Why e-learning should continue this fall
I understand why so many people want students to return to their classrooms this fall, along with their teachers and coaches and all the other school personnel who make education possible. I understand because I’m one of those people. I’m entering my 37th year teaching high school English, and nothing would make me happier than to sit down with a group of enthusiastic students and have a boisterous discussion about Macbeth or Beowulf, or to hear my speech students inform their classmates and me about their most beloved topics.
I miss the students. I miss talking to them, and teaching them, and making them laugh every so often. I miss it all.
Nevertheless, after staying abreast of the latest developments regarding COVID-19, and thinking through myriad scenarios, I’ve come to the conclusion that having in-school attendance in August would be foolhardy. The risks are too great, and the logistical challenges are too overwhelming.
Even though here in Illinois we were largely successful in flattening the curve — the mantra in the early days of Covid — we certainly didn’t vanquish the virus. Some of our neighboring states, like Iowa and Missouri, did very little to contain the spread. Locally there are people testing positive for the virus, and we’ve had several deaths in our community. Because of our early success in dealing with Covid, we’ve been moving from one reopening phase to the next like clockwork — but the reopening itself is due to economic and political pressure. It’s not based on the best advice of medical science.
As a country, we are losing our battle with the virus. Nationwide there are nearly 3 million confirmed cases, and we’ve recorded over 130,000 deaths (many epidemiologists believe our numbers are under-reported because in late 2019 and early 2020 we were not identifying people with COVID-19, and attributing their illnesses and deaths to other causes). I believe I had the virus in mid-March, just as our state was shutting down, but I was neither a movie star nor a professional athlete so I couldn’t get a confirming test. Luckily, I recovered fairly quickly without medical assistance. Weeks later an antibody test came back negative, but the antibody tests are unreliable for several reasons.
Having in-person school this fall would be a logistical nightmare. The one-two punch that the CDC has been recommending from the beginning — wearing a mask and staying at least six feet apart — would be all but impossible to maintain in schools. Besides, recent studies have suggested social distancing isn’t very effective indoors since COVID-19 stays in the air longer and is more contagious when airborne than first believed.
To quote a recently published article, “Global experts: Ignoring airborne COVID spread risky” (Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, 6 July 2020): “The authors [of a recent study] said that handwashing and physical distancing are appropriate—but not sufficient—to provide protection against respiratory microdroplets, particularly in poorly ventilated indoor environments such as those that have been at the center of several ‘superspreading’ events.”
I’m familiar with “poorly ventilated indoor environments,” more affectionately known as classrooms in my world.
The researchers concluded: “In order to control the pandemic, pending the availability of a vaccine, all routes of transmission must be interrupted.”
All routes of transmission must be interrupted. If we open schools this August, even in some modified way (with alternating days of attendance, for example), we will be providing countless routes of transmission. Even with our best efforts to enforce the wearing of masks and keep students as far apart as possible, there are going to be routes of transmission. In classrooms certainly. There are also buses, cafeterias, locker rooms, restrooms, hallways.
If a student tests positive for Covid, or if they find out they’ve been exposed, what then? What if that exposure was, say, on a Sunday and it’s now Wednesday when they find out their situation? Every student, teacher, custodian, cook that they’ve been around — should they be quarantined? Tested? What will that quarantining mean for their families?
Throughout my career, teaching at various schools, we’ve been figuring out ways to encourage students to come to school no matter what, with rewards and punishments. The goal has always been perfect attendance. Now we must reverse course and tell students to stay away if they have even the hint of a Covid symptom. Fall allergy season is fast approaching. Farmers are about to harvest their fields. Many, many students suffer from seasonal allergies and many suffer from asthma. From August to December every year they have coughs and runny noses and dripping sinuses.
How will we know if their Kleenex addiction is an allergy or COVID-19? How will they?
Ask any teacher. Ask how many boxes of tissue they go through in a normal year.
And what about teachers? Nationally one-third of schoolteachers are 50 or older. I’ll be 58 in September. According to the CDC, by the end of April more than 90% of the Covid deaths in the U.S. were people 55 or older. (link) Many older teachers have chronic health issues that put them further at risk. But even younger teachers can have health issues that place them in greater jeopardy in spite of their age.
If a teacher is exposed to Covid, or tests positive, they’ll have to be out of the classroom for at least two weeks (even with no serious medical consequences). In every school I’ve taught in, most of the substitute teachers were retired teachers in their fifties, sixties and even seventies. Even if they’d be willing to step in for a few weeks, should they? Should we ask them to? Is it even ethical? (After reading my post, a colleague pointed out that if substitute teachers step forward, they generally work in different buildings and for more than one district, which means subs could easily facilitate an outbreak themselves.)
I know that keeping children from going to school in person has significant drawbacks. I know it creates all kinds of obstacles for parents. Students suffer in many ways, especially perhaps special-needs students. I get it, I sympathize, and if I could I’d wave a Harry Potter-like wand and make it not so. I’d do it in a heartbeat.
In addition to nearly four decades of classroom teaching (seniors in high school predominantly), since 2016 I’ve also taught online graduate courses in a university’s MFA program. I learned that online teaching and in-person teaching are inherently different. A teacher must approach them differently, with different methods and different expectations. There’s a learning curve. It’s instinct to try to recreate your classroom curriculum in the virtual environment — to just shift everything from one to the other lock, stock and barrel.
Unfortunately, for the most part, that approach doesn’t work very well. Even for classroom veterans, online teaching requires rethinking and retooling. In order for it to be effective — to be meaningful and hopefully even enjoyable for students — requires considerable thought, investigation of online tools and platforms, development of methodology that is unique to web-based environments, and so forth.
For that matter, students have to learn to be online students, too. How they learn, how they keep track of their assignments, how they submit them, how they respond to feedback — everything is different online, and students, like teachers, will have a learning curve also.
