Misrepresenting Urban Education

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I am not one for bumper sticker politics, but I saw a t-shirt on a teacher recently that said, “Those who can, teach; those who can’t teach, pass legislation about teaching.” 

This made me think about the fact that the vast majority of our critics have never stepped into a classroom since they walked across their high school auditorium stage to take their diploma.  A couple examples slapped me in the face recently.

I shouldn’t give this guy the publicity that comes with a response, but the other day I read an editorial by Chris Powell, the managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, that really got under my skin.  Powell routinely offends me because he hates teachers so profoundly and bashes them so regularly on the editorial pages of the JI.  I know this not because I subscribe to the JI but because someone at the Willimantic Chronicle loves to run Powell’s editorials on an all-too-regular basis.

One of Powell’s obsessions is with social promotion.  In a recent editorial, he misrepresented results of the most recent NAEP tests to suggest that half of all Connecticut high school seniors “had not mastered high school English,” when in fact Connecticut had the highest reading scores in the country, and had the most significant gains for African-American students.  Furthermore, if Connecticut were its own country, its scores on the commensurate PISA exam, which is international, would place it among the top performers in the world.

This is not to say we don’t have work to do, but honestly.  Powell gets himself in a lather because students who don’t score proficient on the NAEP test get a “diploma anyway.”  He writes that this is “because the unacknowledged policy of public education in Connecticut is never to hold students to standards but to promote them from grade to grade even if they fail to learn.”

Now, Powell is maligning all Connecticut teachers, but being that he is based in Manchester, I assume he has those teachers foremost in his mind.  But as someone who has spent the whole year working in three schools in Manchester, I can tell you I have never seen Powell cross the threshold of any building, and that I have certainly not witnessed the lack of standards or failure to teach or learn that he reports. 

The fact of the matter—in Manchester and everywhere else—is that we all do our best to progress our students, and then, yes, we generally pass them to the next grade.  Which is as it should be.  Research has routinely demonstrated that retention does not aid learning but hinders it.  In fact, keeping a student back in a transitional grade like 1, 5, or 8 is one of the best predictors of dropping out of school. 

Don’t believe me?  Read Russell Rumberger’s excellent compendium titled Dropping Out.  Rumberger demonstrates in great detail that when students repeat a grade their likelihood of future failure increases.  (One of the most frightening predictors of prison for African-American males is if they repeat first grade!).  We are much better off promoting students and then providing the necessary interventions and support to promote their continued learning.  There’s the rub, no doubt, but that is the best option.

Maybe I get frustrated with Powell because I hold journalists to a higher standard.  I expect them to promote opinions that are informed by fact, observation, and experience, and not merely based on something they read on the internet.  But truth be told, such uninformed opinions about education—and especially about urban education—are pervasive.  (I know I’m not telling most of my readers anything you don’t know). 

And here’s my other disturbing example.

The other day I was heading to East Hartford High to sit in on my friend Kim Shaker’s UConn Early College Experience class.  They were reading Hamlet.  I always love going to Kim’s classes because she’s a great teacher, she has a preponderance of energy, and her classes look like a model United Nations.

I observed and lightly participated in a great class that was doing this fun, dynamic close-reading activity with Claudius’ confessional monologue.  The students were brilliant.

But here’s my point.  As I was leaving to go to East Hartford, I bumped into an acquaintance, and when I told him where I was headed, he said, “Be careful!  Those places are dangerous!” 

Those places?  I didn’t even want to ask for clarification.  I just said, “Don’t believe the hype,” got in my car, and drove off.

The Bill That Funds Everything We Do

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bandarqq Do you remember Schoolhouse Rock?  I can still sing along with “I’m Just a Bill.”  Remember the poor bill who had to sit there in committee waiting to become a law?  I loved those old commercials, but one thing I learned years ago was that prior to sitting in committee something that is “just an idea” can’t move along the legislative chain unless a bunch of senators and representatives endorse it by signing what’s called a Dear Colleague letter.  And that’s what I have been doing all day today. 

