Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In a recent New York Times article titled At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice, Mitoko Rich wrote of how charter schools seem to be developing something of a “youth cult” in their teaching ranks. She reported that in the charter network “teaching for two to five years is seen as acceptable and, at times, even desirable.”
Teachers in the thirteen YES Prep Schools, which are located throughout Greater Houston, have a reported average of two and a half years of experience. The teachers who work for Achievement First—which has 25 schools in Connecticut, Brooklyn, and Providence, R.I.— “spend an average of 2.3 years in the classroom.” And the individuals who teach in the KIPP schools and the Success Academy Charter Schools stay in the classroom for an average of four years. This youth culture—or culture in which most classroom practitioners have little teaching experience— differs from that of our country’s traditional public schools where teachers average nearly fourteen years of experience…and where public school leaders have made it “a priority to reduce teacher turnover.”
In the NYT article, Jennifer Hines, senior vice president of people and programs at YES Prep, was quoted as saying, “We have this highly motivated, highly driven work force who are now wondering, ‘O.K., I’ve got this, what’s the next thing?’ There is a certain comfort level that we have with people who are perhaps going to come into YES Prep and not stay forever.” (Note: New teachers at the YES Prep schools receive just two and a half weeks of training over the summer before arriving in the classroom.)
Rich says it was Teach for America (TFA) that was mostly responsible for introducing the idea of a “foreshortened teaching career.” TFA is an organization that recruits “high-achieving” college graduates and places them in some of our neediest schools. In a piece for Policymic, Benjamin Cosman wrote about TFA recruits. He said that after just five weeks of training, “Teach for America participants lead a classroom for two years, slap it on their resume, and leave the school with a bevy of opportunities.”
Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, contends that “strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers. The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.” (Question for Wendy Kopp: Are you sending your teaching recruits into the “strongest” schools?)
Mark Naison, a professor of African American Studies and History at Fordham University and a man who once viewed Teach for America as a positive program, has a difference of opinion regarding teacher turnover. He has been disappointed that TFA doesn’t instill a commitment to teaching in its program participants. In fact, Naison no longer allows TFA to recruit his college students.
Naison said the following about Kopp’s organization:
Until Teach For America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.
He added:
Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach For America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make. Nor do they encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career; indeed, the organization goes out of its way to make joining TFA seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher-paying professions.
Several years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was: “use teaching in high-poverty areas as a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it effectively advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.
After reading Rich’s article about the high turnover rate of teachers in charter schools, Catherine M. Ionata responded in a letter to the editor. She wrote:
The charter school representatives in your article defend the rapid turnover of teachers. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, even says that teachers can become great in one or two years! Would we expand this idea to other professions? Do we think the best lawyers are those fresh out of law school? Should we choose a rookie physician for complex surgery, because this surgeon is more “enthusiastic” than veteran surgeons?
Ronald Thorpe, president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, said, “To become a master plumber you have to work for five years. Shouldn’t we have some kind of analog to that with the people we are entrusting our children to?”
Education expert Diane Ravitch also weighed in on the subject after reading Rich’s article:
Can you imagine that a “teacher” who graduated college in June is already “a great teacher” by September?
Why do we expect entrants to every other profession to spend years honing their craft but a brand-new teacher, with no experience, can be considered “great” in only one or two years, then leave to do something else?
This is a recipe to destroy the teaching profession.
How can anyone say they are education “reformers” if their goal is to destroy the profession?
What other nation is doing this?
This is not innovative. In fact, it returns us to the early nineteenth century, when the general belief was that “anyone can teach, no training needed.” Teaching then was a job for itinerants, widow ladies, young girls without a high school degree, and anyone who couldn’t do anything else. It took over a century to create a teaching profession, with qualifications and credentials needed before one could be certified to stand in front of a classroom of young children. We are rapidly going backwards.
Henry Seton, a humanities teacher at Community Charter School of Cambridge in Massachusetts, was another educator who responded to Rich’s article. He wrote:
The high teacher turnover at charter schools leaves these institutions fragile and ill equipped to support their most vulnerable students. It takes far more than a year or two in the classroom to develop that elusive set of skills needed to serve our nation’s neediest cohorts of students — young men of color, English language learners and so on. And I have seen some of the most well-regarded charters here in Massachusetts left reeling and in danger of closing after extensive teacher departures.
