Next U. S. Secretary of Education: Michelle Rhee????

Okay. Time to face reality. Mr. Donald J. Trump is going to be the 45th  president of these great United States. 

If nothing else, we know the KKK is happy. “Make American Great Again!” Overturn Roe v. Wade! Also, maybe: overturn Brown v. Board of Education.

Now we hear that Michelle Rhee might be in line to become the next U. S. Secretary of Education. If you have forgotten who Rhee is, or was, a brief refresher course will be offered momentarily.

First, let’s consider two more Trump choices who have said they are not interested. Dr. Ben Carson said no thanks—but would have been a “perfect choice” in a bi-partisan list of “perfect choices” to head the Department of Education. That is: presidents from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush to Barrack Obama have seemed constitutionally obligated to select individuals who lack all experience in education. 

I think Mr. Trump should make me Surgeon General. I mean, I watch a lot of TV shows about doctors and hospitals.

Anyway, it could be worse. I wonder if America’s four million front line educators were really ready for Ms. Eva Moskowitz to head the Department. Moskowitz was also under consideration, but informed the president-elect that she had no interest in the cabinet position. This is true even though Mr. Trump wants to push school choice even farther and even though Moskowitz believes every child should be allowed to attend an elite charter school—unless that child has serious behavior issues or crippling handicaps.

Those kinds of children, if they manage to get through the doors of Success Academy at all, should all return to the regular public schools.

Meanwhile, like so many leading advocates of school reform, who only care about the children, Moskowitz piles up the dough. I can’t find current figures; but she made $567,500 for the 2012-2013 school year, running Success Academy Charter Schools, an operation serving 11,000 students. Not bad, considering school superintendents in  large urban, public school districts with a hundred times as many students make half as much.

Then again, what did anyone expect when American education has been turned into a get-rich-quick, money-making scheme? Didn’t we realize shady operators would focus only on the money?

Exhibit A: Trump University!

Our normally litigious president-elect settled a series of fraud cases this week, aimed at his famous university, first denying fraud had been perpetrated in his name, and then coughing up $25 million to pay the claims of thousands of students who were prepared to argue in court that they had in fact been…um…defrauded. I realize many Trump fans don’t believe anything they read except what can be found on the backs of cereal boxes; but even Fox News couldn’t help reporting the Trump University debacle.

And if you haven’t noticed, you can pretty much shake any for-profit education tree and money-grubbers and even outright crooks will rain down round your ears. I’ve previously highlighted K-12, Inc., another stellar charter operation, where five top executives paid themselves a total of $35.4 million in salary and bonuses for 2013 and 2014. I’ve focused on Corinthian College. There, too, five top college officers took $22 million in salaries and bonuses over a two-year period. Sadly, once the U. S. Department of Education started investigating—citing high pressure recruiting tactics to juice enrollment—the Corinthian enterprise came unraveled and the school went belly up.  

(The money continues to roll in for the top officials at K-12, Inc. This chart shows compensation for Fiscal 2016.)

Too bad students, lacking preparation to do real college-level work, had been tricked into enrolling. 

To bad they had to borrow 86% of all money used to attend Corinthian. 

Too bad they agreed to pay interest rates as high as 17.9% for those very loans, nicely set up for them and payable to...Corinthian.

Good news? 

The profiteers profited. 

Now thousands of young Americans are stuck with those loans—and stuck with college credits from Corinthian of such dubious value that reputable institutions of higher learning won’t accept them for transfer.

And now, speaking of money, we come to the matter at hand: the potential elevation of Michelle Rhee to head up the U. S. Department of Education. 

Perhaps the most famous graduate of Teach for American, Rhee labored three long years in a real classroom, at which point she realized she knew everything there was to know about fixing the nation’s schools. Quickly, she rose through the ranks of educational bureaucracy and took control of the Washington, D. C. Public Schools. As chancellor, Ms. Rhee stressed improving math and reading scores in keeping with dictates of No Child Left Behind.

That law is now defunct; but raising scores in accord with that law was, according to Rhee at the time, really important.

What happened when Rhee pushed administrators and staff to improve test scores? As anyone could have predicted, successful schools raised their scores! If scores didn’t rise, Rhee fired staff and administrators. Typically, she fired one principal while cameras were rolling, filming a documentary about the wonders of Michelle Rhee. In just three years as head of Washington schools, Rhee managed to terminate hundreds of educators because scores on standardized tests mattered—as long as those particular tests were being pedaled by politicians and school reformers.