I and well over a hundred other teachers from writing project sites from all over the country have been visiting our legislators, asking them to sign Dear Colleague letters that will allow the National Writing Project to continue to compete for funding from Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (otherwise currently known as the No Child Left Behind Act), which has not been reauthorized since 2007 but whose provisions remain in place.

Some teachers have a hard time on these trips, visiting legislative delegations whose members believe the Department of Education should be abolished, or who believe that education funding should be left entirely to the states (and thus to the wildly unfair system that uses local property taxes to fund education), or who’d just as soon see education privatized.

But the legislators from Connecticut—Joe Courtney, John Larson, Elizabeth Esty, Jim Himes, and Rosa DeLauro in the House and Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal in the Senate—all support funding opportunities for the National Writing Project, and so we received support from the entire delegation.

In years past, before the recession that began September 14 of 2008, I and other site directors used to bring several hundred teachers to this annual Spring Meeting, but for a while now it has been a much more modest event, and Bryan Crandall from the CWP-Fairfield and I often found ourselves talking to legislators by ourselves.

This year, however, I was fortunate enough to have the funds to bring four teachers with me to visit our legislators.  Kelly Cecchini and Amanda Lister from Manchester High School and Steve Staysniak and Leslie Blatteau from Metropolitan Business Academy in New Haven are here with me.

We spent eight hours, from 8 till 4 today, walking back and forth and up and down Capitol Hill visiting our legislators.  Usually, these trips mean visiting with education aides and interns, who are sometimes no older than my undergraduates, but this year we met personally with Jim Himes and John Larson, and were supposed to meet with Joe Courtney, too, till he was called away last minute. 

We had great meetings with each legislator’s education aide, and bringing the teachers was awesome because I could allow them to tell stories about how the federal dollars manifested in actual programs and benefits for students in their schools and classrooms, rather than tell stories second hand.

You might think these aides are inaccessible or indifferent, but nothing could be further from the truth.  They are happy to meet and talk, and are deeply interested in the subject of education.  For one thing, it’s what they do, and meeting with actual teachers gives them some real windows onto the outcomes of their efforts.  And, as I like to joke only half facetiously, they have office desk jobs that place them in front of screens for long periods of each day.  The opportunity to get up and out and meet some real teachers and discuss education is always most welcome.  And many come from teaching families or, in some cases, were teachers themselves earlier in their careers.

Some fun highlights this year were being able to walk the tunnels between the House office buildings.  Do you know that all the buildings on Capitol Hill are connected by underground tunnels?  We also got caught behind some security fences alongside one of the House office buildings and had to push them aside while armed guards watched us with detached amusement.  Best of all was that the weather was nice.  No cherry blossoms yet, but after some light morning rain, by afternoon the sun was out and it was in the mid-70s.  I don’t know about you, but I still have snow piled three feet high alongside my driveway, so the warmth was an absolute blessing.

Anyway, I know it’s popular to rant about our elected officials, but I have been meeting with ours for almost a decade now, and I have to say it’s always a pleasure to talk shop with such dedicated people.

The Social Promotion Straw Man

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Once again, the Journal Inquirer’s Chris Powell is way off the mark in his excoriation of teachers—and of the state of education in Connecticut in general. 

Now, there’s a lot to address in Powell’s recent editorial—attacks on the CEA, a defense of standardized testing, and the use of decontextualized NAEP data, just to name a few.  But for now, I want to address the issue of social promotion because it is such a frequent straw man of Powell’s.

According to Powell, social promotion is Connecticut’s unacknowledged “system,”

the result of which is that a high school diploma in Connecticut “sets students on a path only to remedial English … at the state’s public universities.”

Social promotion sounds like such a simple issue.  Students should not be allowed to enter the next grade unless they have mastered the material presented in their current grade.  Certainly, when I was a high school English teacher I heard frequent complaints that the middle school teachers engaged in wanton social promotion, thus making our jobs infinitely harder.  The usually proffered solution is grade retention.  Powell also supports standardized testing as an accountability measure for teachers.

