"Entrenched Job Security"

A friend of mine recently wrote:

"For other contexts, staying in the classroom may the best option- teaching has lots of perks that are often underappreciated- relative stability when compared to other job options based on education/experience, shorter work year, decent benefits, and again- entrenched job security despite what many actually perceive...."

"Entrenched job security" is a necessary feature of the sort of deferred compensation schemes historically employed in civil service.  What "entrenched job security" really means is robust due process, i.e. one can only be fired for just cause related to actual performance, not because you are the wrong race, you didn't give the school board chair's daughter an A, a younger teacher would be cheaper, or the superintendent's niece needs a job.  I am willing to talk about ways that due process has become too robust, but I strongly believe that due process and seniority protections are absolutely necessary corollaries of the single salary schedule.

As I've written before, we have a system that provides civil servants with the greatest rewards in terms of top level salaries and dignified pensions in exchange for longevity.  There's a whole raft of assumptions built into this system, but in the final analysis, it is what it is.  Unless you have a reasonable expectation that you can make it to retirement in your chosen profession, a single salary schedule is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Another historical thing to remember is that government employees and their unions have tended to opt for pensions and benefits at the expense of salaries.  If these seem generous, it is because we have paid for them with cold hard cash.

In the current environment it would be a lot safer to take the cash up front.  We are governed by a kleptocracy that is seeking to steal the deferred compensation not only of teachers, but of all manner of government workers.  Our due process rights, pensions and benefits (thanks to our unions - not just NEA and AFT but all public sector unions) are a slap in the face to private industry, and create pressure for decent treatment for all workers.  Very inconvenient for the 1%....

To be clear, I am not a fan of the single salary schedule, and it's accompanying arrangements. I would prefer to explore different compensation methods.  The political/economic problem is that these methods would accelerate payment of wages and benefits from the future to the present.  Let's face it - it's far cheaper to be unfair to people, to get rid of expensive employees, and to steal their deferred compensation, than it would be to create rational strategic compensation plans that pay people today for the work they do today.

The recent release of test data in NYC is part of an ongoing effort to flush the system of mid-end career educators.  People are not excrement; they should never be flushed.  We must be offended when people are treated this way, not because we are fellow teachers, but because we are fellow human beings.  Even if we were not teachers, I would claim we would have a moral obligation to be offended by what is at best basic unfairness and at worst criminal contempt for human beings.

Teacher compensation is not bunch of "perks" and rights that other people do not have.  That plays right into the so-called "reform" narrative playing out in Indiana, Wisconsin, NYC, etc.  Rather, we have earned these things.  Want to talk about other ways of doing business Mr. Politician?  I'm all ears.  But we're not going to fund it through wholesale theft.  Crime is un-American - at least in the America I aspire to.

Focus On the Learning!

I really appreciate the phrase “student learning.”  Unlike “student achievement” or “student outcomes” it has not yet become a euphemism for bubble test scores.  I appreciate student learning because it enables me to imagine a range of indicators for success in the classroom: true multiple measures.

What can student learning look like?  When you leave my classroom after music class, I hope there is something you can do, think or remember, something that you couldn’t before you walked in.  Perhaps you can perform a song, or you can play a simple rhythmically independent accompaniment; perhaps you made a connection to prior knowledge, or have deepened your understanding of some concept, such as tempo or dynamics, and demonstrated that deepening by using that concept to create a short musical piece.   Perhaps you can finger a new note, or have just acquired some fluency between fingerings that leaves you feeling successful.   In any event, my aspiration as a teacher is that you leave my classroom having grown in some small way as a creative person, as a human being.

I acquired this focus on student learning by going through the National Board Certification process.  This demanding process requires around 300 hours of work at minimum.  You produce a video portfolio and take a tough six part exam on your knowledge of content and pedagogy.  It was in the portfolio process that my brain got reprogrammed to focus on student learning.  I had a candidate support provider who helped me go over my portfolio with a fine tooth comb.  At each stage Dan would ask, “What does that have to do with student learning?”  Eventually it became my mantra.  It has an annoying tendency to slip from my mouth during faculty meetings.  Even if it doesn’t slip out, it certainly echoes around the inside of my brain.

