Much to my surprise, this thought was, the next day, the subject of one of the Education Week teaching blogs in a post titled ‘TFA Critic Hints at Plans to ‘Disrupt’ Training’.

I guess I feel a bit proud that I’ve built up my reputation over the years so that pondering my next move is, at all, newsworthy.  But what concerns me is that this article is a bit too reminiscent of articles about terrorist threats that I’ve read throughout the years.

Now, I’m sure that the author of the article, Liana Heitin, who is a fellow TFA alum, was not trying to evoke this comparison.  A good journalistic story involves conflict and suspense, and by speculating what I might have up my sleeve for this summer, the post is definitely an attention grabber.  But I can see how many people might view me as the bad guy in the story.

Heitin points out that new TFAers would be taking a big risk if they were to be uncooperative or adversarial this summer.  They would risk getting kicked out of the program if they boycotted mandatory meetings or otherwise refused to stay in line.  This is accurate.  I find that TFA suffers from something I’ll call ‘second year teacher’ syndrome.  Basically since the first year is tough, teachers develop a complex and overcompensate their second year with needing to have ultra ‘control’ over their classes.  When you teach for another 5 years or so, you get over that.  But since most TFA leaders only teach two or maybe three years, they find themselves ‘stuck’ in this mindset and are very rigid.  As tolerant as TFA claims to be of individual differences, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, they are quite intolerant of the thing that makes everyone different from one another — we have different ideas and opinions.

The article ends by saying “we’ll have to wait till next month to find out …”

If I were to orchestrate some kind of protest, and I doubt I have enough of a ‘following’ from new TFAers to accomplish one, it would actually not be the first time that trainees revolted at a TFA institute.  I can think of two times, in the early years, where this happened.  The biggest one was in the 1994 institute in Houston (which was the only institute at that time).  The first three institutes had been in Los Angeles, where there was year-round school, so trainees got a lot of student teaching practice.  TFA had run out of money and threw together the budget Houston institute.  Because of their constraints, they were not able to give the new TFAers many students to practice with.  Wendy Kopp had an ‘all corps’ meeting and there was a near revolt with angry corps members standing on chairs and screaming.  They knew that they were not getting the best training possible.  Ironically, this issue hasn’t been improved much.  People don’t revolt since, as far as they know, it was never any better.

A second revolt happened in the 1996 Houston institute when KIPP founders Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, just two years into the KIPP program, presented to all the corps members about their program.  The audience started grumbling when they saw the demonstration of how well the students can skip-count.  The sense was that this boot camp was about submission and not about the love of learning.  One of the corps member advisers, I remember, took one of the original KIPP kids aside and asked her, “Do you get to read anything by Maya Angelou?” and the kid had never heard of her.  Levin and Feinberg were practically booed off the stage.

Someone on Twitter even asked me ‘Are you really about to launch an occupy TFA movement?’  I doubt, though, that this article, or my post on which it was based, has sent the higher ups in TFA into any kind of emergency meeting to try to figure out how I might attempt to pull this off.

The truth is that I was really just musing about it when I wrote the post, but if everyone thinks that this evil mastermind is going to spend the next month hatching a diabolical plan which will catch everyone off guard, I’ll end the suspense today.

By ‘disrupting the institute’ I don’t mean that I’m going to coerce any new TFAers into getting kicked out of the program.  I also don’t want to distract the new TFAers from their main task, this summer, which is to learn as much as they can about teaching so the kids they teach in the fall have a moderately competent teacher.

Here is a list, though, of some things I might do:

1.  I could write a post with what I consider to be required reading and watching to understand both sides of this ed reform battle.  One good starting point is a debate between Diane Ravitch and Geoffrey Canada that happened on a special education edition of Meet The Press during NBC’s Education Nation.  Click here to access it.

2.  I could ask the new corps members to record what goes on in some of the training sessions and then anonymously post them and I could comment on them.

3.  I could give my own ‘homework’ and assignments that I think will balance the training.  Corps members would have to efficiently complete their required institute assignments to do my optional homework.  This could include groups of corps members supplementing their very meager student teaching experience by spending an hour or two each night practicing teaching to each other.

4.  Though new corps members might see me as a ‘denier,’ I could seek help from the institute staff.  There are 9 institutes with a lot of staff members.  I’ve received many emails from some of these staffers over the years.  Some staff members get very frustrated, as I felt when I was a staff member, when they realize they are participating in a very unhelpful training model.  These staff members don’t have as much to lose by protesting — just their summer jobs.

5.  I could ask corps members what topics are going to be discussed with their trainers and I could write blog posts with ‘disruptive’ questions that corps members can ask their trainers about these topics.  I don’t think corps members can be kicked out for just asking questions (though you never know …)

6.  I could make a blog post that guides corps members through my most relevant older blog posts.

7.  I could make podcasts with advice or do more episodes of my live spreecast video internet show.

8.  I could write a guide about how to research the statistics on a school that the new corps members are interviewing at or are potentially placed at.  I can show them how to identify a charter school that gets results by kicking out the lowest performing kids.  I would tell corps members that if it were me, I would not accept an interview or a placement at a school, like most KIPP schools, that has a 40% attrition from 5th to 8th grade.

But I am not planning an official ‘Occupy TFA’ event that I will be ‘leading’ remotely or otherwise.  Even if I had the ‘following,’ I would not do that since it would be too much of a distraction.  Learning to teach is hard enough, particularly when you only get a few hours in front of  a few kids that may or may not be around the age of the students you will eventually teach in the fall.  I may not even do any of those other things on the above list.  Really it will depend on how much time and energy I have to dedicate to this.

I hope these ideas don’t make me a TFA terrorist.  I’ve always thought of myself more like Michael Moore and TFA is like the Republicans.  One thing that definitely makes me different from extremists who hate America is that there is nothing that would stop them from fighting.  They don’t really have ‘demands.’

I, on the other hand, know exactly what TFA could do that would cause me to stop my relentless critique.

1)  The first thing they would have to do is to declare ‘neutrality’ in the current ed reform war.  There are two main sides:  the corporate ‘reformers’ and the people who think the corporate ‘reforms’ will actually make things worse.  TFA has aligned themselves with the corporate reformers because many of their prominent alumni are leaders of that movement and because the corporate reformers always make sure that TFA is taken care of.  But TFA has gotten so powerful on their own, they don’t need to align themselves with a particular side.  Just like Yale University didn’t take sides when Bush and Kerry were running for president, TFA can figure out a way to include people like me and people like Michelle Rhee in their panel discussions on reform.  They could say that the corporate reforms are still experimental and there is a mixed bag of results so let’s get everyone discussing what is truly working.  Critics will be welcome since if the corporate reformers can’t beat them in a debate, maybe the critics’ arguments have merit.  For instance, I truly believe that American schools are not in crisis.  Our low poverty schools beat all the other countries in the world on those international tests.  Our schools can be improved incrementally as things gradually evolve, and they have been improving over the years.  But the transformational change they love to talk about is not really possible without addressing the root cause of poverty.  Any school that claims to have achieved that is being disingenuous.  Schools aren’t failing.  Society is.  This doesn’t mean, though, that we give up trying to teach better.  But we have to recognize the limits of what schools can do otherwise we end up shutting down schools and firing teachers for things they can’t possibly overcome, and which nobody has ever figured out how to overcome without somehow cheating.  This would also mean stopping the constant touting of Washington D.C. and New Orleans, two districts that are a complete mess, from what I understand.  TFA would also have to resolve that charter schools go against the mission that “One day ALL students will have …” since charters serve only about 5% of students, and have not lived up to their mission of lifting the quality of the non-charters through friendly competition.  Instead the charters often send their rejects to the public schools to bring down their scores so they can get shut down and replaced with another charter.

Becoming neutral would also be a wise long term decision for TFA.  As the pendulum has already begun shifting away from the corporate reform movement, TFA will have much easier time gaining the favor of my side when we eventually take over once the corporate reformers are exposed as complete frauds.

2)  TFA would have to stop placing corps members in cities where experienced teachers are being laid off.  In my first year the veteran teachers in my school helped me get through that tough year.  I doubt that new corps members will get much support from experienced teachers when those corps members just replaced a more experienced, more competent, teacher who those veterans were friends with.

3)  TFA would have to stop exaggerating the ‘success’ of the first year corps members.  First of all, one out of eight corps members who begin training will quit before completing the two year commitment.  By lying about how well the new corps members are doing (are they as effective as traditionally trained first year teachers?  Perhaps, but that isn’t really saying much.  First year teachers are, in general, not effective).  By lying about first year corps member effectiveness they actually hurt the education system since new corps members hear these stories and think teaching will be easy so they don’t take training as seriously as they can.  Also, these stories of exaggerated success make philanthropists donate more money to TFA which might go to other organizations that don’t mislead about their success.  Teaching is hard and first year teaching is nearly impossible.  Denying this feeds into the myth that poor kids are failing because of bad teachers and that good teachers can turn that around.  Neither thing is true.

Well, I hope this sets the record straight.  TFA terror alert level can be moved back to ‘blue’.

I recently attended the NCTM math teacher’s conference, and I was pleased to see real teachers who have created some great websites that can get kids excited and motivated to learn about math.  Internet math star Dan Meyer did an excellent presentation about how videos can be used to get kids thinking about math — not instructional videos, but videos of something real happening which can spark discussion.  He announced a new website 101qs.com (for 101 questions) where people can upload interesting photos or videos and others can leave comments with good thought provoking questions.  Another great site that is under development is from Mathalicious, and is called math52.com.  What I like about both of these is that they are not just taking the same old boring thing and making tutorials — they are working on making math something that kids WANT to do.  With innovative sites like these, I actually haven’t heard much about Khan Academy recently.

