In 2008, TFA celebrity and StudentsFirst founder Michelle Rhee had this to say in an influential TIME magazine feature:

“The thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely,” she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn’t respect…. “People say, ‘Well, you know, test scores don’t take into account creativity and the love of learning,’” she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. “I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.”

Over the years TFA has become all about ‘data’ and TFA alumni became education ‘reform’ leaders who also stressed the importance of ‘outcomes’ like test scores and test score ‘gains.’  So I was pleased to see in a recent Pass The Chalk post where ‘reform’ hero, TFA board member, and Grammy award winning singer John Legend interviewed a 2012 TFA corps member, John Choi, who has just completed his first year.

Here is a quote from Mr. Choi:

“My vision has come a long way from just focusing on data. My number one goal is to inspire students to want to learn the material. Everything else just follows from that. At the end of the year it doesn’t matter what their scores are—but if I can see passion in the subject I would have succeeded in the classroom.”

Good for Mr. Choi.  I hope we hear more like this from TFA.

That’s some fire-and-brimstone rhetoric you’re using, Gary. You’re absolutely right that pro-reform people like me are not doing a good job if we want to hide our tracks for when the reform-apocalypse is nigh. I’m not too worried though.

I don’t like being deemed ‘moderate’ – because I think ‘moderates’ too often just vapidly demand that we ‘do what’s right for kids’ – but I do think it’s completely appropriate and necessary for reformers to dissent, argue, and hold each other ‘accountable.’ (The irony there is intended.)

As to the politics, I’m not as pessimistic as you are optimistic – that is, I’m not worried that the tide will shift so quickly against reformers. Put it in perspective: almost every Republican politician is ‘pro-reform’ and a huge number of Democrats are too. It would take a massive shift of the political landscape to wind up where you predict.

I do sense some shift though. I think reformers are correctly realizing – as I’ve written about before – that alienating teachers is not an effective method for enacting reform. Admittedly, it’s not entirely clear what this kinder, gentler reform looks like.

On that front, let me posit one example and a suggestion. You recently took Kevin Huffman to task for a proposal that would bring experienced, highly rated teachers into low-performing schools. I personally think it’s a terrific idea; as I’m sure you know, high-poverty schools are often staffed by the most inexperienced teachers. Huffman’s proposal would attempt to ameliorate that problem.

The Memphis teachers’ union president, Keith Williams replied to this eminently sane idea with an utter non sequitur: “These teachers will not be able to make a substantial difference in these communities, which have economic deprivation, massive poverty and are disconnected from the fiber of society. Those students don’t do well until you put other programs in place for their families.” Regardless of whether this is true, it does not respond to the substance of Huffman’s proposal. Is Williams suggesting that because schools can’t change everything, we shouldn’t try to change schools?

I happen to agree with you that it doesn’t make sense to withhold the full $7,000 bonus from teachers who participate in the program but do not achieve a certain rating. (This is particularly true in consideration of the statistical noise in value-added measures.) This sort of feedback, I think, is an excellent example of where there is room for teachers and reformers to work together. But instead of trying to improve Huffman’s proposal, the union chose to bash it.

On the topic of school choice, I think your analogy to clubs is illustrative: Why don’t we just have the government-run clubs? Why not let the government take over restaurants too?  The answer is that many people believe that competition and the market lead to a host of good things: innovation, price reduction, diversification, better service.

Do you think we should nationalize our clubs and restaurants? And if we had such a system, would those who wanted to change it be waging a ‘war on restaurant workers?’ If government-run schools are such a great idea, why not have government-run restaurants?

A sensible answer is that restaurants are different than schools. Diane Ravitch often makes a similar point. I do think that choice supporters like myself have to acknowledge some degree of truth to that. I have been disappointed by some of the research (pdf) on charters and vouchers; though I also think there’s reason to be believe that we’ve not seen the true potential of a choice system since there are often caps on and unequal funding for charters. (Though I do recognize the charter funding disparity is a complex issue, I haven’t been able to find an apples-to-apples comparison.) There’s also a lot of research suggesting some promising (but not necessarily conclusive) results and innovations created by school choice.

Reformers have now by and large gotten on board with the notion of charter accountability, which I support. If a charter school is not showing good results within a few years, it should be closed. The evidence in favor of this is strong, and the leading reformers are embracing this idea.

I’d also add, anecdotally, that when my school hired a new principal she visited a neighboring charter and returned bearing many new ideas. Some of those ideas panned out; other didn’t. This is an example of the fact that school choice can benefit traditional public schools, and indeed there’s some strong evidence to support this view.

I’m also curious how your time teaching at a magnet school affects your view on this. I don’t mean this as a gotcha question, but aren’t magnets exactly – indeed even more so – like the Studio 54 club you analogized charters to?

Finally, I want to return to school budgets for a moment. In general, Gary, if you think that schools can only make a limited difference in students’ lives, than maybe we shouldn’t cut funding, but we certainly shouldn’t increase funding. (I’m not clear on your position though: is it that schools can’t generally make significant measurable differences in students’ lives or that they can’t make significant differences both measurable and immeasurable?) It seems like you think that the difference between an average teacher and an undertrained, inexperienced teacher is large, but the difference between a great teacher and an average one is small. Is that right? And if so, is there any evidence (beyond your ‘sixth sense’) for this view?

Matt

Dear Matt,

You are right that what is currently labeled education ‘reform’ does have bipartisan support.  You know what else had bipartisan report?  The Iraq war.  And if a president were to, again, lie and claim we need to go to war based on intelligence of hidden weapons of mass destruction, I seriously doubt that the bipartisan support for going to a war based on lies would be supported.  I could be wrong about my two year time frame.  I guess we will see.

This discussion that we are having, in some ways, is a microcosm, of the big ed reform debate going on around the country.  And just like the entire ‘reform’ side, you are already running out of gas.

I have no problem with trying to recruit the best teachers to teach in the toughest schools.  If nothing else, it will be an interesting experiment to test what would happen if everything else was held constant at a school and some of the teachers were replaced with ‘highly effective’ teachers.  $2,000 is definitely not enough money to lure someone there.  $7,000 might be enough, though probably not.  A few years ago the New York City DOE was offering $30,000 for ‘highly effective’ teachers to transfer to ‘failing’ schools and teach three classes and spend the rest of the time mentoring other teachers.  I applied for this, but got turned down.

If I had gotten that offer and taken it, I still don’t think that this would be a great ‘investment’ for the city.  As I suggested in that post about Huffman, there are other things besides money that teachers at ‘failing’ schools would like — such as smaller classes and smaller class loads.  So rather than giving me a big signing bonus, what if every teacher at that school had class sizes maxed at 20 students and four periods at most a day.  That might lure me there even without the merit pay signing bonus.  This would cost a lot more but I believe that this would make that big ‘difference’ even more.

I won’t address your government run nightclubs question.  I’ll let the readers who are willing to leave comments feast on that one.

Finally, a recurring theme in these letters is ‘how much of a difference’ can schools and teachers make.  In all my letters, particularly the fourth one, I’ve tried to make it clear that schools and teachers do make a difference.  And in answer to your question, sometimes it is tough to measure that difference.  Certainly test score ‘gains’ capture a small part of it.  If those gains are gotten through heavy test prep for poorly made tests then the gains don’t capture the difference at all accurately.  And, yes, I do think that there is a big difference between an untrained new teacher and an average teacher, but not as big between an average teacher and a ‘highly effective’ one.  This is just another way of saying that teaching, like juggling, has a steep learning curve.  A beginning juggler can’t keep three balls in the air, even for a few seconds.  Nobody would want to watch that for very long.  A competent juggler might be able to keep three balls going for a few minutes at a time.  As most people can’t even do that, it is still pretty impressive.  And the ‘highly effective’ juggler has five balls going at a time.  Even though few people can do that, it isn’t that much more impressive than the juggler with the three balls.

OK Matt, that’s it for me for today.  I do hope that you’ll come back with something a little more compelling that this recent offering.  Though it does give me some stuff to ‘riff’ off of, and that is useful if just for that, I just don’t know if me and the readers of this blog are getting enough out of this.  In terms that you can relate to, you’ve got to increase your ‘value added’ if you want to continue share the spotlight with me.

Gary

At my school we would take all the tests and split up the task among the math teachers, being careful that no teacher grades his or her own class.  The scoring rubric is often very vague and we would have a lot of heated arguments about how many points of partial credit to give for this or that, as we tried to fairly interpret the guidelines.