As a union activist, I experience a similar echo effect inside my head as we operate the levers of union influence: negotiations, grievances and so forth.  Our recent foray into Interest Based Bargaining is hobbled by the fact that we are not yet focused on student learning.  Unlike districts that truly achieve Labor Management Collaboration, our contract talks still focus on adult issues, and not student learning.  In the most progressive districts, the adults strive to make the collective bargaining agreement into an education improvement plan.  In my district we have yet to cross that threshold.

In this sort of context, things like behavior and climate become ends in themselves.  We do not want good behavior in our classrooms or great school climate because it’s nice to be nice to each other; we want it because behavior and climate are necessary preconditions to great student learning.  We do not want great working conditions and competitive pay because teachers “deserve it;” again, we need these things to the extent that they promote conditions of maximum growth for students by creating supports for the best teaching and by removing distractions.  Without that focus on the learning as the most vital institutional goal, the school drifts, and climate and behavior, working conditions and pay, deteriorate anyway.

Why is a laser-like focus on student learning beneficial to children?  It is the best way that educators can express that they care for the students.  If we expect that our classrooms will be incubators of intellectual, artistic and ethical growth, this indicates that we want the students reach their potential.  We all arrive at school with baggage.  To focus on behavior or pay as an end is to get mired in the baggage – all the reasons that we can’t treat each other well.  To put the learning at the center of the institution is to put the student at the center in a truly profound way.

How does this express itself in actual classroom practice?  In the planning process the teacher keeps standards and curriculum in mind.  Not that binder on the shelf, but living curriculum which has been internalized.  I strive to make the constant connection between the activities I select, and the things that are appropriate for a particular cohort of students to master.  For example, I might look at a group of sixth graders and see that they need some conscious experience of 6/8 time, so I plan a series of lessons culminating in an opportunity for them to improvise and/or compose a piece of music in 6/8 time.  I love using a creative act for assessment – to me, it demonstrates true understanding.

Without a focus on standards and curriculum, the focus becomes the activities themselves, and the question becomes not what the students will learn, but what the teacher will do to entertain in order to get through the day.  An activity centered classroom is a teacher centered classroom.

It may seem ironic that the direction of institutional attention to student learning, seemingly external to the self, can have such a salutary effect.  To lose that focus, however, is to lose the soul of the school, and cripple us in the muck of the psychic baggage we carry.  To lift one’s eyes, to see that we can be better than we are, is to express faith in ourselves and in our students.  From time to time we may fail, but it is in the relentless movement towards growth that the members of a school community best express their humanity.  This is why we need to focus on the learning.

How Do You Spell Respect?

Yes, I know this book was published in 2009.  And yes, I know that it's 2012.  Perhaps this book was ahead of it's time and it's moment is now.

Against a policy backdrop of reductionist accountability run amok, The Mindful Teacher by Elizabeth MacDonald and Dennis Shirley quietly restores a measure of sanity and balance.  This book could not have arrived at a better time for educators feeling under siege.

The Mindful Teacher displays profound respect for the teaching profession by throwing into high relief the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of teaching.  It is a demanding volume that honors the reader by showing confidence in the intellectual capabilities of educators, drawing on the best of the philosophical traditions of both east and west.  The book is more than a philosophical tome, however.  It constantly grounds this elevated discourse in concrete examples of improved teaching practice and better student learning, through six moving case studies of urban teachers, displaying teaching as a profession in the finest sense. 

MacDonald is a teacher in the Boston Public Schools; Shirley is a respected researcher and academic.  Together they pioneered the Mindful Teaching seminars, really a professional learning community (PLC) which is a product of an exemplary school/university partnership.  Dennis Shirley is a rare academic who is humble enough to see the correct role for academics in the education enterprise.  He sought ways to respectfully support educators.  Rather than pushing an agenda on a group of hard pressed urban teachers, he supported a process enabling them organically discover the questions they themselves needed to explore.

The seminars took place over a four year period and yielded ten clusters of questions specific to participants, but universal in character, and an “eightfold structure” which could be adapted to other PLCs with different circumstances.  An example of a question I found particularly telling: “What does it mean to be a teacher leader? How can I help build support networks for teachers in a way that leads to my renewal rather than burnout?”

An essential part of the eightfold structure of the seminars is the role of meditation in creating a space in which mindfulness can grow.  The concept of mindfulness emerges from the Buddhist tradition, and the concept of mindful teaching is advocated in the book as a means of mitigating alienated teaching, a concept borrowed from Marx.  The authors handled the practice of meditation in their seminars in a way that made it accessible and helpful to people from a variety of spiritual traditions.

