2014: The Year Teachers became Public Enemy #1

MOST TEACHERS WERE probably too busy working with kids to notice. But in 2014 we were declared “Public Enemy #1.”

Who so declared? A group of arrogant fools with no idea what it is like to spend a life in the classroom.

Luckily, as the chart below indicates, the general public still has faith in teachers. When it comes to ethics and honesty, elementary teachers rated higher in a 2013 Gallup survey than almost any other profession. (We were not included in a more recent survey in December 2014.) True, we lost to nurses. But we nosed out doctors and military officers.

Members of Congress, state officeholders and lobbyists (who have a stranglehold on education policy) ranked at rock bottom.

The only profession they beat out was witches.

(In 2014 nurses finished first again at 80%. Members of Congress dropped a point and came in dead last.)

WELL, THEN, WHO DECIDED teachers were the Great Satan? Glenn Beck was one. Campbell Brown was another. Frank Bruni, education writer for the New York Times, was a third.

There were plenty of others.

Beck weighed in with his book: Conform: Exposing the Truth about Common Core and Public Education. It wasn’t just Common Core that left Beck fuming. He also railed against extending the school day in hopes of raising test scores. What really made teachers wince, however, was his reasoning:

There’s also the issue of what our kids would learn with even more hours at school. Many of these educators would relish the opportunity to spend more time feeding students a steady stream of radical, anti-American political ideas, encouraging teen sexual activity, and deemphasizing the importance of traditional values and religion.

Former CNN anchor Brown also had a bee-filled bonnet. Leading the charge against teacher tenure, she left listeners with the impression that this was the gravest problem our nation faced, with the possible exception of Ebola.

Again, her “reasoning” was what shocked: 

In New York City, home to the largest public school system in America, the four-year graduation rate hovers at a dismal 60.4 percent. More distressing: Less than 22 percent of the city’s students graduate college and emerge career ready, and the number drops to 12.2 percent for Hispanics and 11.1 percent for African-Americans.

Despite those statistics, a new teachers’ contract celebrated by political and union leaders offers more frustration. The deal will weaken evaluations of teachers, reduce instructional time, send teachers with disciplinary records back to the classroom, and make it harder to fire a teacher who engages in sexual misconduct with kids.

In August the California Supreme Court rendered a decision which may end tenure in the state. First, the judge in Vergara vs. California ruled that students from low income families often had less-qualified teachers and attended schools which were less safe than schools attended by students from high income families. Therefore, the judge added, a more equitable method of assigning good teachers and a quicker way to fire bad ones was essential.

SECRETARY OF EDUCATION Arne Duncan was thrilled. After all, Duncan likes to tell anyone who will listen: “equal opportunities for education must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher.”

Real teachers, struggling to help real kids attending low income schools, might have pointed out that children from low income families also deserved great neighborhoods to live in....

Great pediatricians to keep them healthy....

That the parents deserved great job opportunities....

And that teachers deserved a great Secretary of Education, one not so utterly and consistently clueless....

Who else decided in the last twelve months that teachers were the root of all evil? Thomas J. Kane, a Harvard economist whose research helped decide the Vergara case, “proved” it with numbers. According to Kane, a poor teacher cost the average child something like sixteen bazillion dollars in lifetime earnings.

So, for god sakes, we had to have excellent teachers in every classroom.

Time piled on, too, with an egregious cover story about bad teachers (“Rotten Apples”). If a reader followed the logic of the article, they came away convinced that millions of feloniously-inclined educators were hiding behind tenure protection. Naturally, Time decided to ask former Washington, D. C. school chancellor Michelle Rhee to comment. Just as naturally, Rhee agreed the Vergara decision would fix a “broken status quo.”

Rhee, for those who don’t recognize her by name, appeared on the cover of Time in 2009. There she stood—looking menacing, broom in hand—indicating she had her own plan to fix a broken status quo. She was going to use that broom to clean up the mess in the schools by sweeping out...of course...all the bad teachers!

During her three years as chancellor, Rhee did indeed fire hundreds of educators when they “failed” to raise test scores. Rhee did reward hundreds who raised scores. She then grabbed her broom and skipped town before news of a huge cheating scandal involving “raised” test scores hit the educational fan.

WHO ELSE WAS LEADING the fight to fix education?

Bill Gates, for one, was hard at work behind the scenes. Unlike Beck, Gates was all for Common Core, even though politicians seemed unable to decide if they were for it—or against it—or for it and then against.

Common Core, as you may recall, was adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia four years ago. But in 2014 lawmakers in Alabama and Ohio were hard at work trying to withdraw from the program. In Mississippi the issue turned out to be “politically radioactive” and the governor called it a “failed program,” even though he once touted it. Georgia dropped out, citing the high costs of all the standardized testing. In Louisiana the governor wanted to rescind approval. The legislature wouldn’t let him. Indiana and Oklahoma pulled out entirely, with lawmakers who voted for it four years before leading the repeal effort.

