My first shocking moment as a teacher in a Saint Louis city middle school happened about two months ago, in my fourth week on the job. Early in the afternoon, during my free period, a well-behaved and well-respected female student stormed into my classroom with tears in her eyes. When I asked her what was wrong, she told me that the teacher in her classroom at that time was choking to death and that he was going blue in the face and convulsing against the wall.

Without thinking, I ran next door to see if I could do anything to help my colleague and fellow teacher. But when I got there, with a crying student behind me, the teacher seemed to be perfectly ok as he swept the floor in one corner of the room (even while his students were running around the classroom chasing each other and screaming and yelling). I approached my colleague with a mixture of confusion and concern and asked him if he was alright. His response was, "what do you mean? I'm fine." I told him that a student had run out of room to ask me for help because she thought that he was choking and convulsing to death.

His answer--indeed, his entire existence as a teacher in an urban public school district--will always symbolize to me the full depth of the human capital problem we face in K-12 education today. He told me that he had pretended to die to get his students attention, as they weren't listening to him (which was obvious by their screams and objects flying across the room). When I pressed him on whether there were any less extreme tactics to accomplish the same goal, he said that in his expert opinion based on twenty-five years teaching, he simply didn't know. My last question to him was what he thought the educational value was to faking his death to get his students to listen, especially since it hadn't seemed to work. "Mr. Tang," he replied, "one of the first lessons you need to learn about teaching is that much of what you will do every day will have no educational value."

I would love to say that this teacher is an exception and not the norm at my middle school. Sadly, of our 20 full-time teaching staff, he is not the first or even the second most likely teacher to be fired. Worse yet, not a single one of the severely incompetent teachers on staff has been let go thirteen weeks into the school year. That's thousands of hours of valuable instructional time wasted for children who desperately need the supports and challenges that caring adults can provide.

One additional consideration makes the staffing situation at our school even worse. It would be one thing if our administrators were bound by restrictive labor union regulations and collective bargaining rules preventing teacher firings. After all, stories of the ridiculous process for firing tenured but negligent teachers in places like New York City are famous. In NYC, for instance, out of a teaching staff of 80,000 teachers city-wide, only about 10 tenured teachers per year are fired for incompetence. But in my public charter school in Saint Louis, teachers are not unionized. Not a single one of us is tenured. There is no collective bargaining agreement guaranteeing teachers some elaborate due process system that in the end is fair to no one and especially unfair to the kids. The teachers don't even have contracts, they have letters of agreement.

So why, why, why, is my death-faking next-door teacher still getting a pay check every two weeks? It's possible that there are no better replacements in the city - though I find that hard to believe since any half-capable adult with a college degree could do better. Altenratively, it's possible that my principal is just not decisive or brave enough to get rid of a proven ineffectual teacher. But I'm convinced there is another explanation that owes to an almost nationalized culture of blinders and low-expectations with which educators look to each other--blinders and low-expectations that yield to teacher professionalism arguments that simply defy logic.

The best example I can submit of this comes straight out of last week's New York Times article on a new effort to fire low-performing teachers in the big apple. After announcing a plan to reward outstanding teachers with bonus pay last month, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor of Schools Joel Klein dropped the other shoe this month: a plan to get rid of teachers on the opposite end of the spectrum. The unions, happy with the idea of more money for their ranks (so long as they have a say in who gets it), were less enthusiastic about the more recent proposal. Calling the effort to evaluate and replace chronically ineffective teachers a "teacher gotcha unit," Union President Randi Weingarten added, "Basically, it’s signaling to principals that rather than working to support teachers, the school system is going to give you a way to try to get rid of teachers.”

The problem with this logic is that Randi Weingarten is defending teachers who think it is perfectly acceptable to fake your death to try and get your students attention. She's defending teachers like another colleague of mine who, three months into the year, know about half of his students' names. She's defending teachers like another colleague of mine who, in eighth grade science, has asked her students to color in pictures for a grade for much of the past month.

In short, the "let's support teachers, not get rid of them" argument presupposes that every current teacher has a chance to be effective, if only a principal would schedule one more professional development day. But that's patently false. And it's only a culture within education that lets this happen--a culture that accepts the collateral damage (student learning) of low-expectations and patient blinders for awful teachers.

