Myth Busters: Teachers Do the Same Thing, Year After Year

As we said in our last post, teachers have been taking an ugly pounding lately, as state lawmakers make difficult budget decisions in the face of serious budget shortfalls.

Today, we’d like to explore a second myth about teachers that is being advanced during this national debate about the importance of education, teachers, and education spending.

Today’s Myth:

Teachers do the same thing, year after year and after the first few years of teaching, little preparation is needed.

Remember that teacher you had for junior high science – the one that had been teaching for about 25 years? Remember the way she used the same tests, the same lessons and the same worksheets as she did when your dad and your aunt had her?

Well, she probably isn’t there anymore – and if she is, she is under constant scrutiny and will soon be on her way out.

Today’s teachers do not have the luxury of teaching the same thing, year after year. Instead, they are constantly updating their teaching strategies, attending professional development sponsored by everyone from their schools to the federal government. With this professional development comes the expectation that teachers will take what they have learned and apply it in the classroom.

This means teachers are constantly implementing new strategies, familiarizing themselves with new teaching materials and adjusting to the latest technology.

Today’s teachers are expected to be highly innovative and able to adapt to near constant change.

This need for innovation and constant training and retraining is one of the biggest reasons that we should view teachers as professionals.

Teachers deserve the benefits they receive, including a stable, predictable retirement, reasonably priced health insurance and a respectable salary. They earn those in many ways, including through being lifelong learners, constantly striving to improve their skills and understanding of the field.

Myth Busters - Part One

Teachers have been taking a pounding lately, as states across the country continue to make difficult budget decisions in the face of serious financial shortfalls.

In these discussions, we see a number of myths about teachers being propagated. Over the next few days, we’d like to explore some of these myths.

Today’s Myth:

Teachers work less than eight hours a day.

At a gathering of parents recently, I was stunned to hear a parent say, “It’s not like teachers have it that hard. They get to leave by 3 every day and they have time during the day when they aren’t even TEACHING. And they have summers off. How hard can it really be?”

But when you look at the average teacher’s official work assignment, you see that they are scheduled to be at work for at least eight hours a day, usually arriving at least 30 to 45 minutes before school starts and staying at least 30 to 45 minutes after students have departed.

Most teachers do, indeed, have a planning period of at least 45 minutes to an hour. But that time is often spent communicating with parents through face-to-face meetings, phone calls, emails and other avenues. Teachers also have a tremendous amount of paperwork to handle, and that amount of paperwork is continuing to grow as the federal government gets more and more involved in public education through No Child Left Behind.

With all of these responsibilities, little time is left to do things like handle grades, plan for the next day, organize their rooms or get together needed materials, such as photocopies of assignments, readings, tests, etc.

For this reason, it is not uncommon for many teachers to get to school at 7 a.m. and then stay at school until at least 4:30 or 5 p.m. – and that is generally with little or no time to truly relax and eat lunch.

The reality is, most teachers work at least 10 hours a day, including many hours at home at night, on the weekends and yes, even during those summer months.

It is true that some cuts to education are likely inevitable during such difficult economic times.

But at the same time, we should be careful not to fall into the trap of demonizing teachers, simply so we can salve our collective consciences as those cuts are made.

Teachers work – just as hard, and probably harder than most of us. Their work is important and should never be minimalized.

Daycare Decisions

“Where does your son go to after-school care?” I asked my new mom friend, in part because I was hoping to learn about new resources in the community and partly just to make conversation.

The mom looked down, mumbling the name of a neighborhood preschool and after-school care provider.

“I know there are better places,” she said, quietly, not quite meeting my gaze. “We did our research. We know there are problems there. He could be somewhere better – more academic -- and even safer. But this was all we could afford, so it was what we had to do. We are hoping we can make a change next year, if things work out. For now, we tell him to be careful and make the best of it.”

During the school year, this mom sends her son to an after-school program for at least 15 hours a week, recognizing that it is not as safe or enriching as it should be.

In the summer and on holidays, including spring break, the high-energy boy, who has ADHD and would do best in a calm, structured, predictable environment, spends more than 40 hours a week at the center many in this suburb north of Houston view as substandard.

The difficult decisions working women and families make about childcare have been looming particularly large for Houston area families these past few weeks, since a Feb. 24 blaze at an in-home daycare center in Houston killed four children.

Officials have said in that case, the in-home daycare center owner, 22-year-old Jessica Tata, left seven children between the ages of about one and four unattended and oil cooking on the stove while she shopped at Target.

The truth is, that in daycare, like in most things, you get what you pay for.