I’m not very optimistic about this new ‘flipped classroom’ model where students watch the lesson for homework and then do their homework as classwork in class.  As someone who has been using computers since I got my Atari 800 computer for my Bar Mitzvah in 1982, I feel like I’m the sort of person who would have a good chance to learn something on a computer if I wanted to.  A few years ago I was taking piano lessons and learning a bit about music theory and decided I wanted to train my ear to recognize the different types of chords and chord progressions.  I researched and purchased what seemed to be an excellent software package called ‘The Earmaster.’  It had a great interface.  It had questions and played the chords and tracked which ones you got correct and adjusted the questions accordingly.  But after a few days, I found myself not interested in the program anymore and that was the last time I used it.  And I really was motivated to do this so I can’t imagine how a kid who can’t get inspired by an actual person sweating it out ten feet away from them is going to be able to maintain concentration for a computer.  One of my co-workers said she learned Spanish from the Rosetta Stone software.  Maybe certain people have the discipline to learn from a computer.  I don’t think, though, that everyone can.

A few months ago Khan was the keynote speaker at The Celebration Of Teaching And Learning.  When someone asked about the quality of the videos, he said that the videos are unscripted and he felt that this was part of what made them popular.  Even when he makes mistakes or leads students, inadvertently, down a ‘dead end,’ it is part of the process of seeing how math people think.

While I do appreciate the spontaneity and the energy that can come from improvisation, some students (perhaps most) will learn more (outcomes, right) from a lesson that is carefully planned.  In my original post, I made a video to contrast with Khan’s on the same topic.  Some people did not like my video and I admitted that I didn’t think mine was that great either, just better than Khan’s.

So I’ve made another attempt.  In the original post, I took an elementary concept of averages and many people were critical of mine for being too slow and detailed.  I think, though, that it is easy for people to think that when they already know the topic.  For this one, I’m going to do a throwdown with Khan on a topic that most people have long forgotten — The Law Of Cosines.  My challenge is for people to watch Khan’s thirty minute improvised explanation and derivation and then try to answer these two questions.  Then watch my video and see if you can do it.

These are two questions that can be solved with The Law Of Cosines.  As a pretest, take a crack at them before watching either set of videos.

Question 1:  Two sides and the angle between them are known.  Find the length of the third side.

Question 2:  All three sides are known.  Find the measure of angle C.

Answers at the end of the post.

This is a very popular topic, often worth up to 10% of the Trigonometry Regents exam, despite being something that teachers generally only spend about 4 or 5 days on.

One of the complications I had to resolve in creating my video is that different students like different types of explanation.  The college way to teach something like this would be to show the ‘long’ way of doing the problem, then derive the formula, and then show how to apply the formula.  You will see that Khan does the first two of these components, yet never shows how to do a practice question with the formula.

I know that some students like to see the long way and the derivation and that helps them understand the formula better.  Other students like to first see how the formula works and then learn why it works later.  And many students just want to get the answer right and, at least to not alienate those students, it is best to teach it that way.  So what I did was add buttons that enable students to skip the derivation and get right to the formula.  I also gave options to skip over review material, and also buttons that wait for the student to answer questions.

Here is Khan’s 3 part 30 minute explanation of The Law Of Cosines.  Watch it and then try to answer the two questions above.

Here is my video.  By skipping ahead, you can get through it in about 10 minutes.  Or, you can watch the whole thing with the ‘long’ way and the derivation of the formula in about 30 minutes.  Watch mine and then try to answer the two questions (you’ll need a scientific calculator — click here to access an online one)

I still don’t think that the ‘flipped’ classroom is a great way to learn math.  But if its going to be done and popularized, the videos need to be high quality.  I don’t think that I ‘nailed’ this lesson, but I do think it is at least pretty good.  I’m interested, though, if the Khan defenders will be able to do so again when comparing these videos.

Answers:

1. 7.9 cm

2.  84.3 degrees

I issued this plea for help for two reasons:  1)  I am exhausted by nearly twenty years of critiquing this organization, particularly the past 14 months when I started working on analyzing and critiquing the entire corporate reform movement, and 2)  It was a way to check to see if anyone was truly ‘with me.’  By doing this, I was risking the possibility that nobody would respond and then I’d have to really reconsider whether this was a worthwhile use of my time.

Though there were not a lot of comments after the post, I did actually receive several emails from people who did not feel comfortable making their stories public.  I also got an email from some guy who said he was worried about my mental and emotional state and thought that it could undermine all the other posts I’ve done.

Well, he and everyone else who is worried will be happy to know that I’m feeling just fine.  I think that I accomplished a lot in this past year with my writing.  I even had editorials in The New York Daily News and on the CNN website.  I’ve debunked ‘miracle schools’ who claim they get incredible results with the ‘same kids’ as neighborhood schools.  I’ve exposed shoddy research papers that get quoted by corporate reformers and politicians alike.  I’ve written several critiques of TFA, one called ‘Why I Did TFA And Why You Shouldn’t’ which got over 20,000 hits.  I don’t want things to get too repetitive, so I’m spending some time recharging, which is why there were only two posts in the past month.  I expect I’ll ‘lay low’ until around the time that the TFA institutes begin.  Depending on how much free time I’ll have this summer, I might be helping organize new TFA corps members to be ‘disrupting’ the institute if they are not getting properly trained or are feeling like they are being lied to in various ways — more to come on that in June.

If I seem pretty enthusiastic it is because my call was answered by at least one brave soul who has begun a new blog on the teachforus.org site, and I want to alert everyone who reads my blog to start subscribing to ‘The Loving Critic’s’ blog and his/her debut post, which was excellent, ‘Visions of a different Teach for America.’  One thing about the blog which I hope was just done inadvertently is that comments are not allowed on the site.

At the end of the first post, I got a ‘shout out’ which I really appreciated.  I don’t get much ‘back’ from doing what I do here.  I think that what I’m doing will help kids in the long run as it prevents the corporate reformers from spreading their lies which ultimately hurt kids and teachers.  But to have someone whom I have never met elect to take the time to fight alongside me means a lot.  If I’m the only person doing it, it might be easy for my critics to label me as some kind of paranoid, conspiracy theory spreading, crank.  With two, it becomes the start of a movement.  Assuming exponential growth (a big assumption, I know, but you never know) this will grow next to 4, 8, 16, 32, etc..  Maybe then I can retire and go back to writing funny stories about my first few years of teaching.

For this post, I’m going to reflect on the teachers in my life that I’ve appreciated.  Some were great teachers, some were just good teachers, and some, believe it or not, were ‘bad’ teachers.

Mel Isaacs, sixth grade 1980-1981

Since my school had some team taught classes, I had ten different teachers at Birch School in Merrick, Long Island.  Of those ten teachers, three had a big impact on me:  second grade, Mrs. Weinrab, fifth grade, Mrs. Gart, and sixth grade, Mr. Isaacs.

Mr. Isaacs was a legend in our school and my sister, who is two years older than me, had him when she was in sixth grade.  Mr. Isaacs had announced, already, that he was retiring, so my sixth grade year would be his last year teaching.  On the last day of fifth grade, we were told who we would be having next year and I was not assigned to his class.  My mother called the school and requested that I get switched into his class.  My mother said that Mr. Isaacs was such an influence on my sister and then threw in that my parents were recently divorced and I could use a consistent male role model, I think.  Whatever she said, it worked, and I was put into the class.

Mr. Isaacs was an amazing teacher.  He truly ran a student-centered class and insisted that we turn in every assignment.  I remember having to make up about twenty things at the end of the year or I would be ‘left back’  — now I know this was probably an idle threat, but it worked.

I will never forget the two major units we did on Ancient Greece and The United Nations.  For the U.N., each of us chose a country and we made flags and then we had simulated meetings of the general assembly, the security council, and the world court.  This was 31 years ago, and I still get a sense of pride when I pass by the actual United Nations, here in New York City, because of how much I had learned about it back then.

I suppose that if there was one thing Mr. Isaacs could have improved about his teaching would have been to refrain from smacking me, and some other boys, on the side of the head when we were day-dreaming.  I’m not saying I didn’t deserve it.  Back in 1981, it probably wasn’t even something a teacher could get fired for.

Milton Klausner, 10th grade English 1984-1985 and 12th grade English 1986-1987

Claire Bendle, 11th grade English 1985-1986

The best two teachers I had in high school were not, for me, my math teachers.  The math teachers were fine — good enough.  Certainly from a value-added perspective, my math teachers would be considered to have done a great job with me.  But I know that it was my English teachers who had the most impact on me — even though I didn’t do very well on the English Regents or the A.P. English test.

I think an English teacher has done a great job if they help students develop a love for reading or writing, preferably both.  I’ll admit that they didn’t get me to love reading literature — something I still don’t like.  Not that they didn’t try, but I just couldn’t get through ‘The Grapes Of Wrath,’ ‘The Scarlett Letter,’ and ‘Ethan Frome’ without the aid of Cilff’s Notes (has The Internet put Cliff’s Notes out of business?).

My great English teachers did not help me love reading, but did help me learn to write, something that is my true passion — even more than Math.  I remember that Mr. Klausner had us write an ‘anecdote’ every day of the entire school year.  I can’t imagine how he graded all of them, now that I am a teacher, but somehow he did.  He used to have us read our first sentences out loud and he’d judge if they were exciting enough.  In almost all my published work, I can see Mr. Klausner’s influence in some of my pithy first sentences.

Mrs. Bendle helped me develop my abilities as a humor writer.  She must have given many assignments that allowed me to explore this type of writing, and was very encouraging of my efforts.  I remember telling the girl who sat behind me in that class, that I was going to write a book one day.

A great teacher is one that makes assignments that encourage students’ abilities and my two high school English teachers did just that.

Wynn Landau, trumpet teacher, 1978-1987

Surely the most influential teacher in my life was not a teacher from my schooling, but someone who was referred to my family when I was in 4th grade by my elementary school band teacher, Mr. Feulner.

As I was showing some early talent for the trumpet when I started playing in 4th grade, I started taking private lessons with Mr. Landau.  I’m not sure how old he was, probably in his early to mid seventies when we started.  Mr. Landau was, literally, a giant.  As a side effect of a radiation treatment when he was a little younger, his bones began to grow again.  As a result, he was physically grotesque.  But his goodness and love of teaching made his students unable to notice this.