(Teachers could only shake their heads and wonder if these people had any idea what they were doing.)

The New York Times also kicked teachers in the shins on several occasions. Frank Bruni delivered some of the best blows, agreeing that problems in U. S. education pretty much began and ended with poor teachers. After talking with Mike Johnston, former Teach for America star/turned Colorado lawmaker, Bruni had no doubt the Centennial State had acted wisely in eliminating tenure. Because, with tenure, Johnston told Bruni, there was “no incentive for someone to improve their practice.”

Who else agreed that teachers were the problem? Naturally, Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America (who never taught for America or for the Fiji Islands, either), joined in the kicking with gusto. We needed smart people in every classroom, Kopp clamored. We needed people like Rhee and Johnston and everyone else who signed up with Teach for America!

Of course, one problem with this model boiled down to math. Those who signed on agreed to try to save children for two years. (After that: not so much.) Kopp had to admit that of 47,000 men and women enrolled in the last twenty-five years in the program only 11,000 remained in the classroom last September.

AMANDA RIPLEY also weighed in on the subject, delivering a number of speeches in 2014 to august bodies of non-teachers. Ripley specializes in reporting on education, although she has no personal experience in the classroom, except as an avid student. In The Smartest Kids in the World, And How They Got that Way, she first pinpointed the problem in U.S. education in 2013. Finland, she wrote, had smarter teachers. For that reason, Finnish students scored near the very top in international testing assessments.

(See: PISA scores.)

What could we learn by studying the Finnish model? We could learn that American teachers were numbskulls. That’s why American students scored somewhere in the middle on PISA assessments.

Bruni was at it again in the fall, penning a review of another new book on education, this one by Joel I. Klein, former New York City school chancellor. What factor mattered most in “the education equation?” Surprise, surprise: “Teacher quality.” Insisted Klein: “a great teacher can rescue a child from a life of struggle.” 

This is true, of course. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy—and Klein might find that out if he tried teaching.

(Needless to say, he never will.)

Bruni reminded readers that Klein “oversaw the largest public school system in the country and did so for longer than any other New York schools chief in half a century.” “That gives him a vantage point on public education that would be foolish to ignore,” Bruni insisted. Or to put it plainly, anyone interested in education should jump in a car and drive at breakneck speed to the book store and pick up a copy of Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools.

THEN AGAIN: maybe the potential reader should tap the brakes once or twice. Klein devoted eight years to fixing the New York schools and then he decided he’d was finished. (Most of his life he has been a corporate lawyer.) Plus, Campbell Brown said the New York City Schools still sucked, despite all his efforts! So, if you’ve taught nine years, or fifteen, or thirty-one, you can offer valuable insights because you have “a vantage point on public education that would be foolish to ignore.”

Of course, Bruni never bothered to ask veteran teachers what they thought about pretty much anything.

In 2014, that was all too typical.

With the year drawing to a close, Campbell Brown journeyed to Washington to speak at the convention for the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Without noticing the irony, the Foundation later reported: “At the nation’s premier annual education forum, lawmakers and policymakers were immersed in two days of in-depth discussions on proven policies and innovative strategies to improve student achievement.”

Two measly days. Two measly days—and they knew everything.

So it was, last year, that teachers were labeled “Public Enemy #1” by those who knew nothing about what it meant to work in a classroom.

THESE FOOLS TALKED and talked and talked about what had to be done to save every child. Meanwhile, they left all the saving to real teachers.

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Time Runs A Incredibly Stupid Story

Gag! Another article blames teachers for all problems in the schools.

If you teach for a living you probably know Time magazine ran a stupid story this week. “Rotten Apples” it’s called. It’s the tragic tale of how tenure is ruining kids’ lives and how bad teachers plague the land.

I won’t be the only educator to notice the terrible timing, with this issue landing in mailboxes a day after the awful school shooting in Marysville, Washington. And you have to wonder. Do the people cited in this story, who claim they want to fix the problems in our nation’s schools, really believe tenure is the big issue? They say tenure means “employment for life.” Maybe Time could highlight some of the tenured teachers who have died in recent years trying to shield children from catastrophic harm.

I won’t be the first to note that not a single teacher is asked to comment in the story, either. 

Who does get their say? Who are the real “heroes” fighting for the kids? “Silicon business types and billionaires,” people like David Welch and Bill Gates. Gates is working on a plan to change the way history is taught in our schools, because he’s sure there’s a better way, and we have to listen to him because...he’s Bill Gates! Welch is a “Silicon Valley muckety-muck who lives in one of the fanciest ZIP codes in America,” according to Time. Naturally, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is mentioned. He agrees. Tenure is a curse. And Arne knows everything about education, because he went to Harvard and never got around to teaching. Remember? He’s the guy who “fixed” the Chicago Public Schools. Of course, the city still has gang problems and hundreds of school-age children have been shot there in recent years. 