And, as author and social justice advocate Jonathan Kozol frequently says, in America we have our “cheap children” and our “expensive children.”

The youngsters that died in the Houston daycare fire were some of America’s cheaper children – a reality some might argue led to authorities dropping the ball and making it possible for Tata to flee to Nigeria before her arrest. (She is now back in custody and in the process of being extradited to the U.S.)

Daycare – good daycare – can be wildly expensive. It is not uncommon for a family with two children in full-time daycare to spend $1,700 or more per month. If a single-parent family is paying the bill, that works out to more than $10 per hour in a 40 hour work week.

Obviously, a federal minimum wage employee making $7.25 an hour would actually be paying to work with these childcare expenses.

That leaves families, particularly women, with difficult choices.

In some cases, women and families can qualify for government-funded vouchers to help cover childcare expenses. But not all childcare providers accept those vouchers. And often, the ones that do accept the vouchers offer programs that are less enriching and, in some cases, including that of Jessica Tata’s in-home facility, far less safe.

That leaves parents like the mother who I spoke to feeling helpless – fearing that their children are not in safe care or receiving the enrichment they need to thrive, but with no way to do anything about it.

In some cases, families feel so financially strapped that they end up leaving children home alone when they shouldn’t or they bounce their children from one friend or neighbor to another, trying desperately to continue working but to avoid paying for care they simply cannot afford.

Surely in America – the richest nation in the world -- we can come up with better alternatives for all children.

The Big Challenge: Reversing Generations of "Hard Bigotry"

“Why is it necessary to increase the use of testing when we know from years of previous testing what the results will be?”

Ronald A. Wolk, founder and former editor of Education Week, asks this compelling question in his recent article on the high stakes of standards-based accountability.

Wolk reminds us that despite decades of paying lip service to the idea that all children can learn, low-income and minority children continue to “fall on the wrong side of an unyielding achievement gap.”

But more importantly, he reminds us that educators and schools did not create this gap – and that as a result, a systemic approach is needed to truly solve the problem.

Wolk writes: “To assume that these students fail because of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” as President George W. Bush suggested in making the case for the No Child Left Behind Act, is preposterous. Their failure is due to the hard bigotry that generations of these kids have suffered. And high common standards won’t rectify that. Indeed, they divert attention away from the real problem by creating the illusion that things will improve if students and teachers are held to even higher standards.”

What might this systemic approach to closing the gap look like?

Wolk maintains that smaller schools, where students and teachers have close relationships, would be a good start.

He also suggests that universal preschool is an important tool in closing the achievement gap. He maintains students should be evaluated primarily on portfolios and that traditional classroom instruction needs to be replaced with an environment where students are more in control of their own educations.

Teachers, he argues, could serve primarily as “advisers who guide students in educating themselves.”

Wolk’s suggestions, of course, are controversial in a number of ways.

But his point that drastic changes need to be made – in education and in society as a whole – should not be ignored.

How would you propose addressing the “hard bigotry” that some of our students and families have endured for generations? How do we close the achievement gap? What works? What doesn’t? Where do we go from here?

No Child Left Behind Update

We are encouraged to see that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is continuing to argue that No Child Left Behind needs to be changed to recognize and reward schools and districts that show improvement based on progress and growth.

This proposed change could arguably be good news for two groups of students – those who are well below grade level and those who enter grade level well ahead of their peers.

Under the current system, schools and teachers do not typically receive any statistical credit for moving those students who are well below or well above grade level forward.

That means in schools that are at risk of being sanctioned because of their lack of success in reaching Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals, there is inevitably a temptation to ignore the needs of these two groups of students, focusing instead primarily on students who are just below grade level and therefore most likely to hit performance targets on standardized tests.

The premise of No Child Left Behind, as the name clearly states, is that all students should be moving forward academically. And this forward movement can only come when the formula being used to measure schools recognizes all growth – including academic growth seen among our lowest and highest performing schools.

Duncan says that he would like to see the law changed before the 2011-12 school year, so that schools can be more fairly assessed and their needs supported. We hope this is a proposal that can move forward quickly.

What do you think?

Reflections on the National Youth at Risk Conference

We had the opportunity to debut our new book, co-written with Keith L. Brown, at the 22^nd Annual National Youth at Risk conference last week.

We were thrilled to share some of the concepts of Motivation, Education and Transformation: The Change Agent’s Guide to Reaching Our Youth and Lifting Them Higher during a number of small and large-group discussions, including a session featuring Mr. Brown.

Keith, as always, was masterful in his presentation, which analyzed how perception – the we view the world – is basically our reality. Keith went on to challenge some of our perceptions, including how we view and treat minority and low-income students and the impact our perception has on our professional practice.