Benjamin Cosman (Policymic) wrote that young teachers in charter schools “are supposed to save education in the United States.” He thinks, however, that there is a “very real danger in valuing inexperience in the teaching field…” He believes this “supposed remedy” may possibly be hastening the “demise of public education.”
In his article titled It’s Harder for Charter Schools to Keep Teachers, Francisco Vara-Orta wrote about information provided in data collected by the Texas Education Agency. The data, taken from 47 local school districts from 2006 to 2011, showed that the “average teacher turnover rate for charter school districts was 46 percent, compared with 13 percent for traditional school districts.” Vara-Orta wrote that analysis of the data showed that teachers leave charter schools in Bexar County nearly three times more often than teachers in traditional public schools, “which generally pay more and perform better academically.” He continued, “Of the 10 districts rated academically unacceptable by the state in Bexar County last year, all were charters, with turnover ranging from 38 percent to 65 percent…”
Researchers from Vanderbilt University found that the teacher turnover rate in charter schools was nearly twice as high as that of traditional public schools. In addition, the researchers found that teachers in charter schools were also more likely to leave the profession.
Excerpt from the Vanderbilt report titled Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools:
Our analysis confirms that much of the explanation of this “turnover gap” lies in the differences in the types of teachers that charter schools and traditional public schools hire. The data lend minimal support to the claim that turnover is higher in charter schools because they are leveraging their flexibility in personnel policies to get rid of underperforming teachers. Rather, we found most of the turnover in charter schools is voluntary and dysfunctional as compared to that of traditional public schools.
A second reason is that attrition is highest among teachers that are new to the profession. Past research found teachers make important gains in effectiveness in their first three years and smaller gains over the next few years (McCaffrey, Koretz, Lockwood, and Hamilton, 2003; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2005). Given that almost 50% of teachers leave the profession within their first five years (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003), many teachers are leaving the classroom before they have developed into optimally effective practitioners. Moreover, exiting new teachers are often replaced by similarly inexperienced teachers and consequently students in schools with high turnover may rarely be exposed to experienced teachers.
Third, turnover affects many of the organizational conditions important to effective schooling, such as instructional cohesion and staff trust. Effective schools hold shared beliefs in similar instructional goals and practices (Fuller & Izu, 1986; Bryk & Driscoll, 1988). Schools with high turnover are challenged to develop a shared commitment towards the same goals, pedagogy, and curriculum. The constant churning of teaching staff makes it difficult to collaborate, develop standard norms of practice, and maintain progress towards common goals. This can lead to fragmented instructional programs and professional development plans that must be adapted each year to meet the needs of a teaching staff in constant flux (Guin, 2004). High turnover also makes it difficult for teachers to build relational trust, which is critical towards productive collaboration in schools (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Guin, 2004).
Critics of charter schools argue that students and schools need stability. “When you stay in a school or community, you build relationships,” said Andrea Giunta, a senior policy analyst for teacher recruitment, retention and diversity at the National Education Association.
As might be expected, studies have shown that teacher turnover often “diminishes student achievement” and has a negative impact on “the overall school environment because it creates instability and a loss of institutional knowledge.”
Matthew Ronfeldt, an assistant professor of educational studies at the University of Michigan—along with colleagues Susanna Loeb and James Wyckoff—conducted a study on teacher turnover. Their report was titled How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement. Loeb, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, said that the problem of teacher turnover had been well-documented. She noted, “One in three teachers leaves the profession within five years.” In their study, the three researchers sought to find out if students “do worse in the year after there is high turnover.” They discovered that high teacher turnover hurt student achievement in English and math—and that the negative impact was as “significant as the effect of free lunch eligibility (a standard measure of poverty) on test scores.” They also found the negative impact to be strongest “among schools with more low-performing and black students. “
In a Texas Tribune article dated January 27, 2010, Brian Temple wrote that at some charter schools in the state “it’s the teachers who can’t wait to clear out at the end of the school year.”
Temple reported that according to data that had been released at the time, 79 percent of the faculty of Accelerated Intermediate Academy in Houston turned over before the 2008-09 school year. At Peak Preparatory in Dallas, 71 percent of teachers did not return…and at Harmony Science Academy in College Station, “69 percent of teachers split.”
Temple continued:
In all, more than 40 of nearly 200 charter operators the state tracked — some which oversee multiple schools — had to replace more than half their teaching staffs before the last school year. Even more established and successful operators, including KIPP and YES Prep in Houston, lose nearly a third of their teachers annually. In contrast, just six of more than 1,000 non-charter school districts statewide had more than half their teachers leave, and none of the 20 largest school districts had a turnover rate higher than 16 percent.
