The Portals

I attended meet the teacher night a couple of weeks ago, and then last night I attended the ceremonial Chromebook distribution exercise at Pelham Middle School.  Here's what's reeeaaaalllly going on in the affluent suburban schools these days.

My daughters' school experience is aggregated within four on-line theaters:

1. Castle Learning:  On-line testing aligned with New York Common Core Learning Standards for every subject, evenBasica gym.  Cover a topic, take the "Castle Learning."   Exam cram.

2. Infinite Campus: This is the one they call "The Portal".  This is the core SIS (Student Information System) of the school.  Parents and students both have their own access levels.  I've never logged in, but the kids do, constantly.  "I need to check the Portal...."  This is serious business, and of course, aligned to state standard for reporting purposes.  Gradebook, official stuff goes here.

3. GoogleApps for Education:  Document sharing for the class assignments.  New this year, if you've used GoogleApps, or Office365, you know what this is.  Good for doing labs in science class, etc.

4. E-Chalk:  This one seems to be related to actual teaching and learning.  Assignments and presentations are posted here.

To make it extra convenient to access all that on-line educational administration, each eighth grader has now been given their own Google Chromebook.  Mind you, 97% of those kids already have access to a computer at home, nevertheless thanks to the Pelham Education Foundation and a grant secured by State Senator Jeff Klein, Pelham's 13 year olds are now toting school issued mobile devices.

Full disclosure, I sell computer network infrastructure for a living, including some to schools.  I'm happy to see more mobile devices being unwrapped.  It's good for the economy segment that I work in everyday.

Basically, the technology arms race is going full bore in our schools.  These tools don't seem to help teachers impart knowledge more efficiently.  The application infrastructure I've described above is good as a distribution system for educational metadata, but I'm unconvinced it makes teaching and learning more efficient.

For example, last year, night after night, my daughter downloaded page after page of math questions from E-Chalk.  She had a hard time with the subject matter. I constantly asked her, "Do you have a textbook?"  "No, Daddy, you download the assignment and there's an example there."  The teacher was capable, and available for help, but it would have been better to have a BOOK that explains how to do the problems.

Each portal has a set of usage guidelines, access rights, instructions and navigation.  The district purchases user licenses and annual subscriptions.  There are web pages to explain it all in mind numbing detail.  We think we need all that stuff to make our kids ready for contemporary work, but does it make them read better or understand math to a greater degree?  I'm unconvinced.

Brown v New York: Charter School Funding Challenged in Court

Excerpt: 

In September 2014, five Western New York families, with children attending charter schools in Buffalo and Rochester, filed a lawsuit with the help of the Northeast Charter Schools Network (NECSN). The lawsuit, Brown v. New York, challenges the constitutionality of the funding scheme used by the State to allocate money to charter schools.

These brave charter school parents argue  the state funding formula  results in their children receiving only 60 to 75 cents on every dollar and no facilities funding denies them access to a sound basic education, as required by the New York State Constitution.

Additionally, as 90% of students attending charter schools are students of color, and theNew York Charter Schools Act directly targets populations that tend to be overwhelmingly comprised of minorities, the Plaintiffs also allege that the funding scheme has a disproportionate and discriminatory impact on minority students.

Postage Meter Kids

There is age-old anti-charter school rhetoric purporting charters cherry pick kids to spike test results.  I know that practice is not happening within the charter schools with which I have been affiliated.  Cherry picking is a terrible metaphor and it is the opposite of what really happened at one charter school in 2011. 

My experience with education reform went into high gear in 2008, when my wife, Debra, and I began the process of founding Amani Public Charter School in Mount Vernon, NY.  Amani is now about to begin its fourth year of operation, with an enrollment of 320 children.  Debra is the school's Executive Director.

In my unpaid and unofficial role as Charter Evangelism Officer, I prepared Amani's Web site and Facebook page in December of 2010 and posted Amani's first student application form in three languages.  Before the school had a permanent address, or a single teacher on-board, applications began to pile up in a post office box.  

I noticed that some applications were arriving in plain white envelopes, with no return address, and instead of postage stamps, these letters were processed by a postage meter.  These were complete, validated applications, signed by parents.  I wondered what was going on.  It couldn't be coincidental that so many applications, 25 or more, arrived in  identical envelopes, with printed postage and no return address.  This didn't match the pattern of the other applications.  One clue was most of these applicants attended the same elementary school.

Recall, charter schools are public schools.  There is no admission criteria.  You apply, you go.  If your neighborhood school sucks, you can try a charter school instead.  If the charter is overrun with applications, and most are, then the school has an admissions lottery.