Some of the other highlights of our time at the conference – which is definitely our favorite of the year because of its tendency to draw like-minded people -- included:

• Chatting with people who stopped by our table to ask us questions about the book, as well as the work that we are currently doing at the Institute;
• Meeting with several clients about future projects;
• Shooting footage for a video trailer discussing our book;
• Attending a social gathering featuring MESHELLE: The Indie-Mom of comedy, along with a number of other conference goers who jumped in and shared their spoken word poetry and other talents;
• Hearing about the work done by leaders of a number of like-minded organizations, as well as information on the latest educational research – all from the perspective of how to most effectively serve at-risk youth;
• Meeting with teachers and sharing information on our upcoming Teacher Project Retreat, which will be held in Southern California July 8-11.

We left the conference recharged and eager to continue moving the work of the Institute forward through our blog, book and grant writing, our consulting work with non-profit organizations and schools and through some other projects we plan to announce in the coming months.

Thank you to all of the passionate, like-minded people we met at the conference. You encouraged us in our work and served as a poignant reminder that this work do, collectively, with and for youth matters tremendously.

Wanted: Less Political Shorthand, More Honest Dialogue

What’s in a word?

When the topic is education and the word is “reform” the answer is “a great deal.”

This article, written by Education Week reporter Sean Cavanagh, does a good job of explaining how the word reform is a“powerful shorthand” used to frame education debate.

As Cavanagh and others have pointed out, those who position themselves as “reformers” typically stand in opposition to what they consider to be the “status quo.” Their political discourse is filled with arguments about the importance of challenging the “education establishment” or bureaucracy.

Those with a focus on reform often talk, as well, about the importance of putting the needs of students first, giving less focus to the concerns of adults within the educational system.

Many who call themselves reformers support charter schools, seek to challenge the control of teachers’ unions, and advocate for school accountability and merit pay for teachers.

Members of both parties, including Republican governors and President Barack Obama, have used the word reform in speeches and press conferences as part of an effort to explain their educational policies. They use the word, in part, because it packs a punch, and because it also seems to be code for a specific set of policies.

But there may be some danger in using the word “reform” or “reformer” to frame educational debates in this country. The word, it seems, has the potential to divide people and to force them to revert to pure partisan thinking, instead of considering educational issues with an open, reflective mind.

Former Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, a former top U.S. Department of Education official and the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, explains this danger well:

"That kind of labeling exercise hardens positions and makes people defensive," Mr. Whitehurst said. "We need to be able to consider anything out there, including what is considered 'the status quo.' "

This is particularly true for those of us who support key tenets of educational and social justice, including issues of equity and equality within public education.

Partisan politics has kept people from thinking critically about education and possible policy changes for far too long. We do not need more partisan debate, peppered with code words like “reform” that divide us into separate camps before we even fully realize it.

What we do need, instead, is honest, open debate, that considers the results of research, as well as the experiences of those people who are most familiar with the system and how it works from day to day.

Do Colleges Produce Informed and Engaged Citizens?

There was a time when American colleges and universities placed a great deal of emphasis on training leaders to shape communities and to influence the political landscape.

But a recent study seems to show that students who graduate from college are no more likely than their peers to be actively engaged in the political process, beyond simply voting.

The findings are found in the Enlightened Citizenship: How Civic Knowledge Trumps a College Degree in Promoting Active Civic Engagement. The study is part of the fifth annual National Civic Literacy Report conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization.

The question at the heart of the study is: Do colleges produce informed and engaged citizens?

According to the findings of the study, attending college does not make individuals more likely to donate money to a political campaign, strive to influence others about how to vote, attend political meetings, work on political campaigns, contact elected officials, sign petitions or write letters to the editor.

Some factors that do seem to positively influence civic engagement include being a teacher or college professor, having a higher income level, frequently attending religious services and watching TV news.

One negative influence on political engagement? Playing video games frequently.

Leaders with an educational and social justice orientation have to question what these findings mean. Why are college graduates not more likely to get involved in politics? Is it the responsibility of college level educators to change that focus?

Is it possible that colleges – and the students who attend them – have become so focused on the economic benefits of attending college that they have ceased to emphasize the importance of civic leadership?

Could it be, also, that attending college makes people overly cynical and therefore less likely to believe that their involvement matters? Also, if college graduates are opting out of political involvement, what does that mean for leadership? Who is going to fill the gap left when college graduates opt out of civic engagement?

And finally, how can we, as leaders for educational and social justice, encourage the young people and college graduates in our lives to get involved? How do we model that involvement for them?