The financial cost of teacher turnover is high. According to a study conducted by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future, teacher attrition costs approximately $7.3 billion per year. Since teacher attrition is so costly and has been shown to have a negative effect on student performance, Benjamin Cosman wonders why TFA and charter organizations like the Yes Prep schools encourage teachers to have a “get out while you can” mentality.
Cosman argued:
We should be cultivating teachers who are in it for the long haul, who build steady careers based on longevity, who become the wizened old stalwarts who’ve been around the block a few times. Yes, there are problems with tenure and bad teachers sticking around too long, and those issues need to be addressed. But the exact opposite — getting teachers in and out as fast as we can — is certainly not the solution.
Excerpt from Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States, an issue brief released by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future (NCTAF) in August 2005:
There is a growing consensus among researchers and educators that the single most important factor in determining student performance is the quality of his or her teachers. Therefore, if the national goal of providing an equitable education to children across the nation is to be met, it is critical that efforts be concentrated on developing and retaining high-quality teachers in every community and at every grade level…
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ 1999–2000 “Public School Teacher Survey,” 47 percent of public school teachers worked with a mentor teacher in the same subject area.12 Sixty-six percent of teachers who were formally mentored by another teacher reported that it “improved their classroom teaching a lot.”13
Mentors are an important factor in providing support for new teachers as they enter the real world of the classroom, but mentoring alone is not enough. Comprehensive induction proves most effective at keeping good teachers in the classroom. Studies demonstrate that new teacher turnover rates can be cut in half through comprehensive induction—a combination of high-quality mentoring, professional development and support, scheduled interaction with other teachers in the school and in the larger community, and formal assessments for new teachers during at least their first two years of teaching.14
I can speak from experience. Mentor teachers can prove invaluable in helping young and inexperienced teachers by providing them with advice, insight, educational ideas and materials that have proved successful in the classroom, and by being a sounding board for them when they feel a need to express their frustrations, insecurities, and fears. Experienced teachers helped me when I was a teaching “ingénue.” Later, when I was a seasoned professional, I helped guide and advise young teachers. I shared books and teaching materials with them. I also listened to their new ideas. Other experienced educators at my school and I found that mentoring new teachers helped us to bond with them and to become a close-knit educational community.
Older teachers provide wisdom. Young teachers bring in a “breath of fresh air.” I think the healthiest school communities have teachers with different perspectives and levels of classroom experience—new teachers, teachers in mid career, and the old sages who have been around the block more than a few times.
One has to wonder how difficult it must be for young and inexperienced teachers to find mentors in their schools if most of the classroom practitioners have little more experience than they. One has to wonder how schools where teachers stay for just two or three years can develop their own culture and institutional memory—as well as a sense of stability and community. One has to wonder how children feel when their teachers come and go so frequently and rarely show evidence of a commitment to their schools and the student population.
It saddens me to think that there are “school reformers” in our country who encourage “foreshortened careers” in education…who think that youth trumps experience…who don’t instill a commitment to education in the young people they recruit for their teaching programs.
SOURCES
At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice (New York Times)
The High Turnover at Charter Schools (New York Times)
Charter schools are developing teachers with short tenure (Examiner)
Teacher Attrition in Charter vs. District Schools (CRPE–Center on Reinventing Public Education)
High teacher turnover in charters: Does student achievement suffer? (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
A Revolving Door (Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff)
Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools (Vanderbilt University)
It’s harder for charter schools to keep teachers (My San Antonio)
Teacher Attrition in Charter Schools 2007 (NEPC–National Education Policy Center)
Professor: Why Teach For America can’t recruit in my classroom (Washington Post)
Teacher Turnover Negatively Impacts Student Achievement in Math and English (The Journal)
Teacher turnover harms student learning (University of Michigan)
Teacher turnover affects all students’ achievement, study indicates (Stanford University)
Churn, Churn, Churn, Is Not Good for Kids or the Teaching Profession (Diane Ravitch)
LA students more true to their charter schools than teachers, studies say (UC Berkeley)
Charter Schools Battle High Teacher Turnover (Texas Tribune)
Teach For America: Let’s Stop Encouraging Teachers to Leave After Two Years, Maybe? (Policymic)
Guest Post: Teacher turnover – who stays and who leaves (Stanford University)
High Teacher Turnover Rates are a Big Problem for America’s Public Schools (Forbes)
Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States (NCTAF-National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future)
NCTAF Study: Teacher Attrition Costs U.S. Over $7 Billion Annually (American Association of Colleges for Teacher education)
Gene,
I said it was an inappropriate metric because it is subjective. The valuable metrics in this situation are objective. In fact, in designing HPT metrics, like in any science, objective outweighs subjective.