Mr. Landau spent about half of each lesson telling me stories about his life.  These tales were as tall as him, but if they were even a little true, he lived a pretty amazing life.  He was in the army, I guess for WWII, and he claims that he was the bugler who played ‘taps’ at FDR’s funeral.  He said that he and three of his platoon mates pushed an anti-Semetic drill seargeant off of a tower.

Fourth grade was when my parents got divorced.  My grandmother died when I was in 5th grade.  My dog died when I was in 6th grade.  Mr. Landau was the most consistent figure in my life throughout all those years.  I remember that in 5th grade my class had an ‘honored guest’ party and while all the other students invited their parents or grandparents, I invited Mr. Landau.

I was (and still am) a very shy person.  But when I played the trumpet, I was anything but.  I practiced a lot and was first trumpet from 4th grade through 12th grade.  I could play louder than the entire band if I wanted to.  As first trumpet, I was also pretty popular, at least among the people in the band.  The trumpet gave me an identity and a ‘thing’ that I excelled at.  The confidence that I have today when I’m in my element — either in the classroom, or writing these blog entries, were nurtured by Mr. Landau and the years of trumpet lessons.

Between my second and third years of teaching, back in the summer of 1994, I was visiting New York from Houston when I got the call that Mr. Landau had died.  By an amazing coincidence, it was possible for me to attend his funeral.  But, ironically — and this is perhaps the biggest regret in my life — I didn’t.  Back then I was so obsessed with teaching that I would not even consider changing my flight to get back to Houston early enough to set up my classroom.  If I could go back and do it again, I would have paid my respects properly — and brought my trumpet and played ‘taps.’

Assorted ‘bad’ teachers 1974-1991

Most of my teachers were not very inspirational.  Some, particularly in college math courses, were pretty bad.  The one thing about a ‘bad’ teacher is that the student is forced to teach himself the material.  I suppose a great teacher can also teach a student how to be self-sufficient, but there’s a bit more urgency when you have a truly bad teacher.  Bad math teachers inspired me to learn to learn from the textbook.  Bad history teachers have inspired me, in recent years, to read books about American history.  I think if all my teachers were ‘great’ I would have never been forced to pick up this important skill.

And someone who I thought was ‘bad’ might have been considered great by someone else.  This is part of the benefit of having so many different teachers in our lifetime.  Really you only need one great teacher in your lifetime.

As I feared, this post became a lot more about me than about the teachers who inspired me.  I haven’t thought about all these teachers in a long time, and now my whole school experience is coming back to me so I’m just going to ramble for a while — feel free to stop reading if you get bored.  There were other great teachers besides the four that I mentioned.  My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Gart, was influential in my life because she had us do creative oral reports about books we read.  This was what got me ‘writing’ for an audience.  My second grade teacher, Mrs. Weinrab, actually had me over to her house to meet her family for dinner once.  This definitely made me feel special.  Three of my middle school teachers stand out, Mr. Auletta the science teacher — with his corny puns.  Mrs. Osrow, my English teacher for 7th and 8th grade, who also had us do creative oral reports.  Mrs. Schreiber who was my computer teacher in 8th grade and who trusted me and my buddy Jared to demonstrate what we learned at parent teacher conference night.  All the different band teachers I had were quite good — makes me hope that the Arts makes a comeback in schools.  My best science teacher was Mr. Young.  I had him for 11th grade chemistry and 12th grade physics.  I idolized this guy and did very well in his courses.  He let me down, though, when I asked him to write my college recommendation letter.  He cryptically said when I asked, “If I write it, I’m going to write the truth.”  Knowing that I definitely had my flaws, I found someone else to write it.  Now, as a teacher, I rarely turn anyone down.

To all teachers, particularly TFA teachers who are just completing their first years and who, despite my relentless criticism, I’m sure gave it everything they had, I hope that some of your students learn that this is teacher appreciation week and write you a card or something.  Even my first year, I got some thank you notes at the end of the year which I still treasure.

This is the paper that is always cited by Bloomberg, Walcott, and Suransky when they proclaim that the ends justify the means when it comes to shutting down schools.  In his recent New York Daily News editorial, ‘Close bad schools, save their students’ Walcott wrote

A study by the independent education research group MDRC confirmed how well our new schools are working. Among other things, the study found that they “markedly improved graduation rates for a large population of low-income, disadvantaged students of color.”

When these reports were released, many of the flaws in the conclusions were analyzed.  But since the DOE had no other evidence that their reforms were working, they continued to cite this study every chance they could.  Since the other excellent efforts to demonstrate the flaws in these reports have not caught on enough, I’ve decided to reinforce by analyzing the papers myself using the most recent data about the schools involved in the study.

The study attempts to measure the effect of shutting down 23 large high schools and opening 216 small high schools.  As the big high schools were closed, their students were scattered around the district.  The new small schools got new crops of ninth graders so it seems difficult to compare the new schools to the old schools since they have different kids.  For this study, they came up with an interesting approach.  Since students apply to the different schools, and many of the schools require a lottery to see who gets in, they set out to compare the achievement and graduation rates of the students who entered the lottery and were admitted to 105 of the small schools to the students who entered the lottery but ‘lost’ and went to regular schools.

The big finding was that the graduation rate for the students who won the lottery was 6.8% higher that for students who had entered the lottery but didn’t get into one of those 105 schools.

As an isolated statistic, this sounds moderately successful.  Certainly for the 6.8% who graduated and might not have otherwise, it is significant.  As these small schools serve about 400 students each, they have a combined enrollment of 40,000, so 6.8% is over 2,700 students.  But as I examined these two papers carefully I’ve determined that there are many additional factors that call the success of this program into question.  In this post, I’ll highlight the most significant ones.

1.  Who wrote the paper?

The paper was written by MDRC, which is “a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization” according to the Jan 2012 update.  It was funded by Gates, which is interesting, but not surprising.  Gates funds a lot of research and much of it contradicts the corporate reform theories.

What I learned, though, and what I haven’t seen reported elsewhere is that while three authors wrote the June 2010 paper, Howard S. Bloom, Saskia Levy Thompson, and Rebecca Unterman, only two of them wrote the Jan 2012 update.  Missing from the update is Saskia Levy Thompson.  Why the omission?  Well, she couldn’t work on that because two months after the first paper, in August 2010, she was hired as a top DOE executive making $174,410.  And, no, I’m not implying that she created skewed research to land a job, but it is still something ‘interesting’ considering that this paper remains the only piece of ‘proof’ that closing down schools is an effective reform strategy.

2.  Do the 105 schools serve the ‘same kids’ as the schools they replaced?

The schools that had been shut down, according to the report, had graduation rates around 45%.  The new schools had a 68.7% graduation rate.  If it were the ‘same kids’ this would be quite an accomplishment.  Well, they don’t try to claim that it is the same kids which is why they don’t boast a 20% increase, but just a 6.8% one.  This is because the ‘control group’ which are the students who lost the lottery and had to go to a regular school had a graduation rate of 61.9%.  In other words, the kids who entered the lottery were ‘better’ than kids who didn’t.

This is revealed completely in table 2.3 on page 31 of the June 2010 paper.

The most dramatic line is the one about special education.  While 14% of NYC 9th graders are Special Education students, the percent of students who entered the lottery was actually 15.5%.  But somehow only 6.7% went to the 105 small schools.  How can this be?  Statistically, it is nearly impossible that only 6.7% would win the lottery if the pool had 15.5%.  Well, the reason was not that only that number happened to win the lottery.  But most of of the Special Education students who ‘won’ the lottery were not able to attend those schools since those schools, being small schools, could not offer the accommodations that they were entitled to.  This statistic, alone, should invalidate any conclusions made in the study.  Of course when you have much fewer Special Education students, you also have fewer sever behavior issues which tend to take a lot of time and energy to address.

In several other categories we see that the 8th grade lottery winners were ‘better’ than the lottery losers.

The net result of all this manipulation of the entering students could surely account for the 6.8% increase in graduation rate.

3.  What is the ‘expected’ graduation rate increase based on peer effects?

The fact that the graduation rate of the students who went to these 105 schools was 6.8% higher than the graduation rate of the students who lost the lottery and went to regular schools can easily be explained by peer effects.  If you separate the more motivated students, they will do a little better than if you mix those students in with less motivated students.  This is something that everyone already knows.  It is not, though, something that can be the basis of a policy change.  If they really wanted to take this experiment to an extreme, they would separate all the more motivated students out and have schools just for them.  The other schools would get much worse since they would not have enough motivated students to set examples for the others.  I would have expected the graduation rate to increase by more than 6.8% so I don’t see this experiment as much of a success.

4.  What about some of the other results, not often quoted?

On page 53 of the June 2010 report, they have this table comparing different levels of graduation rate and also achievement results on certain tests.

Notice that the control group (students who lost the lottery) actually had a higher percent of Advanced Regents diplomas and also had a higher percent of students getting over a 75 on the Math A Regents.  Looking at this table, it is safe to say that the results of this experiment are, at best, mixed.

5.  What level of achievement have these small schools actually accomplished?

Looking over the 2010-2011 Comprehensive Information Reports (CIR) for these schools, I was struck by how poor their achievement was.  In a school that is producing many ‘college ready’ students, we should see a good number of students taking some of the more advanced Regents.  These would include Chemistry, Physics, and higher math.  There are three different math regents, Integrated Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2 / Trigonometry.  Advanced 8th graders often take the Integrated Algebra Regents, even in a low performing middle school.  ‘Average’ 9th graders and 10th graders who are behind could take that test too.  I took a random school from the list, Validus Preparatory Academy, to see what sorts of Regents they took.  Only 42% of 190 students passed Integrated Algebra.  This is a test, I know from grading it, that only requires getting about 30% correct to get scaled to a passing 65%.  Only 45 students took Geometry, of which only 16% passed.  Only 5 students took Algebra 2 / Trigonometry, of which just 1 student passed.  One student took Chemistry, though there was not a score for that student, and zero students took Physics.  The combined SAT average for this school was 1062 out of 2400.  This is only a little better than you get for writing your name on the paper.