This year we learned that instead of grading the students in our school, the math teachers would all go to another site where the Regents for many schools would be sent and we would work together with teachers from other schools to grade the Regents centrally.

One reason for this new policy is explained by a recent New York Post article entitled “High schools that didn’t grade their own Regents exams last year fared worse than those that did.”  According to the article, as the title suggests, students somehow got a “Home Field Advantage” when teachers from their own school graded them.  I’m not surprised by this.  It isn’t that I think that many teachers were trying to cheat to make them or their students look better — though that is certainly something that must happen.  It is actually possible that the grades, even though they are higher, are more accurate when they are graded by the teachers at the school.

Within the school teachers may have taught a topic in a particular way which is a bit unfamiliar to teachers in another school which might cause those other teachers to grade the test lower.  Either way, if the grades are more accurate or less accurate, it is a fact that when tests are graded by teachers from a different school, they are lower.

At the end of the article we are assured, “This is the first year all high schools are barred from scoring their own Regents.”  And this is something that I welcome.  As long as all schools are doing it, it would eliminate that home field advantage, particularly for charter schools who have the most incentive to inflate their grades, consciously or subconsciously.

So I was quite surprised when I got a tip from a teacher at a school that is co-located with a charter high school that the charter school was grading their own Regents.  I checked around and got confirmation from another charter school that they, too, were grading their own Regents.  For charter schools, it seems, the centralized grading is merely optional.  So much for accountability.

Over the summer when we hear about how charter schools outperformed the nearby ‘failing’ school on the Regents, I hope they will put an asterisk by the statement.

In a recent post I had written about the two new co-CEOs of TFA, I had mentioned that if I were invited to an event on their TFA listening tour, I’d go, even if it was some sort of mass invite instead of a personal invitation.

Well, a few days ago I did receive an email that Matt and Elisa want to meet with some alumni from the 1990s when they are in New York City.  The event was scheduled from 7:30 AM to 8:30 AM, so it was pretty early and quiet when I arrived at the TFA national headquarters.  I don’t know how many people were invited, but a small group of seven alumni were there for this pretty intimate setting.

Without identifying everyone by name, in addition to me there was a man who worked for the college board, a former staff member who is now a public school parent, a current high school principal of an ‘A’ rated school who was going to host Matt and Elisa at her school later that day, a school leader from a school that is featured as a ‘miracle’ public school in Wendy Kopp’s last book, and which gets mentioned at fundraiser events, a 1990 alum who has been teaching for 22 years, and a former TFA staff member who now works for the New York City Department of Education.  With this group, even though I did know a few of them already, I suspected that this might be a TFA / corporate reform love fest with plenty of cries for higher expectations.

Matt asked if we would go around and respond to the questions:  1) How do you think New York City is doing with education currently? and 2) What do you think of TFA’s role?

The first person to respond was the alum who now works at the college board.  Though he tried to be diplomatic, he was definitely cautious and even wary of how TFA was using this opportunity they have to influence school reform.  This was, for me, a good sign.  The public school parent spoke a bit about inequity in schools, nothing really specific about TFAs role.

Next was the principal and she talked about how ed reform is over simplified and that TFA should do more to address the complexity.  Though she felt that this reform movement has incorporated more ‘accountability’ and that charter schools have shown ‘what’s possible’ she seemed generally frustrated with the way that TFA always highlights charter schools, particularly KIPPs.  She felt pretty strongly that the TFA commitment should be raised to three years especially since it is so competitive to get in.

When it was my turn, I had about five minutes, which is tough for me because I had a lot to say and wanted to make what I said count.  I said that I don’t think the reforms in New York City have been improving schools.  Certainly the national tests don’t show improvement compared to other big cities.  As far as TFA is concerned, I said that while I felt that TFA may have earned ‘a seat at the table,’ it seems like they have been given more seats than they deserve and that they have not been responsible with this influence they have been permitted.  For New York, I said that TFA should be actively opposing all the school closures that have been going on here over the years, that some of these schools are schools that employ TFA teachers and even TFA administrators.  When I pointed out that the main NYC DOE employee who is shutting down the schools is a TFA alum, himself, they said that they don’t tell him what to do, and I reminded them that he was recently the keynote speaker at a large TFA fundraiser.  I also expressed frustration that TFA is still putting a spotlight on all the other prominent alumni corporate reformers.  Maybe not Michelle Rhee anymore, but definitely the rest of that crew (Huffman, Barbic, White, Anderson, Johnston, Feinberg, Levin, and Daly).

I wanted to end with something positive since I did appreciate being invited to this thing so I spoke a little bit about how young TFAers can have a very positive influence on their schools.  I talked about how me and the two other TFA teachers at my school in Houston were very involved and active in volunteering to be on school improvement committees all the time.  Of course this is true for new non-TFA teachers too, but I did want to say something positive.

After me was the school leader at the public ‘miracle’ school who I’ve known for a while and who was very sincere about what they have and have not accomplished at his school.  He felt that TFA was also missing an opportunity to help spread best practices, particularly how teachers can work together as a team.  He also spoke about the complexity of the issues and how it seems that TFA tries to simplify things.

Next was the 22 year veteran teacher.  She spoke about how tests are important, but how we lose the ‘soul’ of what education is about when we focus too much on data points and not enough about what kind of people we want our students to be.  A lot of heads were nodding in agreement as she spoke.

Finally, the former staffer who now works for the New York City DOE spoke and he, too, was not very enthusiastic about how TFA was supporting the teachers that were involved in his district.  Though we were all polite, even I really tried to be, I think it was clear that I am not alone in my concerns about the things that TFA is doing.  I believe that there are more alumni who feel the way I do than there are people who believe the corporate reform movement has the right idea.

Matt and Elisa were definitely thinking hard, and furiously scribbling in their notebooks, throughout the meeting.  They looked tired, and not just because it was such an early meeting.  I could be projecting how I’d feel if I were them, and I’m certainly no expert on body language, but how could they not be frustrated trying crack this dilemma they face:  For about five or six years the TFA ‘message’ was pretty easy — charters and Michelle Rhee.  And it was working out pretty good for TFA as they now raise over $300 million a year.  But it seems clear that the ‘tide is turning’ and TFA is going to have to be strategic to make sure that they don’t get left out when the pendulum of ed reform shifts back to things that actually work and people who actually know about education.  But if they stray too far from what has been working for TFA, they risk their funding.  I’m sure they do not want to be the ones who ran the organization into the ground — killing the goose that lays the golden eggs — by trying to be more diplomatic.  Honestly I don’t even know if they have the power to make any significant changes without first consulting the board, which is led by Wendy Kopp.  I don’t envy their task.

I also don’t know if this meeting was typical of these listening tour stops.  The snippets and tweets I had seen and read about made it sound like there were certainly some improvements that people felt could be done, but that people were generally satisfied with how things were going.  Perhaps the audience in this one, teachers who have been at it for nearly 20 years, had a very different, and in my opinion, more informed, view.

Since this was a ‘listening’ tour, Elisa and Matt only made a few remarks afterwards.  They were very nice and quite humble.  They seem to be very hard workers and I think they genuinely care about improving education in this country.  Elisa said that she could see how there is a perception that TFA is on a ‘side’ of the reform debate, but that TFA does recognize how complex the issues are.  Matt, when he spoke, even mentioned that he likes reading my blog.

After the hour was up, Matt and Elisa had to leave for another meeting.  Before they left, I chatted with each of them.  It was a bit strange talking to these two people who, for me, have been abstractions for the past few months.  I found them to be very likeable, just as I have for other TFA staffers I’ve met throughout the years.

I left the building and had to take a few minutes to process what had just happened.  I can’t say for sure that we accomplished much.  I guess it will depend on what sorts of changes that they implement based on these conversations.

I only spoke for about 5 minutes at the table and then for about two minutes to each of them afterwards as I didn’t want to monopolize the meeting with my ideas.  But assuming that they will read this blog entry, I’ll offer some ideas of what changes might quiet some of their critics while not alienating their funding base.  Now I don’t know if they want to hear these ideas, but I think it will be useful to write them up anyway.  Five years from now if TFA continues to lose support around the country, they can look back at this post to answer the question, “What could we have done to prevent this?”

1.  Make TFA a 3 year commitment

Now I know that this is a suggestion that has been around for about twenty years, but now is an important time for TFA to revisit it.  The reason against doing this is that the three year commitment could scare away potentially great teachers — ones who might even stay way beyond three years once they get the bug.  I do understand that argument.  It would be better for the kids if those teachers don’t get scared away by the long sounding commitment.  But if this argument is really valid, why not make it just a one year commitment for all the potentially great people who are scared away by the two year commitment?