This past March teachers in Illinois and many other states suddenly found themselves teaching online — literally with no preparation whatsoever. Teachers are professionals, and we adjusted as quickly and as best as we could — but it was far from ideal. The online teaching that students and parents experienced in March, April and May was not representative of what online teaching can be, with the requisite time to prepare.
The people who are in charge of deciding whether or not we return to the classroom in August, and, if so, under what circumstances and conditions, are under a great deal of pressure. I don’t envy them that. Various surveys and news stories have suggested that the majority of parents want their children to go back to their physical school this fall. I understand it. Like I said earlier, I want that too.
Also like I said earlier, in spite of the majority’s desire, the reality of the pandemic makes it ill-advised, even dangerous — for students, teachers, other educational personnel, students’ families, teachers’ families, the school’s community, and even the state and the country . . . even the world.
Here’s what I recommend: School this fall should be exclusively online (for all the reasons I’ve cited in this post, plus a lot more that I didn’t but could). Teachers should begin their professional duties in mid-August (or whatever their contracts dictate), and they should start the challenging and time-consuming process (if done well) of preparing for online teaching. Then have students join their online courses about mid-September. Hopefully by the end of 2020, the virus will be better contained (right now it’s skyrocketing out of control), and there will be a legitimate expectation for a vaccine or at least an effective treatment for COVID-19. Perhaps, with luck, we could resume in-class teaching in January 2021.
It may seem like a slow start to the year — having teachers begin serious preparation mid-August and bringing students into the mix mid-September — but even with an online approach there are innumerable details that must be attended to. Families, for instance, are going to need time to figure out how to make their life work if their children are not returning to the classroom in August (remember that teachers have families too). Schools must make sure they have everything they need to make online learning effective (which may require purchasing hardware, buying subscriptions, setting up platforms); and school districts need to help students have what they need at home to be successful (adequate computers, reliable web connection, etc.).
At present, the laws regarding school calendars would be problematic under the recommendation I’m making — but to my way of thinking those nuts and bolts shouldn’t supersede an approach that is best for students and all those concerned. The pandemic presents the most challenging educational situation in at least a century. Lawmakers should consider revising the rule book given these extraordinary circumstances.
I’ll reiterate that I don’t envy the people who have to make the tough decisions. I’m glad that many years ago I decided to spend my career hanging out with kids in the classroom, and leaving the big knuckle-biting decisions to others. Whatever they decide, I and every teacher will do our best to make schools safe and effective learning environments, as we always do.
We love and respect kids, and we’ll get them through this pandemic one way or another. Hopefully we’ll survive it too.
Danielson Framework criticized by Charlotte Danielson
I’ve been writing about the Danielson Framework for Teacher Evaluation for a couple of years, and in fact my “Fatal Flaws of the Danielson Framework” has been my most read and most commented on post, with over 5,000 hits to date. I’ve also been outspoken about how administrators have been misusing the Framework, resulting in demoralized teachers and unimproved (if not diminished) performance in the classroom. (See in particular “Principals unwitting soldiers in Campbell Brown’s army” and “Lowered teacher evaluations require special training.”) At present, teachers are preparing — at great time and expense — to embark on the final leg of the revamped teacher evaluation method with the addition of student performance into the mix (see ISBE’s “Implementing the Student Growth Component in Teacher and Principal Evaluation”). I’ve also written about this wrongheaded development: “The fallacy of testing in education.”
Imagine my surprise when I discovered an unlikely ally in my criticism of Charlotte Danielson’s much lauded approach: Charlotte Danielson herself. The founder of the Danielson Framework published an article in Education Week (April 18 online) that called for the “Rethinking of Teacher Evaluation,” and I found myself agreeing with almost all of it — or, more accurately and more egocentrically, I found Charlotte Danielson agreeing with me, for she is the one who has changed her tune.
My sense is that Ms. Danielson is reacting to widespread dissatisfaction among teachers and principals with the evaluation process that has been put in place which is based on her Danielson Framework. Her article appeared concurrently with a report from The Network for Public Education based on a survey of nearly 3,000 educators in 48 states which is highly critical of changes in teacher evaluation and cites said changes as a primary reason for teachers exiting the profession in droves and for young people choosing not to go into education in the first place. For example, the report states, “Evaluations based on frameworks and rubrics, such as those created by Danielson and Marzano, have resulted in wasting far too much time. This is damaging the very work that evaluation is supposed to improve . . .” (p. 2).
Ms. Danielson does not, however, place blame in her Framework, at least not directly. She does state what practically all experienced teachers have known all along when she writes, “I’m deeply troubled by the transformation of teaching from a complex profession requiring nuanced judgment to the performance of certain behaviors that can be ticked off a checklist.” Her opinion is a change from earlier comments when she said that good teaching could be easily defined and identified. In a 2012 interview, Ms. Danielson said that her assessment techniques are “not like rocket science,” whereas “[t]eaching is rocket science. Teaching is really hard work. But doing that [describing what teaching “looks like in words”] isn’t that big a deal. Honestly, it’s not. But nobody had done it.”
Instead of her Framework, then, Ms. Danielson places the lion’s share of the blame with state legislators who oversimplified her techniques via their adoptions, and — especially — with administrators who are not capable of using the Framework as it was intended. She writes, “[F]ew jurisdictions require their evaluators to actually demonstrate skill in making accurate judgments. But since evaluators must assign a score, teaching is distilled to numbers, ratings, and rankings, conveying a reductive nature to educators’ worth and undermining their overall confidence in the system.”
Amen, Sister Charlotte! Testify, girlfriend!
Ms. Danielson’s critique of administrators is a valid one, especially considering that evaluators were programmed, during their Danielson training, to view virtually every teacher as less than excellent, which put even the best-intentioned evaluators in a nitpicking mode, looking for any reason, no matter how immaterial to effective teaching, to find a teacher lacking and score them “proficient” instead of “excellent.” In her criticism of administrators Ms. Danielson has touched upon what is, in fact, a major shortcoming of our education system: The road to becoming an administrator is not an especially rigorous one — especially when it comes to academic rigor — and once someone has achieved administrative status, there tends to be no apparatus in place to evaluate their performance, including (as Ms. Danielson points out) their performance in evaluating their teachers.