People are polled on satisfaction and happiness all the time. If you talk to 10 people and 6 of them tell you they are satisfied, then, objectively, 60% of those people are satisfied.
Happiness is again subjective. Speaking from personal experience, some of my most valuable and useful skills were acquired in miserable environments. It is a myth that learning must be innately pleasurable. Learning is by definition change. Change is rarely comfortable for humans. It is usually anything but. A well rounded education involves both pain and pleasure.
That’s great for you. But it’s a fact that different people learn in different ways. For some people, pain works. For others it doesn’t. Suggesting that a person you don’t know anything about needs to suffer in order for them to learn is really presumptive, and not very compassionate. To say that all people need pain in order to learn is not based in objective fact.
Education, as it involves the profoundly personal act of learning, is fundamentally subjective.
A school is successful when they teach a student how to think properly (in contrast to what to think). If they create a love of learning where none existed before, that is gravy. Just as ability is individually differential so is proclivity.
Ah, you know, my dad used to say that. “Schools should teach kids how to think, not what to think.” Now, I’m all nostalgic for our endless arguments. Thanks a lot!
Okay, so we’ve established our dramatic difference of opinion on what education is for. I think it’s for whatever the student wants it to be for. You think it’s so that students will learn to think properly (and I agree in cases where the student wants to learn how to think properly!).
Now, some serious questions. They might sound facetious, but they’re actually serious.
What is it, to think “properly?” How do you measure that? How many ways can one think properly? What, exactly, are those ways? Does thinking properly apply to aesthetic subjects as well as math and science? To politics? Religion?
Do you think the school system has ever been successful in getting all or most students to think properly?
What percentage of high school students are thinking properly when they graduate? Do they have to go to college to finish learning how to think properly?
Will students who have suffered more think more properly than those who suffered less or will they just learn to think properly more quickly?
(Okay, those last two were a little facetious. Sorry.)
See, I think your “think properly” idea is even more subjective than my “satisfied” idea. If a person says they’re satisfied, it’s objectively true that they’re satisfied. If a person gives you an answer you don’t like on any number of subjects (or even if they arrive at correct answers in an unorthodox way), you can always say that they’re not thinking properly.
From your point of view, I’m not thinking properly right now. Objectively, we have a disagreement on the issue of the purpose of education. Subjectively, you’re thinking properly about the purpose of education, while I’m not.
I can’t imagine a school in this day and age where the teachers and administrators say, “We don’t care if the students are happy. We want them to think properly.” A hundred years ago, sure. But not any more.
“It’s silly to think you can’t define success with satisfaction.”
Another straw man.
I didn’t say you can’t use satisfaction as a metric.
I said it was an inappropriate metric because it is subjective. The valuable metrics in this situation are objective. In fact, in designing HPT metrics, like in any science, objective outweighs subjective.
“A school is successful if all of its students are happy to be there and are learning things they know will help them throughout life. If a student isn’t happy at a school, then either the school needs to adjust or the student needs to find a new school. Especially as school is coerced activity.”
Happiness is again subjective. Speaking from personal experience, some of my most valuable and useful skills were acquired in miserable environments. It is a myth that learning must be innately pleasurable. Learning is by definition change. Change is rarely comfortable for humans. It is usually anything but. A well rounded education involves both pain and pleasure.
“If a school with 100 students has only one kid in it who is unhappy to be there and feels like the school doesn’t care about him, then that school has failed.”
A combination of the ecological fallacy and the fallacy of composition with a dash of the fallacy of single cause. Also an appeal to emotion.
And my measure is simple.
A school is successful when they teach a student how to think properly (in contrast to what to think). If they create a love of learning where none existed before, that is gravy. Just as ability is individually differential so is proclivity.
Where standardized testing fails is the measure is what, not how. Data retention, not the integration of data and synthesis into knowledge and contextual understanding. Testing could work better as a metric if it went to applied problem solving instead of rote. If the goal of education is to prepare children for life, there is no better metric than applied problem solving. The challenges of life are nothing if not a chain of problems to be solved.