I think that this would improve the quality of the corps members, but even if it wouldn’t, this would be a wise move from a PR point of view.  It would be an incredible political move to silence their critics.  If they were to do this, the worst anyone could say about it would be that it was ‘a step in the right direction.’  The best part about this is that it would cost TFA virtually nothing to do this.

The only tricky part would be how to phrase the press release so they don’t look like they should have done this years ago.  I’d say that they could just say that the landscape has changed from ten or twenty years ago and now the urgency of the problem requires that they have their corps members commit to more years.  This would be huge news in the education world and would be something concrete to help reverse the growing resistance to TFA.

But what about the people who are terrible teachers, even after two years?  Do we really want more kids to suffer through their third year?  Well, just like around 12% of corps members don’t make it through the two years, there would be people who quit before the three year commitment ends.  Realistically, you can’t force anyone to teach more than they are willing to.

2.  More Transparency

For an organization that claims to be ‘data driven,’ they are sure secretive about sharing that data.  An example of this is the quit rate.  Nationally this rate has been around 12% for the last few years, though most people are not aware of that.  But even more secretive is the quit rate for the different regions.  I once read that in Kansas City about 25% of the people quit.  I think Detroit has a very high quit rate too.  But this is speculation since this data is not publicly available.  I know that it wouldn’t be great for recruitment if people knew that one out of eight people quit overall and that in some regions one out of four do, but concealing information like this is misleading.  The same is true for the very mixed results of studies about the effectiveness of TFA teachers compared to non-TFA teachers.  Yes, there are some studies in which TFA has done well, but plenty have said the opposite too.

Now I understand that it would be bad business to highlight the weaknesses of the organization, but if what’s good for TFA is bad for the country’s education system then it is quite irresponsible for TFA not to give the whole story so legislators can make informed decisions about, for example, whether or not to spend millions of dollars of tax payer money to bring more TFAers to their districts.

3.  Slow down the growth of the corps

The number of new corps members each year has exploded from about 1,000 ten years ago to 6,000 this year with a plan to raise that to 10,000 in a few years.  Can you say ‘law of diminishing returns’?  This is way too many corps members.  The cost of training and supporting all these corps members does not seem, to me, to be the best use of TFA’s annual $300 million budget.  Use the money to improve the program rather than grow it.  The reason I say this is that I know that the first year TFAers are generally surviving, at best.  They are not closing the achievement gap.  Probably widening it a bit.  Now I know the idea is that even if most of these first year teachers are pretty bad, if 1% of them go on to become major players in education reform then having 10,000 will lead to 100 leaders while having 5,000 will only lead to 50 leaders.  It seems like the price that having so many students suffer while a first year corps member tries to figure out how to manage a classroom is too big to balance out those 50 potential leaders.

There is an ideal number of new corps members.  Some critics would say it is zero, but I’d say that it is around 3,000.   Ten thousand is absurd.

4.  Stop placing special education teachers

No explanation necessary.

5.  Shut down a few regions

Given what is going on in Philadelphia and Chicago with schools getting unfairly shut down, I’d start by shutting those two down.  Teachers there are very frustrated with this kind of education ‘reform’ and TFA is just another branch of that reform which will not be welcomed by most teachers there.  There are other regions, however, where there really are teacher shortages and where schools really need people who are willing to commit even two years.  Send them there.  Don’t add salt to the wounds of these suffering cities.

6.  Stop fixating on test scores

There are TFA alums who are principals of regular non-charter schools who are doing fantastic jobs, even though they are not getting the kind of miraculous test scores that the big charter chains lie about getting.  I’d like to see TFA give some attention to those other schools.  It would be a nice break to hear about a school that is doing other things besides test prep — maybe they are doing something positive for the community or they have a chess team.  Really anything but test scores to celebrate.  The nice thing about this is that it would allow TFA to ‘take credit’ for even more successes.  But this would require acknowledging that ‘success’ can take many forms beyond proficiency percentages on very poorly made state assessments in reading and math.

7.  Find some new heroes

There are so many alumni doing so much that isn’t directly related to having ‘no excuses’ and beating up on teachers.  Find some of them and give them the spotlight.  Yes, if they know anything about education they are likely to say something negative about the policies supported by the eight or so TFA celebrities we have been hearing about for the past ten years.  Some of those TFA celebrities are sure to be blacklisted when the media finally wakes up to what damage they have caused.  It would be smart to diversity your portfolio of heroes so when the corporate reform movement collapses in the next couple of years, you’ve still got some more stable heroes to claim.

One unsung hero is 1990 alum Steve Zimmer.  Recently he ran for re-election for a Los Angeles school board seat.  His opponent was a non-educator who was heavily funded by corporate reformers from DFER (Democrats For Education Reform).  Zimmer pulled of the upset despite millions of dollars funneling into his opponent’s campaign from people like Mike Bloomberg.  But TFA couldn’t even offer a congratulatory Tweet to their own success story since TFA is one of the darlings of DFER.  My advice:  Just because DFER likes you, doesn’t mean that you have to like them back.  They really don’t know anything about the complexities of education.

OK.  That’s all I’ve got for today.  I hope I didn’t break some kind of unwritten code by reporting about this meeting.  If I’ve portrayed anything inaccurately, I invite Elisa or Matt, or anyone else who was at that meeting (there were also about three other current staffers there) feel free to respond in the comments.

The evaluation system will consist of three components:  55 points for principal observations, 40 points for test scores, and 5 points for student surveys.  Much of this was inevitable as last year the state legislator updated education law 3012-c, which dictated the components and weights of the test scores and ‘other measures’ which now include principal and student ratings.  The whole idea of ‘multiple measures’ is that teachers won’t be unfairly punished for struggling in one category if they make up for it with success in the other categories.  And the most important and reliable measures, therefore, get the most weight, in this case, the principal evaluation.

Reading the 240 page report issued, there were two mentions of a very unusual provision, which has been noticed by several bloggers:

On page 37 it says:

And on page 38 it mentions this again:

So according to page 37, both parties (the city and the union) “indicated in their testimony — consistent with legislative intent — that all teachers rated ineffective in both measures of student learning subcomponents must be determined to be ineffective regardless of their score on the Other Measures subcomponent.”

Well, this seemed to defeat the whole idea of having multiple measures and of weighing some measures more than others.  So I took a look at the actual text from 3012-c and learned that the law does not mandate this at all.

State law 3012-c simply defined ‘scoring bands’ so that teachers scoring between 91 and 100 points would be ‘highly effective,’ between 75 and 90 would be ‘effective,’ between 65 and 74 would be ‘developing,’ and between 0 and 64 would be ‘ineffective.’  Two ineffectives in a row can result in being fired, regardless of tenure status.

Also, the law describes scoring bands for the 40 points of test scores, which is actually broken down as 20 points for state tests and 20 points for ‘locally made’ assessments.  In this they outline that a score from 0 to 2 on either of these, out of 20 points, is ‘ineffective’ for that category.

As a consequence of this, if a teacher were to be ineffective on the two test score components, they would only get a maximum of 4 points out of 40, thus it would be impossible for them to reach the 65 points needed to be ‘developing’ even if they get perfect scores in everything else.

So, yes, mathematically it is true that because the cutoff for ‘ineffective’ on tests was set to 2 out of 20 points on each of the measures and because the cutoff for ‘ineffective’ overall was set to 64, a teacher cannot be rated anything but ‘ineffective’ if they are rated ‘ineffective’ on both parts of the test scores, regardless of what they get on the other measures.

HOWEVER, this does not mean that the intent of the law was to make the test score component trump everything else.  It just so happens that they made the ineffective score on the test score component so low that it would work out that way.  BUT what if they were to decide after a year of doing this evaluation system that too many teachers were being rated ‘ineffective’ overall so they decided to lower the cutoff to something like 55.  Well, assuming that they didn’t change the cutoff for ineffective on the test scores then, at least according to the law, a teacher would be able to escape the ineffective overall rating even if they got a 4 or under on their test scores if they did well enough on the other measures.  Or if they decided to keep the 64 cutoff for overall effective but to RAISE the cutoff score for ineffective on test scores so that now it was 0 to 10 points to be ineffective in test scores, well, again according to the law, it would be possible for someone to get 10 points on test scores and be ineffective on test scores with the new scoring bands, but still get to 65 and not be ineffective overall if they were to get 55 points on their other measures.