Provided that administrators can keep their immediate superior (if any) content, as well as the seven members of the school board (who are almost never educators themselves), they can appear to be effective. That is, as long as administrators do not violate the terms of the contract, and as long as they are not engaging in some form of obvious harassment, teachers have no way of lodging a complaint or even offering constructive criticism. Therefore, if administrators are using the Danielson Framework as a way of punishing teachers — giving them undeservedly reduced evaluations and thus exposing them to the harms that can befall them, including losing their job regardless of seniority — there is no way for teachers to protect themselves. They cannot appeal an evaluation. They can write a letter to be placed alongside the evaluation explaining why the evaluation is unfair or invalid, but their complaint does not trigger a review of the evaluation. The evaluator’s word is final.
According to the law of averages, not all administrators are excellent; and not all administrators use the evaluation instrument (Danielson or otherwise) excellently. Some administrators are average; some are poor. Some use the evaluation instrument in a mediocre way; some use it poorly. Hence you can quite easily have an entire staff of teachers whose value to the profession is completely distorted by a principal who is, to put it bluntly, bad at evaluating. And there’s not a thing anyone can do about it.
Another crucial point that Charlotte Danielson makes in her Education Week article is that experienced teachers should not be evaluated via the same method as teachers new to the field: “An evaluation policy must be differentiated according to whether teachers are new to the profession or the district, or teach under a continuing contract. . . . Once teachers acquire this status [i.e. tenure], they are full members of the professional community, and their principal professional work consists of ongoing professional learning.” In other words, experienced teachers, with advanced degrees in their content area and a long list of professional accomplishments, shouldn’t be subjected to the same evaluation procedure as someone who is only beginning their career and has much to learn.
In fact, using the same evaluation procedure creates a very odd dynamic: You oftentimes have an administrator who has had only a limited amount of classroom experience (frequently fewer than ten years, and perhaps only two or three) and whose only advanced degree is the one that allows them to be an administrator (whereby they mainly study things like school law and school finance), sitting in judgment of a teacher who has spent twenty or thirty years honing their teaching skills and who has an advanced degree in their subject area. What can the evaluator possibly say in their critique that is meaningful and appropriate? It is commonplace to find this sort of situation: A principal who was a physical education or drivers education teacher, for perhaps five years, is now sitting in an Advanced Placement Chemistry classroom evaluating a twenty-year veteran with a masters degree or perhaps even a Ph.D. in chemistry. The principal feels compelled to find something critical to say, so all they can do is nitpick. They can’t speak to anything of substance.
What merit can there be in a system that makes evaluators omnipotent judges of teachers in subject areas that the evaluators themselves literally are not qualified to teach? It isn’t that veteran teachers don’t have anything to learn. Far from it. Teaching is a highly dynamic, highly challenging occupation; and the successful teacher is constantly learning, growing, self-reflecting, and networking with professional peers. The successful principal makes space for the teacher to teach and for the student to learn, and they protect that space from encroachment by anyone whose design is to impede that critical exchange.
Ms. Danielson offers this alternative to the current approach to evaluation: “An essential step in the system should be the movement from probationary to continuing status. This is the most important contribution of evaluation to the quality of teaching. Beyond that, the emphasis should be on professional learning, within a culture of trust and inquiry. . . . Experienced teachers in good standing should be eligible to apply for teacher-leadership positions, such as mentor, instructional coach, or team leader.”
Ironically, what Ms. Danielson is advocating is a return to evaluation as most teachers knew it prior to adoption of the Danielson Framework.
(Grammar alert: I have opted to use the gender-neutral pronouns they and their etc. even when they don’t agree in number with their antecedents.)
Destroying Public Education for Dummies
“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”
It’s the iconic line from the 1976 film Network in which news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is pushed beyond the breaking point and implores his viewers to get mad, go to their windows, open them and shout: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!” — and people do . . . by the thousands.
This is essentially the message of Williamsville (Illinois) school superintendent David Root in the District Dispatch he sent out yesterday in which he writes: “So, want to destroy public education and prevent people from wanting to teach? Not a problem. It’s actually pretty simple.”
Superintendent David Root
Root uses the metaphor of the how-to books “for Dummies” to say that the dummies in charge of state government — recently elected governor Bruce Rauner and the General Assembly as a whole — have managed, without breaking a sweat, to destroy public education and the morale of educators by slashing funds, mandating a litany of pointless tests, and demonizing and demoralizing teachers. One of the points I especially appreciate alludes to the Danielson Framework for Teacher Evaluation and how its adoption by the state is part of a scheme to make teachers in Illinois look ineffective (and thus, I say, pave the way for the lucrative privatization of schools) — an argument I’ve been making for months, especially in my August 17, 2014, post “Principals unwitting soldiers in Campbell Brown’s army.”
Please read superintendent Root’s superb jeremiad in its entirety here. (Or you can also access it via the district’s webpage here.).
Some people were surprised at Root’s vitriol, even though it’s been building for some time, and suggested that perhaps Mr. Root should have held off sending it out until he’d calmed down a bit. But I unequivocally disagree: I say we are long past the point of civility. We need more — all! — administrators, teachers, school board members, parents and students to raise their windows and shout: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!
And we shouldn’t stop our raging against the “education reform” machine until public schools and public educators receive the support and the respect they deserve. Because, ultimately, our students deserve no less.
Bravo, superintendent Root! I too am as mad as hell!
Principals unwitting soldiers in Campbell Brown’s army
(This is a long post — and for that, my apologies. But it’s important, and I encourage you to take your time and read it thoroughly.)