The Mindful Teacher concludes with an exploration of dialectical tensions in the profession of teaching.  The Seven Synergies are individually necessary and jointly conditions for mindful practice, including concepts such as a caring disposition, professional expertise and collective responsibility.  The Triple Tensions acknowledge the existence of polarities in teaching practice: contemplation and action, ethics and power, the individual and collective.  The faith the authors show in us, that we can hold these tensions in our minds in what Estelle Jorgensen calls a “both/and” synthesis, demonstrates a profound respect for educators as intellectual and spiritual actors.

I was a bit troubled near the end of the book when the authors referred to teaching as a vocation.  As a labor activist, I fight for professional compensation and working conditions, and worry that teaching as a vocation leads us down the path to martyrdom.  But then I realized what The Mindful Teacher had taught me: profession and vocation are just one more tension that can be creatively embraced.  I felt both moved and honored.

One Mouth and Two Ears…

Sharla Steever is a fourth grade teacher from Hill City SD.  She is a National Board Certified Teacher, and a Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellow for the United States Department of Education (I was a TAF in 2010-2011.)  Sharla is also a dear friend, with a powerful commitment to the Native American community.  Her guest blog here fits with the social justice orientation of Education Worker.

Please view the video Tokata: Moving Forward in Indian Education

The last few months I have spent a great deal of time travelling around the rural beauty of the state of SD to places even I, who have spent my entire life here, had never seen. I had the honor of holding a variety of teacher round tables and personal interviews with the educational leaders of our Native American Reservation schools and videoed every bit of it.

My goal? To bring the voices of this unique group of people, with their unique educational issues to ED in their own words.

These people are from places in our own backyard that are dealing with levels of poverty, alcoholism, and unemployment far exceeding national averages, but they are also some of the most self-determined, creative, beautiful people I have ever met in my life.

I began this project with a desire and hope to educate myself and others about issues in Native American education on our reservations. What I didn’t expect was the gift it would become to me. As I sat across from each person in this video and so many more, I was given the gift of story – some sad, some inspiring, some anger-filled, some so beautiful they moved me to tears. Through all of them I discovered something very important. If we truly want to impact change, we must first start by listening…not only to the words that are shared, but to the heart behind the words.

I learned a great deal about the issues facing our educators and students in these areas, but more than that I learned that there are amazing people doing incredible work day after day and year after year in areas of poverty that are far beyond most of our imaginations. If we want to help improve the situations these schools are facing, we must begin by working to understand them. How do we do that? We do it by listening to their stories. My hope is that this video provides a glimpse into these incredible stories and helps to inform those in positions to create change.

I hope you will enjoy and share, “Tokata: Moving Forward in Indian Education.”

More on Vermont Teachers Negotiations

I appeared on CCTV on October 28 with Avery Book and local VT-NEA leader Amy Lester, who is vice president of the Vermont Workers Center.  Just discovered it was online.  I was incorrectly identified as an executive board member - in fact I am a member of the VTNEA board of directors.  This broadcast speaks to the reasons that we need to reform teacher negotiations, and to the reality that we need to act in solidarity with others on matters of social justice.

Please view the video.  The teacher negotiations issues start at around minute 10 for those of you in a hurry.  The program happened over three months ago, but all the issues are still valid.

Relate this back to Reforming Vermont Teacher Negotiations.

Vermont and NCLB Waivers: Student Learning or Power Politics?

In order to understand the Vermont NCLB waiver application you have to understand the waiver process itself.  An op ed in the Times Argus recently critiqued certain features of the state’s application, including emphasis on high stakes testing, and failure to address poverty as a factor in low student achievement, but the waiver process is a Federal policy of the United States Department of Education.

To understand waivers you also have to take into account the power dynamics in Washington.  There is an ongoing effort by Congressional Republicans to block virtually every Obama administration initiative.  The Republicans strive to deny the administration a signature domestic policy achievement during an election year, even though an Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization has been the first term hallmark of virtually every administration since LBJ.  The last re-authorization happened in 2001 during the Bush administration.  We know this iteration as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

I believe the Obama administration put ESEA on the back burner for a variety of valid reasons.  There was the possibility of bipartisanship.  They expended political capital on fixing the economy, on wars, on health insurance reform, and embedded a major education policy initiative in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – Race to the Top (RTT).  RTT was a highly successful competitive grant program which leveraged states to make wholesale education policy changes at a very modest cost – just four billion dollars. 