All the while, Ms. Rhee was making her name in education. She gave speeches and charged colleges $35,000 to impart her wisdom. She wrote books about how to fix education and they sold wonderfully. Even Oprah gave her love on her program. But Rhee’s abrasive style was also rubbing people the wrong way. 

True. There were educators who loved her. Those who raised test scores (and many did so with great gusto) got fat on bonuses. 

Unfortunately, for Rhee, reporters also started digging. 

At one school, Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, test score improvements were stunning. In 2006 only 10% of students at Noyes scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math. Two years later 58% did. It was amazing; and Rhee basked in the admiration of the leading school reformers. In 2009, Noyes was one of 264 schools nationwide to win a prestigious National Blue Ribbon School award. Twice, in 2008 and 2010, Ms. Rhee awarded teachers at Noyes (which served preschoolers through eighth grade) $8,000 bonuses. Wayne Ryan, principal at the school, was awarded $10,000 on both occasions. 

Unfortunately, a 2011 report by USA Today revealed that high-performing schools in Rhee’s district had “extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones.” The pattern showed up in 103 schools, more than half of all buildings in the D. C. district. 

In 2009 seventh-graders in one class at Noyes averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures on the reading test. 

The average, citywide, was less than 1. 

What transpired in the meantime? The D. C. schools won another $75 million in the “Race to the Top” program run by Arne Duncan, then U. S. Secretary of Education, because Duncan also loved standardized testing. Principal Ryan was featured in a series of recruiting advertisements, calling him “one of the shining stars of DCPS” and a man known for his “unapologetic focus on instruction.” 

The Office of State Superintendent of Education also began to notice all the fishy smells and ordered an investigation. Top D. C. school officials dragged their bureaucratic feet. The State Superintendent’s office asked McGraw-Hill to examine test results at 96 D. C. schools, including 8 of 10 buildings which won TEAM awards from Rhee “to recognize, reward and retain high-performing educators and support staff.” Based on rising scores in 2007 and 2008, more than $1.5 million in bonuses had been paid. Now McGraw-Hill found that three award-winning schools had wrong-to-right erasure rates that raised red flags in 85% of classrooms. After 2009, the district hired an outside investigator to examine eight schools, including Noyes. Just like that, test scores plunged in 2010. A second investigation, after tests were completed that year, found 41 schools, including Noyes again, had at least one classroom with unusually high numbers of erasures. 

When Rhee was reached by phone in 2011 she reminded reporters she was no longer chancellor of the D. C. schools and passed on chance to comment. D. C. officials also refused to comment at the time—refused to let reporters visit schools—refused to let them talk to principals, including Adell Cothorne, the new leader at Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus. 

And now we discover that Michelle Rhee might be our next U. S. Secretary of Education.

I can’t say where we’re headed in the future; but I am ready to make one bold prediction. If President Trump selects Rhee—and the Senate confirms her—we can expect one dramatic change in U. S. education. 

Test scores are surely going to rise!

(Eraser sales will also skyrocket.)

If Heart Surgery Was Like School Reform

The operation to be performed on Mr. Viall, scheduled for Monday, would be complicated to say the least. So the experts gathered. The leader of the medical team which would soon transplant a heart was an Internet billionaire who first became interested in improving health care after watching Patch Adams on cable TV. Naturally, Mr. Gates, the billionaire, was having his say. “I think, because I have made billions in the Internet field, everyone should listen to me. And I believe we need better doctors and nurses in hospitals. I think we should test them on what they know every few weeks.”

Mrs. Viall, a former educator, like her heartsick husband, had been asked to attend and a keen observer might have noticed her raise an eyebrow in a first sign of disbelief. Polite to a fault, however, she held doubt in check. She would listen with care and not rock the medical boat.

A second gentleman in a white lab coat spoke up. His name tag read: “Arne Duncan.” Mrs. Viall wondered: Where had she heard that name before?

“I believe,” said Dr. Duncan, “that we should amputate Mr. Viall’s left leg.” I might not be a medical doctor,” Duncan admitted. “But I did serve as administrator of a hospital once.”

Mrs. Viall seemed about to spit out her coffee at Dr. Duncan’s remarks. “I don’t see why you’re in on this discussion….” she offered.

A fourth individual at the conference table interjected. Like all the other experts she wore a lab coat. But where her name tag should have been, the words “Pearson Education” were embroidered in green, followed by dollar signs. “You know,” offered the Pearson person, “you can never have too many tests. I think we should test Mr. Viall for glaucoma and probably Ebola.