As Validus Preparatory Academy was just chosen since it was the last school on the list alphabetically, I decided to look at the ‘best’ school, according to the 2010-2011 city progress report.  The ‘It Takes A Village’ school scored at the 99.4th percentile on the city progress report.  In a school that high, you should expect a lot of kids taking Algebra 2 since that is really an 11th grade course while 12th graders would be taking precalculus, or even calculus.  We should also see many students passing Chemistry and Physics.

It Takes A Village had 23 students take Algebra 2 (19 passed), 31 for Chemistry (19 passed), and 40 for Physics (25 passed)

The fourth ‘best’ school, The Urban Assembly School for Media Studies had 9 students take Algebra 2 (5 passed), no Chemistry, and no Physics.

Some other schools had higher percentages than these, but, in general the academic achievement and rigor at these schools was very thin.  For their five best schools, the average SAT scores were 1135, which was below the city average of 1222.  For AP exams, they had an average of 17% passing vs. 30% for the city.  And since the demographics of these schools gave them a ‘peer index’ of 2.27 which is above the city average of 2.25, they can’t even use their demographics as an ‘excuse.’

6.  Have any of these 105 schools been, since, shut down?

As of the most recent school closure announcements, seven of the 105 schools have been closed.  This 7% is not that different than the percent of schools throughout the 1,100 schools that have been shut down.

The seven schools are International Arts Business School, Gateway School for Environmental Research and Tech, Manhattan Theater Lab High School, Global Enterprise High School, Performance Conservatory High School, Urban Assembly Academy for History and Citizenship, and The School for Community Research and Learning.

Conclusion

Shutting down schools and reopening new ones is likely to create an illusory bump in some statistics — in this case the 6.8% improvement in graduation rate.  A brand new school with all first time freshmen will be free of the distraction of the repeater freshmen.  In that way, I’m not surprised that there were minor increases.  But these increases are just a result of this dynamic and not from getting a crop of better teachers.  In time these schools will likely begin to suffer the same problems that brought down the schools they replaced.

This is not a scalable solution and it seems to be doing much more harm than it is good.

As always, I really encourage professional journalists to dig deeper into this than I am able to do in my limited spare time.  There is certainly a Pulitzer Prize in journalism waiting for the reporter who takes down the corrupt corporate reform movement.

I joined, as most people in TFA did, to ‘make a difference’ to ‘give back.’  Hopefully my inexperience in my first year didn’t serve to do more damage to the kids I tried to teach than if someone else was teaching them.  It took me a lot of years to convince myself that the good teaching I did in my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th years made up for whatever damage I had done with that first group.  I also could rest more easily knowing that as I taught middle school math, that first year, I was only one of six teachers they had that year and that the other five (we had a ‘cluster’ system so the group of 150 kids who had me had the same other five teachers) were quite good.

After I learned how to be an effective teacher, I became critical of the TFA training model.  This began in 1996 when I first (and last) worked as a staff member at the institute.  Over the next fifteen years I tried everything I could to both encourage TFA to improve the training and also to spread the word about the deficiencies of this training.

Even though most people who have been through the TFA training surely agree that it is flawed, I was the lone dissenting voice for a frustrating fifteen years.  This always confused me.  Why was nobody else angry about this?  Why was nobody else speaking up?  Maybe people didn’t want to admit how tough their first years were.  Maybe people worried that if they said how poor of a job of teaching they did and then tried to blame it on the poor training, whoever they were telling would think that this was just an excuse.

This general silence goes on today.  Maybe TFA instilled the idea of the ‘locus of control’ so much that people are conditioned to not blame anyone else for their failures.  It doesn’t make sense to me.  Here’s a question I have for any current TFAer or alum:  If someone close to you joined TFA and just finished the institute and you had five minutes to give them some valuable advice that you wish you had heard at the institute, what would you tell them?  Unless your answer is:  “Nothing.  The institute pretty much covered it all.” then you know what I’m talking about.

Only recently, about fourteen months ago, did I turn my attention to the bigger issue of education reform.  Before that I was content to write advice for new teachers and to write funny stories about my first year of teaching.  But I had some sort of epiphany at, of all places, the 20 year alumni summit.  Suddenly, it was all so clear to me:  The same sort of people who had been pretending that they knew anything about training teachers had now taken charge of the American education system and were pretending that they had any idea how to make it better.  Instead they were conducting a huge experiment based, not on research, but on half-baked ideas about what the cause of the achievement gap is and what the remedies are.  This pretending that they know what they are doing was much worse than before since instead of just hurting the student of those first year TFAers, they were now harming millions of innocent students and teachers too.  Since that convention fourteen months ago, I’ve dedicated a huge percent of my life to learning about and writing about this issue.

And it would be wrong to assume that I ‘like’ doing this.  No.  I’m doing this because I can’t not do it.  I’ve got to speak up and spread the word since I truly believe that if the corporate reformers, who TFA has aligned themselves with, win then kids will ultimately lose:  Nobody will want to be a teacher anymore and those who do teach will just teach to meaningless standardized tests so they don’t get fired.  The result will be less educated students who hate learning.

Unfortunately for me, I have a special talent for understanding and writing about this topic.  And, yes, I do get some pleasure out of it too:  I do enjoy the bit of ‘fame’ it’s gotten me.  Certainly I’ve also enjoyed finally having a ‘clique’ that I belong to after all those years where TFA shunned me.  All in all, this has definitely given me a sense of purpose, but I am still looking forward to the day that this battle ends.

I’m 42 and a husband and a father of the two greatest kids in the world, a 4 year old girl and a 1 year old boy.  Right around the time my son was born was when I started learning about this ed reform battle.  The poor little guy has had to spend his whole life, so far, with a father constantly talking about the latest ed reform news.  His first two words, I think, were “Diane Ravitch,” and his third and fourth words were “Michelle Rhee.”

This is why, for my sake, and for the sake of my wife and children, I’m asking all the current and former CMs to help me out.  In the past few years, I’ve been relieved that a few other TFAers have joined in.  Probably the most prominent is author Roxanna Elden, who wrote the excellent book ‘See Me After Class.’  But there are others, even on this teachforus site.  Wessie, of Drinking The Kool-Aid fame has been posting with such honesty, and Tony B’s blog also.  I don’t know if these two think of themselves as on the same ‘side’ as me — but I do since I think I’m just on the side of telling the truth, whatever your ‘truth’ is.

You were recruited by TFA because you were smart and ambitious and would be able to use your talents to teach, but also to analyze what is going on, after getting first-hand experience.  So now you’ve experienced how difficult teaching is.  You’ve seen, also, how complex the achievement gap is too.  So do you really believe that the issue is ‘bad teachers’ who need to be motivated through fear of being fired or through cash bonuses?  Is that really what you determined after working in a school alongside people who elected to become career teachers?  Those of you who worked in charter schools, do you really believe that they are providing an excellent education to all students?

Its time for you to speak up too.  Start writing about it.  Make your own blog or, if you want, send stuff to me and I’ll give you a ‘guest post.’  I know it is more comforting to pat yourself on the back for having ‘given back’ to society — but if you don’t get real about how some of these ‘solutions’ will make things worse, you are part of the problem.

If you think that the TFA celebrities truly know what they are doing with the power they have attained then, well, you may be the best, but you sure ain’t the brightest.

Nearly everything I’ve read that questions the validity of the value-added metric mentions the astronomical ‘error rates.’  When the NYC Teacher Data Reports were first released, the New York Times website ran an article with some numbers that have been frequently quoted:

But citing both the wide margin of error — on average, a teacher’s math score could be 35 percentage points off, or 53 points on the English exam — as well as the limited sample size — some teachers are being judged on as few as 10 students — city education officials said their confidence in the data varied widely from case to case.

Thinking so much about value-added for my analysis, it recently hit me that the above critique actually understates the real problem with value-added error rates.  Implied is the possibility that if they could just figure out some way to get those error rates down to under some acceptable threshold, then the measure would be much more useful.  But I plan to show in this post that it would not matter if they got the error rates down to 0% because the error rates do not actually mean what most people think they mean.

So what is an ‘error rate’?  Well, if I have a thermometer and when the temperature outside is 70 degrees while my thermometer says the temperature is 77 degrees then my thermometer, at that moment, has a 10% error.  If I read the thermometer twenty times when the temperature is 70 degrees and I get readings as low as 56 degrees and as high as 84 degrees, we can say that my thermometer is not very accurate since there is a 20% error rate compared to the ‘true’ temperature.  This is what we think about when we hear about error rates.  How the measurement compares to the ‘true’ number.

In the case of the temperature, the ‘true’ temperature that my readings are compared to is measured by some kind of very expensive and very accurate thermometer.  Without that other thermometer that has the ‘true’ temperature, there is no way to measure the accuracy of my thermometer.

So when we hear that the value-added metrics have a 35 percent error rate for a particular teacher and that the teacher scores at the 40th percentile, we think that this means that the teacher’s ‘true’ quality is somewhere between the 5th percentile and the 75th percentile.  There is no way the teacher’s ‘true’ quality can be lower than the 5th percentile or higher than the 75th percentile otherwise the error rate for that teacher would not be 35 percent.

This is making the very reasonable assumption that these ‘error rates’ are defined by how the value-added measure compares to the ‘true’ measure of teacher quality.  But since there is no equivalent, in teaching, of the super accurate thermometer that measures the ‘true’ quality, how can it possibly be compared to that?

Because the error rates are more meaningless that I had realized.  They don’t compare the value-added number to the ‘true’ teacher quality number — they can’t.  Instead, all that the error rate measures is how the value-added number for that teacher compares to what the value-added number for that teacher would be if we re-calculated it with about fifty times the amount of data.  That’s it.  With more data the error rates go down so that with fifty years of data, the error rate would be pretty close to zero and then we could say, definitively, that this teacher is in the 40th percentile as a ‘value-adder.’  But that is not the same thing as saying that the teacher is in the 40th percentile in her ‘true’ teacher quality number.

Now that is not to say that this more accurate ‘value-adder’ percentile would be completely useless — but it still would not deserve to count as a large portion of a teacher’s evaluation.