Fast forward past opening day, and the students and staff are in place.  The children are real  personalities now, not just entries in a form.  "How did you find out about Amani," my wife asked several children.  "My teacher told my Mom about it," said one.  "My teacher said I should go here," said another.  "My teacher got me in," said another fifth grader.  Alas, the clues triangulated.  Teachers in the Mount Vernon City School District were guiding children and families to apply to Amani.  Although I cannot prove this categorically, we have kid testimony that the "postage meter" applications were the work of teachers.

Why were Mount Vernon teachers pushing kids to Amani, then a brand new charter school?

Assuming goodwill, one or more Mount Vernon public school teachers believed that these kids would have a better chance to achieve someplace outside of regular public schools.  A selection happened, but it was the reverse of the popular myth.  

Campbell's Soup: Canned Attacks

The vitriol that Campbell Brown has stirred within New York's educratic community is striking.  It's well established that if you don't have a good argument, then just attack your opponent on a personal level and hope for the best.  Let's deconstruct some basic recurring themes I've seen in social media this week:

"You're not a teacher, you don't know what you're talking about.  You just hate teachers and want to tear down teaching.  You're a troll."

It is possible to respect teachers without being one, and I do know what I'm talking about.  The things that PEJ and others are fighting for affect me personally, my family and my friends.  I know people working multiple jobs to keep their kids out of public schools, some amassing personal debt.  I personally blew a lifetime of savings to get my kids over to a public school that is safe and high functioning.  This troll started a public charter school so other kids could have a chance to achieve.

"Those privatizers and profiteers just want to eliminate due process."

Wright v New York isn't going to reverse 100 years of labor law, but it might just right-size the cost of removing folks who really don't belong in front of children.  The process is totally broken, and due for an update.  The school board I served on for five years could not afford the luxury of a rubber room to warehouse teachers for months and years on end while lawyers bill their way through the 3020-A process.  You know where most teachers are while due process is happening?  They are in classrooms, in front of kids.   

"You're not fighting the real enemy, <fill in the blank with anything bad>."

This is a diversion tactic.  There is an endless list of reasons public education is in a pickle.  When I was on the board of ed in Mount Vernon, NY, a parent once made an appointment to see me.  She spoke without interruption for one hour and fifteen minutes and placed at my feet responsibility for everything that has gone wrong in America since the Civil War.  Finally, I said, "What can I do for you in the next three weeks?"  Let's make a dent on that which is within our control.

The scripted attacks against PEJ and the lawsuit, Wright v New York, are a narrative developed to bolster public support for teachers' unions.  In an odd way, I hope they work, because if the reality of public education's material weaknesses seep into the mainstream, support for public employees' unions of all kinds will suffer horribly.  Dear teacher, be careful where you throw those verbal grenades.

Weingarten: Down The Road

When I received the inside Tweet that teacher tenure was on Melissa Harris-Perry's "syllabus" this week, I had to watch.  10:00 AM Sunday I poured myself a bowl of Frosted Flakes and tuned in.  

Due process, blah blah blah

Teachers are most important factor, etc, etc.

Corporate greed will destroy public education, uh-huh, uh-huh.

Fifteen minutes of chatter, so far nothing new.

Then, as if she was looking through the TV directly at me, the President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten pronounced,

"The bigger point is this...How do we attract and retain well prepared great teachers for our most needy kids? Because what's happening is just a few miles down the road in Westchester we're not talking about these issues, but in Rochester we are, and we are in the places where there are intense real social economic issues.  So why are we not having that conversation?"

Well, I am from Westchester.  I grew up here, live here, served on a school board here, founded a charter school here, I'm raising kids here.  She can't be talking about my Westchester, she's must be talking about the Westchester of Mad Men or maybe West Chester, Pennsylvania.

Though I may disagree with the dear leader of the AFT about teacher tenure, my issue is not along the spectrum of reformer versus union boss.  It's that Ms. Weingarten seems to have a blind spot with respect to Westchester County, New York.

Westchester has forty school districts and two charter schools.  These include public schools in Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Port Chester, Peekskill and Greenburgh.  These are places where there are "intense real social issues."

When we talk about race equity in education, I think plenty of people visualize what Randi Weingarten articulates, that "down the road" are places free of the exhausting social problems that plague inner cities.  It's convenient to imagine that the pathologies of the ghetto stop at the bridges and tunnels that supply the pulsing hearts of the big cities.  

The Mount Vernon City School District has about 8,000 students, and 90% are free and reduced lunch eligible.  When I was on the school board there, 80% of the kids in the eighth grade were failing three or more classes.  There's a high density of poverty.  Every social problem, health problem, money problem, job problem you can read about or experience is here in Westchester.

On a lighter note, as a New Yorker, Weingarten should know that Westchester is north of the Bronx, and is generally considered, "up the road," some would even say, "upstate," but not "down the road."    