But now, with Kings plan the way it is written, these would be loopholes that they can use to give the test scores more weight than the law allows.  It very clearly says in King’s decision that ineffective in test scores means ineffective overall.  Right now the way the scoring bands are defined, it is a moot point.  Mathematically it is not possible to escape ineffective overall if you are ineffective on both test score components.  But if the bands were to change then this would become a very real possibility and one that, by my reading of the actual law, would be illegal.

A few days ago I saw a tweet from TFA co-CEO Matt Kramer which was also retweeted by the other co-CEO Elisa Villaueva-Beard about an important op-ed written by Huffman defending a new merit pay scheme in Tennessee.

Huffman was responding to a quote from the Tennessee teachers’ union president Keith Williams in an article in a local paper the week before.  Just so I’m not accused of taking anything out of context, here is Huffman’s piece in its entirety:

On May 8, during Teacher Appreciation Week, the Tennessee Department of Education announced a new program to provide $7,000 signing bonuses and $5,000 retention bonuses for high-performing teachers willing to teach in “Priority Schools” — the schools performing at the bottom of the state in academic outcomes. Most of these schools — 69 out of 83 — are in Memphis.

The money, which in the past would have been spent on consultants, vendors or administrators, represents a historic effort to help struggling schools turn around student performance by investing directly in proven, superstar teachers.

If you are not deeply immersed in the upside-down world of public education, you might assume that the teachers union in Memphis would be ecstatic about millions of dollars flowing directly to teachers, and about the recognition of the incredible impact that great teachers have on their students’ lives.

Unfortunately, you would be wrong.

Upon learning of the signing bonuses, Memphis Education Association president Keith Williams remarkably told The Commercial Appeal in a May 9 article: “These teachers will not be able to make a substantial difference in these communities, which have economic deprivation, massive poverty and are disconnected from the fiber of society. Those students don’t do well until you put other programs in place for their families.”

Think about that for a minute. “These teachers” won’t make a difference — teachers who have the highest Level 5 competency rating and a proven track record of advancing student learning. “Those students” don’t do well, no matter their teachers — students in poverty, the children most in need of supportive adults who believe in their abilities.

Williams is dead wrong. Every day, in Memphis and across Tennessee, we see
teachers who work with students in poverty making a profound difference in the lives of children and families. Let me introduce you to two of them.
Katrina Armor and Casie Jones are both proud Memphians who teach at schools with high poverty and historically low overall achievement.

Armor has been teaching for five years and is in her first year at Corning
Achievement Elementary School. Jones, a fellow in the Teach Plus program, is an 11-year veteran teacher and is in her fourth year at Martin Luther King Jr. Student Academy.

Despite the challenges in their daily work, Armor and Jones are committed to holding themselves, their students and their colleagues to high standards. Last year, just 27 percent of the fifth-grade students at Corning were proficient in math on TCAP. This year, as they headed into TCAP, Armor had more than doubled that proficiency percentage. Because of her leadership, her students achieved significant growth that will change their academic trajectories and their future opportunities.

Jones works with students who have been part of the juvenile justice system or were expelled from their previous schools, teaching English to some 400 sixth- to 12th grade students each year.

Despite these challenges, Jones aims to ensure that all of the students she works with have access to college and other strong postsecondary opportunities and know what is possible in their futures regardless of what has happened in the past.

While not every teacher achieves great results, many do. Last year, 29 percent of Memphis City Schools teachers scored a Level 5 on rigorous performance evaluations which incorporated measures of student growth.
Most of these teachers served students in poverty, and did it extremely well. I dare say, most of them believe they make “a substantial difference” in the lives of kids and that “those students” can succeed, no matter their families’ income levels.

Poverty has a massive impact on our students, and it is without question an enormous challenge in the work of educators in Memphis. It is critical that states and cities, churches and nonprofit organizations, businesses and civic groups work together with schools and continue to address the underlying causes of poverty. Doing so will make the work of educators more manageable and sustainable, and will multiply the impact of a strong foundational education.

But we must also be clear on this point: Children in poverty can achieve at high levels when we adults give them the opportunities they deserve. This is happening every day in classrooms across our state. When exceptional teachers and great leaders build schools focused on student growth and outcomes, they can help break the cycle of poverty.

At the state Department of Education, we recently adopted five core values to guide our work. One of these values is optimism, which we defined as follows: “We believe in the potential of all Tennessee students to reach high levels of academic achievement. We believe that, in collaboration with our colleagues across the state, we can and will build a system that helps our students meet their potential. We operate with a strong sense of possibility that we can accomplish difficult tasks, and we foster innovation in ourselves and others.”

It is long past time for adults in leadership roles to express their belief in the potential of all children, and in our obligation to build a system of schools that serves them. Our best teachers share this belief and deserve to be recognized, and if any of their representatives believe otherwise it is regrettable.

Before I get into my analysis of Huffman’s statement, here is the full text of the article in which the quote that so offended Huffman appears:

Tennessee upped the ante Wednesday, offering $7,000 bonuses for high-performing teachers who agree to work for two years in any of the state’s 83 chronically low-performing schools.

The teachers will get $2,000 for signing and the remaining $5,000 the next summer. The state is also offering a $5,000 retention bonus to teachers with similar credentials who agree to stay another year in a priority school. The bonuses are effective immediately.

In both cases, the money will be forfeited if the teachers do not achieve the same high test scores, or in the case of the retention bonus, renege on their commitment to stay a year.

The Department of Education will provide the funds to the school districts. It did not say how much money it has set aside.

“We know that teacher effectiveness is the most important school-based factor impacting student achievement,” said Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman. “Our goal is to get more of our most effective educators into our struggling schools. We value our teachers, and this is a great opportunity for us to show it.”

Teachers must be Level 5 on their overall evaluation scores and three-year TVAAS average. The state says it will make allowances for teachers too new to have three years of test score data.

The bonuses also only apply to teachers who agree to leave a stronger school to work in priority schools, or those scoring in the bottom 5 percent. Those schools are all in Memphis, Davidson, Hamilton, Hardeman and Knox counties.

The bonus is expected to help teacher recruitment in the Achievement School District, which will operate 17 low-performing schools in Memphis this fall.

“We need Tennessee’s best educators to be builders of the possible in our Achievement Schools,” said Ash Solar, ASD chief talent officer.

Keith Williams, president of the Memphis Education Association, is wary. “These teachers will not be able to make a substantial difference in these communities, which have economic deprivation, massive poverty and are disconnected from the fiber of society. Those students don’t do well until you put other programs in place for their families.”

Despite the passionate rhetoric of Huffman’s writing, I believe I ‘get’ what Williams was saying and I fully agree with him.  I think that Huffman probably understands what he was saying too, but took this as an opportunity to accuse someone of having low expectations for poor kids.

What Williams said was that the teachers who transferred from the ‘better’ schools to the low performing schools would not make a ‘substantial’ difference.  I think that nearly all teachers make a positive ‘difference’ in students’ lives.  This includes teachers with ‘average’ and even ‘below average’ value-added scores.  So the idea that by bringing in some ‘ringers’ who got excellent evaluations at much easier schools will surely ‘significantly’ improve the more difficult to teach in schools is pretty unlikely.  These amazing ‘level 5′ teachers who apparently represent 30% of all the teachers in Tennessee are not at all guaranteed to get a level 5 the next year when they transfer to the lower performing school.  Maybe those teachers are a very good fit at the school that they are currently in, but would not be able to adjust to the greater demands at the new school.  Though value-added is supposed to be an unbiased measure of teacher quality, it is very fickle from year to year, even with students with similar demographics so when a teacher transfers to a school with so many more out-of-school factors to contend with, the consistency of the value-added scores is even worse.

Notice that even though Huffman describes the bonus as a $7,000 signing bonus to transfer, the second article explains that it is actually just a $2,000 bonus to transfer.  Only if the teacher gets at least a level 4 at the new school will she be able to get the remaining $5,000.  The fact that they wouldn’t just give the teacher the full $7,000 up front is an admission that the value-added scores might just not be consistent from year to year, especially if the teacher makes a big decision to leave an easier school.

I will say with a lot of confidence that very few people will take this gamble.  Giving up a position that you are excelling at, even by this limited definition of excelling, for just $2,000 is absolutely crazy.  Maybe some teachers will be duped into this if they don’t read the fine print, I guess.