My point is that most people who hear about these ‘error rates’ do assume that it means that the error rate is based on comparing the number to the teacher’s ‘true’ quality.  Even I’ve written in the past things like “The 30% error rate means that 30% of the time an effective teacher will be rated ineffective by this measure and an ineffective teacher will be rated effective.”  Now I realize that this was too generous.  It would have been more accurate to write “30% of the time an effective ‘value-adder’ will be rated as an ineffective ‘value-adder’ and vice-versa.”  Until the ‘true’ quality of a teacher can be measured accurately with some other method, we’ll never be able to say anything more definitive than that about value-added.

In this Education Week article, they quote Duncan

“Almost immediately, armchair analysts, bloggers, and pundits virtually uniformly predicted that the SIG program would flop,” he said. “They said it would be a terrible waste of time, talent, goodwill, and money. …. Fortunately, great teachers, great community partners and parents—and most importantly, committed students—didn’t listen to the skeptics.”

Districts could choose one of four models for the school in need of improvement. Here is the description of the four models from the US DOE website.

Worth noting is that over 75% of the schools chose the ‘transformation’ model which was based on helping, and not firing, the teachers.  So I don’t know that so many bloggers and pundits predicted that they would ‘fail’ (though it wasn’t predetermined what ‘success’ or ‘failure’ is).  I can’t speak for all bloggers, but from my point of view, giving extra funds to a school is generally a good thing.  But if the schools are told that they must spend the money on expensive consultants or expensive data systems, then I begin to really doubt if it is money well spent.  I wasn’t blogging about this topic when this program began, so I didn’t predict it would fail.  What I would have predicted, however, is that the results would not likely be ‘dramatic.’  And based on what I’ve read so far, the results are not.

According to the article

About one in four schools saw double-digit increases in math proficiency. And about one in five schools posted double digit increases in reading proficiency. In all, during the first year of the program, the percent of students who were proficient in math or reading went up in roughly 60 percent of SIG schools, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told the crowd assembled at the Building a Grad Nation Summit in Washington.

A year ago, the big thing was the 90-90-90 schools (schools with 90% free lunch, 90% graduation rate, 90% ‘achievement’).  Now that it has been revealed that there aren’t any of those, the new thing is ‘double digit increases.’  So the idea is that if a school has 20% proficiency one year and it goes up to 30% proficiency the next, this is cause for celebration, even if the state average is 80%.

While I do appreciate ‘progress,’ the ‘double digit increases” thing is deceptive.  Test scores from one year to the next go up and down.  Just because a school gets double digit gains one year does not usually mean that they continue that rate of ‘growth’ until they hit 100%.  In following up on schools that have gotten ‘double digit increases’, I’ve found that they frequently go down the next year.

The stat that “the percent of students who were proficient in math or reading went up in roughly 60 percent of SIG schools” is also quite insignificant.  I suppose if you assume that without these interventions all the schools were going to go down in math and reading, then the fact that 60% went up in one or the other seems good.  But since test scores can fluctuate from year to year it is actually extremely likely that a group of low performing schools would have over 60% going up in reading or math.  Anything under 75% is actually low.

Here’s why:  Imagine flipping two coins, a nickel and quarter.  The nickel represents math and the quarter represents reading. A heads on a coin represents an increase in scores and a tails represents a decrease. 25% of the time the coins would be both tails (reading and math decrease), 25% of of the time they would be both heads (reading and math increase), 25% of the time the nickel is heads while the quarter is tails (math increases and reading decreases), and 25% of of the time the quarter is heads while the nickel is tails (reading increases and math decreases).  So in 3 out of the four scenarios, or 75% of of the time, you flip two coins there will be a head on one or the other (or both) coins.  So if the chances of scores on math and reading each have a 50% chance of going up, which schools generally do since they fluctuate up or down small amounts each year, the chance that at least one of them will go up is 75%.  This is why getting 60% going up on reading or math might sound good in a press release, but it actually isn’t very good.

There were 800 schools in the project, so of course with that many schools there are bound to be some ‘miracles’ and there are bound to be some that continue to be ‘failing.’  If I went through the 800 schools looking for ones that got lower test scores, I’d be accused of cherry-picking, so what I did was let the people at the DOE tell me which schools to investigate.  In an article on the US DOE blog, a Washington Teaching Ambassador Fellow named Greg Mullenholz answered questions about the School Improvement Grants.

Here’s a relevant question and answer

TQ [Teacher Question]: What are some promising results that we are seeing in schools identified by their states as being in need of a turnaround?

 

Mr. M: When a school is identified as being in need of a turnaround, we often find that the school and the district engage in a critical analysis of the school’s data, its academic culture, and the resources that might be available to it from the community at large. Essentially, they see the school as a doctor would evaluate a patient and then make a diagnosis that would be best for that particular situation. SIG funding is only one part of the turnaround, and we know that you can’t simply buy a school turnaround. It has to be a collective effort with all stakeholders focused on the ultimate goal of providing a high-quality education for all of the students. Here are just a few examples of promising practices and results:

• Weinland Park Elementary in Columbus, Ohio, in its first year under SIG and with the support of outside partners, gained 13 percentage points in reading and 19 in math by employing a data-based model of instruction that looked closely at specific student needs and tailored instruction to meet those needs.
• Luke C. Moore High School in Washington, D.C. , which serves students between the ages of 17-21 who have dropped out or had difficulties in traditional school settings, has transformed its school culture to one of high academic expectations and student self-efficacy Under its new principal, the school made Adequate Yearly Progress by improving reading proficiency by 10 points and math proficiency by 20 points. This is due in part to a decrease of student referrals and offsite suspensions by 50%!

So of all the schools in the program, he decided to highlight Weinland Park Elementary and Luke C. Moore High.

Weinland Park Elementary got $825,000 and chose the transformation model, which did not require firing half their teachers.  According to Mullenholz, they “gained 13 percentage points in reading and 19 in math.”  Looking at their school report card, I noticed that he was talking about the comparison of the 4th graders in 2009-2010 to the 4th graders in 2010-2011.

Before you get too impressed, remember that this is comparing two different cohorts of students.  A much more relevant comparison would be to compare the scores of the 4th graders in 2009-2010 to the scores of the 5th graders in 2010-2011.

2009-2010 4th graders scored 34% in reading while 2010-2011 5th graders scored 34.1% in reading.  So, actually, that cohort went up by .1% in reading.  2009-2010 4th graders scored 27.7% in math while 2010-2011 5th graders scored 22% in math so that cohort went DOWN 5.7% in math.  Not as impressive looking now, and this was one of the two schools out of 800 that they CHOSE to spotlight.  Also notice that if you compare the 5th graders from 2009-2010 to the 5th graders from 2010-2011, they went down 6% in reading, up 7% in math, and down 1% in science.

Luke C Moore in D.C. also chose the turnaround model.  They got $552,000 to implement it.  The DOE says it went up by 10% in reading and 20% in math.  Looking over the school report cards, I learned that this is based on how their 10th graders did in 2009-2010 compared to their 10th graders in 2010-2011.  Though the school had 400 students in 2009-2010, there were only 45 students who took the test to get 11% passing math and 18% passing reading.  The next year the enrollment in the school went down to 311.  Now, they actually had more students taking the test, though it still was only 70 students and their 10th grade scores were now 22% in math and 42% in reading.  These are very small sample sizes and it is a stretch to imply that these improvements were representative of the growth of the entire school.

So while I do approve of more money being spent on ‘failing’ schools, and I also approve of trying to help the school improve without firing the teachers, I think that it is not quite time to celebrate and declare that anyone has proved that poverty can be overcome by hiring expert consultants. And while one year of data is also too soon to call this program a ‘failure,’ it certainly can’t be called a ‘success’ yet either.

Because of my views about this, Duncan likes to label people like me ‘skeptics.’  Basically, he and other corporate reformers are ‘optimists’ since they believe that the ‘crisis’ in schools can be overcome through more accountability and choice and I’m a ‘pessimist’ because I don’t think we can do much better than we’re already doing.  But there is another way to look at it.  Maybe I’m the ‘optimist’ because I believe that schools and teachers can’t be pushed to do much better than they are already doing because they are already doing a good job.  So from my perspective, I’m the ‘optimist’ and he is the ‘alarmist.’  Still, I’m all for improving things.  Certainly, I don’t think that things are perfect.  But what I am most skeptical about is that these ‘reforms’ are not based on research and will likely make things worse.  If we weren’t in a true crisis before, we certainly are headed toward one now.

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, by Steven Brill. (Simon and Schuster, 2011; 496 pp.;
978-1-4516-1199-1, $28.00 hardback.)

In Defense Of The Anti-Reformers

In ‘Class Warfare’ lawyer Steven Brill demonstrates his litigation skills as he lays out his case against teachers’ unions and the so-called anti-reformers.  His argument is clear, concise, and compelling.  As prosecutor, he calls mainly on the witnesses that will strengthen his case, skillfully cross examining them and shrewdly striking from the record almost anything that might introduce a reasonable doubt.

Brill’s argument can be summarized in four main points, which I’ll first enumerate  and then challenge one by one.

1)  Some charter schools prove that teachers can overcome poverty.
2)  Most teachers in non-charter schools are not overcoming poverty because of many clauses in their contract which put the needs of the adults above the needs of the children.
3)  Teachers are also, because of union pressure in getting state laws passed, not accountable for their performance.  Performance, as defined by standardized test score gains, is something that can now be easily and accurately measured.  Unlike other professions, teachers are not compensated for their performance.  Instead they are subjected to “lockstep seniority-based compensation.”
4)  Entire cities like New York City, Washington D.C., and New Orleans that are encouraging charters, limiting union perks, and evaluating teachers on performance are yielding results.

These four points are so compelling to education reformers, Brill describes, that Race To The Top was designed as a way to encourage states to change their laws to remove charter caps and to tie teacher evaluations to standardized test scores.