Because of my interest in the subject (as demonstrated in my blog posts over the past few months), I was invited to participate in a video roundtable via Skype with administrators from several schools about implementing the Danielson Framework for Teacher Evaluation, and I found many of the comments, well, bewildering. Even though it was a select group, I strongly suspect that their attitudes and approaches are representative of not only administrators in Illinois, but across the country — as the Danielson Framework has been adopted by numerous states. Before I go any further I must stress that these are all good people who are trying to do their job as they understand it from the State Board of Education, their own local school boards and the public at large. Around the video table were a superintendent of a k-12 district, building principals of elementary, middle, junior high and high schools, and even a k-12 curriculum director, along with three teachers — elementary, junior high and high school (yours truly). I’m going to try to represent their words accurately, but without attribution since their comments were not on the record. In fact, as the two-hour video chat became more heated, several people were speaking with a good deal of candor, and clearly their remarks were not intended for all ears. (By the way, kudos to the tech folks who brought us all together — it worked far better than I would have suspected.)
I considered not writing about the video conference at all, but ultimately felt that I owe it to the profession that I’ve devoted my adult life to (as I enter my 31st year in the classroom), a profession that has been beleaguered in recent years by powerful forces on every side: attacking teachers’ integrity, our skills, our associations, our job security, our pensions. We feel we have so many enemies, we don’t even know where to focus our attention.
What is more, most teachers are afraid to speak candidly with their own administrators and they’re especially afraid to speak out about what’s going on in their buildings. In spite of education reformers blanketing the media with the myth of “powerful teachers unions,” the truth is that associations like the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers aren’t all that powerful — if they were, would teachers be in the plight we are now? — and individual teachers are very vulnerable. Nontenured teachers can be terminated without cause, and tenured teachers can be legally harassed right out of the profession. In fact, it happens all the time. Moreover, teachers tend to be naturally non-confrontational, which is why they chose to go into teaching in the first place. People with more aggressive personalities will seek other kinds of professions. As a result, we’ve been lambs to slaughter at the hands of reformers, legislators, school board members, administrators … at the hands of anyone who wants to take a whack at us. Rather than fight back, it’s easier to keep quiet and bear it, or to move on.
I’ve been writing about educational issues for the past several months — the unfair termination of young teachers, the inherent flaws of the Danielson Framework, the way the Framework affects teachers, and my issues with PARCC and the Common Core. My posts have been garnering hundreds of hits, and a few online likes, but many, many private, under-the-radar thumbs-ups and thank-yous. Teachers appreciate that someone is speaking out, but they’re not only afraid to speak out themselves, they’re even afraid to be seen agreeing with my point of view. If this isn’t evidence of the precariousness of being a teacher and the overall weakness of “teachers unions,” I don’t know what is.
Public Opinion and the Rarefied Air of Excellence
Much of the round-table discussion had to do with the Framework’s insistence that very, very few teachers rank in the top category (identified as “Excellent” in many districts’ plans). Before Danielson, districts tended to have three-tier evaluation instruments, which were often labeled as “Excellent,” “Satisfactory” and “Unsatisfactory.” Danielson adds a tier between “Excellent” and “Satisfactory”: “Proficient.” Many veteran teachers who had consistently received an excellent rating under the previous model were downgraded to merely proficient under Danielson. This downgrading was predicted as early as two years ago when the new instrument emerged on the educational horizon. I didn’t want to believe it would be that severe, but it has been this past year, the year of implementation, with very few teachers being rated as excellent. For the record, I was rated as proficient — not as excellent for the first time since I was a nontenured teacher, more than 25 years ago.
In fact, as I wrote in a previous post, the Illinois Administrators Academy offered a special workshop this past summer to train administrators how to deliver the unpleasant news that a veteran teacher has been downgraded to proficient — the downgrading was so pervasive across the state. The Framework was originally developed by Charlotte Danielson in 1996 as a way to evaluate first-year teachers, so it made perfect sense that a single-digit percentage would be deemed as excellent. The Framework has undergone three revisions since then and now purports to be an instrument that can assess every teacher, K-12, every subject, and even nonclassroom professionals like librarians and school nurses. Nevertheless, the notion that very, very few teachers will rate as excellent has clung tenaciously to the Framework throughout each revision.
I asked the administrators why that aspect of the Framework remains even though the Framework’s purpose has been expanded dramatically since it was conceived in the mid-1990s. I was told by the k-12 superintendent that the Framework has gained such wide acceptance in large part due to that very aspect. Under previous evaluation instruments, 90% of teachers were judged to be excellent, and the public doesn’t accept that as true. In fact, the public believes (and therefore school boards, too, since they, like the public at large, are almost always noneducators with no classroom experience) that the traditional bell curve should apply to teachers. The bell curve, or Gaussian function, is of course the statistical representation that says the fewest examples of anything, qualitatively speaking, are at either extreme of the gathered samples, and the vast majority (let’s say 80%) fall somewhere in the middle, from below average to above average.
According to the superintendent, then, the public believes that the bell curve should apply to experienced, career teachers as well — that only a small percentage are truly excellent, and the vast majority fall somewhere in the middle (to use Danielson terms, in the satisfactory to proficient range). First of all, who cares what the uninformed public thinks? In our country we have a fascination with asking pedestrians on the street what they think of global warming, heightened military involvement in the Middle East, and allowing Ebola victims to enter the country. John Oliver of “Last Week Tonight” did a segment on this phenomenon that went viral on social media:
Assuming this is true — that the public believes only a small percentage of teachers are excellent based, unconsciously, on the principle of the bell curve (and I’m willing to believe that it is true) — the belief yet again speaks to the ignorance of the “man on the street.” In this instance, the bell curve is being fallaciously applied. If you take a random sampling of people (let’s say, you go to the mall at Christmas time and throw a net around a random group of shoppers) and task them with teaching some random topic to a random group of students, then, yes, the bell curve is likely to be on target. In that group of shoppers, lo and behold, you netted a couple of professional teachers, so they’re able to teach the material pretty effectively; another much larger group of shoppers who are decently educated and reasonably articulate could do a passable job imparting the information; and a smaller group on the other extreme would really make a botch of it.