Here is some of that fine print:

So a teacher would first have to have had a level 5 in 2011-2012.  Then they would be eligible to apply, BUT sometime this summer they will get back their 2012-2013 scores and if they have fallen below a level 4 they will lose their eligibility.  THEN they must also get another level 4 or better at the new school.  I know that 30% of teachers get this high rating, but if the Tennessee system (they invented value-added in Tennessee over 20 years ago, actually) is as inconsistent as it is elsewhere, this seems like a pretty big risk.

I actually would support giving all teachers in a high poverty school a raise, even though I know this is something that the union might not like.  Another way to compensate teachers for teaching at the toughest schools would be to have their class sizes capped at 20 students, or have them just teach four classes a day instead of five or six if they are a secondary school.

Looking at Huffman’s argument, we see that he highlights two teachers who ‘prove’ that teachers can make ‘profound’ differences.  One teacher, Katrina Armor, is an experienced teacher who is in her first year at a charter school in the Tennessee Achievement District.  The school, Huffman says, only had 27% of the 5th graders scoring proficient in Math last year and now, look at the careful wording, “This year, as they headed into TCAP, Armor had more than doubled that proficiency percentage.”  Not that her students got the 50% proficiency, since I don’t think the tests are even scored yet, but that she did this “as they headed into the TCAP,” maybe on some diagnostic, I guess.  Perhaps her students will get good results when they come back, but it is a bit funny that of all the teachers he could have chosen, he has picked one that he doesn’t have hard data supporting how good she is at improving test scores.

The other miracle teacher is working with the toughest to serve population, kids who have been expelled or are imprisoned.  And the evidence of her success isn’t ‘data-driven’ at all, but just “Jones aims to ensure that all of the students she works with have access to college and other strong postsecondary opportunities.”  So she “aims to ensure,” but does she actually accomplish it?  Huffman is very careful with his words.

Perhaps Keith Williams could have been a bit more careful so that Huffman wouldn’t misunderstand (or at least pretend that he misunderstood) what his point was.  It isn’t that teachers can’t, or don’t, make a difference.  It is just that bringing in ‘ringers’ from the easier schools getting a whopping $2,000 signing bonus aren’t going to make a difference that is ‘substantial.’  I guess it depends on what you think qualifies as ‘substantial,’ but based on my definition, I’d agree with him.

If you’re not finding any thoughtful reform writing, then you’re not looking hard enough. Read Michael Petrilli and the Fordham Institute’s stuff, particularly Education Next; read some of the Dropout Nation, which includes important discussion of school discipline; read Rick Hess or Jay Green. Not of course that all these writers fit neatly into the ‘reform’ box – and I think that’s a good thing.

I certainly agree with you that TFA can be far too simplistic both in its public portrayal and its training of corps members. I remember during Institute having an almost religious belief in ‘high expectations’; then I got to my school and realized that, no, what made a great teacher was not so simplistic as ‘teacher mindset.’

That being said, I’m willing to defend TFA to a small extent: I think it’s appropriate for teacher-training programs to be highly aspirational, even unrealistic. During my first, very difficult year teaching, something TFA indoctrinated in us often haunted me: “Everything that happens in your classroom is your responsibility.” Could this literally be true? Of course not, and I often tried to convince myself that it wasn’t. Yet, to this day, I basically believe it – in other words, I think that good teachers hold themselves accountable for most everything that occurs in their class.

I think of ‘poverty is not destiny’ in the same sense. Of course it’s wrong to suggest that poverty has no effect on student outcomes – even Michelle Rhee acknowledges as much – but it would be wrong, in my view, for a teacher to focus on that. And, yes, at my school, that sort of mentality, that poverty meant our students were destined to fail, did crop up every now and then.

TFA is wrong insofar as it suggests that poverty can be wholly ameliorated by high expectations and student ‘investment’ (along with all the other Teaching as Leadership prongs – which I agree with you are mostly awful). Where TFA gets it right, though, is with its focus on the very real potential of all students.

Do I think that excellent teachers at my school changed some students’ life trajectories? Yes, I definitely do. Do I think some charters (as well as some traditional public schools) have changed students’ life trajectories? Again, yes.

On the other hand, I knew corps members who would say things like, “My students have grown five years in reading.” Similarly, I’ll always remember a ridiculous article about a few of my former students claiming that some of them had “advanced more than four years” in reading – over the course of a half-year.

I think it’s unfortunate and wrong when schools or policymakers or journalists overstate success. I really admire the thankless job you’ve done at debunking many of these ‘miracle’ schools. I know it’s affected my thinking. A couple times in the last year I’ve been to high-performing charter schools, and the first question out of my mouth is: what is your rate of student attrition? (Though it may be a little less clear cut than you’ve made it out to be – we don’t know how many of those students, say, moved away. I’m also inclined to believe that many of these schools, while not being miraculous, are nevertheless really good.)

I think the reform community is becoming more honest with itself on this point. That’s a good thing. By the way, I suspect the cause of such (inexcusable) hyperbole is neither evilness nor pure ignorance, as you suggest; I think it’s that people so badly wanted to believe that we could ‘crack the code’ on failing schools. (Which I suppose is a form of ignorance.) What reformers are discovering, I suspect, is that the fruits of reform will not be borne overnight.

What’s odd to me is that the logical conclusion from your belief that school can’t change life trajectories is that we should be spending less money on schools than we currently do. The short of it is this: if schools can’t significantly improve students’ lives, and public dollars are a finite resource, we should invest less money in schools and more money in other things. I genuinely don’t get how you can on the one hand emphasize how little schools can do, but on the other suggest that the public pour more money into those same institutions.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, and perhaps we can also pivot a bit to discuss school choice. Do you believe that charters or vouchers or other forms of choice can ever be good? Is there any hope or positives from the school-choice movement?

Matt

Dear Matt,

I’m glad to see that you’re writing more reasonably now.  Mark my words that in the not-too-distant future, nobody will be willing to admit that they were once associated with the ‘reform’ movement.  Unfortunately for most of them, there is a very permanent and easily searchable record of exactly what ideas they supported.  You seem to present yourself as a ‘moderate’ reformer, always willing to admit that the issues and proposed solutions are more complicated than critics, like me, might give you credit for.

But the fact is that apart from someone like Jeb Bush, most reformers try to claim that they are moderates too.  Since you mentioned her in your last two letters, let’s examine the sorts of things that Michelle Rhee has said about different issues.  You referenced her Huffington Post piece from last September as an example of how she admits that ‘poverty matters.’  Reading this, I could see, could make some people think that critics of Rhee are unfair when they accuse her of saying “poverty doesn’t matter.”  In the first half she very nicely lays out all the reasons why living in poverty and why teaching poor kids is quite difficult.  But she really isn’t giving anything away by admitting this since the other shoe drops in the second half of the piece which justifies the title of the article “Poverty Must Be Tackled But Never Used As An Excuse.”  More recently she spoke in Kansas City and really summarized her views when answering a question from the audience in the last five minutes.

She had met with a bunch of teachers before the interview and explained:

“One of them said ‘are you saying that there are people out there who are saying that what teachers do in schools don’t matter?  That poverty is, you know, is sort of the driving force and we can’t make a difference?  He literally said ‘I can’t believe that that’s the case.’  And I said ‘Yeah, actually there are people out there who believe that.’

So here’s the bottom line:  Does poverty matter a whole lot?  Yes it does.  Does living in abject poverty make it harder for children to come to school every day and to be ready to learn?  Unequivocally yes, it makes it harder.  Does it make it harder for the teachers to teach those kids effectively?  Yes it does.  But can that be an excuse for why we aren’t pouring everything that we can into making sure that that child is successful?  No we can’t.  Because the bottom line is that if we say if you are poor we can’t really help you in school, sorry, then that’s basically saying to kids if you’re born into poverty, sorry, you don’t have a chance to live the American dream you’re not gonna be able to be successful in life because of the very fact that you are poor.  That is so unamerican.  That is against everything that we stand for as a nation.  What we stand for as a nation is the notion that you can be a child coming from any circumstance, any family, whatever the color of your skin, the zipcode you that live in and you can still live the american dream and you can have a full and productive life because you are getting a high quality education.  That’s what we stand for as a country.”