Maybe it's just me as a twenty-three year-old first year teacher, but I applaud the "teacher firing squad" that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have created to get rid of bad teachers in their schools. Any company that only fires 0.001% of its 80,000 employees for poor performance every year would be out of business rather quickly. Schools should be no different. But until more good teachers start standing up with disgust at the horrible quality of some of their peers and tell their administrators and union leaders to stop subjecting our students to these failing teachers, I'm afraid little change will happen.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pop quiz. How much money do America's public elementary and secondary schools spend each year on textbooks? Tens of millions of dollars? Hundreds of millions? Billions?

If you answered "billions", you were right. $4.4 billion in the 2006 - 2007 school year alone, to be exact.

Why is that important? For two reasons. First, it's an incredibly large amount of money that, if freed up for other purposes, could yield potentially significant results. For instance, if you spent the money on a financial incentive program to reward high school students in the lowest-performing and most disadvantaged urban and rural school districts, you could offer several thousand dollars a year to students and families who otherwise demonstrate very little interest in academic success. If you spent it as an incentive for the top 10% of teachers, you could offer those outstanding educators a $15,000 per year bonus.

Second, it is important because a recent set of developments in the education reform world, as reported in USA Today,have the potential to actually free up the money for other purposes. The major development is the merger of open-source, web-based technology with curriculum experts to make textbook materials and other lessons available online for free. The most significant program to date is free-reading.net, a resource that teachers can use to help them provide early reading instruction to elementary students--particularly those who are behind grade level. The resource gathers the collective wisdom of teachers who have used different resources, gets tips on what works and what doesn't, and even provides free videos to teachers that show how a given lesson should be taught.

If you think about it, there's little reason why a wikipedia-type textbook shouldn't be created in all subjects ranging from chemistry and biology to world history to algebra to reading. If a wide base of subject-area experts can agree on a fair and unbiased presentation of each subject, and if different teachers can actually contribute to and comment on different lessons in real-time, wouldn't that only serve to benefit students?

So what is stopping schools from moving in this direction more rapidly? Well, the textbook industry has 4.4 billion reasons to stamp out competition from free online curriculum sources. So far, there has been little evidence to support the conclusion that asking little johnny to carry around multiple six pound textbooks from class to class and to and from home is good for his brain, let alone his back. But if research in the coming years can show that free online textbooks and curriculums are no worse (or are even better) than their printed counterparts, let's hope that this won't be an area in school reform where what's best for students is trumped by some other interest!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the big things is ed news lately is the launch of a company called K12, an on-line virtual school provider that is now offering state-approved curriculums in 17 states. The company represents a serious foray into the virtual education business, perhaps the most significant--and controversial--to date.

It is controversial for two reasons. First, there isn't much data out there that proves one way or another if virtual, teacher-free, classroom-free schooling can actually teach students. Second, K12 was launched by one of the chief architects of the conservative education movement, Bill Bennett, who was Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan. He has been attributed by different sources with statements that suggest that he would like to stop public schools from receiving any new funding or supports so that they will fail. Why would he want public schools to fail? So that they will be replaced by vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, and other forms of private education.

If you visit their homepage, you'll see why K12 is getting serious looks from the education community. It is well-done, attention grabbing, and confidence inspiring. The only thing that really matters in the end, though, is will it help students learn at a better rate than the traditional school counterpart? If so, there's no reason for reformers and politicians to want to kill it altogether, though tweaking to improve student achievement is always a worthwhile goal. If it does not improve achievement, then it doesn't deserve any more support than a failing public school, charter school, or any other such institution.

I dug up this video (below) from a student who attends one such virtual school and who says it is working. My gut instinct tells me that he is one of those exceptional students who will succeed under any circumstances, so a virtual school may be a great opportunity for him to excel. But I would need to see more qualitative and quantitative data from low-achieving and mid-level students on how virtual schools work for them before forming a broader opinion. My gut instinct tells me that success in a virtual school is highly dependent on the amount of self-motivation that the student has, and the amount of time the parents have to ensure that their kids are keeping up with all the work. And that is not a recipe for universal success--especially in the areas where schools and students need the greatest improvement.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 07:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)