Ignoring such “unimportant” issues, Time focuses on tenure. The judge’s ruling (which would strike down California tenure law if upheld), rested on complex “value added measurements” (VAM) which showed a bad teacher could “set a student’s educational progress back by 9.54 months.” A second study, again based on complex VAM, and supposedly controlling “for factors like race and poverty rates” found that replacing bad teachers “could increase students’ lifetime earnings by $250,000 per classroom.”

Strangely enough, reporters and editors failed to notice that they blew up the foundation of their story before the last paragraph could sputter to a sorry end. In April the American Statistical Association questioned whether such methodology “adequately measures a teacher’s total value to a student’s education.” The following month the American Educational Research Association took an even stronger stand, saying there was “a ‘surprisingly weak’ correlation between teachers’ VAM scores and their actual skills.”

Leaving complexities aside, let’s imagine we wanted to increase the lifetime earnings of students. Why not start by raising the minimum wage? Next, convince Silicon Valley tech firms, like Apple, run by billionaires like Welch, and the the folks who run Walmart to stop outsourcing millions of jobs to China. Yep. The Waltons appear in the Time story. They’ve tossed around piles of money in an effort to support charter schools. You know, because they care about children. They care so much they pay those children’s parents, who work as cashiers in their stores, a princely sum. Oh yes: $8.48 per hour. 

Michelle Rhee also rears her sour puss. If you don’t know Rhee, teachers, you should. She’s the most obnoxious of all obnoxious school reformers. (As reformers go, Rhee is the rare exception in that she actually taught for three years.) Time once did an idiotic story on her, too. Rhee promised, as chancellor of the Washington, D. C. schools, to sweep out all the bad teachers and cure the problems in education—sweep!—just like that!

Like so many school fixers, Rhee told every reporter who would listen (and write up a glowing story about Michelle Rhee) that using test scores to rate teachers was the key. During her time at the D. C. helm she fired hundreds of veteran educators when scores didn’t measure up. Then she gave bonuses to teachers and principals in cases were scores surged. Unfortunately, as USA Today later discovered, most D. C. educators who posted “improved” results did it mainly by plying erasers to alter student answer sheets.

Time did get at least one story line right when noting that an “outright mutiny” might be brewing among teachers. But no one at the magazine had the good sense to wonder why. Teachers are itching for a fight, I suspect, not because they care only about protecting their jobs. Not at all. They want to do their jobs right. They don’t want to fill out more forms. They don’t want to spend more valuable instruction time charting data. They don’t want to give more and more standardized tests. They want to get back to helping kids. They don’t fear being “exposed” as a result of VAM. They don’t believe VAM is valid to begin.

Let’s imagine that tenure could be eliminated next week. The 10-15% of children who are chronically absent wouldn’t suddenly rise from their beds and start coming to class in regular fashion. The four-year-old girl in Delaware who recently brought hundreds of packets of heroin to nursery school would still be headed for kindergarten next year. And that poor child’s real problem would still be her screwed up mom. If we ended tenure immediately we’d still be the advanced nation with the most school shootings by far, the lowest percentage of children enrolled in early education, the highest percentage (save for Romania) of boys and girls living in poverty, and the highest incidence of teen pregnancy too.

If tenure ended next week, people like Welch and Gates still wouldn’t know what my wife knew, because she taught—that if a third grade student has a prostitute and a drunk for a mother, the kid won’t really care if his teacher has tenure. 

They wouldn’t know what I knew, because I taught—that a seventh grade girl might struggle in history class, not because I’m tenured but because when she goes home her father is sexually abusing her every night.

Even Time admits that tenure laws developed a century ago, when a teacher “could be fired for holding unorthodox views or attending the wrong church, or for no reason at all if the local party boss wanted to pass on the job to someone else.” Those same dangers remain today. We still have politicians who are scumbags, who might love to get rid of a few good non-tenured teachers just to open up slots for their friends. We still know there are billionaires out there who want to push their particular religious or political agendas in the schools, and we know they might be inclined to throw their money around and make it clear to administrators and school board members they wanted an individual teacher who opposed their positions gone. Tenure still protects good teachers from all kinds of harm.

In fact, getting rid of tenure is just the latest panacea in a long, illustrious parade of panaceas offered up by those who insist they know how to fix the schools, who say they care about saving every child, and who insist they know how to do it, even though they’ve never done it at all. They have the great plans. 

As for you teachers, tenure or not, the leave it to you  to do all the real, hard work of saving every child.