So what we have first is Rhee accusing her critics of saying that good teaching doesn’t matter.  Now I could see how you might think it is fair for her to say this.  After all, if her views are being oversimplified by some to say that she doesn’t think that poverty matters at all, shouldn’t she be able to say that the critics don’t think that quality of teaching doesn’t matter at all?  But notice her main argument isn’t so much that poverty ‘matters’ but that poverty “makes it harder” but that teachers can’t use it as ‘an excuse.’  But what is this ‘no excuses’?  If I tell a student that I want the ten homework problems tomorrow and I don’t want any excuses, I’m saying this because I feel that the student can accomplish this goal if he just decides to do it.  That’s when you say “I don’t want excuses.”  But if I tell a kid to do something that I don’t think is possible like I want them to do the entire book and I don’t want excuses, this is quite unfair.  Since the kid can’t possibly accomplish what I want, what is he supposed to say to me the next day when he doesn’t complete the assignment?  So when Rhee and other reformers say that poverty can’t be used as an excuse they are either being very unreasonable as they are asking people to do something that may just be impossible, or they believe, deep down, that it is something completely within the teacher’s control if the teacher just decides to do it.

In all my years of teaching, I have never once heard another teacher say that the reason a student failed a test was because the student was poor.  I’ve heard teachers say that the student must not have studied, that the student goofed around during the lesson so they aren’t surprised.  I’ve heard them say that the kid just isn’t smart enough to master the material.  And yes, teachers often admit that they didn’t teach the topic as well as they had hoped to.  I suppose that these are excuses, but if you do not achieve perfection you should be able to come up with a reason about where the breakdown was.

As far as whether or not Rhee believes that ‘great’ teachers can overcome poverty single-handedly, watch what she said recently on the Bill Maher show.  She told an anecdote about how when she was chancellor she went to a low performing high school during first period and noticed that most of the classes had just a few students in them since students were coming late to school, but that there was one teacher who had a full classroom.  Then, later in the day she noticed some kids from that full class leaving the building before school was over.  When she asked them why there were leaving school they said that they come to the first period class because they learn from that teacher, but they don’t go to the classes later in the day because they don’t.  While I’ll admit that students do selectively cut the classes that they dislike the most for whatever reason, this story is very contrived that there should be a teacher that is so great that he gets a class that would generally have twenty chronic cutters and he gets them all to get to school at 8:00 AM.  It is a typical example of the exaggerated power of a teacher.

In a speech last year Arne Duncan did something similar when he said  “Everyone who has worked with poor children knows that poverty matters and affects school performance. But everyone who has witnessed the life-altering impact of great teachers and great principals knows that schools matter enormously too.”  I’m on a mailing list where I get a monthly newsletter from the DOE which is actually called “Teaching Matters,” a double entendre which is also a dig against all the critics, like me, who supposedly think that it doesn’t.

The fact is that nobody realistically thinks that poverty does not matter nor does anyone think that quality of teaching does not matter.  The difference between the ‘sides’ really is how much do this different factors contribute to student ‘achievement’ or lack of it.  I’ll bet that if there was a way to truly quantify where most people stand on this issue, most people (with the exception of some who have their heads completely in the clouds like Joel Klein and Bill Gates) would have scores that were pretty close.

Again I want to stress that the reason I love being a teacher is that I do feel that I am making ‘a difference.’  It is just the nature of the job and I think I make a difference even when I’m just doing a so-so job that day.  If you’re an English teacher and you’re introducing your students to a classic work of literature, you are making a difference.  Sometimes when I’m teaching a topic that is particularly interesting, like The Pythagorean Theorem, I think how lucky I am that I get to be the one who taught them this.  That’s one thing that makes teaching exciting.  It is one of the few ‘perks’ of teaching that Michelle Rhee isn’t trying to take away from us.  Even a below average teacher makes more of ‘a difference’ in a kids life than, say, a highly effective waiter.  I just don’t know that there are many of these mythical ‘great’ teachers who inspire whole classes of kids to alter their life’s trajectory.  When I think of the few ‘great’ teachers that I had in school, I’m sure that not every kid agreed that those teachers were great.  So an average teacher is considered ‘great’ by a few kids in each class but of course we remember the teachers that we thought were great and politicians who don’t understand education don’t realize that no teacher is considered great by all his students.  I often wonder what percent of my students think that I am ‘great.’  Certainly I’ve received my share of thank you letters from students saying things like “you’re the best math teacher I ever had,” but there are plenty who did not think I was very good either.  As a math teacher I try to incorporate the beauty and history of math into my lessons, when possible, as opposed to the practicality of it.  Not every student really cares about how Archimedes derived the surface area of a sphere.  Some are content to just memorize the formula and know how to apply it.

My ‘pessimism’ about the influence of teachers, remember, also comes from having kept in touch with some of my superstar students from twenty years ago.  Most of those promising students did not complete college.  Most of the girls were mothers before they turned 20 years old.  Even one of the true ‘nerds’ I knew took about ten years to get his undergraduate degree.

You raised a good question about how the premise that even ‘great’ teachers don’t make a huge difference in changing students lives, then shouldn’t we just reduce funding to schools?  You could go even further and ask why I get so upset about how poor TFA training is if I think the teacher influence is so small.  What I’ve really said, though, is that ‘great’ teachers don’t make so much more of a difference than ‘average’ teachers, and that I think average teachers do make an appropriately sized difference in student’s lives.  So cutting funding might not actually lower standardized test scores by very much, but I do think it would decrease some of the less easily quantified benefits of school.  I think Einstein once wrote that “education is what remains after one has forgotten everything one has learned in school.”  Though this is not very ‘data driven’ of me to say, I feel like if education budgets are stripped, the shallow experience kids would get in school would mean that after they have forgotten everything there would not be anything left while putting more money into things like arts, music, and theater is worthwhile since it contributes to Einstein’s nebulous ‘education.’  I do think, though, that a lot of money is wasted by schools so perhaps even without increasing funding, we could use the existing funding more efficiently.  But what I see going on with corporate ed reform is budgets being cut AND the sparse remaining money being used on consultants and computers which don’t have a large educational impact.

Finally, I want to address your question about school choice.  This is something I have not written very much about, aside from demonstrating that many charter schools aren’t much different than the neighborhood ‘failing’ school.  I do understand the choice strategy:  Schools will be forced to ‘up their game’ since if students have the freedom to go to whatever school they want, the ‘bad’ schools will be left with no students and be forced to shut down.

I’ve struggled to come up with a good analogy for this, and I hope this one works:  I don’t get out much, having a wife and two small children, yet suppose that I get permission to go out for New Year’s Eve.  In New York City there are a lot of trendy and exclusive clubs and I don’t really have the ‘choice’ to go wherever I want.  Besides not being able to afford the cover charge in some of the places, I also don’t have the ‘look’ to get any bouncer to whisk me to the front of any long entrance line.

So I end up in my local, ‘zoned’ if you will, club, ‘The Bull and Finch,’ where there are a lot of people who, like me, are over 40 years old and who aren’t going to be partying with Paris Hilton anytime soon.  Maybe it is unfair that I can’t just choose to go to Studio 54 (I think there still is one) since maybe if given the opportunity, I’d show that I really do belong there.  So if my fairy godmother got me into the club, I guess that would be good for me, assuming I don’t get kicked out of the club for not fitting in easily enough.  But what if this is taken to an extreme and somehow everyone’s fairy godmother shows up and now everyone is at Studio 54.  Well, at that point, it isn’t really Studio 54 anymore, is it?  What I’m trying to get at here is that what makes Studio 54 so great — ‘high performing’ — is the fact that people who look like me are not there.  The bartenders at ‘The Bull’ are just as competent as Studio 54.  And certainly they serve the same Bacardi Rum and Coke.  And ‘The Bull and Finch’ certainly doesn’t deserve to get shut down for poor performance.  When are people like me supposed to go when we get kicked out of Studio 54?

The difference between the ‘high performing’ charter school and the ‘failing’ local school is the students.  I am sure that if you were to swap the teaching staffs at the two schools there would not be a significant difference (we can argue what qualifies as ‘significant’) in what the students learn.  Yes, there could be a few schools that are underperforming because they are completely mismanaged and out of control, but the vast majority of ‘failing’ schools, I think, have teachers who are, at least, competent.

I think it is important for people to realize this because without this established, the net result of ‘choice’ is that a small percent of students, maybe 3% (5% go to charters, but only about half of them benefit, in a real sense, I think), benefit from it while the other 97% of students actually suffer from it.  And the ‘choice’ that supposedly exists is mainly a mirage.  Parents, especially ones who have the students who need the most help, are duped into ‘choosing’ a school based on incomplete information.  They see the false claims about the school’s 100% college acceptance rate and they leave their local school only to end up in a school that did not, generally, have any special talent for working with their child who often ends up back in a public school but who now has the permanent stigma of having been booted (call it ‘counseled out’ if you want) from a school that was supposed to be so great.