“That would be an additional $20,000,” she added cheerfully, smiling in the general direction of Mrs. Viall.

“But those tests couldn’t possibly help. My husband has a heart condition,” Mrs. Viall tried to object.

“We have to test patients on everything, Mrs. Viall,” suggested Dr. Ripley, another expert on the team. “That’s how we know how sick they really are. Did you know patients in Finland and other advanced nations live longer than American patients? In life expectancy, we finish 26th, which only proves that other countries have superior doctors and nurses. So we need to raise standards in our medical schools.”

“I’m not sure I agree,” Mrs. Viall replied. “I think the fact my husband likes to finish off a bag of chips every time he watches The Muppet's Show might have something to do with his condition. I’m not sure the fault lies with…”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ripley remarked with a slight hint of disdain. “All of us here at this table agree: America’s health care system is failing. And besides, you have to listen to me. Because I wrote a book on the topic! As for Mr. Viall, I believe we should also remove his spleen.”

By now, Mrs. Viall was deeply worried. It seemed these “experts” had no clue. She looked round the table at the twenty men and women in the room. “How many of you have ever performed actual surgery?” she inquired with a frown.

Not a single expert raised a hand.

“I once worked briefly in a pediatrician’s office,” a woman named Rhee offered with a forced smile. “Now I like to give speeches about how to fix our nation’s health care system. In fact, I can talk to you for an hour if you like. I only charge $35,000.”

“Are you kidding? Who are you people,” Mrs. Viall exclaimed. “What makes any of you think you know anything about heart surgery? It doesn’t sound like any of you even went to medical school?”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re all experts, don’t you see,” Dr. Duncan replied. “We’re all really smart. And some of us are rich, too.”

“I’d like to talk to an actual doctor,” Mrs. Viall tried again.

“Don’t be old-fashioned,” said another white-coated figure at the end of the table. The elderly fellow looked familiar. Then it dawned on Mrs. Viall. This was Senator Mitch McConnell, taking a break from a busy schedule talking to lobbyists in Washington, D. C. “We politicians understand heart surgery better than doctors and nurses ever will. We have just passed an expanded version of No Patient Left Behind. We call it the “Every Patient Lives Act” and it’s going to be great! As a result of this legislation, we can now guarantee that every patient will survive. If patients die, we will close failing hospitals and fire all the doctors and nurses.”

“Also, we will need to create new batteries of tests, to find out what doctors know,” chirped the happy Pearson lady. “We should probably test patients, too. I mean, we’d be talking billions!”

“Who here is in charge of surgery tomorrow?” Mrs. Viall asked, looking nervously around the room. A man with “Klein” on his name tag raised a hand.

“I’m a lawyer,” Klein replied. “So I know exactly what doctors and nurses should do. I wrote a book about how bad the doctors and nurses we have really are.”

“I’ll be in charge of hooking up all those arteries and veins and positive and negative wires,” offered a younger woman seated to his left. Her name tag read, “Kopp.” For once, Mrs. Viall recognized a name. Kopp was founder of Stitch for America, an organization dedicated to bringing smarter nurses and doctors into hospital across this great land.

“My god,” Mrs. Viall gasped. “Have you ever been part of a heart surgery team, Dr. Kopp?”

“Not really. But I went to an Ivy League college! So you have to do what I say.”

“You know, I was an educator for more than thirty years,” Mrs. Viall offered. “So, if you asked me, I wouldn’t offer opinions on medical care, because that’s not my area of expertise. I only know education. My husband would say the same. Frankly, I don’t think any of you have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. You’re not trained in the medical field.”

“Doesn’t matter,” piped up a fellow named Brill. “I also wrote a book about surgeons. That means I know everything there is to know about the challenges of being a surgeon. And I think it’s clear. Surgeons are at fault every time a patient dies. By the way, I’m a lawyer, too.”

“I made a movie about surgery,” interjected a fellow two seats to Brill’s right. Guggenheim was his name. “I’m a millionaire. So my wife and children and I enjoy the very finest health care available in the United States. But I want to see poor families have better care. I want them to have the best doctors and nurses. And it’s clear: doctors and nurses in poor neighborhoods are failing, because poor people die at a younger age than rich people…So my movie puts blame where it belongs, on doctors and nurses working with poor people.”