To properly engineer a system, one must first design the goal of that system.
The primary function of schools is neither happiness nor entertainment.
If that’s what you want for children, let them stay home and watch TV and play video games all day.
The primary function of schools is to teach people how to think.
I should hasten to add that the text below the first link above is from the article. I’ve never met Ms. Olson.
There are lots of great public schools out there making lots of students very happy. But we should never forget all the students that are not happy at school.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201106/how-does-school-wound-kirsten-olson-has-counted-some-ways
Let me introduce you to Dr. Kirsten Olson. She is an educational researcher, activist, consultant, and writer deeply concerned about children, learning, and the conditions of our schools. She is, among other things, president of the board of directors of IDEA (the Institute for Democratic Education in America). I met her for the first time, for lunch and conversation, a couple of weeks ago, and then I eagerly read her latest book, Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing up to Old School Culture. If you have ever gone to school, or have a child in school, or might someday have a child in school, or care about children in school, I recommend her book to you.
Wounded by School is the outcome of research that Olson began when she was an education doctoral candidate at Harvard. As one who loves learning and has always had high esteem for education, Olson intended to conduct research into the delights and enlightenment experienced in the course of schooling. But when she began interviewing people to learn about such positive effects, she found that they talked instead about the pain of school. Here is how Olson’s doctoral advisor, Sara Laurence-Lightfoot put it in a forward to the book:
“In her first foray into the field–in-depth interviews with an award-winning architect, a distinguished professor, a gifted writer, a marketing executive–Olson certainly expected to hear stories of joyful and productive learning, stories that mixed seriousness, adventure, and pleasure, work and play, desire and commitment. Instead, she discovered the shadows of pain, disappointment, even cynicism in their vivid recollections of schooling. Instead of the light that she expected, she found darkness. And their stories did not merely refer to old wounds now healed and long forgotten; they recalled deeply embedded wounds that still bruised and ached, wounds that still compromised and distorted their sense of themselves as persons and professionals.”
As her project expanded, Olson began interviewing people of all ages, from schoolchildren on up to grandparents, people from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and occupying a wide variety of careers. She was struck by the earnestness and emotion that came forth as people talked about the wounds that they still felt in relation to their schooling. Olson was pioneering a direct way to understand the effects of school on psychological development. She asked people who had been there how school affected them.
In her book, Olson categorizes the wounds into seven groups, and she illustrates each with quotations from interviews. Then, in later chapters, she describes how caring parents, teachers, and students themselves can help prevent and heal the wounds. Here I’ll simply list and describe in my own words Olson’s seven categories. (I’ve added my own twist to the description of each type of wound, so if you find fault in the descriptions, the faults may be mine rather than Olson’s.)
The first four categories of wounds all seem to result primarily from the restrictions that are placed on students’ behavior and learning in school–the preset curriculum, the narrow set of permissible learning procedures, the tests in which there is one right answer for every question, and the often-arbitrary rules that students have no role in creating. These categories are:
1. Wounds of creativity. School stifles creativity. This is perhaps the most obvious wound of school. Students’ own passions and interests are generally ignored. Students’ unique, creative ways of solving problems and their outside-the-box answers to questions, which fail to match the teachers’ answer sheets, are not understood and are graded as wrong by busy teachers. Rote learning and tests that have one right answer for every question leave no room for creativity. Olson’s informants who went on to live creative lives apparently did so despite, not because of, schooling. They had to recover or rebuild the creative spirit that had been so natural to them before starting school. My own guess is that altogether too many others rarely think about creativity once they have lost it in school; they may not even notice this wound. And then there are those who remain creative in those realms that school doesn’t touch, but become uncreative in the realms covered by the school curriculum. How many people have totally lost mathematical creativity because of the ways it was taught in school?
2. Wounds of compliance. In school students must continuously follow rules and procedures that they have no role in creating and must complete assignments that make no sense in terms of their own learning needs. Students generally cannot question these rules and assignments; if they do they are smart-alecks, or worse. To avoid getting into trouble, they learn to obey blindly, and in the process they learn to be bad citizens in a democracy. Democracy requires citizens who question the rules and insist on changing those that are unfair or don’t make sense. They also hurt themselves by going through life following narrower paths than they might if school had not taught them that it is dangerous to explore the edges.