I never really had a problem with charter schools until I started noticing this negative side effect.  If a charter school were to be honest, for a change, and admit that it is a place for the most motivated parents to send the most motivated poor students — like a magnet program — then I do think that there is a place for this in education.  But when the supposedly miraculous success of that school is used by ‘leaders’ — many of them TFA alumni — as a justification for closing schools and for hastily developing unscientific teacher evaluation systems which will drive people away from the profession, away from schools that need the most help, and will discourage people from even entering the teaching profession in the first place, well, that’s what caused me to enter this fray only two years and three months ago.

The momentum of the push back to the corporate reform movement is gaining a lot of strength recently.  A good one was the election of Monica Ratliff to the Los Angeles school board against a corporate reformer with a 2 million dollar campaign against her 50 thousand dollars.  A parent trigger recently backfired leading to 21 out of 22 teachers there requesting to transfer and parents feeling like they were duped.  I’m not sure if the ‘tipping point’ was reached yet, but I’m confident that it is coming.  I mentioned in the last letter that I have a good instinct for seeing where things are going.  I used to predict the collapse of the reform movement to be around four years from now.  I’m moving my prediction up to under two years.  When this happens, all the reformers will be scrambling to show that they were always ‘moderate’ reformers.  Just yesterday the Rhode Island ed commissioner, Deborah Gist, claimed that she is distancing herself from the ‘reform’ movement.  And in Minnesota, a very big TFA state, the governor vetoed a 1.5 million budget item to expand TFA there.  Things are happening fast.  This is just the beginning.

The ‘reformers’ remind me of the people in the book of Exodus who prayed to the golden calf while getting impatient waiting for Moses to return with the 10 commandments.  And like those people, they will be punished.  Will you be one of them?

Gary

Matt Kramer and Elisa Villanueva-Beard have been carefully chosen to be the faces of TFA.  I am beginning to see how they each might embody one of Wendy’s two public personas:  There’s Wendy the extreme corporate reformer who pals around with Joel Klein and who refers to TFA critics as ‘haters’ in commencement addresses.  Then there’s Wendy the moderate corporate reformer who writes editorials about how teacher evaluations should not be publicly released and who wrote a thoughtful response to my open letter to her.  Though I still don’t know a lot about either of them, it seems like Matt is the extreme reformer (Bad Kopp) and Elisa is the moderate reformer (Good Kopp).

Matt and Elisa have embarked on their TFA Listens tour.  Based on what they are tweeting about, they are listening, but only hearing what they want to.  And what they want to hear is that schools are plagued by non-TFA teachers who abuse students with their soft bigotry of low expectations:

Of the two, the one who I can relate to more is definitely Elisa.  She has taught, unlike Matt, as a 1998 TFA corps member so she understands the realities of what goes on in schools.  She recently spoke at her alma Mater DePauw University and made a very humble speech.  In general she seems to be trying to welcome different ideas, though she doesn’t always succeed at this.

I’m having trouble understanding how Matt is qualified to be a co-CEO of TFA.  I just don’t see what he ‘brings to the table.’  Though I did appreciate that he responded to one of my twitter messages to him, I’ve found some of the things he’s written to be a bit unusual.  I know I’m not his media adviser, but if I were I’d advise him to stay clear of tweets like this:

Someone must have brought up that ed reform is dominated by white males and Matt deflects the question by implying that the only other option is for them to ‘abdicate responsibility.’  I don’t know.  I suppose that someone can easily go through anyone’s Tweets and find the least thought out one and pounce on it.  Still, you’ve got to admit that this one is kind of strange.

Whether you’re a ‘Good Kopp’ or a ‘Bad Kopp,’ you’re going to be enthusiastic of the TFA celebrities.  In this change of leadership, all the reform superstars have retained their status, with the very conspicuous absence of public school enemy number one Michelle Rhee.  It seems like TFA is trying to distance themselves from her, at least publicly.  They didn’t even publicize her recent autobiography.  However they are still eager to promote Rhee’s disciples.  Rhee’s ex-husband Kevin Huffman is the current commissioner of education in Tennessee.  Tim Daly took over as head of The New Teacher Project after Rhee left to become chancelor of D.C..  Chris Barbic founded YES prep and now works for Huffman.  Jason Kamras was one of Rhee’s top deputies in D.C. and continues to do his damage there.  And no matter what brand of ‘Kopp’ you are, a KIPP shout out is always in order.

I’ll continue to monitor the #TFAlisten tour and also continue to wait for them to come to New York.  I’ve decided that as long as I’m permitted to go to a #TFAlisten event in NYC I’ll attend even if I don’t receive a hand-delivered invitation signed by both Elisa and Matt.

Newark, New Jersey, is an excellent example of a city where charter schools have flourished over the years.  A TFA alum is even the chancellor of schools in Newark.  KIPP schools are the gold standard of charter schools and have been in Newark for some time.  According to their website they have five schools there serving around 1,800 students.  Two schools are elementary, two are middle schools, and there is one high school.  One of the middle schools, the RISE academy, if often hailed as a true ‘miracle school’ that defies the odds with its amazing test scores.

One thing that KIPP does which I respect is publish an annual report summarizing the statistics of its over 125 schools.  Though they leave out certain information which I think is relevant, they leave a lot in which paints a more accurate picture of their successes, which in some cases are quite limited.

Looking at page 75 of the report, we see what sort of achievement in high school was accomplished by the students who graduated from the miracle two KIPP Newark middle schools.  Their SAT score was 1250, which is extremely low, only 416 per section.  When it comes to AP tests, only 31% took AP courses and only 2% passed at least one AP test.  With their numbers this means that just one student in the entire school passed an AP test.  If the amazing KIPP Newark middle schoolers are kids who peak in 8th grade, what good is that?

But this only tells a small part of the story.  I found two other sources for information about this school’s performance.  The first is on the KIPP Newark website where they report the unusual demographics of this school.  At the bottom of this page we learn that this school has nearly 60% girls.

There have been studies about how high attrition is for black boys at KIPP and this is further evidence about this.  Combine this with some facts from their New Jersey school report card where we see that in addition to this unequal balance of boys and girls, there is, for some tests, an incredible ‘gender gap.’  For example, in 8th grade language arts, 71% of boys scored proficient or better compared to 89% of girls.

Another thing I found on the state report card is that the Newark KIPP network does suffer from attrition.  Notice how the recent graduation class of 55 students was 71 students three years earlier.

Two years ago, when KIPP released their 2010 annual report, I wrote about how they admit their student retention rate was only 88%.  When you lose 12% of your students a year, that amounts to losing about 40% of the students who begin a KIPP middle school in 5th grade by the time they are supposed to complete 8th grade.  Two years later, that figure has not changed at all.

While I do appreciate that they are willing to admit this statistic, it is amazing to me that education writers don’t write about this more often.  I know that the attrition isn’t solely from students who have been ‘counseled out’ (unofficially expelled).  Sometimes families have to move for reasons out of their control, but I’d think that if KIPP were so great many families would find a way to have their child continue there.

KIPP has received a lot of money on the facade that they have the secret to getting amazing results from the ‘same kids’ with the ‘same resources.’  Their own reports and publicly available data from New Jersey clearly show that their success is extremely limited.  Yet, they continue to expand and to be used by politicians as evidence that ‘reformers’ know what they are talking about.  How long this will continue, I don’t know, but I have to believe that it won’t be for very long.

I’ve often heard teachers complain about the latest reform “fad.” It’s understandable insofar as veteran teachers have been around for many rounds of “reform,” only to see each and every one swept abashedly into a locked closet in the back of the class (right next to where I surreptitiously put those pre-tests I never got around to grading).

I think there’s a lot of truth to that, and I suspect that you agree. Where we’d probably part ways is the takeaway from this insight. You might say that this goes to show how temporal the current regime of reform is; I would say that the faddish nature of past reform shows that we need to stay the course.

You write that Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson’s reforms in Washington DC have not worked.  (Disclosure: I previously spent a couple months working as an intern at StudentsFirst. And I had one very brief, very pleasant conversation with Michelle Rhee. I have no affiliation with StudentsFirst now, though, and my views are my own.)

I think it’s misleading to say that based on a few years of inconclusive data we can determine that a reform has “failed.” There is mixed evidence regarding the results of the changes made in D.C., but as Matt DiCarlo pointed out in a takedown of some of Rhee’s overstatements, it’s inappropriate to draw broad conclusions, pro or con, based on just a few years of observational data.