It might be nice if all these idiots stopped offering so much advice, rolled up their sleeves, and tried to help. Bill Gates, David Welch, Arne Duncan, and Haley Sweetland Edwards, who wrote this Time cover story, we humbly invite you, no we dare you, to step into the failing school of your choice and see what it’s really like to teach.

Something tells me none of you could last.

Is Getting Rid of Tenure the Answer? Or Should Teachers Stop Breathing?

I’m just a typical retired teacher. I probably shouldn’t let the flurry of attacks on public school teachers bother me.

But I do.

For that reason, I would like to pose a question that goes to the heart of school reform thinking: Why do so many experts sound so stupid when they talk about fixing our schools?

This question bothers me like a sharp stone in my shoe. I read about what’s “wrong” with American education and end up scratching my head.

Maybe I’m dumb! That’s a thread in attacks on public school teachers today. Supposedly, we’re not smart enough. Finland! Finland is the model we must follow. In Finland only smart people teach! In fact, according to education experts there’s nothing wrong with American education except all the bad teachers.

A typical editorial in the New York Times this week hammered on that point. According to Mike Johnston, who “spent two years with Teach for America,” bad teachers with tenure are the great stumbling block in the path of every child’s academic success.

After spending two whole years in a classroom, Johnston seems to think he learned everything there is to know about teaching. Then he spent six years working as a principal in a Denver public school. And what do you know! 

His school had amazing standardized test results.

(We will not mention here the numerous cheating scandals involving other “amazing” standardized test results. We will also not mention that all the amazing test results linked to No Child Left Behind have now been tossed out the classroom window onto the schoolhouse lawn. Nope. We will keep our teacher sarcasm in check.)

No Child Left Behind is dead. Long live Common Core, instead.

Frank Bruni, who signed the editorial, noted that Johnston’s mother was a public school teacher. Johnston isn’t a teacher hater. (So Bruni says.) Still, he “expresses the concern that we’re not getting the best teachers into classrooms or weeding out the worst performers.” That’s the first line that makes me choke on my morning toast.

You there! The physics teacher pointing out the solution to a complex problem on the white board. You! The one grading those eighth grade Language Arts essays! You! The one talking to the weeping third grader! YOU are not the best person for the job.

You are the PROBLEM. 

If we could get rid of you all children would excel. We can’t get rid of you though. You have tenure. You rat!

So what must be done? Johnston says we need to implement a tenure system that “means something,” a system based on test results. (Even bogus test results? Or results that no longer matter because NCLB is dead?) We can’t continue the system we have now that rewards teachers “just because you’re breathing.”

That’s the second line in the editorial that makes me choke on my toast. If I read this editorial right, asphyxiation is the cure for what ails U. S. education. We simply convince bad teachers to stop breathing.

Ironically, after trashing teachers in a general way, Bruni ends by exhorting readers to support good teachers everywhere. But this is one of many pieces of a similar kind that hint good teachers are few and far between. Hard to find. Kind of like Sasquatch. Or unicorns. “We need to pay good teachers much more,” Bruni adds. “We need to wrap the great ones in the highest esteem. But we also need to separate the great from the bad.”

Now a Colorado lawmaker, Johnston has the last word: “Our focus is not on teachers because they are the problem,” he says lamely, having already said the reverse. “Our focus is on teachers because they are the solution.”

That’s the line that finally makes me mumble a curse.

I loved teaching and had tenure most of my career. I knew what I did truly mattered. So I did the absolute best I could. But unlike the non-teaching experts—or the quick teaching quitters who go on to become “leaders” and politicians and critics—I learned that I wasn’t the solution. No teacher has ever been and no teacher ever will.

If every bad teacher in a classroom suddenly stopped breathing next week critical problems in all our schools would absolutely remain. (In Finland, to cite one example, 4% of children live in poverty. In the USA that figure is 23%.) Good teachers put dents in such problems. Good teachers do that every day. 

Nevertheless, our so-called leaders must face up to the truth. Teachers aren’t the solution and tenure isn’t the problem. H. L. Mencken put it plainly seventy-five years ago: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

The experts offer up simple solutions to complex problems, simple solutions that all to often prove disastrously wrong in the end. If we wish to improve outcomes in schools we have to rest school reform on a solid foundation of good sense. A society has a right to expect teachers to give their best. A society cannot, however, expect them to perform miracles with every child every day.

Teachers don’t need to be lectured, punished, or vilified by fools. They need aid in addressing terrible problems that seep into schools—problems rooted in neighborhoods and homes, problems not of their making, nor within their ordinary human capacities to resolve.

FOR A SEPARATE LIST OF SUCH PROBLEMS, FLOODING INTO SCHOOLS FROM THE OUTSIDE, GO TO THE AUXILIARY POST.