“Maybe poor people die sooner because they have poor housing and live in dangerous neighborhoods, Mrs. Viall tried. “Maybe gang violence is a problem. Maybe drugs are rampant.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Guggenheim interrupted. “I live in a gated community high on a hill. I mean, you don’t expect my family to actually interact with poor people, do you? I mean, I send my own children to private schools…”

“It might help if you wanted to understand the problems poor people face, and the problems a health care system faces in treating them, if you hung out with them once in a while,” Mrs. Viall muttered.

“Oh, ‘poverty, poverty, poverty,’ that’s just an excuse doctors and nurses offer for their failings.” Mrs. Viall stared at the newest speaker. No! It couldn’t be! This was no doctor, either. It was Patrick Dempsey, who played “Dr. McDreamy” on Grey’s Anatomy for many years.

For a moment, Mrs. Viall sat in stunned disbelief. Surgery tomorrow was going to be bad, really, really bad. The people who were going to do her husband’s heart transplant had no idea what they were about do. It reminded her of current trends in U. S. education, where so-called “experts” had spearheaded a naïve and entirely misguided—and expensive— movement to reform the nation’s schools.

Well, if she and Mr. Viall needed help with a will, at least there were several good lawyers in the room.

You don't have to know anything about education to become a famous education expert.
You only need an inflated opinion of yourself.

School Reformers Cry “Wolf!”

What’s wrong with America’s educators these days? Why don’t they believe school reformers when they say they have plans to “fix the schools?”

Maybe it’s because real educators want nothing more than to work, unimpeded, with actual children.

Maybe it’s because the reformers have cried, “Wolf!” once too often. Or twenty times too often.

Doubtless, millions of educators across the country could add examples to this kind of story. But I’ll start with Rod Paige, Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. You may recall that while serving as superintendent of the Houston City Public Schools, Mr. Paige won acclaim for the “Houston Miracle.” On the strength of his walk-on-water powers, he followed Mr. Bush to Washington in 2001, where the Texas duo promised to duplicate miracles on a fifty-state stage.

Simply stated, Mr. Paige claimed to have reduced dropouts in many inner city high schools to zero.

Yep: zero!

It turned out later that the “Houston Miracle” was less miracle and more a matter cooking the books. One Houston high school, for example, managed to classify all 462 dropouts as “transfers.” Unfortunately, by the time everyone realized Mr. Paige couldn’t turn water into wine he was ensconced at the U. S. Department of Education.

On January 8, 2002, President Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. Now it was the turn of Congress and the president to shout “Lupus!” Once this blockbuster legislation was implemented, they promised we could erase all racial gaps in academic performance. Follow the rules and regulations and every child in America would be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

So, what really happened? Rules and regulations spread like kudzu. Standardized testing and test prep overwhelmed everything. Time for art, music and physical education were slashed from the curriculum. Data-collection dominated the lives of frontline educators and took time away from doing what they truly needed to do. Days and weeks and in some cases months that should have been devoted to meaningful instruction were wasted. The National Assessment for Educational Progress would report in 2009 that racial gaps in reading and math were not closing. Despite all the time, effort and money poured into testing, scores in reading and math at the fourth and eighth grade levels rose no faster than they had before No Child Left Behind passed, when educators were still free to work with students in their own creative fashion.

Millions of educators on the frontlines of learning knew testing wasn’t working. What they knew didn’t matter. More and more reformers, most of whom had never bothered to teach, added to the cacophony.

“Wolf,” blundering billionaires like Bill Gates shouted, insisting everyone should listen to them because they had so much money. They knew what was “best” for the children and demanded all kinds of new “standards” for public school students. They said teachers had to be “held accountable” for test scores and prodded like dumb cattle to advance in the direction the reformers had charted. But they had no idea what was good for those teachers, and more importantly, no idea what was good for all those public school children. Frankly, they preferred to send their offspring to private school where educators were treated like adults and professionals.

“Wolf,” snarled Michelle Rhee, for a time the nation’s most famous school reformer. Rhee actually taught for three whole years but spent the rest of her time in education clambering to the top of the bureaucratic ladder. In 2008 she took over the Washington, D. C. schools. Appearing on the cover of Time magazine that fall, she promised to raise test scores or raise hell for teachers and administrators. Over the next three years several hundred educators who failed to raise scores were fired.

Others, who did raise scores, received fat bonuses. Then Rhee skipped town just in time to avoid responsibility for a massive cheating scandal. It turned out raising scores was easy if you knew how to ply an eraser.

Across this great nation, bold reformers like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein continued to put forward their new plans. Yes, they promised. They could “fix schools”—in this case, in New York City. So Bloomberg and Klein “graded” schools. And they closed “failing” schools. And they opened up lots of charters.