But career teachers are not a random sampling of shoppers at the mall. They’re highly educated professionals who have devoted their lives to teaching, who have constantly worked to improve their craft, and who have honed their skills via thousands of contact hours with students. It stands to reason, in fact, that career teachers should be excellent at what they do after all that training and experience. No one, I suspect, would have an issue with the statement that all Major League baseball players are excellent at baseball — some may be bound for Cooperstown and some may go back to the minors or to some other career altogether after a season or two, but they’re all really, really good at playing baseball compared to the average person. Why is it so hard to believe that 90% of career teachers are excellent at what they do?
The Fallacy of the Bell Curve and Nontenured Teachers
Unfortunately, the acceptance of the bell-curve fallacy has an even more devastating impact when applied to teachers in the beginning of their careers. One administrator shared that her board expects a few nontenured teachers to be terminated every spring, that the board implies the administrators aren’t doing their jobs if every nontenured teacher is retained. I was dumbfounded by this statement. It’s barely a figurative comparison to say that it’s like having to sacrifice a virgin or two to appease the gods at the vernal equinox. It’s no wonder that many young teachers feel as if they’re performing their highly complex duties with a Damoclesian Sword poised above their tender necks. I know firsthand one young teacher who resigned last spring after two years in the classroom to pursue another career option because she’d seen the way other young teachers were treated and had already experienced some administrative harassment. And this was a teacher who by all accounts was doing well in the classroom (in a specialized area in which there aren’t a lot of qualified candidates). She didn’t even know what she wanted to do for a living, but it will have to be better (and professionally safer) than teaching, she believed. I have to believe she’s right.
But, again, in the case of young teachers, the bell curve is being applied erroneously. Generally speaking, when teachers are hired, administrators are drawing from an applicant pool in the hundreds. They’re college educated, trained in their field, and they’ve passed their professional exams. They often have to go through multiple rounds of interviewing before being offered a position. Of course, even after all of this, there can be young teachers who have chosen their profession poorly and in fact they’re not cut out for teaching — but school board members shouldn’t just assume a certain number should be cut from the herd to make room for potentially more effective young professionals — and if that sort of pressure is being applied to administrators, to be the bearers of the bloody hatchet every spring, that is grossly unfair, too.
The Danielson Group’s Indoctrination
The evaluation training that administrators have to undergo, all forty hours of it, indoctrinates them to the Danielson Framework’s ethos that excellent is all but attainable, and it has led to all kinds of leaping logic and gymnastic semantics. An idea that was expressed multiple times in various ways during the roundtable was that proficient really means excellent, and a rating of excellent really means something beyond excellent — what precisely is unclear, but it has to do with teachers going above and beyond (above what? beyond where? … no one seems to know or be able to articulate). The Framework was often referred to as “fact-based” and “objective,” yet administrator after administrator couldn’t put into words what distinguishes a “proficient” teacher from an “excellent” one. It’s just a certain feeling — which is the very definition of subjectivity. The Framework for Teacher Evaluation approach is fact-laden, but it is far from fact-based.
The Danielson model is supposed to be an improvement over previous ones in part because it requires evaluators to observe teachers more than in the past. In the old system, typically, tenured teachers were observed one class period every other year. Now they’re observed one class period plus several pop-in visits, which may last only a few minutes, every other year. The Framework recommends numerous visits, even for veteran teachers, but in practicality evaluators are doing well to pop in a half dozen times or so because they have so many teachers to evaluate. Nevertheless, the increased frequency seems to give administrators the sense that they have a secure hold on the behaviors of their teachers and know with confidence what they’re doing in their classes. This confidence, frankly, is troubling. Let’s be generous and say that a principal can observe a teacher for a total of three class periods (one full period, plus bits of four or five other ones). Meanwhile, the typical teacher teaches, say, six periods per day for 180 days, which equals 1,080 periods. Three class periods represent less than one percent (0.3 percent, rounding up) of that teacher’s time with students during the year. How in the world can an evaluator say with confidence Teacher A is excellent and Teacher B is really close, but definitely only proficient based on seeing them teach less than one percent of the time?
Yet one principal said with confidence, bravado even, that he could observe two high-performing teachers who had always been rated as excellent in the past, and based on his Danielson-style observations he could differentiate between the excellent high-performing teacher and the proficient high-performing teacher, because, he said, the excellent teacher was doing something consistently, whereas the proficient teacher was doing that something only some of the time — what that something is was left undefined. If a writer submitted an academic article to a peer-reviewed journal and was drawing rock-solid conclusions based on observing anything .03% of the time … well, let us say that acceptance for publication would be unlikely.
The same standards of logic should be applied to judging teachers’ careers and assessing their worth to the profession. Period.
The Portfolio Conundrum
The confident administrator may point to another component of the Danielson model that is supposed to be an improvement over the previous approach: a portfolio prepared by the teacher. Teachers are supposed to provide their evaluator with evidence regarding their training and professionalism (especially for Danielson domains 1 and 4, “Planning and Preparation” and “Professional Responsibilities”), but there are some inherent problems with this approach and a lot of confusion. As far as confusion, principals seem to be in disagreement about how much material teachers should provide them. Some suggest only a few representative items, but the whole idea is for the portfolio to fill in the blanks for the evaluator, to make the evaluator aware of professional behaviors and activities that he or she can’t observe in the classroom (especially when they’re observing a teacher less than one percent of their time with students!). However, if teachers hand in thick portfolios, filled with evidence, the overburdened principal (and I’m not being sarcastic here), the overburdened principal hardly has time to pore through dozens of portfolios that look like they were prepared by James Michener (I debated between Michener and Tolstoy) — which leaves teachers in a conundrum: Do they turn in a modest amount of evidence, thereby selling themselves short, or do they submit copious amounts of evidence that won’t be read and considered by their evaluator anyway?