In truth, however, like everything in the field of education, social promotion is a far more complex issue than it seems.

First of all, Connecticut’s students’ so-called lack of proficiency is relative.  In fact, the results of the NAEP tests show that, at roughly 50%, Connecticut’s students have the highest rate of English proficiency in the country. 

Rightly so, Powell will point out that this still means that half our students are not scoring at proficiency.  And while this is accurate, Powell’s diagnosis of the situation and his suggested solutions are off the mark. 

His additional claim that teachers offer no viable alternatives to social promotion is also completely inaccurate. 

Clearly, Powell has not done his research.

For one thing, study after study has demonstrated that grade retention occurs inordinately to males, African-Americans, and the poor. 

Secondly, study after study has demonstrated that grade retention not only fails to improve learning but actually leads to decreased achievement and increased dropout rates (and, ultimately, is a significant predictor of incarceration).  Retention is terribly disruptive to students’ social connectedness and sense of self.  Students who are retained become severely alienated from their peer groups and from school in general, especially in later grades and if retention occurs more than once.

Thirdly, grade retention is financially costly and impractical.  The impact on scheduling alone would be a nightmare.  Imagine scheduling an incoming kindergarten class when half of the previous year’s students are being retained.

Fourthly, grade retention produces myriad social problems, such as mixing older students with younger students, which becomes especially acute in the middle school years. 

Lastly, educators, in fact, offer all sorts of suggestions for addressing the learning needs of students who do not perform at grade level proficiency.  As opposed to promotion or retention, these approaches come under the label of intervention, and they include small class sizes, overlapped curriculum, aptitude grouping across similar grade levels, extended pre-school and kindergarten, tutoring, after-school and weekend programs, summer enrichment programs, and family and community literacy programs.  Ideally, students remain with their age peers but receive one or more of these interventions.

The dilema is that these demonstrably successful intervention approaches are costly.  Standardized testing, by contrast, is also costly but has no research to support its effectiveness.  Testing merely assesses.  But if we spend our scant resources on testing mechanisms, we have nothing left for intervention, and we will not be surprised when the tests show that students are below proficiency. 

The research shows that if schools (and the state department of education) are going to invest in improving the learning of at-risk students, they would be wise to eschew the ineffectiveness of grade retention and the maddeningly high cost of standardized test development, administration, and preparation that Powell advocates, and instead they should invest in these proven intervention programs.

I’ll give you an example from Powell’s own backyard.  As you likely know, recent legislation in Connecticut has made it illegal for community colleges to require students to take more than one year of developmental coursework.  In short, the developmental coursework that used to be offered by the community colleges has been thrust back upon the high schools.  In and of itself, this is fine, but high schools need to be supported in this.

So, about three years ago, using federal funds from a College Access Challenge grant, English Professor Steve Straight from Manchester Community College and English teacher Kelly Cecchini from Manchester High School developed a kegiatan that allows students at Manchester High to take a Developmental English course that mirrors MCC’s Developmental English course.  This is a dual enrollment kegiatan that is, in a sense, a type of curriculum wrapping. 

Since then, Kelly and Steve have developed and received approval for a credit-bearing English Composition course (English 101) that Kelly teaches at the high school for which the students receive MCC credit.  This model is now being developed at other high schools in MCC’s service area, including Rockville, East Hartford, South Windsor, and EO Smith in Mansfield.  Steve and Kelly are also working with me to help Metropolitan Business Academy in New Haven develop a similar kegiatan with Gateway Community College, with the hope that it can become a model throughout the city.  And, independent of us, educators in Bridgeport have developed a similar kegiatan between Housatonic Community College and both Central and Bassick High Schools.

So, does it work?  Three years worth of data suggest that it does.  Before the implementation of this program, fewer than 50% of all MHS students entering MCC qualified to enroll in English 101.  Three years into this wrap around intervention, almost 70% of all MHS students entering MCC qualify for credit-bearing English.