Sure enough! Graduation rates rose! The racial gaps in performance narrowed! Test scores went up!

At first, there was celebrating in the ranks of the reformers. But it turned out schools under intense pressure to raise graduation rates simply made graduation easier. It didn’t matter that 1-in-5 New York City kids was chronically absent and that this wasn’t actually the fault of educators. Dennis Bunyan, a senior at Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem, was typical, admitting he was absent so often from his senior English class that he “basically didn’t attend.” Yet, through a special program of “credit recovery,” he was allowed to do three essays in ten hours and gain a full Language Arts credit. “I’m grateful for it,” he told a reporter, “but it also just seems kind of, you know, outrageous. There’s no way three essays can cover a semester of work.”

Next, it turned out that the racial gaps in performance hadn’t narrowed at all in New York City.

Frontline educators knew that most “racial” gaps had far more to do with poverty than race or any other factor. Yet, when they tried to point this out reformers shouted, “Wolf!” all the louder.

In any case, when the State of New York phased out tests tied to No Child Left Behind and new tests tied to Common Core were implemented, New York City’s “progress” turned out to be evanescent.

Scores in the city (and across the state) plummeted.

With the election of President Obama and the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education new voices joined in all the shouting. Mr. Duncan promised to lead a “Race to the Top” and tame the sharp-toothed beast. The wolf, he assured everyone, wouldn’t stand a chance once he took office.

Something was still wrong, however, and frontline educators knew it. Like Secretary Paige, Secretary Duncan first won acclaim for fixing big city schools, in Mr. Duncan’s case, the Chicago Public Schools. Oddly enough, after he left the Windy City, the schools he “fixed” didn’t stay fixed. Gang violence, to cite just one terrible example, continued to plague the city. School-age kids were cut down by the hundreds  and a focus on testing did nothing to staunch the blood.

After Mr. Duncan moved to Washington, a fresh reformer joined the fray. Mayor Rahm Emanuel claimed—what else!—to have a plan to tame the wolf. He turned many schools over to private corporations to run as for-profit charters. He hand-picked a new superintendent. Meanwhile, one Chicago charter chain made headlines by charging misbehaving students $386,000 for discipline packets. The new superintendent decided to hand over $23 million in no-bid Chicago Public School contracts to a former employer. In return, company officials promised a huge signing bonus whenever she left her CPS post and rejoined their operations.

It turned out there were huge profits to be made by those who shouted “wolf” in the most vociferous fashion. In New York City, in 2013, sixteen top executives for sixteen charter chains “earned” more than the chancellor of the New York City Public Schools. Deborah Kenny of Village Academy led the big cash parade with $499,146. In Columbus, Ohio, seventeen charters went out of business in a single year, but not before founders walked away with large stacks of taxpayer dollars. Across the country, 2,500 charter schools closed their doors and went bust, founders often taking everything, including the last rolls of toilet paper with them. K-12 Inc., an online charter operation, to cite one especially egregious example, paid five top executives $34 million in just two years, 2013 and 2014, and devoted $26.5 million, most of it taxpayer cash, to advertising in 2010 alone.

And what about that “Race to the Top,” touted so loudly and so often by Mr. Arne Duncan?

It turned out that real educators and real students were forced to wade through an ever deeper quagmire of rules and regulations and devote days and weeks to test prep and test-taking, for no real purpose.

After listening to reformers shout, “wolf, wolf, wolf,” reading scores for high school seniors were lower in 2013 than twenty years earlier.

Billions had been wasted on tests and test preparation. Math scores for seniors—after a decade of misguided reforms—rose no faster than before all the “school reforming.”

After all the focus on testing the racial gaps—actually, the poverty gaps—still refused to close.

And, even though more students now graduated, ACT scores remained flat from 1990 until now.

And SAT scores in reading, math and writing (that third test added only in 2006) all declined.

It never mattered. The reformers kept up the shouting. The people who actually worked with America’s youth kept doing the best they could. Here in Ohio, lawmakers said we had to prepare students for tests in reading, math, science and social studies. “Wolf,” they cried in 2002. Educators were fooled into believing. But the tests in science and social studies proved expensive to grade. They were poorly designed, too. So the people who cried “wolf” said, “never mind.”

Those two tests were killed in 2009.