In the shadow of New York City, Westchester's poverty zip code school systems get shoved into a blind spot.  The most needy kids are here, too.

Rorschach

The personal attacks on Campbell Brown are profound, and represent much more than the absence of good counter arguments to teacher tenure reform.  My wife and I were the targets of ad hominem attacks for years while I served on the Board of Education in Mount Vernon, NY and here's what I think is really going on:

Campbell Brown, in this role as the face of tenure reform in New York, is a Rorschach test on race.  She has a leadership position in a civil rights battle.  The vast majority of teachers are white women, and Brown looks like a teacher.   

Citizen Stewart wrote a blog entry this week that crystallizes it:

"To earn this level hostility Ms. Brown only needed to take up the cause of poor black and brown mothers who want the same level of quality in their children’s classrooms as you’ll find in neighborhoods with the most demanding, affluent families."

Plus, the tenure lawsuit threatens to move the cheese of the teachers' union.  The Diane Ravitch's of the world know that this case will grind its way through the courts, and some legislative changes will result, eventually.  Their squealing is brinksmanship, a fist-pounding to show the rank-and-file they're looking out.

If the folks opposing tenure reform bet on the personal attack card too aggressively they might look like bigots given the premise of the litigation.  If unions don't push hard enough, members might think the leadership is soft.  In reality the union is super powerful and tenure is not going to disappear.  

One thing that made it impossible to negotiate sorely needed changes in the teachers' contract in Mount Vernon, NY is the Triborough Amendment to New York State's Taylor Laws.  Triborough basically guarantees teachers will continue to be paid on the terms of an expired contract, including some components of annual raises.  It prevents labor strikes, but it also makes it extremely difficult to negotiate new terms.  "Our feet are in cement," we were told by a labor negotiator.  Triborough offers a thick layer of protection.

With tenure reform, there are also safety catches protecting teachers.  For example, if the rules on firing tenured teachers were eased, there are volumes of other labor laws that guarantee due process.  If the probationary teaching period were upped to four years instead of three, tenure would still be granted.  New Jersey bumped up to four years fairly recently and the world didn't end.  If student performance could be considered in deciding whether to grant tenure, teachers could just keep doing what they do, and earn tenure.  In each scenario, tenure continues and outcomes will hopefully improve.

The vitriol and personal attacks validate Campbell Brown picked the right fight.  There are layers of protection around the teaching profession, as there should be, and the public narrative about teachers being under attack is grossly overstated.  People lashing out against Campbell Brown are airing their own interest, fear and sadly, ignorance.

2nd NY Lawsuit to Change Teacher Tenure

Daily News breaks the story.

The article spells out the standard for a new lawsuit to change teacher tenure in New York:

"Brown (and Partnership for Educational Justice) has to prove inequity, inadequacy and causation — that the different legal constellation in New York causes the learning issues that we see throughout the state,” said David Bloomfield an education professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center."

Full disclosure, I'm not a lawyer. Here's my interpretation along with my own direct observations:

Inequity:  Weak teachers are concentrated in the districts where the students come from less means.  In Mount Vernon, New York, where I served on the Board of Education for five years, tenure decisions were often an after-thought.  Some teachers even received tenure by estoppel.  In affluent Pelham, New York, next door, nobody gets tenure without careful observation and consideration.  Although tenure works better in the affluent districts, it's not perfect there, either.


Inadequacy:  "You don't need to worry about the challenge words, honey."  That's what my friend's kid was told in the third grade by her teacher.  That teacher is inadequate.  She wasn't trained properly, she was rewarded with tenure, and a generation of kids won't worry about the hard vocabulary words.  Less words, lower scores, less graduation, less college, less income. Massive impact.  


Causation: The inadequate training, observation and non-accountability CAUSES the inadequacy and the inequity.  It's a circle.  Tenure, as codified in New York State law makes it nearly impossible to rid the schools of inadequacy.  

Thank you - plaintiffs, Campbell Brown, and the Partnership for Educational Justice, for making New York public schools better for everybody.

Tenure On Trial

Tenure On Trial, New York Observer, July 14, 2014

"In a system that employs about 75,000 teachers (the NYC public schools), only 12 were dismissed for poor performance from 1997 to 2007."  

Meanwhile, the teachers union argues that tenure doesn't protect bad teachers.  According to New York's United Federation of Teachers, tenure enables good teachers to "fight for what students need."  The UFT may be right about good teachers, but it masks the underside of tenure, which is that it traps bad teachers and permanently compromises entire school systems.  

Here's how it works in New York State.  