Challenging Brill’s argument:

1)  Miracle Schools

Several times throughout the book, Brill makes the claim that charters “proved that intense, effective teaching could overcome poverty.” (page 303)  Brill utilizes the standard reformer trick of touting some ‘miracle schools’ which are serving the ‘same kids’ sometimes in the same building with stunning results.

Two common critiques of high-achieving charter schools are that they get their results though “cherry picking” and attrition.  Brill relegates the “cherry picking” argument to a footnote at the bottom of page 16.  “None of the actual data supports” the claims that charters “ ‘skim’ the most motivated students from the community or that they fail to represent as many of the poorest kids, kids with learning disabilities, or English-language learners.”  So why in the pro-reform August 2011 issue of The Educational Gadfly was there an article called “Public School Choice in the District of Columbia:  A Descriptive Analysis” with the summary “The skinny? Yes, charters are cream-skimming.”  The author admits that the incoming students were ‘better’ than those who didn’t apply, but then went on to argue that it is good to give those better students the opportunity of the better learning environment.

Attempting to present research contrary to this, on page 303 Brill cites a study in which students who applied for a charter lottery and won were compared to students who applied for the lottery and lost.  He said that the ones who won did better than the ones who lost, which seemed to prove “Same demographics, same motivation, different results.”  But this is just what I’d expect.  The more important comparison is to compare students who entered lottery and lost to students who never entered the lottery.  All this study proves is that if you isolate the most motivated kids, they will perform better than they would if they were mixed in with the others.  Brill never brings up the attrition concern at all.

Exhibits A and B are ‘miracle schools’ Harlem Success Academy 1 and Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts.

Introduced on page 10 and then weaved throughout the book is Harlem Success Academy 1 charter school, which shares a building with the lower performing P.S. 149.  The fact that Harlem Success 1 has very good test scores despite having “similarly qualified, or challenged, students” (page 16) as P.S. 149 proves what is possible with hard working teachers with high expectations.  But Harlem Success has 64% free lunch versus 78% for P.S. 149, 15% special ed versus 24%, and 6% English language learners versus 10%.  One other detail missing is a curious amount of attrition for the third and fourth grade cohorts.  Harlem Success’s 83 kindergartners and 73 first graders in 2006 had dwindled to just 63 third graders and 59 fourth graders in 2009.  This is a stunning 22% decrease.  Meanwhile in P.S. 149 they went from 39 kindergartners in 2006 up to 44 third graders in 2009 and from 45 kindergartners in 2005 to 44 fourth graders in 2009.

Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts was started by one of the heroes of the book, State Senator Michael Johnston of Colorado.  A large ‘failing’ school was split up and Johnston was given a chance to take over a portion of the school with a staff that he could build from scratch.  On page 139 in a pep talk to an unspecified number of 9th and 10th graders Johnston says “The state’s statistics say that half of you probably won’t graduate” and that he intends to prove them wrong.  One year later, on page 196, he tells his 44 eleventh graders that he will help them all graduate and get into college.  A year and eight months later, on page 198, Obama comes to see the graduation and congratulate the 44 graduates for getting into college.  It’s a great story and demonstrates what can be done with a great leader who has high expectations and who has the power to choose his staff.

But the success is exaggerated in a very relevant way.  When I looked up the records on the Colorado Education website I learned that the group of 44 graduates who got into college did not begin as 44 tenth graders two years earlier.  There were at least 73 tenth graders in that original group as that was the number of eleventh graders one year later.  So, ironically, about half of them did graduate, just as the state expected.  Another irony omitted by Brill about Mapleton is that Johnston will soon become a State Senator who gets a law passed tying teacher evaluations to test scores while at his own school the scores were terrible with, for example, 11 percent proficiency in math in Johnston’s final year as principal there.

I don’t reveal these statistics as a way of saying that Johnston wasn’t a good principal or that his teachers were not good.  I do this to make a point that in this current ed reform debate, we need to have a realistic definition of what qualifies as success.

2)  Union Contracts

The argument that there are too many bad teachers needs to be backed up by a statistic of approximately how many such teachers there are.  If the percent of bad teachers is very low, then firing them all would not change things much.  Brill uses P.S. 149 (page 45) as an example of a school that has between 25% if not 33% of teachers like this.  Based on my informal experience at several schools, I’d put the number under 1%.

For the same reason there are not many terrible lion tamers, there are not that many terrible teachers.  Students make life miserable for a bad teacher, so there are lot less stressful ways to make a living than to be an ineffective teacher.

Brill describes several union benefits from the New York City contract with extreme contempt.  Principals, Brill says, are handcuffed by the union contract.  If they try to observe teachers they get accused of harassment, and they have no say about the format of a teacher’s lesson plans.  He quotes a teacher as saying she can write her lesson on toilet paper if she wants to.  Of course nobody actually writes their lessons on toilet paper.  Even lazy teachers like to write the plans on something that can be saved and used again in future years.

Here is the actual two sentence clause from the contract:  “The organization, format, notation and other physical aspects of the lesson plan are appropriately within the discretion of each teacher.  A principal or supervisor may suggest, but not require, a particular format or organization, except as part of a program to improve deficiencies of teachers who receive U-ratings or formal warnings.”

Notice that this isn’t about the substance of the lesson plan, but just the ‘physical aspects’ of it, like what color paper it is on and what kind of ink it is written in.  Also Brill does not mention that the second sentence allows a principal to require a certain physical format when the teacher is on an improvement plan.

Many reformers lament that we have a system that  is good for the adults when it should be good for the children.  This is one of the most misleading sound bites in the entire education reform movement.  Brill uses an example on page 410 which brings this issue to its absurd extreme.  As a comparison he gives an example of something from a flier for the non-unionized charter Harlem Success Academy I.  “In a traditional school, if it’s forty degrees or colder no one goes outside into the schoolyard, because it’s too cold for the adults.  Not us.”  Does that mean they they will go out when it is 20 degrees out?  At what temperature is it too cold for both the adults and the kids?  And how does it benefit the kids if they and their teachers get sick?

When Klein speaks about Randi Weingarten on page 101, he reveals one of the biggest disconnects between the two sides about what motivates the union.  Here are three crucial excerpts from that page:  “To Klein, Weingarten was so smart that she had to know that playing the game of simple advocate was hurting the children she professed to care so much about.”,  “Weingarten compounded Klein’s frustration by never admitting who her real — and only — clients were.”,  “But Weingarten’s line was always that what was good for teachers was always good for children.”  So Klein, and apparently Brill, believe that Weingarten lies when she says that she believes that the reforms she rejects will be bad for both teachers and kids.  This is a pretty serious charge, and one that Brill will reinforce when he has his big ‘revelation’ at the end of the book.

3)  Value-Added

In a recent radio interview, Brill summarized his views as follows:  “The nation’s K to 12 schools are basically the only workplace in America where, until recently with some reforms including reforms in your state [Colorado], until those reforms, they have been the only workplace in America, even though there are 3.2 million public school teachers, where performance basically doesn’t count.  The effectiveness of teachers is not measured.  It’s not measured through a good peer review process, through any kind of a review process, through progress of the students in terms of how well they do on tests in the beginning of the school year versus the end of the school year.  And because that performance isn’t measured, in fact it’s ignored, the most important factor in the schools in terms of advancing children which is the effectiveness of teachers has basically gone untouched and that’s the problem that the so called education reformers are trying to fix.”

Brill’s claim that teachers are not evaluated by ‘performance’ is untrue.  Principals observe teachers formally and informally and a good principal can tell very quickly if a teacher is effective or not.  There is a certain ‘vibe’ in a productive classroom which cannot be faked.

What Brill means is that, in many places, standardized test score ‘gains’ are not a factor in teacher evaluations.  The measurement of this is known as ‘value-added’ which is when a computer attempts to compare how a teacher’s students do on a standardized test to how those same students would have performed on the same test had they lived in a parallel universe where they had an ‘average’ teacher.

Brill cites one of the gurus of value-added, professor Thomas Kane of Harvard University.  Kane, he says, found that when value-added measurements are applied to schools they are very volatile.  They jump from year to year.  Kane expected, then, that when applied to the smaller sample size of a teacher, it would be even more volatile.  But, Brill claims, Kane found the opposite.  “Teachers who did well one year typically did well every year, and those who did poorly kept doing poorly.  It seemed that the teachers were the key variable.”  (page 150)

Brill either misunderstands or just misrepresents Kane’s findings.  If teacher scores are stable from year to year and the teachers make up the school then the school’s ratings would have to, mathematically, also be stable from year to year — which they, by Kane’s admission, are not.  It would be like saying that the teacher’s weights are stable from year to year but the average weight of the staff fluctuates wildly from year to year.

Kane doesn’t give many details about his model, but if we look at Mathematica Policy Research, which creates the value-added for Washington, D.C., they write “for teachers with the lowest possible IMPACT score in math—the bottom 3.6 percent of DCPS teachers—one can say with at least 99.9 percent confidence that these teachers were below average in 2010.”  So people at the very bottom might stay, in general, in the bottom half.  That is not a very stable confidence interval.

Mathematica also prepared a report for the DOE where they said that error rates in value-added for one year of data would be up to 33%, which means that 33% of the time an effective teacher can be rated ineffective and 33% of the time an ineffective one could be rated effective.  This is why when you compare value-added measures to principal evaluations, they have almost no correlation.  I learned this while studying the raw data of a report cited by Kane which erroneously claimed to prove otherwise.  The teacher with the lowest principal rating in the study actually got a higher value-added score than the teacher with the highest principal rating.  Value-added is the alchemy of ed reform.

Kane wrote in one of his papers that these value-added measures should not count for the entire evaluation so there should be ‘multiple measures.’  But he thinks that value-added is accurate enough to count between 33% and 66% of the teacher ratings.  In D.C., it currently counts for 50% for teachers who can be measured in this way.  In a recent interview, Michelle Rhee described a conversation she had after speaking to a Wall Street Journal conference of CEOs.  One of them asked what her most revolutionary thing she had done as D.C. Chancellor.  She responded, “now 50% of the evaluation is going to be based on how much students learn.”  The CEO then said “Isn’t that the teacher’s job?  I mean, shouldn’t it be 90% of their evaluation?”  Rhee could have explained to the CEO that the metrics aren’t accurate enough to be given that much weight.  Instead she said, “Listen, bucko, right now we’re at zero percent.  Going from zero percent to 50% is huge.”