In 2010, Ohio lawmakers decided all the tests tied to No Child Left Behind were useless. Educators would have to be on the lookout for a wolf of a different color. Suddenly, legislators in Columbus and more than forty other states cried out in favor of Common Core! This time the tests politicians were demanding and paying fresh billions to have created would fix everything!

Only this wolf, too, was a figment of the imagination. In 2014 lawmakers in Ohio and in many of those same states that voted to implement Common Core rubbed their eyes—and the wolf they feared was no longer there—and they decided Common Core was a terrible idea.

But wait! Was that another fanged monster approaching? The tests used in Ohio in 2014, and tied to Common Core, would be tossed. New tests would be created—at new cost to taxpayers. Teachers and students would again be required to prepare for a battery of tests they had never seen, even though a decade of testing had resulted mainly in damaging the process of learning.

“Wolf!” the reformers cried yet again.

Only now, educators no longer believed them. The educators grumbled and cried and cursed at all they had been put through, at all the time lost when they could have been helping children.

Parents, too, began to understand. The people who kept shouting “wolf” had fooled them far too often.

John J. Viall is the author of Two Legs Suffice: Lessons Learned by Teaching, a book about what good teachers can be expected to do, as well as a look at what others must do if students are to achieve a well-rounded education.

The story is based on his 33 years of experience in junior high and middle school classrooms.

Now available Amazon.com.

We Hate You, Teachers, the School Reformers Said

Hello, teachers. We are the people with all the great plans to fix America’s schools. Did you know we hate you?

Yes, we do.

We are not the children you teach. Nor are we their parents. (In terms of ethics and honesty, the public rates you just below nurses, doctors and pharmacists.) It doesn’t matter to us. We hate you still.

Who are we? We are reformers who, in our insufferable arrogance, insist you must save every child. When you cannot—because no ever has—we denigrate your efforts. We question your professionalism. We are men and women who will not teach, or teach only briefly. And yet, somehow, we know it all. We are the Guggenheim’s and Bloomberg’s and Gates’ who have solutions for every problem in the public schools, but send our children to private schools.

In ways you can never fathom (probably because you aren’t very smart) we care more about children than you do.

We prove how much we care by offering up bold plans to save every child. You must implement these plans, of course. We are too rich and important and busy giving advice—and did we mention how smart we are?

If our plans fail, it can’t be our fault.

It has to be you.

Who are we? We are the politicians who hamstring your every move. We want you to save every child by piling up data. Data will save them all! Pile that data high!

Now pile it higher!

We want you to give plenty of standardized tests because lobbyists pay us to insure we push for more tests. We want you to stop complaining in your teachers’ lounges, even if we change our minds every August about which tests you must actually give. We tell all our friends your unions are the main problem in education today. We say dealing with you is like dealing with terrorists.

We want to punch you in the face.

We are the pundits who insult you daily in newspapers and on TV. We are authors of books about teaching, people who never taught, but we know exactly what we would do to save every child if we were in your shoes. Indeed, we blame you for every problem America faces today. We mock you.

We hate you, too.

But who are we, really? Sometimes, we wake in the middle of the night, and we think about what we’ve done. And we know in our hearts that we are cowards. We toss and turn because we know we have asked you to do all the fighting that must be done to save the children. We don’t save a soul.

We criticize. We don’t act.

We weren’t there at Sandy Hook when you and the children were slaughtered like sheep in a pen. We weren’t there when Colleen Ritzer was murdered in a bathroom at the school where she taught. We weren’t there to tackle the gunman at Chardon High. We have no plan to address violence in schools and don’t really care what happens to you. We are the fools in Congress, whose approval rating hasn’t topped 20% since September 2012. We are the governors and state lawmakers who hold out our hands to receive fat contributions from corporate education interests. All you do is hold the hands of traumatized Chicago second graders, or scared Nevada middle school kids who have just seen blood spilled, on the way to, or at their schools.

We are the men and women who act like we know more about saving children than you do, even if you have spent six years, or sixteen, or thirty-six in a classroom, working with kids. We have spent no time in a classroom, most of us, or labored only two or three years. Then we tired of the challenge. We realized we were better suited to giving advice and piling up fat speaking fees, often by lambasting you. “Here is what you need to do,” we insisted, “if you want to save every child.” But we don’t think you do. We tell everyone you are lazy, and protected by tenure, and stupid, too.

We are the bureaucrats who put together studies no one, save other bureaucrats, will ever read, who pile data in giant heaps. We say you can never have enough data, not when it comes to saving kids. We are the types who become U. S. Secretaries of Education without ever saving one child.