And it’s a moot question, of course, since nearly all teachers are going to be lumped into the proficient category to satisfy the public’s erroneous bell-curve expectations.
The Undervaluing of Content
I’ll add one bit more from the conversation because it leads to another important point — perhaps the most important — and that is one principal’s statement that he mainly focuses on a teacher’s delivery of the material and not the validity of the content because he usually doesn’t have the background in the subject area. In larger school districts, there may be department chairs who are at least in part responsible for evaluating teachers in their department (so an English teacher evaluates an English teacher, or a math teacher, a math teacher, etc.), but the vast majority of evaluations, for tenured and nontenured teachers alike, are performed by administrators outside of the content area. This, frankly, has always been a problem and largely invalidates the entire teacher evaluation system, but when the system was mainly benign, no one fussed too much about it (not even me). Now, however, when tenure and seniority laws have been weakened, and principals are programmed to be niggardly with excellent ratings, the fact that evaluators oftentimes have no idea if the teacher is dispensing valid knowledge or not undermines the whole approach.
Not to mention, the Danielson Framework claims to place about fifty percent of a teacher’s effectiveness on his or her knowledge of the subject. The portfolios are supposed to help with this dilemma (the portfolios that aren’t being read with any sort of care because of time issues). I’m dubious, though, that this is a legitimate concern of the framers of the Danielson Framework because they definitely privilege an approach to teaching that places the burden of knowledge production with the students. That is, ideally teachers are facilitating their students’ acquisition of knowledge through self-discovery, but they’re not imparting that knowledge to them directly. Indeed, excellent teachers do very little direct teaching at all.
This devaluation of content-area knowledge has been a growing trend for several years, and it’s not surprising that administrators are easily swayed toward this mindset. After all, teachers who go into administration have made the choice to pursue knowledge not in their subject-area field. Very, very few administrators have a masters degree in their original content area in addition to their administrative degrees and certificates. In theory, they may accept the idea that broader and deeper knowledge in your subject area is important, but they can’t truly understand just how valuable (even invaluable) it is since they didn’t teach as someone with an advanced degree in their field. They’re only human after all, and none of us can truly relate to an experience we haven’t had ourselves.
Campbell Brown and Her Unwitting Campbell Brown-shirts
We didn’t talk about this during the video round-table, but it seems clear to me that none of the administrators had any sense of the role they’re playing in the larger scheme of things. The players are too numerous and the campaign too complex to get into here in any depth, but there’s unquestionably a movement afoot to privatize education — that is, to take education out of the hands of trained professionals and put it in the hands of underpaid managers so that corporations can reap obscene profits, and turn traditional public schools into barely funded welfare institutions. The well-to-do will be able to send their sons and daughters to these corporate-backed charter schools, and middle-class parents can dig their infinite hole of financial debt even deeper in an effort to keep up and send their children to the private, corporate schools as well.
Campbell Brown and the Partnership for Educational Justice were behind the lawsuit that made teacher tenure unconstitutional in California (the Vergara decision), and they’re at it again in New York (Wright v. New York). The Danielson Framework, wielded by brainwashed administrators, is laying the groundwork for Vergara-like lawsuits across the land. Imagine how much easier it will be for Brown and partners in “reform” like David Boles to make the case that public schools are failing because, see, only a handful of teachers are performing at the top of their field. The rest, 90-something percent, are varying shades of mediocre, with powerful teachers unions shielding their mediocrity from public view.
Superintendents and principals have drunk the Campbell Brown-colored Kool-Aid. In this instance the metaphor is especially apropos because there are already movements underway to dismiss traditionally trained administrators as underqualified. In Illinois, the State Board of Education is changing from certificates to licenses and in the process requiring additional training to become an administrator. It is a recent change, but already there are insinuations that administrators who received the traditional training are going to be underqualified compared to their newly licensed colleagues.
Moreover, what does it say about a principal as recruiter of young talent when a significant number of his new hires have to be terminated year after year? What a waste of money and resources, and what a disservice to children! And what does it say about a principal as educational leader of his building when he can’t even shape the majority of his veteran teachers into excellent practitioners? Clearly, he’s not especially excellent either. And all those well-paid superintendents who hired all those lackluster principals, well … And all those publicly elected boards of education who hired all those lackluster superintendents, well … the gross mismanagement of taxpayer dollars is bordering on criminal fraud.
As I see it, the Partnership for Educational Justice’s grand scheme is to have principals help them dismantle professional associations like the NEA and AFT via their use of the Danielson Framework, state by state. Then they’ll systematically replace public schools with corporate-backed charter schools which will be staffed by undertrained, low-paid “teachers,” and instead of principals, each school/franchise will be overseen by a manager — just as it works in the corporate world now. Instead of boards of education who answer to taxpayers there will be boards of directors who answer to shareholders. Brilliant.
So every time principals sign an evaluation that undervalues their teachers, they’re also signing their own resignation letter. It’s all right: they’ll look quite fetching in their Brown-shirts as they wait in the unemployment line.
Not speaking about Danielson Framework per se, but
Sir Ken Robinson has several TED Talks regarding education, and his “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley” is an especially appropriate follow-up to my last post about the Danielson Group’s Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument. Robinson, who is very funny and engaging, doesn’t reference Charlotte Danielson and her group per se, but he may as well. The Danielson Group’s Framework, which has been adopted as a teacher evaluation instrument in numerous states, including Illinois, is emblematic — in fact, the veritable flagship — of everything that’s wrong with education in America, according to Robinson.
Treat yourself to twenty minutes of Robinson’s wit and wisdom:
’Tis the season–to traumatize young teachers
Illinois has many seasons–bow season, shotgun season … and every March is “traumatizing young teachers” season as school administrators across the state dismiss nontenured teachers, and they’re not even required to give a reason for the dismissal, hence, oftentimes they don’t. Teachers are left devastated, humiliated, and profoundly confused about whether they’ve chosen the right professional path after all.