One irony of these value-added statistics is that they are so meaningless and practically random, that the use of them is likely to save many ineffective teachers who happen to get high scores on their value-added.

Brill celebrates the 2010 L.A. Times publication of value-added scores for thousands of named teachers as “what would rank in any era as one of its most important pieces of enterprise reporting.”  Brill does admit on page 370 “Making performance scores pubic might embarrass some teachers or even unfairly stigmatize them because some of the ratings may be inaccurate.  But those negatives are outweighed by the benefit to the children and their parents of getting a read on how their teachers are performing and holding teachers accountable.”  The L.A. Times, in a recent  editorial published on November 20, 2011, changed their tune on value-added.  They wrote “Test scores probably have some value in the rating of teachers, but that has yet to be proved.”

Brill describes with venom throughout the book teachers’ “lockstep seniority compensation” and implies that teaching is the only workplace where people are not compensated on performance.  But in most jobs people get annual raises so those who are more senior have higher salaries than the rookies.  Even the world of law with which Brill is very familiar, it is quite unusual that someone out of law school becomes a partner in a law firm.  There is a process of ‘earning your stripes’ and getting raises along the way.

As a teacher I like knowing that I can look at a chart and plan out my future based on what I know I will be making down the road.  I would not want to endure the ups and downs of my test scores, making $165,000 one year, as he claims is quite feasible, and then $40,000 the next as my value-added unexpectedly drops.  There’s a reason I became a teacher instead of a professional gambler.  Even when I was a young go-getter twenty years ago, winning ‘Teacher Of The Year’ in my fourth year of teaching, I never felt cheated by not getting a monetary bonus for this.  Good teachers get rewarded in other ways.  We get asked which electives we’d like to create and teach.  We are given the working overhead projectors.  And if we want more money, we can leverage our teaching record to land a good administrative job.

4)  Miracle Districts

New Orleans, New York, and Washington D.C. are held up as examples of districts that are reaping results from these types of reform.  In Washington D.C., however, Rhee’s reforms did not close the achievement gap at all.  On page 138 Brill writes “New Orleans had arguably become one of the nation’s best urban school systems.”  Meanwhile the Recovery School District, which is predominantly charter schools, ranks 69th out of 70 districts in New Orleans.  They boast that RSD is the ‘most improved’ district because its ‘District Performance Score’ (DPS) has gone from 58 to 67 which is, mathematically, a 14% increase.  DPS is a number that can be as high as about 120 and the average district scores about a 95.  This percent increase statistic is meaningless.  Another district that went from 110 to 118, which was only a 7% increase, despite being the more difficult improvement.  Percent increase inflates scores of districts with very low starting scores.

Brill generally presents the reformers as infallible gods — particularly Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Arne Duncan.  About Rhee’s qualification to be D.C. Chancellor, “she certainly knew everything there was to know about what was needed to make schools work.”  (pages 173-174)  About her getting ousted from D.C., he says that her failure was not realizing she should campaign.  One part that is conspicuously short is the section about Duncan’s accomplishments before being named Secretary of Education.  There was one paragraph on page 237 and a vague claim a page later “when the Bush administration had distributed a few competitive grants, [Duncan] had  achieved many years worth of reform in a few months because his team had been so eager to win.”  But Chicago schools are in terrible shape with the achievement gap actually growing during and after Duncan’s tenure there.

There are, however, a few spots where Brill does criticize reformers.  Bloomberg gave way too good of a contract to Randi Weingarten because he was trying to get elected to a third term.  Another place where Brill is critical is his description of the Race To The Top judging process which he describes as a farce with states winning by, essentially, cheating on their application while other states lost unfairly.

The so-called anti-reformers are mocked and ridiculed throughout the book.  Brill’s three page rant about Diane Ravitch reveals that he didn’t really understand the point of ‘The Death and Life of The Great American School System.’  Yes, she defines what she is against for much of the book and only has a little about what she is for.  She argues against all the ‘quick-fix’ solutions doomed to fail and then he is upset that she does not offer her own ‘quick-fix.’

At the end of the book, Brill is credited with having an ‘epiphany’ about how the supposed successes cannot be scaled without the unions.  His revelation is that eliminating the unions would cause more problems than it solves so the ideal solution is for the unions to get behind the reforms he supports.  He even suggests that Bloomberg appoint Weingarten as chancellor of New York City schools.  When questioned about this, Brill gets quite defensive because he knows that this epiphany has been misinterpreted.  It was just an example of Brill accidentally doing something that is uncharacteristic for him — he was too subtle.  As he describes what Weingarten would do as chancellor, Brill shows that he truly believes, as Klein suggested earlier in the book (page 101), that Weingarten ‘knows’ that her advocacy of teachers actually comes at the expense of the children.  If she suddenly was responsible for the achievement of the students she would admit what he already knows — that she has been lying all these years when she has said that what is good for teachers is good for students too.  When I say similar things about how what is good for teachers is good for students, I know that I am saying what I truly believe, and I have no reason to think that Weingarten is not genuine when she says the same.

After this revelation, Brill concludes the book with his five recommendations, which include ending LIFO, merit pay for teachers with high value-added scores, saving money by replacing teacher pensions with 401(K)s, and making teaching a temporary job rather than a life-long career “In a world where career changes are the norm … that may not mean that they stay for twenty or thirty years, but it should mean they are there for at least five or ten.” (page 427)

I feel certain that the reformers will lose this battle but in doing so might have actually caused something good to happen.  With propaganda like ‘Waiting For Superman’ and ‘Class Warfare’ they have awakened the proverbial sleeping giant.  Anti-reformers are now operating with a new sense of urgency as they band together to fight these well meaning, but hopelessly ignorant, interlopers.  Giving a sense of urgency to the anti-reformers who can pursue authentic research-based reform might be the silver lining here.

Fifty years from now it will be interesting to reread this book with the hindsight of what happened.  I believe that soon the ed reform ‘bubble’ will burst.  All the invented gains will be exposed and those who participated in the cover up will be banished to obscurity.  We all will finally realize that early childhood education is a much worthier investment of money than test prep and accountability.  We will give up on ‘value-added’ measures when we realize that they will be too costly to ever be accurate enough to tell us anything better than principal observations already do.  We will look back at the remedies proposed by the reformers the way we now look back at the use of leeches to cure diseases.

And eventually people mocked in this book like Diane Ravitch and Linda Darling-Hammond will not be called, inaccurately, ‘anti-reformers’ but what they really are — scholars.

Citations:
http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdereval/rv2006pmlinks.htm
Spreadsheet from The Colorado Department Of Education with enrollment data for Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts showing 73 Juniors in 2006.

http://elm.cde.state.co.us/datalabreport.htm
11% proficiency in math for Mapleton Expeditionary School of The Arts in 2007-2008

http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/E595859D-5AF8-4100-AB4B-6058527FA427/0/2010_2011_EMS_PR_Results_2011_09_27.xlsx
New York City Database with demographic data for Harlem Success Academy and P.S. 149

https://reportcards.nysed.gov/files/2009-10/AOR-2010-310300860897.pdf
https://reportcards.nysed.gov/files/2007-08/AOR-2008-310300860897.pdf
Harlem Success Academy I enrollment data to show attrition rate

https://reportcards.nysed.gov/files/2009-10/AOR-2010-310300010149.pdf
https://reportcards.nysed.gov/files/2007-08/AOR-2008-310300010149.pdf
P.S. 149 enrollment data to show attrition rate

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-sirota-show/id345603185#
Steven Brill on David Sirota radio program on 9/7/11

http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/PDFs/education/error_rates.pdf
Mathematica Policy Research Report “Error Rates in Measuring Teacher and School Performance Based on Student Test Score Gains”

http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/redirect_pubsdb.asp?strSite=pdfs/education/valueadded_models.pdf
Mathematica Policy Research Report “Design of Value-Added Models for IMPACT and TEAM in DC Public Schools, 2010-2011 School Year”

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/rc/papers/2006/04education_gordon/200604hamilton_1.pdf
Kane, Staiger, Gordon ‘Identifying Effective Teachers Using Performance On The Job‘ 2006

http://ssrn.com/abstract=757356
Jacob, Lefgran ‘Principals as Agents: Subjective Performance Measurement in Education’ 2005

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCcNzh7C_Tk
Interview with Michelle Rhee on 4/20/11 at The Commonwealth Club of California

http://support.edexcellence.net/site/MessageViewer?em_id=2026.0&dlv_id=6065#b1
The Education Gadfly Volume 11, Number 30. August 4, 2011.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
Diane Ravitch 2010

A new TFAer might be confused about why she could be ‘hated.’  After all, all she’s trying to do is do her part, give back, be a front-line soldier in the war against the achievement gap.  What could be so bad about that?

I’m glad that when I joined TFA in 1991, nobody ‘hated’ me for it (aside from some of the students who were unfortunate enough to have me as a teacher in my first year — but that is another story).  The veteran teachers in my building ‘adopted’ me and helped me in any way they could.  When the office stopped accepting kids from my class, the veteran teachers would allow me to send my discipline problems to their rooms.  When I was getting observed one day, veteran teachers ‘had my back’ by intercepting the students who were trying to come to class late (generally kids who I had trouble controlling in class) and bringing them to their rooms so I could have an opportunity to have a better observation.  When I would sleep on the couch in the teacher’s lounge during my free period (I did not have energy to plan, then, since I had to recover from all the screaming), the veteran teachers would carefully nudge me awake so I wasn’t late for my next class.  Far from hated, the teachers in my school liked me and took care of me the way one might care for a stray cat.

But if you Google ‘I hate TFA’ you’ll get a lot of matches, nowadays, and I want to use this post to explain why.  I hope to help new TFAers to understand, but also to help TFA, itself, to understand so they might be able to prevent this with some pretty significant changes.