3. Wounds of rebellion. Some students respond to the arbitrary rules and assignments by rebelling rather than complying. They may in some cases feel intense anger toward the system that has taken away their freedom and dignity, toward teachers who seem to be complicit with that system, and toward the goody-goody students who go along. They may manifest their scorn by sitting in the back of the classroom, making snide remarks, blatantly flouting rules, and rarely if ever completing assignments. Rebellion may sometimes be a healthier response than compliance, but if it goes too far it may hurt even more than compliance. Failure in school may cut off valued future paths. Anger toward schooling can lead to a turning away from all forms of learning. And, perhaps most tragically, the rebellion can take forms that physically harm the self and others, especially if the person turns to drugs, promiscuous sex, and crime as forms of self-expression and self-identity.
4. Wounds of numbness. The constant grind of school, doing one tedious assignment after another according to the school’s schedule, following the school’s procedures, can lead to intellectual numbness. Many of Olson’s respondents described themselves as “zoned out” or “intellectually numb” as long as they were in school. Intellectual excitement is rarely rewarded in school, but doggedly grinding it out, doing what you are supposed to do, never missing a deadline, is rewarded. Brilliant work in one subject at the expense of ignoring another might earn you an A and an F in the two classes; but good-enough, non-inspired work in both subjects might earn you an A in both. This is one of the many ways by which schooling kills intellectual enthusiasm. When students do demonstrate enthusiasm, it is usually about something that has nothing to do with their lessons.
The remaining three categories of wounds identified by Olson all seem to be inflicted by the ways that people are ranked and sorted in school. You can be wounded differently depending on whether you are ranked low, high, or middling.
5. Wounds of underestimation. In her interviews Olson found that some described ways in which they were wounded by assumptions made about them because of their race, social class, gender, or performance on one or another test that was supposed to measure intelligence or aptitude. In some cases, it seemed easier to go along with the assumption than to fight it, so the assumption became a self-fulfilling prophecy. More generally, a low grade achieved in a course or set of courses can unduly discourage people from following what had been their dream. A would-be biologist chooses a less-desired track because of a D in tenth grade biology. A would-be author concludes that professional writing is beyond her scope because an English teacher could not see the sparkle of her essays or the brilliance in her non-conventional sentence structure and gave her below-average grades. If only students knew how many great achievers in our society received poor school grades in the realm of their achievement! If only teachers knew.
6. Wounds of perfectionism. High grades and high scores on intelligence tests, too, can wound. Students who develop identities as high achievers may feel extraordinary pressure to continue high achievement, in everything. For them, even an A- in a course, or getting only the second best part in the class play, or rejection by the top Ivy League school, may feel like terrible failure–failure to live up to the image that others have of them, or the image that they have of themselves. The wound of perfectionism explains why so many “top” students cheat, when they feel that they must to get the grade that everyone expects them to get (see School is a Breeding Ground for Cheaters). When grades are the measure of perfection, everything is done for the grade. In school, “perfection” and intellectual numbness are quite compatible. For an excellent description of how the wound of perfectionism can interfere with real education, I refer you to the courageous valedictorian speech given a year ago by Erica Goldson.
7. Wounds of the average. The middling student, who is neither sinking nor soaring in the eyes of the school officials, may suffer from invisibility. In Olson’s interviews, these people described themselves as feeling insignificant, as people who don’t really matter much. In the worst cases, they developed self-identities as people who are unimportant, who do not make waves, who go along but never lead.
http://www.amazon.com/Wounded-School-Recapturing-Learning-Standing/dp/0807749559/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1378868561&sr=1-1
Gene,
Satisfaction in subjective and individual. If you want to address metrics, that is not a suitable one to measure in defining success.
Learning is subjective and individual. What else matters in life than being satisfied with one’s personal pursuits? If a kid is happy with what he learned at school, but got a C- on a test in a subject he didn’t care about, is that kid unsuccessful?
We measure most things by how satisfying they are. What’s the most successful mid-sized economy car? Probably the one the scored high in customer satisfaction. What’s the most successful movie? The one that movie goers enjoyed the most.
It’s silly to think you can’t define success with satisfaction.
Define what makes a school a success.
A school is successful if all of its students are happy to be there and are learning things they know will help them throughout life. If a student isn’t happy at a school, then either the school needs to adjust or the student needs to find a new school. Especially as school is coerced activity.
If a school with 100 students has only one kid in it who is unhappy to be there and feels like the school doesn’t care about him, then that school has failed. The fact is that the average “succeeding” (via test scores) school has a much higher percentage of unhappy kids than that.