Example 1:  Let's say you get hired to work in a high functioning public school.  You are a young, perky recent college graduate with some experience as a teaching assistant.  The principal observes your work several times over the course of your first year and helps you become a better teacher.  If your classroom abilities are reasonably OK, you will be asked to return for a second year.  The only ways you will not get tenure is if you quit voluntarily or if you are not offered an opportunity to return prior to your third year anniversary.  That's not you, so at the end of year 3, your principal will recommend you for tenure in a form letter to your superintendent.  The school board will approve your tenure at their next meeting, a perfunctory vote.  Immediately afterward, the superintendent will call out your name to congratulate you on your coveted status as a tenured teacher.

That's it.  You are 25 years old, and you have something that closely resembles a lifetime guarantee of employment.  If you want to make teaching your life's work then losing your job is one thing that will NOT keep you up at night for next 25 to 40 years.  Without regard to the depth of your expertise or the skill with which you impart knowledge, you are going to be in a classroom.  You might become Teacher of the Year material, or you might become burnt out and tired of kids.  Once you've got it, tenure treats everyone the same, and that's where the problem begins.

Example 2:  Imagine the school you were hired to work in is on a rough corner of a hardscrabble neighborhood.  The kids have high needs, social problems abound and it's not even safe to park your car.  You're a great teacher and a great person, so you see the opportunity of your lifetime to make a difference.  However, your principal is less motivated than the one in Example 1.  She started out idealistic, like you, but now after many years, she would rather be doing anything else.  She's in a union too, and she already has tenure.  Her teacher observations don't happen as often, or maybe not at all.  The new teachers were placed there by "the district" and the principal is not motivated, intellectually or politically, to care about who can teach well and who cannot.  Nobody's monitoring attendance, professional development is an afterthought.  You receive tenure after three years, but so do a bunch of other young teachers who really don't belong in a classroom.  You will all teach in that system for a generation or more, regardless of ability.  

Here's the secret code to all this.  In high functioning school systems, weak teachers are either coached to improve or let go, before the tenure lock-up.  In awful school systems it's easy to slip through those first three years.  The clock ticks, and a generation of kids pays the price.  At best, current K-12 tenure is deeply flawed, but the Scardales of the world deal with it by hiring carefully and firing within the probationary first three years.  School districts that are addled with financial, social and managerial problems spiral downward because tenure poisons their teaching stock, permanently and profoundly.  The consequence of bad tenure decisions linger and have an incalculable impact on systems with the most needy students.

One Newark

I learned about this one from Whitney Tilson's email newsletter.  School officials in Newark created a voluntary effort to offer universal enrollment for students citywide to all of Newark’s 71 public schools and 21 public charter schools.  That's what I look for, a place where parents have choices and everybody wins as a result.   In my opinion, wherever there are failing school districts, 20% of the schools within the district should automatically be converted to charters with a 5 year term.   Set a rational academic bar, and when a district is below it, an RFP process begins.  This would be a bit like California's parent trigger law, without the dependency on massive grass-roots organizing.

From the article: "charters were eight of the 10 choices most commonly named for seats in kindergarten through eighth grade."

Campbell Brown: Who and Why

Diane Ravitch asks "Who is Campbell Brown and Why Does She Want to Eliminate Tenure?" in a July 6 blog entry.   It's time to push back against this sort of sensationalism.  Ravitch has written many books about education and she has impressive credentials.  However, on this matter of teacher tenure I think she has a blind spot.  Campbell Brown wants to refresh the way tenure works so it can better support the goals of teaching and learning.  These are the same objectives that Ravitch writes about so forcefully.

The Vergara decision is a step toward updating tenure to include work performance as part of the criteria for granting and maintaining tenure.  The California court's decision might just open the door to making it a bit more possible to remove tenured teachers who really don't belong in a classroom.   If Ms. Ravitch would turn off her firehose, and consider the merits of modernizing what it means to receive tenure, she would see that Campbell Brown values teachers, and she wants to elevate the profession to a higher level.

The Ravitch blog implies that teachers need tenure protection so they won't be fired as a result of false accusations by children.  I doubt Campbell Brown, or anybody else, wants unfair firings.  However, New York's 3020-A process for firing tenured teachers is so complex and so expensive that it's seldom invoked.  When it is used the process is costly to taxpayers, and klunker teachers can remain on the payroll, or even in front of kids, while it rambles on for years.  I saw this when I served on a board of education.

We need a snark-free debate on this matter of K-12 tenure.

Amistad Sends 41 to College

Achievement First Amistad High School celebrates 41 graduates, all headed to college this fall

June 30, 2014 - NECSN

Cheers bounced from wall-to-wall as Achievement First Amistad High School's 41 graduating seniors entered Yale University's auditorium for the students' recent commencement.  There was good reason for so much celebration. With this graduating class, Amistad High School continues to live up to its reputation and mission.

Congratulations to the Amistad graduates.  That's one of the first schools my wife and I visited, in 2009, when we first started researching how to bring a charter school to Mount Vernon, NY.