Updates

My former colleagues at Huntington Park High School, will find out Monday if they've been rehired. The rest will have to pack up and clear out. My heart grieves for these fine people who've been bulldozed by a system that values the appearance of sweeping reform above the hard, incremental work of actual achievement.

As for me, I am leaving for France and I'm not sure whether I'll be able to make any further posts to this blog until July 9th. I hope you'll remember to drop by.

Untitled by Apostoles Georgiou, a contemporary Greek painter. I've seen a number of his untitled paintings that depict little frozen moments before indistinct backgrounds. He thereby gives us liberty to project our own associations, which in my case, is that of waking a sleeping student. Metaphorically I can think of no more powerful image. As proof, allow me to challenge you to role play both of these figures: in what way are you the awakener? In what way the sleeper? Click on the picture for a closer look.

Fast Reshuffle

The school where I taught for nearly twenty years, Huntington Park Senior High, is being reconstituted. This means that everyone--the administrators, the teachers, the clerical, maintenance, cafeteria, and security personnel, every one of them--has been given notice. If they want their jobs back, they must reapply, and the rules state that only half of them can be rehired.

Disruption for the students will be dire, especially those preparing for college. The Los Angeles School Board has apparently not considered what happened the year following a similar reconstitution imposed upon nearby Fremont Senior High. Many of its best teachers chose not to reapply, in some cases taking their expertise, programs, even grants, to other campuses. Sixty per cent of the classes wound up being taught by substitutes and temporary volunteers.

A former colleague told me yesterday that hiring interviews will be handled by four panels, each consisting of district officials, a parent, and a student. I don't know how evaluations can be performed fairly and uniformly by four separate panels, but apparently time pressure necessitates a decentralized approach. Huntington Park's new school year begins in just six weeks.

Of course most teachers will land on their feet. The district can't actually fire them without cause, so they'll either be reshuffled to other campuses or they'll stay home and collect their full salaries.

My greater concern is for the lower paid classified workers, many of whom live in the neighborhood and walk to work. If they must transfer to remote campuses, some will have to take buses, lengthening their day and perhaps turning their kids into latch-key-students, who are, almost by definition, at risk.

I don't wish to hyperbolize, but I think it is fair to say that reconstituting is a top-down attempt to force change upon a school's culture. There can be no line of argument for replacing the man who cuts the grass, vis a vis raising student achievement, other than desperate faith in authoritarianism.

All my life, I've been suspicious of anyone who utters such phrases as crack-down, no-nonsense, zero-tolerance, and across-the-board. Ignorance of nuance, indifference to root causes, and refusal to refine priorities, is hardly a virtue. In other postings I'll continue to share my experiences and comment upon the educational challenges we face, but let me say for now that executive petulance will solve nothing.


Smiling Tom by Robert Henri, 1924. Henri, an Ashcan School luminary, painted lots of children, often smiling, and of all races and ethnicities. It's evident that he genuinely liked them. I've rarely heard school board members, educators, or government officials speak of children except in the aggregate. By the way, this painting is to be auctioned at Christies next week with an estimated price of between three and five hundred thousand dollars. Click on the picture for a closer look...and let me know if you decide to bid.

Neologism

Back in the sixties, a piece of business jargon became current and made its way into respected dictionaries: incentivize. We encounter this odious word nowadays in two national discussions: ( 1) whether cutting taxes will motivate employers to hire, and (2) whether offering bonuses to teachers will raise students' test scores. The first is one of many issues upon which economists will forever divide. The second is an argument that I hope will soon be put to bed .

A major study was released last week by Vanderbilt University and the Rand Corporation that concluded teacher bonuses don't raise children's test scores. The study was conducted in Nashville over a three year period, using randomization and control groups, and offering bonuses of up to 37.5% of salary to math teachers in grades five through eight. The only measurable improvement was among fifth graders, but it disappeared by the sixth grade.

The Washington Post observed: " The study suggests that teachers already were working so hard that the lure of extra money failed to induce them to intensify their effort or change methods of instruction."

Exactly.

The Obama administration has quadrupled funds available for "incentivizing" teachers in its Race to the Top program. Education Department officials often talk about changing the "culture of teaching," but never about the "culture of students."

Incentives work, provided they're directed at the variable that needs to be motivated.


Augustinian Nun by Piero della Francesca, 15th Century. I remember liking this artist when I first encountered his work in college because I saw, or projected, a deadpan humor in his portraiture. This painting is a good example. I bet it gives every former parochial school student a case of the willies. Click on the picture for a closer look.