So, teachers offer “no alternative to social promotion”?  There is “no mechanism for making diplomas meaningful”?  High school diplomas are “a path only to remedial English”?  Teachers only offer “touchy-feeling measures of student performance”?  Teachers merely want to “escape” accountability?

Mr. Powell, please look a little more closely.  Pay attention to what’s going on in your own town.  Do a little leg-work.  Conduct a little research.  Rather than rant against teachers, take up the cause of teachers.  Help them advocate for research-based solutions, community support, and funding to provide the proven interventions their students need.

PS  Anyone interested in the research on these issues might start with Russell Rumberger’s Dropping Out:  Why Students Drop Out of High School and What Can Be Done About It.

The Interesting Case Of Charter Schools

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Two interesting bits of information were reported on March 27.  The Hartford Courant reported that the legislature’s education committee had removed a moratorium on charter school expansion.  And The New Haven Register reported that New Haven’s Board of Education president Carlos Torre had accepted a position on Achievement First’s Board of Directors only days after Torre had helped squash a new partnership between Achievement First and the New Haven Public Schools.

Quite a banner day for charter supporters, I’d say.

I know a lot of teachers who work in charter schools, and I have done observations of teachers in charter schools.  There are good, hard-working teachers in charters just like there are everywhere.

My concerns and objections are not with teachers or even individual charter schools.  Teachers are teachers and several studies have demonstrated that across the nation charter schools perform on average about as well as public schools. 

My concerns are with issues of funding, working conditions for teachers, and the treatment of students.

In the case of Elm City Imagine, the charter that was prevented from opening in New Haven, $700 plus in-kind services would have followed each child to the new school.  That means for every student drawn away from one of the local public schools to this new charter, well over $1000 would have been siphoned off from local budgets.  I say “well over $1000” because the non-descript phrase “in-kind services” sounds like a no cost measure, but in-kind services most definitely cost something.

Here in Mansfield, our board of education just submitted a budget that calls for a 4% increase—and still eliminates two instructional consultants.  What would our budget look like if we lost a couple hundred students plus $700 each, and on top of that had to pay for in-kind services?  It would be devastating, assuredly.

Then there’s the issue of teachers’ rights and working conditions.  As reported by The New York Times on April 6, because teachers in charters do not enjoy the same collectively bargained rights as teachers in public schools, they are often greatly overworked, to the point that they suffer extreme stress and, ultimately, leave at a much higher rate than in public schools.  The Times reported that the turnover rate at the Success Academies in the city was around 50%.  Success officials offered a much lower number of 17%, but even that is almost triple the average in New York’s public schools. 

Most importantly is the issue of students.  Ultimately, for many charter supporters, this is the only issue.  They have no qualms about the diversion of public funds or the (mis)treatment of teachers.  It’s about “high-quality public school options and great schools for every child,” as the Courant quoted Achievement First’s CEO Dacia Toll.

And this is perhaps the most interesting issue of all.

The day after the Courant reported on the abandonment of the moratorium, the paper ran an op-ed from a parent describing how wonderful “the Achievement First family” has been for her two sons and her daughter.  Another couple of days later came an announcement from Urban Prep Academy in Chicago that for the sixth straight year it had placed 100 percent of its seniors into college.

Sounds nice, but I have to ask, At what cost and at whose expense?

What happens to the students who fail out of a charter or get kicked out for disciplinary reasons?  Take for instance the Urban Prep Academy in Chicago that is so boastful of its graduation and college placement rates.  After the third year that Urban Prep made this claim, The Chicago Tribune ran an article that showed that approximately half of the students who began as freshmen at Urban Prep were no longer at the school four years later.  That means that the 85 college-bound young men in that senior class were the lucky ones from a group that actually had a graduation rate of more like 50%—well below the national average that now tops 80% for all high school seniors and 70% for African-Americans. 