A few years ago the Illinois legislature, in one of the opening salvos in its campaign to destroy and demoralize educators, expanded the length of time that teachers could be let go without cause to four years, which means that young professionals (or older ones entering the profession later in life) can be dedicated, hard-working teachers who are establishing themselves in their communities and developing collegial relationships for one, two, three and even four years when they’re blindsided by the administrator’s news that they won’t be coming back the following year.
Sometimes, of course, there have been issues raised, and the teacher has not corrected them to the administrator’s satisfaction; and sometimes the school district’s desperate financial situation has led to the dismissal. Too often, though, the young and developing educators are sacked without any warning whatsoever–they’ve fallen prey to the caprices of an administration that has no one to answer to, excerpt perhaps school board members, who tend to know only what administrators tell them since they rarely have direct contact with the teaching staff.
The situation has been exacerbated in the past year by the state’s mandate of a new model for evaluating teachers. It is more complicated and more labor intensive than the tools most district’s had been using. The increased complications and time commitments have not led to a better approach to evaluation, however. They’ve only opened the door for even more nebulous assessments of a teacher’s performance. Teacher evaluation is a rich subject in itself, too rich of a subject to discuss here–but the bottom line is that teaching is far too complex an endeavor to be reasonably evaluated by a single rubric that is used across grade levels, disciplines, and teaching assignments. In fact, it’s insulting to the profession that so many people believe such a model can be devised and successfully implemented. Physicians, attorneys, engineers, business professionals–and politicians!–would never allow themselves to be evaluated the way that a teacher’s worth is determined.
But no matter how simple or how complex the evaluation process is, its usefulness and fairness depend on the sagacity and integrity of the evaluating body. Unfortunately, sagacity and integrity are not prerequisites for becoming an administrator or a school board member. There are good administrators out there, of course, and well-meaning board members; but administrators and board members come in all stripes, just like the human population as a whole. Yet there is no check-and-balance built into the process. Young teachers who are dismissed unfairly, and the professional associations who represent their interests, have no recourse. No recourse at all.
In other words, there is no evaluation of the evaluator, whose sagacity and integrity, apparently, are assumed by the Illinois General Assembly … in all of its sagacity and integrity.
When there is an unfair and unwarranted dismissal, a shockwave goes through the faculty and the student body almost as palpable as an accidental death. Other nontenured teachers become like deer in hunting season and worry that they’ll be next–if not this spring maybe the next, or the next, or the next, or the next. Tenured teachers are angered, saddened and frustrated by the loss of a valuable colleague and trusted friend. It greatly diminishes their respect for their superiors and their good will in working with them. It disrupts students’ focus, and it teaches them a hard lesson about the perils of choosing a career in education. And once a district becomes known as one that mistreats young professionals, word spreads virulently and the best and brightest don’t bother to apply.
Who, in their right mind, would want to work for an administration and board that will dismiss them without reason after a year, or two, or three, or four of hard work and dedication? Who, in their right mind, would chance subjecting their spouse and possibly children to the trauma of a lost job beyond their control?
Young teachers have mainly debt (nowadays from colossal student loans) and very little savings. It’s frightening to be jobless, especially when it’s due to no fault of their own–at least, no fault they’ve been made aware of. Yet teachers must continue to teach for the remainder of the school year, while also looking for new employment. They are often–magnanimously–given the option of resigning instead of being dismissed, but it’s likely a thin disguise that fools no one in their search for another teaching job. They find themselves in very difficult situations when interviewing elsewhere because the question must come up “Why did you leave such-and-such school?” What, then, do they say that won’t compromise either their honesty or their chances of landing another job?
The fact that we as a society allow this devastating unfairness to be visited on our young teachers every spring is just another indication of how little we value education, educators and–for that matter–the children they’ve dedicated themselves to educating.
Notes from the Illinois Education and Technology Conference 2012
(It’s been several months since my last post. I’ve been writing a monograph on the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, and it’s soaked up a lot of my time and writing energy. In particular, Sunday mornings have been my preferred blogging time, but that has also been the best hours to work on my Beowulf project, which is now far enough along that I can start to devote some thinking-writing time to other pursuits, like this blog. I know: Hooray!)
I’ve deliberately restricted the subject matter of this blog to my reading and writing life, which means I’ve deliberately avoided writing about other things that are important to me, like education. But I’ve been a public schoolteacher for 29 years, plus I’ve also been an adjunct instructor at two universities, one public, one Catholic, for 15 years — so I have a lot of opinions about education (informed opinions, I like to believe). I’ve avoided blogging about education-related issues for a couple of reasons, most likely. One, so much of my life and my being are devoted to teaching, it’s a pleasant break to blog about other pats of my life that are important to me. Two — and no. 2 is the more practical matter — to write about education is to, inevitably, critique education, and since my experiences are limited to specific faculties and specific superiors, that means I must at times critique my colleagues, my administrators, and my school board members.
I believe no. 2 is the reason that one hears so little (i.e., reads or sees via interviews, etc.) from actual practicing teachers: all the power and authority flow in one direction, from the top down. Quite frankly, a school board or an administration that decides it wants to make a teacher’s life miserable can quite easily do so. I know that the media makes it sound like “teacher unions” are these all-powerful entities, but the truth is there’s very little associations can do to shield teachers from their superiors’ day-to-day ire. New tenure/seniority and evaluation laws in Illinois make it fairly easy for administrations to circumvent tenure protection — but even before such laws were adopted, administrations could always rely on the oldest trick in the book: perhaps they couldn’t very easily out and out fire a teacher they didn’t like, but there was nothing preventing them from making his life so miserable that he opted to resign or retire ahead of schedule.
Consequently, the ones who know education best — the classroom teachers who are in the trenches day in and day out — are left standing silently on the sidelines of debates, allowing their associations to speak for them en masse (associations, a.k.a, unions that have been demonized in the media as all that is wrong with education in the United States).