The first person to publicly criticize TFA was professor Linda Darling-Hammond in 1994 in Phi Delta Kappan in an article called “Who Will Speak for the Children; How ‘Teach for America’ Hurts Urban Schools and Students.”  I was in my third year at that time and I didn’t take much notice of this critique.  At that time, there were fewer than 1,000 corps members a year so TFA wasn’t really able to do too much damage, I felt.  Principals, back then, weren’t really forced to hire us.  There were schools with huge turnover problems and they chose TFAers over long-term subs.

Over the next seventeen years, I never really ‘hated’ much about TFA.  I was often frustrated that they would not improve their training model.  I did what I could do to help out.  I even worked at the 1996 institute as a Corps Member Advisor (Michelle Rhee, now of StudentsFirst, was my supervisor, though she was a bit younger than me.  Hari Sevungan, also a major person in StudentsFirst, was one of my trainees.)  For about ten years I presented workshops about classroom management at various institutes, trying to fill the massive gaps I felt existed in the training.  So TFA frustrated me because I felt they were providing bad advice to the new teachers.  In a sense, they were lying to these new teachers about how to be an effective first year teacher and I felt that this hurt the new teachers and, more importantly, the students who were to be taught by these new teachers.  Still, I would never have said there was anything I actually ‘hated’ about TFA.

Over the course of the weekend of the TFA 20th year summit in February 2011, I had an epiphany.  What caused this was also causing people all over the country to have similar feelings, and that was when TFA became truly controversial.  There was a panel discussion and everyone on the panel was a corporate ‘reformer.’  Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Geoffrey Canada were the most vocal.  At the end of the weekend, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made the keynote.  Listening to him tell what I knew had to be a blatant lie about the success of a school that had been ‘turned around’ by firing the teachers, I snapped.  I had had enough.  That was when my blog posts shifted from advice for new teachers to what it is like now.

Wendy Kopp recently responded to a critique of her book and of TFA, in general, by Diane Ravitch in The New York Review Of Books called ‘How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools.’  Wendy’s response, in The Huffington Post, was called ‘In Defense Of Optimism.’  Reading Wendy’s piece, I have a clearer picture of why those who ‘hate’ TFA do.

Incidentally, I don’t ‘hate’ TFA.  Though I’m one of the bigger opponents of the corporate reform movement, I don’t think that TFA needs to be aligned with it.  TFA recruits very motivated people who really want to do something ‘good’ for society.  Very few of them are looking to pad their resumes.  And I am one of the few people on my ‘side’ who believes that it is possible to teach someone to be a fairly competent teacher in five weeks.  Unfortunately, though, TFA does not know how to accomplish this.  The training is horrible, truly bordering on criminal negligence.  But I still think it is possible, with a better training model, to produce competent teachers.  As far as the two year commitment goes, well, people from ‘traditional’ teacher training programs don’t really have any long term commitment, either.  And it seems that many people from ‘traditional’ training programs leave within five years, anyway.  And, up until recently, nobody forced any principals to hire TFAers.  They wanted to.  (Now, though, in a sense, some are forced to because TFA has contracts with districts who lay off other teachers to make room for the new recruits so those principals are forced to hire TFAers.  I don’t like this very much.)  And some TFAers, like me, have taught well beyond two years and have gone on to become honest school leaders (i.e. they did not become millionaires by running charter networks that skim the most motivated poor kids and boot the ones who are bringing down their test scores — but that is another story.) and have made a difference in many kids’ lives.  So TFA, for me, could have a limited role in ‘fixing’ education.  Unfortunately, they got so much money which they used to ‘expand’ so that 6,000 new people come in a year rather than the 500 or so from the first years.

Newcomers to TFA probably rationalize the ‘haters’ with the easy, but flawed, logic of “Teachers are threatened by TFAers since by working so hard we are making them look bad.  In five weeks we learn to be more effective than other first year teachers and at least, if not more, effective that some veterans.  It is no wonder they hate us.  I’d hate someone who exposes me for being lazy too.”  Though this is inaccurate, it is the arrogant sentiment, also seen in Wendy’s piece, which is the true reason that some people hate TFA.

As TFA is often accused of arrogance, Wendy concedes in her book and also in the Huffington Post piece,

“my experiences have also deepened my appreciation of the magnitude of the problem and led to a nuanced vision for change.”

This is a humble beginning.  She used to think it was going to be a lot easier, and now she realizes it isn’t.

But as the best defense is a good offense, she writes:

“we in the United States have discovered that we don’t have to wait to fix poverty to dramatically improve educational outcomes for underprivileged students. In fact, there’s strong evidence that one of the most effective ways to break the cycle of poverty is to expand the mission of public schools in low-income communities”

To make it seem like there are two views:  1)  ‘wait’ until poverty is fixed and then concentrate on improving education or 2) improve education right now, is extremely oversimplified.  Ravitch doesn’t say we should sit around doing nothing until poverty is ‘fixed.’  Nobody says that.  The issue is whether the ‘reforms’ supported by the corporate reformers are likely to help or to make things worse.  The popular ‘remedies’ of closing down schools and firing teachers are not really based on research.  They don’t seem to be working in any individual schools, let alone districts, or states.  So one thing that Ravitch always advocates for, something truly based on a lot of research, is to expand early childhood education from ages 0 to 5.  This is something that has consistently been proven to help.  This also does not mean we do nothing to improve schools for kids over 5.  But turning schools into test-prep factories does not help those kids either.  And the ‘strong evidence’ Wendy mentions that school can break the poverty cycle is pretty flimsy, unfortunately.

Then Wendy gets humble again.  She admits that most TFAers are not all the heroes that they sometimes showcase.

“While we applaud the example of a few exceptional teachers who overcome every obstacle to put their students on a different trajectory, if we’re relying on classroom heroes alone, we’re setting ourselves up to fail.”

This sentence is quite important, at least when taken out of the context of what is about to be said.  One thing that frustrates me sometimes about the corporate reformers (It’s hard to tell if Wendy is a hard-core one, or if she is truly just an optimist) is that they do say things like this when people complain that they are putting too much of society’s problems on the shoulders of teachers.  So they say that it’s not just about the teachers — but then the policies are all about firing teachers and holding them more accountable.  Actions speak much louder than words.  Even Michelle Rhee has ‘said’ that it is not just about bad teachers, yet every time she shows up to lobby against LIFO, that’s all she talks about.

Then the pendulum shifts again from humble to arrogant when Wendy explains that though TFAers are not all heroic teachers, TFA leaders have sparked the turnaround in New York City and New Orleans.  I don’t want to clutter this already very long post with numbers, but let me assure you that I have nothing to gain when I assure everyone that New York City and New Orleans are complete messes.  It would be wise for TFA to not take any credit for them.

Then comes the biggest doozy of the piece,

“Ravitch is also wrong to suggest that Teach For America corps members aren’t effective. A significant body of rigorous research shows that they are more effective than other beginning teachers and, on average, equally or more effective than veteran teachers.”

This is just a lie.  Phillip Kovaks has studied every research paper ever written about TFA and has concluded otherwise.  And he also has nothing to gain, personally, by exposing this.  He does it for the same reason I do.  Lies that ultimately hurt kids and teachers need to be revealed.

Realizing, perhaps, that she has really stretched the truth, she then writes:

“Still, I am the first to admit — as I do in my book — that “the bell curve of effectiveness within our corps is still too wide” and “our teachers are still not, on average, changing the trajectory of their students.”"

Humble again.

One last passage I take issue with:

“More than two-thirds of our 24,000 alumni are working full-time in education. Although few of them intended to enter the field at all before their involvement with Teach For America, today a third of them are teaching, 600 are serving as principals, and many others are working as district leaders. Of the remaining third of our alumni, half have jobs related to low-income communities or schools, and only three percent are working in the private sector — hardly the “corporate” stereotype Ravitch is so fond of perpetuating.”

So 2/3 of alumni are ‘in education’ and half of the other 1/3 (1/6) are in low-income communities or schools, which is a total of 2/3+1/6=5/6=83% of alumni.  This is just not true.  This is based on an alumni survey with a low response rate, particularly from the older corps.  The numbers are further skewed by the fact that the recent corps are 12 times the size of the older corps.  I can’t fully debunk this claim here, but I promise you that this is, at best, misleading.

So Wendy did have some moments of humility here.  In person, I’ve found Wendy to be quite nice.  Without her help, back in 1996, I could not have gotten my first book published.  She approved my request to print up copies myself and sell them to the 1996 corps members at the Houston institute.  Over the past 20 years I’ve chatted with her about a dozen times and she always been friendly to me.  I really don’t know if she believes what she is saying in this article or if she and TFA are in a bit of a jam.  They had to stretch the truth to stay in business and now they think they have to continue that way.  I’m not sure.  Sometimes I think that they have come to believe their own lies.

The big reason, though, that people who hate TFA is the way TFA benefits from actions that hurt kids and teachers.  When a school gets shut down unfairly, a TFA alum will be there to start a charter school in the old building.  When a school fires half its staff for a ‘turnaround,’ TFA licks its chops as they get to populate these schools with more TFAers.  Meanwhile, TFA must know, deep down, that shutting down schools and turning them around doesn’t work.    TFAs silence on these issues is another thing that people hate about TFA.  Surely some of these schools employ plenty of TFAers and have administrators who were TFAers who get fired because of these.  Destructive corporate reforms seem to benefit TFA and nobody else.  And TFA could do the right thing and speak up against this, but they don’t since these reforms are the source of much of their money and power.

To denounce some of these reforms, as they should, they would have to alienate some of their highest profile alumni.  Without these high profile alumni, TFA would have to focus on other alumni, like principals of traditional schools who are doing a great job, but not getting the test score gains that the famous TFA alumni cheat to get, or lie about getting.

It would take a lot of guts for TFA to disassociate themselves with the corporate reform movement.  They would be smart, though, to do this as soon as possible.  The foundation of the corporate reform movement is already beginning to crumble.  TFA does not need to go down with that ship but, sadly, they probably will.