Who are you, teachers? You are nothing to us.

But who are you, really? Your students think you matter. Their parents do, too. You are the educator who teaches the painfully shy five-year-old to speak in kindergarten for the first time. You are the third grade teacher who consoles the boy who just found out his parents are going to file for divorce. You are the teacher who helps the fifth grader who weeps one morning at school, after his drunken mother shaves large patches in his head the night before, who sends him to the counselor. You are the counselor and the school nurse who cut off the remaining, random tufts of hair, so the poor young man will feel a bit better in the end.

You are the foot soldiers of education. The battlefield is your classroom, where all the fighting takes place. It is there you labor without respite to fire great kids from fine homes with a passion to excel. And on that same battlefield you try to save the sixth grader who comes to class smelling of urine because he and his mother call a rusted out station wagon home. It will not be easy saving this boy. You know that—even if the people who criticize you so cavalierly do not.

(Or perhaps they know, and don’t care.)

Who are you? You are the special education instructor who must help autistic twins fit in with the other kids in the seventh grade. You are the junior varsity track coach who motivates girls to run harder than they ever thought they could. You are the tenth grade Language Arts teacher who can spot the unnecessary word in any sentence, in any essay you receive, a word like a wart on a beauty queen’s nose, and convince a young writer to cut it out.

This is who you really are. You deal with teens every day, kids who belong to gangs, gifted teens, teens who are contemplating suicide and want to know if you have time to talk. Many of you have been fighting for young people almost your entire adult lives. You have embraced the challenge. You have not wavered or quit. But you are more frustrated than at any time in your careers.

You are sick of the haters who have no earthly clue.

You are the art teacher who fuels a fire of creativity in your fourth grade kids.

You are the middle school band instructor who turns bleating trumpet players into future professional musicians.

You are the health teacher who reaches that obese kid and shows her a path that will help her lose weight.

You are the biology teacher who inspires a young woman who goes on to Ohio State and to graduate school at Yale.

You are the math teacher who feeds the thirst for knowledge of a future Rhodes Scholar.

You are legion. You are men and women who give up evenings every week and Sunday afternoons to call parents, work on lesson plans, attend concerts and games, and catch up on tall stacks of ungraded papers, projects and artwork.

Really, who are you? You are the people who labor long and hard to save every child.

And, really, who are we? You do all the fighting. We talk and talk. We are shirkers in the fight to save children.

We hate you in the end because when we look in a mirror, we see what we truly are and what we are not.


MY BOOK ON TEACHING--ABOUT WHAT REAL TEACHERS KNOW--IS NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.

No standardized tests necessary!!!!!

Confessions of a "Bad Teacher:" I Loved Teaching like a Crack Addict Loves Crack.

I thought I was a good teacher. 
(I also thought the Bengals would win.)

MY NAME is John, and I have a problem. For thirty-three years I was a bad teacher. And I thought I was good.

Denial. That’s all it was.

 

Then, Sunday, I stumbled across an excellent article by Dr. Michael Flanagan and his words gave me strength. You see he’s a bad teacher too.

 

Dr. Flanagan had to battle through the same agonizing process I must now endure, although he does admit there were sometimes “free bagels and donuts involved.” And I am a complete sucker for donuts.

 

(I’m sorry. When I salivate, I digress.)

 

 

FOR NINETEEN YEARS he taught, successfully, or so he thought. Oh, sure, he heard school reformers say that the big problems in education boiled down to bad teachers at the front of too many rooms. Still, he refused to face the truth. Like me, he kept pretending he was good. He’d get awards for excellence…and he’d believe those awards meant something too. 

As for me, I’d be grading papers at 11:30 on a Wednesday night and I’d tell myself, “John, you’re doing a good job.” I had an addiction you see. 

Grading papers was a crutch, like a bottle of booze to a drunk. 

I’d go to work on Monday, and students would tell me they loved my class, and I’d delude myself and think they were telling the truth. I would arrive at school early and let kids come in for extra work and I’d skip lunch to help and stay late too. I was hooked.  

I thought I was good. 

Sure. There were times I wondered. I’d pick up the New York Times and read what the latest school reformers had to say. These reformers didn’t have the same problem I did because they always avoided trying to teach. But I wouldn’t listen, not even when Brent Staples said schools did a terrible job of screening and evaluating teachers, so that they hired “any warm body that comes along.” I heard what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told an audience at M.I.T., that the big problem in schools was too many teachers were plain dumb and still I refused to face the demons. 

