join the discussions here.Teachers' Letters is not just for teachers. It is a grassroots site for anyone who wants to make America's schools the seedbed for the innovative thinkers and active citizens of tomorrow.

Find out other reasons why testing is not the answer to reform. Visit Anthony Cody, Marsha Ratzel, Renee Moore, Nancy Flanagan, Chuck Olynyk, Heather Wolpert-Gawron, to find out what else is missing in the testing mania. And see David Cohen's brilliant satirical piece on testing from last month.

Dialing for Duncan

Following our truncated, technology-challenged call on Monday, the phone rang in California and Kansas on Tuesday afternoon. At the other end of the line was Arne Duncan.

Anthony Cody in California and Marsha Ratzel in Kansas were receiving a follow up from Duncan. He wanted to hear what they didn't have the opportunity to say. Marsha had just finished an intense day in front of sixth graders anxious for the last day of school this Friday and spent 15 minutes in dialogue (at least half the time we had as a group on Monday)

Visit their blogs to see exactly how those conversations progressed.

And progressed is the key word.

There may be opportunities to pick up where we were cut off.

That is our focus right now. What are the next steps?

It appears that this question is back on the table.

While we all regroup, I urge you not to cut yourself off from these discussions. The teachers at the other end of the line represent the entire geographic spectrum of the United States.

And we are all on a similar page (perhaps with minor divisions on the details.) The twelve cover the gamut from Special Education to Advanced Placement.

From Alaska (Bob Williams) to Florida (Rian Fike).

Five are in the battle weary California (Anthony Cody, Heather Wolpert-Gawron, Eleana Aguilar, Sandee Palmquist, and Chuck Olynyk). They are facing massive layoffs and closures.

The middle section of the country is well represented by Renee Moore in the equity starved Mississippi), Nancy Flanagan (Michigan), and the passionate, bold, persistent Marsha Ratzel in Kansas.

We represent only teachers.

We are looking only for an opportunity to be heard before the accusations of failure and the firings go up another notch.

We want to be the reform we can see so clearly that has a real potential to lift up the children of the nation and quite possibly set the entire country on a new path.

You may be needed in the near future.

There may be time to pass the baton on to other classroom teachers. Get ready for the pass.

Because your voice may be needed if we are to influence changes in the law that will affect our professional lives for a very long time.

Educate yourself. Join Teachers' Letters for Obama on facebook and check in regularly. Teachers are posting their hopes and dreams for a program that makes sense for children.

Yep. You've got a homework assignment.

Monday Chat with Duncan

It was over too fast.

No, it really was.

Over. Too. fast.

Nine teachers of the original twelve were able to make it in on the phone dialogue with Arne Duncan at 5:30 p.m. eastern time. Well, actually it was 5:34, but who's counting?

We were. We each had about two minutes of suggestions for the Blueprint.

As it turned out only four of us were able to speak.

First we had a little semantic issue. We were invited to ask questions but came only prepared with suggestions - hoping to spur a discussion.

After Heather Wolpert-Gawron and Marsha Ratzel spoke to the issue of College and Career Readiness, where I could only hear her third word because of the feedback and echoes (feedback and echoes? really? when you can Skype halfway round the world?) I spoke - on behalf of Renee Moore and Jane Fung who were unable to join us. Renee was traveling - again on behalf of teachers - and Jane was working with her kindergartners.

We do have day jobs.

Here is the Renee, Jane, Mary portion of the Teacher Blueprint for improved schools:

We need great teachers in every classroom and an effective force of teacher leaders to guide and inspire them. Uniform teacher quality is not just a matter of redistributing a few excellent teachers, but rather maximizing the professional potential of all gifted and dedicated educators. The talent is there, but we have underused the expertise and drive of much of the current teaching force.

The Blueprint is unnecessarily vague on defining teaching effectiveness. Stating the goal, “readiness,” does not describe nor prove support of the possible processes to achieve readiness. Some programs already exist that have been proven to help develop teachers and leaders of excellence, such as National Writing Project and National Board Certification. Both of these programs, with proven, positive results for student achievement, were initiated, designed, and are currently sustained by classroom practitioners, all prior to endorsement by national programs. Given the latitude to design and implement reform, teachers can affect real change. Yet some of these same programs are slated for Federal funding cuts. This sends a very mixed message: our goal is continuous improvement of instruction, but we're unwilling to pay for it.

It is also paradoxical to insist on excellence in teaching on the one hand while encouraging short-term, quick fixes to our teaching shortages on the other. Alternative preparation programs provide minimal, insufficient preparation for the complex 
work of teaching, particularly teaching in high-needs settings which requires
even more advanced pedagogical skills.

A well-trained teacher helps to create better prepared students. Therefore, we suggest the following: one way the teaching profession can be enhanced is by creating more Federal scholarships for pre-service teachers in certified programs, including promising urban and rural teacher residency programs. In addition, expanding funding for programs such as Teacher Quality Partnerships and improved training and collaboration time for existing staff in struggling schools could erase years of punitive measures and build a community of excellence in our most difficult schools. Developing and keeping effective teachers in 
high needs schools will also require policymakers to address the great inequity in working conditions for teachers and the great inequity in learning conditions for students in those schools.

Without great teachers: continuously supported, trained, dedicated teachers, our students cannot fulfill the goals of the Blueprint or live up to their potential. A great teacher is not an isolated figure who has magically appeared with those skills--great teachers learned how to be effective, and all teachers can improve. Truly exceptional teachers, those who are capable of reaching out to lift up our students from our most high-needs settings, need the support of a great administration behind them.

Sandee Palmquist was followed by Elena Aguilar and both were able to address "Diverse Learners."

But then. That was about it.

No opportunity for Anthony Cody,and Chuck Olynyk to speak to "Safe and Successful Schools" or Bob Williams, Nancy Flanagan, and Rian Fike, to speak to a "Complete Education" and "Fostering Innovation."

My compatriots will be posting what they were both able or unable to say.

Link to all of them for a complete read of our message from the Teacher Letters to Obama group. And comment. And share with your colleagues.

There are 3 million teachers in America and most of us have the summer free -- especially since needed summer programs for our youth have been axed across the nation. Read up. Pay attention. Make your voice heard.

And keep up with any developments by joining the Facebook page Teachers' Letters to Obama.