Wednesday, August 26, 2015

The GLAMorous World of Educational Reform



Currently, American public education may be in the beginning throes of extinction as it experiences unprecedented and calamitous reforms in regard to testing, teacher accountability, and curriculum reform.  Teachers are overburdened to the point of becoming incapable of doing not just all that is asked, but anything that is asked.  I imagine there was a time in education when teachers could plan, teach, assess, and interact with students.  Those days are long gone and beyond the reaches of memory for most teachers working today.
Testing has gotten so far out of control that a school district can have some sort of assessment going on just about any given day.  In Miami-Dade County the district uses 154 of the 180 days of student attendance for some sort of testing.  Even though any individual student may only be testing for a total of 8 hours on any state-mandated test in any given year, that student will also be given an assortment of district-issued assessments in order to address legislation that mandates interventions to get students up to speed.  Tests are not the exception, they are the norm. They occur continually and interfere with instruction to the point instruction becomes almost impossible at times.  
For example, during the first weeks of school a district typically has students take diagnostic tests in order to determine baseline scores and benchmarks in most core subjects.  As the year progresses, these students are then called back to test each quarter to gather data to identify areas of need and to see if progress toward mastery is being made.  In ed-speak this is called “progress-monitoring.”    In English classes, for example, districts mandate writing tests in addition to reading tests so students can be given some sort of mandated test more than 3 times in any given quarter, for a single core subject.   As the legislature lowered the penalties for the class size amendment, districts are cutting teacher positions and are filling classes to the brim with students.  Core classes are being reported to contain student counts over 30 and electives as big as 40.  Computer labs are not large enough to accommodate classes of such size so testing for any given class may be broken up over the course of two or three days.  What this ultimately means is that instruction can be impeded for up to 3 days while testing occurs, and a teacher cannot teach a class fully when at least a third of that class is not present.  If this happens three times per quarter, instruction is basically lost for up to 9 days per quarter, which amounts to more than 20 percent of instructional time.  This is not to mention the other resources lost to testing.  Usually it is the guidance counselors who end up administering these tests, so students are also losing essential guidance in addition to classroom instruction.  In short, schools are not providing the basic services they were designed to do.  They are intentionally being set up to fail (https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3286777759911046485#editor/target=post;postID=7551337420457621865;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=1;src=postname
Besides dealing with the interminable testing (not to mention having a portion of salary based upon student tests even if that teacher doesn’t teach a subject in which his/her students are being tested) teachers are also being forced to collaborate at unprecedented levels.  Many districts are forcing teachers to collaborate in Professional Learning Communities which meet for at least one hour per week.  Apparently management felt that teachers weren’t already doing this and therefore mandated it.  These PLCs occur in addition to faculty meetings, department meetings, district meetings, parent conferences, and weekly academy meetings.  The inherent problem with such excessive meeting is twofold: first, teachers are unavailable after school for tutoring and providing extra-help and second, teachers now have less time to plan and grade.  Between testing and meeting, teachers have very little time on the job to actually do the job, but ironically are held more personally accountable than ever before by holding a portion of the paycheck ransom to test scores. It’s a veritable educational catch 22 if you will.
Seemingly the rationale behind PLCs seems to be only that someone in upper-management had an all-expenses paid trip to observe a model-school and needs an end product to justify the expense or it’s that someone just simply read about a district in Singapore that has high test scores and figured “what the hell, let’s try this.”  The truth is upper administration really seems to have no real reason other than it seems to work in some other places.  “Let’s try it,” they say and if you question the merits of any new initiative you’re labeled out of touch, old-fashioned, and unwilling to change with the times.  In district level meetings they set the agendas and the “norms” of the meetings, keeping negative criticisms and any real thorough analysis of the new ideas at bay.   The new idea in education is always the best idea if you are in middle or upper management.   

But the problem with adopting such practices is that American districts don’t adhere to a full and complete adoption of foreign practices.  For instance, in Singapore and Shanghai, teachers spend 10 to 18 hours per week with students.  In America teachers spend 25 to 32 hours on average with students.   And by adopting the PLC collaboration model but not doing a single thing to lessen other burdens, management only creates more hindrances upon the teachers.    They don’t initiate real, substantive change.  They don’t really care about making real change because if they really wanted to it wouldn’t be done in such a half-assed manner.  They fling shit at the wall to see what sticks.  They piggyback on precursors by plagiarizing and imitating.  There is no actual concern about these ideas actually working because those who initiate will have moved on by the time they fail and the next movement comes along.  And even worse, recent research has shown that there IS ABSOLUTELY NO BENEFIT FROM DISTRICT MANDATED TEACHER TRAINING.  (http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/study-billions-of-dollars-in-annual-teacher-training-is-largely-a-waste/2015/08/03/c4e1f322-39ff-11e5-9c2d-ed991d848c48_story.html)
To an outsider, this issue is far more complicated than this verbose explication can ever clarify and address so perhaps a simple analogy might be more apropos.   Sometimes the new shiny thing isn’t always the best thing and my point can probably be clarified most simply with some images related to American popular music.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  Sometimes, images can leave you speechless.  Somewhere back in the late 1980s a few rock and roll bands involved in the West Coast music scene began garnering attention and filling clubs. The full clubs soon translated to records sales and the dollars began flowing into the record labels.  Soon record label management signed everyone and everything they could market and exploit.  Established, credible acts with reputations built upon artistic merit and tenure in the industry were even forced by management to move in the direction of the new, alluring tide.  Veterans of the industry KISS, Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper were not immune.