The goal, by the way, of some of these changes – albeit not always articulated well by reformers – is to raise overall teaching quality by attracting some people into the profession who might not otherwise become teachers. It is, to use your baseball analogy, to try to make all hitters bat .300 (or more to my liking, have an on-base percentage of .400). Baseball of course, is a zero-sum game – a batter’s success is a pitcher’s failure – but in education it’s at least theoretically possible for all teachers to be excellent. That’s why many reformers believe in increasing teacher compensation in order to attract top talent, and this is what D.C. is trying to do. This sort of reform, though, will by its nature take time.

I know you believe that these new-fangled evaluation systems are doing far more harm than good, but I can’t accept that after a few districts have implemented them for a few years, they can be trashed as complete failures. If we’re not seeing improved results in another couple decades, then I will be the first one to say that these reforms need to go.

The completely understandable response is, well, what happens to the students who are (in your view and many others’) getting worse results because of such reforms? I have no glib answer to that. What I can say is that students in D.C. were struggling greatly before Rhee’s reforms. The spending per student sits at $30,000 and the results were among the worst in the country.

Gary, I know that you believe that schools can only do so much for their students, but certainly DC schools had and have a lot of room to improve. Was there not space to try something new, even if it didn’t align with many educators’ intuitions about what will work? Isn’t this especially true considering the shaky (though mixed) evidence for more traditional reforms, such as class-size reductions and Head Start?

What I feel disillusioned about is that many teachers that I worked with were so negative towards our pay-for-performance system that they sought to tear it down rather than build it up. You’re upset that StudentsFirst spends a great deal of money on elections, rather than trying to improve teacher preparation; well, I hope you’re equally upset that NEA and AFT have spent huge amounts of money backing candidates who oppose teacher evaluations. What if that money were spent on making teacher evaluation systems be as effective as possible?

Few alternatives have been suggested. Yet, I don’t think even you would agree with the notion that a decade ago teachers were being fairly and effectively evaluated. As you know, many “evaluations” consisted of an annual pro forma visit by the principal into the teacher’s classroom; meaningful feedback was not consistently given. I know you think the pendulum has swung too far, but perhaps you could acknowledge that reformers were responding to some bad circumstances.

Am I wrong? I know that the AFT has backed peer review programs, which I think could be great, but it also seems like a blip on the radar. Perhaps reformers have to account for the failure to work with unions on this – but isn’t always a two-way street?

Yours in dialogue,

Matt

PS I hope you saw Matt DiCarlo’s recent piece on VAM. I agree that it’s not junk science or a “sham.” I also think that some districts have a way to go in using it effectively – hence my comments above about teachers being partners in creating such evaluation systems.

My response:

Dear Matt,

“another couple of decades”?  No, I don’t think this would be a good idea.  I do appreciate your desire to apply the scientific method to education, however.  And yes it can be premature to label an experiment as a failure before it has been given time to run its course.  But if we’re going to act like scientists, we have to do it right.  For education, it is a bit like medicine.  There is a ‘disease’ — poor kids getting low test scores — which we want to ‘cure.’  The vital first step is to identify the cause of the disease.  If you misdiagnose this, any remedy based on fixing the wrong cause is doomed to fail.  Even if ‘bad teachers’ were a big cause for low student test scores, I’m not confident that corporate reforms strategies would work, but treating the wrong cause is definitely counterproductive.  In this case it is like trying to cure a strained knee with chemotherapy.

To treat the problem scientifically, the people controlling the experiment should have some idea about what ‘success’ should look like at various stages of it.  Yes, I suppose there could be experimental drugs where they seem to be not working at all and then at the last minute they kick in and cure the disease, but in this case we should be seeing some benefits, particularly in places that have embraced the reforms most like Washington D.C..  Their lack of progress so far suggests to me that I am correct that they are fixated on the wrong root cause.  The problem with waiting for a few decades, from my perspective, is that there is too great of a risk that these remedies come with severe side-effects.

This may seem non-scientific to you, but my very traumatic first year created in me a keen ability to tell when something in education just isn’t going to work.  My first year I was very naive and ideas about how to teach or about how to manage a classroom would sound so good to me until I tried them only to learn, the hard way, that they had serious loopholes.  So since that first year I’ve developed an innate sense for these sorts of things.  When I hear new ideas about how to teach or about how my school’s bell schedule is going to be altered or, at a macro level, how to ‘turnaround’ certain schools, I just ‘know,’ even sometimes when I haven’t been able to verbalize exactly why, it isn’t going to work.

In the case of the ‘bad teacher’ cause I also have some strong first hand evidence that this is not the major issue.  For one, I taught at three failing schools that all had what I’d call ‘above average’ teachers.  Also, two of the smartest friends and TFA alum that I know have been principals of un-miraculous schools.  I feel like if they weren’t able to turn around their schools (at least from a test score perspective) that it can’t be done without some kind of cheating.

You are correct that many schools and districts, pre-reform movement, were not fulfilling their potential.  Though I think there is a limit to what a school can accomplish, I do think it is worthwhile to try to achieve that limit and, yes, schools did have a lot of problems:  money being used unwisely, terrible organization where on the first day of school some classes have 50 students and others have 10 students, bad curricula, etc.  I’m not surprised that ‘reformers’ have been given an opportunity to show that they could do things better.  My hope is that once this wave of ‘reform’ is shaken off, a new movement led by people who actually know something about students, teachers, and schools take over and guide us forward.  I look forward to the day when I can stop playing defense and participate in that endeavor.

I mentioned my ‘sixth sense’ which I’m sure could invite some ridicule, but here is what I believe will happen as a result of this misguided ‘reform’ movement.  Within five or ten years there will be a massive teacher shortage.  Already, I’ve read that in California the number of new teacher applicants is way down this year.  The promise of big bonuses to young superstars will just not be enough to get people to replace all the teachers retiring or otherwise fleeing the profession.  Maybe TFA and other alternative certification will be expanded to fill the void and maybe we may even be able to get test scores to the same, or even marginally higher, level with enough focus on that goal.  But the other metrics, the more important ones that are so tough to measure, will suffer.  Maybe we will drop from the top of the Nobel prize winners category.  Or, like we see in New Orleans, we will have more crime.  We may win the ‘test score’ battle, yet lose the war.  I know that this might sound extremely speculative, but that is where I see things going, at this rate.

As far as the unions spending money to back candidates to go against the ‘reformers’ I think that is exactly what they should be doing right now.  When you’re under attack, you have to defend yourself as your first priority.

You know, the basic premises of ‘reformers’ are not crazy to me.  Certainly we want schools and teachers to be as effective and efficient as possible.  And yes, a good teacher gets kids to learn.  It may be tough sometimes to measure that learning, but still, a teacher should be able to present some evidence that students have progressed.  But these modern measures of progress for students and schools are being misused.  Maybe they are not complete ‘junk’ but they certainly have a large margin of error so using them as a way to rank teachers is not very fair.  Matt Di Carlo does seem determined to keep the possibility that one day these measures will be improved and used appropriately.

But the big problem is that the ‘reformers’ are not as wise as Di Carlo.  The whole ‘reform’ movement is led by people who I really don’t admire.  I haven’t figured out if they are well-meaning but just not wise about things or if they are devious and excellent liars.  I can see the case for either argument.  As a litmus test, compare some of the writers and bloggers on both sides.  A good starting place that will hit home with you is to look at the pieces that you wrote and appeared in The Answer Sheet and in Dropout Nation.  I can’t think of another person besides you who has had pieces in such different forums.  In your Dropout Nation ‘Testing is good for teachers and children‘, editor RiShawn Biddle is so insecure that he constantly interrupts your essay (I counted four such intrusions).  Compare to your ‘It’s time for TFA to fold‘ where Valerie Strauss, after the introduction, allows you to say what you want without interruption.

Anyway, I hope I have not seemed to ‘dodge’ any of your questions.  I’m wondering what you think about the mythical highly-effective teachers and high-performing charter schools.  Do you think they prove that ‘poverty is not destiny’?  Also, what do you think that TFA makes the right decision when they try to convince the new CMs that they are very capable of achieving ‘transformational’ teaching where they change the life trajectory of their students?  Realistically, I don’t think that my impact on students, even in my ‘teacher of the year’ year, was so great that it changed any life trajectories.  Do you think that you did?  Do you think that the alum who trained you did?  If this is unrealistic, is it still OK to train people with that mindset since it will keep them optimistic, like telling someone that a diet and exercise program is likely to work, thus motivating them to stick to it?  Or is is more like telling someone that they can climb mount Everest if they just have high expectations for themselves and little practical training?

Look forward to continuing the dialogue.

Gary