In my long layoff from blogging, while the presidential campaigns burned with rhetorical fury, often misrepresenting teachers and their collective mission, I decided to lift my own ban on writing about education … and I’ll begin by writing about the 19th annual Illinois Education & Technology Conference that I attended in Springfield November 29 and 30. To set the stage, I have been a long-time critic of technology’s powerful role in education. I’m not a Luddite, not by any means. I love technology. I maintain multiple websites, I write two different blogs, I’m on Facebook (too much), I began tweeting before 90% of the world had heard of Twitter, I Skype, I have a smart phone, a netbook, a school-purchased iPad, and this desktop on which I’m writing this post; I love Netflix and Hulu, I have a YouTube channel, I’m on Vimeo, I’ve been into desktop publishing since the mid 80s. . . .
But at the same time, I believe our society and our schools have gone overboard with their worshiping of technology and their advocacy of its use in all circumstances. Quite simply, when it comes to developing the mind via reading, writing and thinking skills, ancient, time-tested (non-computer-technological) ways are still the best — by far. (Now that I’ve lifted my moratorium on discussing education-related issues I’m sure I’ll post more on these specific issues in the coming months.)
So I went to the conference as a devout skeptic, but I was truly hoping to find some reason for hope: some concrete method for employing technology with my students that seemed to be beneficial, or at least some sense that technology would one day be viewed as a tool to be used when circumstances warranted, and not an idol who required daily pacification.
In a word, after two full days of conferencing, I was disappointed.
First of all, there were very few sessions that even pretended to offer practical advice on classroom pedagogy. Many, if not most, of the sessions were conducted by school IT people, the people who bring technology into their districts then keep it running (and expanding). It’s not universal of course, but many IT people seem to view teachers as impediments to their getting the coolest technology into the hands of students. One presenter (who I’m sure is a nice guy in the regular part of his life) even complained about teachers who have the audacity to ask “Why?” — that is, teachers who aren’t willing to embrace every piece of hardware and software that appears at their classroom door, but, rather, they respond critically (as in critically thinking) by asking what the potential benefits and drawbacks are. (One notable exception was Jon Orech, of Downers Grove South High School, who said that asking why is, in fact, the most vital question when it comes to new technology, not what and how as so many seem to think.)
Another IT-person presenter referred to some teachers in his district as being “rock stars,” that is, teachers who use a lot of technology with their students — which of course suggests that more circumspect and more traditional teachers are, sadly, what, Fred Rogers-like? This presenter’s co-presenter expressed what also seems to be a common theme among the pro-tech folks: That if all teachers would simply embrace all that the newest technologies have to offer, then students could finally reach their full potential. Sounds great, except I don’t know what it means, in a practical sense, to embrace the newest technologies. What would that look like in the classroom on a daily basis? How would teachers have to change their approaches to unleash this revolution? No one can seem to say. For that matter, what sorts of potentials in students are we talking about? It seems to have something to do with making them more creative. Achievement is a popular concept; students using technology will achieve more or higher … or something.
Although, the gentleman who made the “rock star” comment also stressed to his fellow IT-ers in the audience, do not — repeat, do not — tell your administration that students will do better on achievement tests, because they probably won’t and then what do you do? He was specifically referring to the concept of one-to-one computing, a trend in education that features giving each student a device of some sort (usually a laptop or a tablet, especially these days an iPad) and having them do just about everything via the device, avoiding traditional textbooks, and paper-based exams and projects, etc. “Rock-star” man also advised his fellows not to count on saving some money in the budget by reducing the amount of paper being used, because this, in essence, “paperless” approach seems to use just as much paper as always.
One-to-one computing, or at least the idea of it, is big right now, especially in the Chicago suburbs it would seem. Schools on the east coast started the trend several years ago, and most have already abandoned it — which isn’t stopping us Midwesterners from giving it a spin around the dancefloor. “Rock star” guy’s co-presenter — both of whom, by the way, seem like very decent and funny human beings — said that their administrator wanted to go to one-to-one because neighboring superintendents were doing it, and he didn’t want to seem out of step. This is another problem in education: many school boards and administrators make decisions out of, basically, peer pressure, and not because of solid research results that support the approach, whichever one we’re talking about.
My final observation: The iPad is extraordinarily popular right now in education — in spite of the fact no one seems to know how to use it in a classroom setting very effectively. It doesn’t easily integrate with existing equipment, like other non-Mac computers, projectors and printers; plus its on-screen keyboard is awkward to use. Teachers really, really like it, but they appreciate what it does for their professional and private lives, not for what it can do in the classroom, which doesn’t seem to be much. I count myself among them. I like my school-purchased iPad a lot and use it every day … at home. I’ve found almost nothing that I can do with it in the classroom, in spite of wanting to find useful applications, which was one of the reasons I attended the conference.
Don’t get me wrong: There were several sessions focused on using the iPad in the classroom, and I of course couldn’t attend all of them — so maybe I just missed the best of the best (my life can be like that) — but based on their descriptions and the sessions I did attend, the suggestions are pretty elementary, and consist of using the iPad in lieu of something else that’s more traditional and more common. For example, use the iPad to make pictures, well, cave children made pictures on their school-cave walls; or use the iPad to make music, well, … you get it. In other words, it seems like a lot of the pedagogical suggestions for the iPad are about playing. And playing, I agree, can be very beneficial and even very educational, but since when did every kid need an iPad to play?
Let me just end by saying that I know tech people are good people, and teachers and administrators who fervently promote technology are good people — it’s just that too many people in education in general are working under the assumption that society has sold them: that technology is inherently positive, and the more schools use it, the better those schools will be at teaching students. We used to think smoking was healthy, too, and that asbestos was a wonderful, life-saving product. Sometimes, even with the best of intentions, we’re wrong; and we have to acknowledge it, and re-think and re-shape what we’re doing. I’d like to believe that time is coming soon in education, but I suspect we’ll be lounging in our asbestos-tiled rooms taking drags on our unfiltered Camels for decades to come.
12 Winters Blog 
2 comments