It doesn’t take too much to get the point. Grown men in bands, some with previous artistic integrity, had been forced by the free market and executive desire to exploit the next, new, fresh idea.  Looking at these pictures should illustrate just how asinine this is.  And doing the same in education should be looked upon in just the same fashion.  You can’t hide behind a bad idea and use children as your shield.  I cannot count the times I’ve heard management say that each new directive and initiative is for the children.  And if you resist a new idea because you realize it’s not going to be effective you’re labeled as being selfish and uncaring.  But it’s not about the children; it’s about politics, career advancement, and money.  Teaching isn’t a mystery and it doesn’t take any modern miracle or reform to help.  We need some common sense, some latitude, and some funding.  It’s a very simple formula. And if you REALLY want to reform education, you address poverty in America because that’s the number one factor when looking to the cause of student failures.  You can’t put a turd of an idea in a shiny jacket and make it glamorous.  Some people prefer the lipstick on a pig idiom but I think calling these ideas turds is more suitable since they are all stinkers.  PLCS, Merit Pay, Wall to Wall Academies, technology in the classroom, Florida’s Best and Brightest Scholarship, word walls, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, FCAT parties and carnivals, classroom libraries, Marquez, Marzano, Criss, and Foundations….all of it is just simply plain crap with no substance to it, pure drivel without intent…. but dressed up in a glitzy jacket with hair that will set your pants on fire.   

Monday, March 30, 2015

Charter School Plan Begins Public School Dismantling



Recently the Florida House passed HB 7037, a bill to increase funding for the construction of charter schools and to decrease the penalties for not adhering to the class size amendment.  If this bill becomes law, there will be devastating consequences for public schools. 

Charter schools are publicly funded schools run for profit.  More and more frequently, these schools use public funds to secure real estate.  The basic ploy is to open as a publicly funded charter school and operate for a few years.  The emphasis is not on providing a sound education, because educating students is not the goal.  The goal is to solicit and secure public monies in the name of education, buy real estate with those funds, and then become owners of the property when the school fails.  In the charter school business model, the goal is to fail.  

This new proposal by the Florida House earmarks 40 percent of a district’s construction funding to be diverted to the construction of new charters.  What this means for public schools is that the budgets for building and improving schools in that district will come to a screeching halt.  The school I currently work in, for example, is over 50 years old and continues to operate in spite of its condition rather than in conjunction with the environment it provides.   While all of the schools in this district will continue to age and deteriorate, the money for improvements will become less available.  Charters, however, will be pristine beacons to parents concerned about sending their kids to shoddy schools in decline.  

Furthermore, the budgets in my district are in disarray.  Taking money out to fund charters will further burden a district in distress.  Teachers haven’t seen any significant pay raise in six years and are losing incentive to stick around.  Nothing is being done to lure quality college grads to replace retiring veteran teachers with incalculable experience.   Allocations are being cut due to the monetary shortfalls and there should be no surprise that the first classes to be cut are resource and elective classes.  Students are losing their art and music teachers in the name of fiscal conservatism while charters are opening in those same neighborhoods offering performing arts curriculum.  It’s highly unlikely that this is a convenient coincidence for educational profiteers.  

As funding for teacher allocations and pay becomes increasingly enfeebled by deliberate politics, classes become overburdened and overpopulated.  The House is responding to this problem by relaxing the penalties for breaking the class-size amendment.  On one hand they cut and burden school district budgets while on the other they pretend to ease the impact of deliberately exceeding class sizes.  Again, it doesn’t take much to see that parents of kids in schools with large classes will choose to send them to charters that seemingly offer educational paradise.  

And that has to be the reality of these bills because there is nothing educationally sound in increasing class sizes.  Even the most cursory look at increasing class sizes would reveal that a teacher would have more papers to grade and would therefore be more limited in providing timely and effective feedback, especially in districts with mandatory academy and professional learning community meetings that take away two days a week of after school planning and grading time.  If a teacher can’t grade and return papers in a timely manner, there is little he/she can do to diagnose and remedy student weaknesses.  Furthermore, teachers are less able to meet with identified struggling students on a one on one basis because of the sheer numbers of kids in the classroom.  This is not to mention the higher incidences of classroom disruptions, misbehaviors, or distractions that come with more bodies in the room.  The class size adjustments have nothing to do with education and everything to do with dollars.  Not dollars for the public school district but rather dollars for the charters to build alluring new facilities, to offer smaller class sizes, and to provide the courses no longer offered by the public schools.  
 
Couple this legislation with previous mandates requiring students to take at least one online course as a graduation mandate and you technically prevent any school from having all of its students considered full-time when it comes to “FTE” (full-time equivalent) numbers.  Schools are funded based upon the number of students enrolled and when a student takes an online course that school loses out on funding.  Further that by adding computer based “grade recovery” courses and some students are only at any particular school for half a day.  There is no limit to how many courses a student can retake on the computer and with graduation rate being a major player in the determination of school grades, school administrators allow students into grade recovery courses magnanimously.  
 
Ultimately, if all of this isn’t enough to make one turn a suspicious eye toward these backwards republican polices then the bill to replace the FHSAA allowing for high school athlete “free agency” surely will.  What legitimate incentive do legislators have to allow students to choose what school they choose to play sports for?  Would a superior athlete attend a charter without a sports team?  Probably not.  Would that same athlete attend the shiny new charter school if allowed to play sports at any other school of his/her choosing?  Much more likely.  


Currently, great people are doing miraculous things in spite of the obstacles thrown into their paths in countless classrooms in our district schools.  But as the obstacles continually increase in both numbers and severity, it’s becoming increasingly arduous for successes to occur in the public schools.  The students aren’t failing.  The teachers aren’t failing.  The uninformed populace is failing to elect responsible candidates who represent the people rather than the chamber of commerce.  If this trend continues there will be no more community schools with student interests at heart, there will just be real estate moguls and profiteers exploiting children in the name of profits.