Worse still may be the disciplinary methods employed in many charter schools.  The April 6 New York Times article reported a suspension rate of 23% for charters, well above the city average of 4%.  On March 8, The Hartford Courant reported that suspension rates across the state were down to a low of 12.3%—but not in charter schools, where rates of suspension were staggeringly high, as much as 59% at one New Haven charter school.

As I wrote to a high school classmate of mine recently, at best, charters are a short term solution for handful of students, but they worsen an already difficult situation and divide constituencies that should have shared interests.

Isn’t it interesting that they continue to make headway into the state?

The Romantic Myth Of The Solitary Writer

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            What’s been on my mind all week to write about is a sort of sad and sort of funny interaction I had with a high school student this past Saturday at Open House, which I’ve worked for the last three years because I really like meeting the incoming freshmen and talking to them about majoring in English.

            Despite all the talk of declining interest in the English major, we got good foot traffic at our table, and only one student who said her dad would kill her if he saw her talking to us.

            Students expressed interest in many things, but many wanted to talk about careers, the teaching profession, and creative writing.

            The young man who made such an odd impression upon me was one who wanted to talk about creative writing.  The conversation took place toward the end of the morning, when most students and their parents had cleared out and headed to find lunch.  The student approached the table slowly, and I asked him if he was interested in English.  He said yes, but almost reluctantly.  When I asked him what aspects of the field he was interested in, he said “creative writing,” but he said it even more reluctantly than before.  I handed him some information on our Creative Writing Concentration, which he accepted, but then he said to me, “You see, the masalah is, I don’t think it can be taught.”  I wasn’t surprised by this.  In fact, I know when I was much younger that I subscribed to the same romantic myth—that creative writing was something people were only able to do well by the sake of some mystical and supernatural process of divine inspiration.

            I have a student now who strongly ascribes to this belief, and I have made it my private mission this semester to provide sufficient evidence to the contrary to disabuse him of this notion.  I recently shared with him a Times article on the editor Julie Strauss-Gabel, who works closely with John Green and currently has five of the top ten Best Sellers in Adult Fiction and has had 22 Best Sellers overall.  In the article, Green talks about how he not only relies on Strauss-Gabel for editing but for guidance throughout the writing process, sometimes seeking daily composing advice.  So far, my efforts have been to no avail, but I keep trying.

            So, I said basically to the high school student that he was subscribing to a romantic myth, and that certainly creative writing could be taught.  He countered by pointing out that F. Scott Fitzgerald had never even completed college.  I countered by saying that dropping out of college was not a plan I would recommend for a successful career of any kind—with all due respect to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Bill Gates. I then pointed out, as I had also just read in the Times, how many successful writers on the Times Bestseller list hold MFAs, and cited, as an example I thought the student might be familiar with, Junot Díaz, who won the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  Unfortunately, the student had never heard of Díaz.

            Then he asked me what “big names” we had in the department.  I told him quite honestly that if he didn’t recognize Díaz he probably wasn’t going to recognize the names of any of my colleagues.  Nonetheless, I rattled off several names—Penelope Pelizzon, Ellen Litman, Gina Barreca, Lynn Bloom—none of which he recognized.  So I shifted gears and bragged about the Wallace Stevens Poetry Program and all the many “big name” poets that jadwal has brought to UConn over the years, even bringing up on my laptop the website that lists all the poets.  Sadly but not surprisingly, he did not recognize any of the poets on the list.  In fact, when I asked, he had to admit that he had never heard of Wallace Stevens.  Pressing forward with his agenda, however, the student asked for names of prominent graduates of our program.  Again, I pointed out that if he was unfamiliar with Stevens, he was likely not going to be familiar with our recent graduates, but I nonetheless mentioned Sean Forbes and Jon Andersen and Ken Cormier, knowing full well that he wouldn’t recognize any of their names.

            In the end, he walked off, unimpressed by the dearth of recognizable writers teaching in our department or emerging from our program.  And I really didn’t know what to make of the young man.  But I wish him well in whatever lonely, isolated writing endeavor he chooses to pursue.  I just hope he doesn’t drop out of college.