Account for the fact that ability is individually differential and therefor even in an equal effort situation, results will vary.
Yes, ability is individually differential, but schools have always treated them as if they weren’t. As if something is wrong with a seven year old who doesn’t read at the arbitrarily determined rate. As if something is wrong with a kid who has no interest in “The Great Gatsby” or knowing the stages of a star.
I hope you take the time to read the article I linked to.
Now, it’s your turn. Define what makes a school a success.
Elaine,
It would have been a race to the bottom! 🙂
Elaine,
I’m afraid that rigidity in thought and authoritarianism have been a large part of most schools since there have been schools.
There are just too many adults who will tell you that they hated school precisely for those reasons. They feel about school the way Einstein felt about school.
He said, “It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.”
He also said, “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one learned in school.”
rafflaw,
“My lack of success was not due a lack of effort. I would have hated it if my thick headedness in math cost a teacher a job!”
And consider what would have happened if you were in school today and didn’t do well enough on the math test to qualify you to receive a high school diploma!
Gene,
My lack of success was not due a lack of effort. I would have hated it if my thick headedness in math cost a teacher a job!
“No, I think mismanagement and rigidity in thought and authoritarianism make schools fail.”
And that will not be remedied by choice. Satisfaction in subjective and individual. If you want to address metrics, that is not a suitable one to measure in defining success.
Define what makes a school a success.
Account for the fact that ability is individually differential and therefor even in an equal effort situation, results will vary.
rafflaw,
You got that right! There are moneyed people in this country who are doing their best to privatize public education–people of no conscience who don’t give a damn about our children.
Elaine,
The high stakes testing, like charter schools is more about private corporations making money, than it is about.judging how well students and schools are doing. Follow the money.
“Do I think lack of choice is making schools fail? No, I think mismanagement and rigidity in thought and authoritarianism make schools fail.”
Yet, it was the school reform movement that brought us rigidity of thought and high stakes testing of children and claimed that traditional public schools were failing because students in some public schools didn’t test as well as reformers say those students should have. The reformers have become the authoritarians. They have pressured public schools/politicians/the public to judge both students and teachers by the results of high stakes standardized tests.
Elaine,
That’s an all too common and sad story. I believe most teachers long for the kind of flexibility that would make school a much more positive, constructive experience for most kids. High-stakes testing is just another element which takes away that flexibility.
Gene,
Ahh, that’s a very, very good question. If the problem is defined as “failing schools,” then (I’m afraid) we have to define what makes a school “failing.”
Presently, our society and our government considers a school that has high test scores to be “successful.” But I absolutely reject this.
But, for argument’s sake, you ask me if I believe that choice will make for higher test scores, then my answer is, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” I might add, parenthetically, (“I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t”).
Alfie Kohn is one of my favorite writers on education. His opinions mirror mine on testing when he writes:
His speechwriters had President George W. Bush proclaim, “Measurement is the cornerstone of learning.” What they should have written was, “Measurement is the cornerstone of the kind of learning that lends itself to being measured.”
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/sbm.htm
Do I think lack of choice is making schools fail? No, I think mismanagement and rigidity in thought and authoritarianism make schools fail.
If you ask me if choice will increase satisfaction with schools, I have to say that I suspect it will, but it depends on how it’s implemented.
LJM,
Speaking from my own experience, public schools were much more flexible before the school reform movement ushered in the era of high stakes testing.
I worked in a school where teachers were always innovating and trying new ideas. We did lots of creative projects with our students, took them on field trips, introduced them to great children’s literature, etc. Unfortunately, once school reform reared its head in our state and brought in high stakes testing, things started to change. It’s the reason I took early retirement. I taught in an excellent school system that was adversely affected by school reform.
The problem being failing schools.
LJM,
Is or is not your contention that choice alleviates the problem?
Elaine,
Yes, you’re absolutely right. Especially if the popular charter school model is “test, test, test!” like it is now. But they’re not all like that, and hopefully there will be more that are less test-centric. When public schools find a way to be more flexible, few families will choose charter schools. Unfortunately, all these “No Child Left Behind,” “Race to the Top,” “Core Curriculum” one-size-fits-all approaches are still very popular.
In the meantime, a not-so-great choice is much better than no choice at all.
LJM,
Having lots of charter schools doesn’t necessarily mean that individual students will find schools that meet their specific needs. A child may have a charter school or two or three located in his/her school district and still not find one that is a good match for his/her talents/needs.