I’d go right back to my phone. I’d call Vicki’s parents and say, “I love having your daughter in class.” Too late now, I see that call was a cry for help. I loved teaching like a crack addict loves crack.

 

REFORMERS constantly tried to show me I was wrong. Michelle Rhee bashed teachers every time she opened her mouth. Campbell Brown hinted that teachers were sexual deviants, protected by powerful unions. Arne Duncan, Steven Brill and Joel I. Klein all agreed that tenure and unions must go. Yet, I kept going back into my classroom day after day. I had to have that fix. I had to keep helping kids. 

I know one step toward recovery is admitting a problem and trying to make amends to anyone you hurt. So let me say I’m sorry. I apologize for spending most of my adult life working with 5,000 kids. 

I’m sorry, Steven Brill, that I called your book, Class Warfare: The Fight to Save America’s Schools, a steaming pile of donkey dung. I should have known you were fighting harder than I did, just not in an actual classroom, or with actual kids. I should have known that you and Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America but never taught, were going to fix the lives of children with bold words. 

I’m sorry for so much.  

I’m sorry for doubting politicians when they passed No Child Left Behind more than a decade ago. Now I see that lawmakers in Washington knew exactly what they were doing all along. I’m sorry I said that law was flawed from the start.  

I’m also sorry that No Child Left Behind is totally dead.  

I’m sorry I don’t believe Common Core will work. I’m an addict, as I’ve said. I’m sorriest of all because I doubted politicians in 2010 when they said they supported Common Core and doubted them again in 2014 when they said, never mind, we’re not for Common Core after all.  

In fact, Governor Bobby Jindal I apologize particularly to you.

 

I’m sorry I didn’t face my problem when it might have meant something to all the wonderful young people I taught. I’m sorry for saying the standardized tests I saw during my long career were weak. I’m sorry I thought the social studies portion of the Ohio Achievement Test (OAT), implemented in 2004, and the last standardized test I saw before retiring in 2008, was a farce. I was wrong to think you couldn’t prove anything with a single fifty-question test if it covered three years of material (grades 6, 7 and 8).

 

I’M NOT JUST SORRY. I’m sad. I’m sad the State of Ohio spent millions designing that social studies subject test as part of the OAT – and then dumped it in 2009 – and will soon dump the whole sorry OAT and start from scratch again. Common Core is coming you know, or maybe it’s not. I’m sorry I said when I heard this kind of news that lawmakers in Columbus had absolutely no clue. 

I’m sorry I once brought in fourteen veterans (from five wars) to talk to 700 Loveland Middle School kids. I realize now, too late, that nothing they said could help any of those teens when it came to a standardized test. 

Especially now, since all those old tests are kaput.  

Today I understand. It wasn’t just me. I hung out with other junkies who thought they were good. We had an outstanding band director at Loveland Middle School who thought it mattered if he turned teens into musicians. We had great art teachers who imagined that if they taught kids to sketch beautifully, they were passing on value. We had a great drama teacher, who for some reason felt drama was worthwhile, and a French teacher who expected kids to speak French with skill, and we had fine coaches, who were all in denial too. Those coaches thought that teaching young men and women to work hard, to strive to improve, to win with character, might help them in life. 

Poor souls – trying to help kids who were bullied – counseling pregnant teens about choices they’d have to make – wondering how to help a boy who lived with an abusive father at home. Who were my colleagues trying to kid? 

Now I know we were all addicts, blind to our own flaws, and I look back on my career and theirs and think, “How sad!” 

But I do feel better today. I’m getting this off my chest and see I’m not alone. I can finally admit I was a “bad teacher” all along.  

I imagined that learning could be enhanced in ten thousand ways. And I was wrong. If it can’t be tested, if it can’t be reduced to A, B, C or D, it’s not learning at all. I have looked in a mirror at long last and have seen reflected an image I cannot like. Still, I can hope my colleagues and millions of public-school teachers will get the help they need. As Dr. Flanagan has shown, it’s never too late. We can all be “good teachers” if we choose. 

The politicians with all the bold plans, those zealous reformers with their millions of words, they’ll show us the way. 

They’ll show us all how to teach.

 

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IF YOU LIKED this post, you might like my book about teaching, Two Legs Suffice, now available on Amazon. 

My book is meant to be a defense of all good teachers and a clear explanation of what good teachers can do, and what they cannot. 

Two Legs Suffice is also about what students, parents and others involved in education must do if we want to truly enhance learning.

The back cover provides a sense of what my book is about.