Weighing Calves

It is the method of this blog to be brief and to pair thoughts with images. I have seldom been able to write about what I know best, public education, under these self imposed strictures. But I can not ignore what is happening in my former school district, Los Angeles Unified, where thousands of teachers have been laid off and the school year has been shortened.

I retired seven weeks ago, in part, to open a slot for a younger teacher. In my role as a mentor, I saw many of my charges continue to teach conscientiously while awaiting pink slips. But my frustration over their plight is exceeded by the abysmal stewardship of officials and administrators.

For my tenth grade classes, six of my last eight weeks at Huntington Park High School were consumed by preparation and administration of three sets of standardized exams. When students return to school in May, they will have two more batteries of exams with three fewer school days in which to complete them. (It is a multi-track school with an arcane schedule). Reading long-form fiction, or working on thematic units, is no longer possible.

Most standardized tests are expensive because they are printed and graded by publishers. Furthermore, most exams have no educational value because students do not get to see which questions they missed. Finally, the data generated is unreliable as many students burn out in the testing hall and stop making an effort. The responses on bubble sheets often display happy faces or graffiti tags.

I suggest that money for standardized exams would be better spent to retain young teachers, and the time wasted on taking them could instead help mitigate the damage from forced furlough days.

In brief, as teachers often say, weighing the calves doesn't make them any fatter.


Golden Calf, by Damien Hirst, the world's richest artist. The sculpture is the carcass of a calf, festooned with gold, and preserved in formaldehyde. The artist auctioned off this symbol of our contemporary worship of lucre for over twelve million dollars. He bypasses galleries in order to cut out the middleman. Click on the picture for a closer look.

Crack the Whip

Can we support public education with more than just tax dollars? PTA's and other parent groups help. So do civic minded corporations that sponsor school activities. But are there structural supports we can give to education?

For example, how about requiring grade eligibility for a young person to drive? Students whose grades slip would have their permits suspended for at least a semester. Drop outs must wait until they're seventeen or even eighteen before they can get a license. The measure is hardly unfair if it removes some of the most irresponsible and accident prone drivers from the road.

What about employers proudly favoring high school graduates in hiring and promotion? Furthermore, what if they rewarded employees who complete additional course work? This is commonly done with white collar workers, but why not blue collar as well? Don't state and federal governments have an interest in promoting a well educated workforce in this time of increased international competition? Couldn't incentives be built into their tax codes?

Why do we resist the idea of high stakes testing? Students take one standardized exam after another, but few, if any, count for grades or graduation. Rather, we aggregate the results and use them to evaluate schools and school districts, but not the students. Some other time I'll expand on the unreliability of low stakes testing, but for now let me ask what a high school diploma can possibly mean if students are not individually accountable for what they have learned?

The dilemma our schools face can not be remedied by targeting teacher unions or innovating new curricula; neither can we test our way out of it. The dilemma is a cultural one: our society lacks consensus on what education means and what a diploma is for. We say we want our kids to learn, but we settle for adolescent daycare, trusting that if kids can just reach their twenties without a pregnancy or a prison sentence, they'll find their way.

With unemployment topping ten per cent, while engineering jobs go begging, we can not afford to be so blasé. We must make public what a public education means.


Crack the Whip by Winslow Homer. Once these kids left their one room school house, they were eligible for free land under the Homestead Act. Click on the picture for a closer look.

Socrates

By rights, Socrates should be the patron saint of teachers; however, he wasn't a Christian. So the Catholics are stuck with the insufferable Gregory the Great (he despised sex) and John Baptiste de la Salle, founder of the Christian Brothers schools where there was always a supply of sturdy new rulers in case one was unaccountably shattered.

When I first thought of entering the field, I called a former teacher of mine and asked him if it had been a fulfilling profession for him. "O my lord, yes," he said, "but the secret is to teach all the time." This was to be our last conversation, as he was very ill, and his words were a great, albeit daunting, gift. He meant that a teacher must never retreat from speaking the truth.

As classes resume for me tomorrow, I will try to bear in mind a corollary to his advice: students learn all the time. The problem is that in our stifling institutions, too often students learn lessons that are wrong. As we herd them into homeroom where nothing happens other than roll call, students learn that showing up is all the school wants or expects of them. As the fire alarms blast at various times every single day, and are summarily ignored, they learn not to heed warnings or to take precautions. And as young teachers are laid off due to budget cuts, students learn that an education is of little value in the workplace.

Socrates was martyred for corrupting the youth of Athens with his gadfly questioning. He taught all the time, turning his own execution into a teachable moment. He was a philosopher and teacher for the ages, and therefore despised by the institutions of his day.

Socrates: Fresco from ancient Ephesus