Against the background of severe revenue problems in almost every state, RTT moved policy in significant ways even in states that did not receive grants.  For example, Vermont’s State Board of Education adopted Common Core Standards along with 45 other states and joined the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to develop a new generation of tests for Common Core.  But we did not even apply for RTT.  The results of RTT were well nigh astonishing.  Seldom has so much change been achieved for so little federal money.

NCLB waivers are a continuation of RTT.  There is enough similarity between the requirements of the two programs to make this assertion.  For example, the adoption of College and Career Ready Standards (Common Core meets this requirement) and the adoption of new teacher accountability systems that take into account test scores in some way are salient features of both programs.  So Vermont’s waiver application makes perfect sense – these are requirements for a waiver.  If you don’t meet the requirements, you don’t get a waiver.

The difference between the programs is rather than dangling cash in front of revenue starved states like RTT, the waiver program dangles regulatory relief from the NCLB ticking time bomb of 100% student proficiency on tests by 2014, a statistical impossibility that will label virtually every school as failing and subject them to a draconian set of restructuring requirements, including firing their teachers and their administrators.

In essence, the Obama/Duncan administration is doing a political end run around a recalcitrant and uncooperative Congress.  In my view, the whole thing has a lot more to do with Washington power politics and whole lot less to do with student learning.  If states adopt the basic tenets of the “Blueprint”, the Obama/Duncan plan for ESEA reauthorization, wholesale via RTT and waivers, then the ESEA becomes moot, and the administration has won the political battle for education reform without firing a shot. An ESEA reauthorization, if it occurs, will merely be codification of changes led at the state level.   It is an audacious political strategy.

Why is student learning jeopardized in this scenario?  Waivers assume that all states have a similar capacity to assimilate these policies.  I found it interesting that states like Massachusetts and Colorado already have waivers in hand.  The former was a round 2 RTT state that has a huge jumpstart on the work.  The latter is a state noted for pioneering many of the innovations that are becoming embedded in Federal education policy.  In Vermont we are starting from scratch.  Ten years of slash and burn budgeting during the Douglas administration have reduced our DOE to a shell of its former self, a compliance agency for Federal formula grants.  Whatever little capacity to respond to national policy is left is embedded in outside organizations like VT-NEA.

We are left asking permission.  Instead of treating the waiver process as an opportunity to rethink systems, we treat the waiver application like a bunch of hoops to jump through - hardly a way to make effective policy.  And student learning is left out of the equation.

The great danger here is that our legislature will panic and do something nonsensical, like New York or Tennessee did around teacher evaluation.  Our legislature has a history of doing that sort of thing at the eleventh hour – things like the “two vote mandate.”  I hope instead that our leaders think about how to bring together people with interest and expertise in great education policy to rebuild Vermont’s capacity so that we can not only respond effectively to the national policy context, but learn to lead it.

Navigate Towards Your Best Hopes

The following post is from an interview with Brad Jupp by James Liou, a 2008 Teaching Ambassador Fellow from Boston.  James’ excellent blog The Teaching Pulse gives unofficial voice to the aspirations of members of the Boston Teachers Union.  I selected excerpts which follow the broad themes of Education Worker, and urge readers to check out the original interview, which is much longer - a rich and profound essay on the contemporary education policy scene.

Brad Jupp is Senior Program Advisor for Teacher Quality Initiatives in the U.S. Department of Education.  He has the ear of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and has considerable, if not central, influence on any federal policies that relate to teacher quality and effectiveness.

As a former middle school English teacher and union activist in the Denver public schools, he is most known for his role in the development of Denver’s ProComp teacher compensation system—one which ties teacher incentives to both school and student performance and growth.

JL: How has being an accomplished unionist affected how you do your work now? 

BJ: I think what I bring from my background as a union leader, first and foremost, is the sentiment that working people want first and foremost, good, fruitful jobs; not the political struggle that they often find themselves in.  And then second, I bring a really three-dimensional understanding of the psychology that [often] occurs in the relationship between unions and school districts, [and between] unions and state legislatures… Frankly, I’ve been on all sides of the table.  And I have an insight into what’s in people’s heads on all sides of the table at this point.  And that’s because [like I mentioned earlier], I pay attention to [connecting evidence to shifts in understanding with] whomever I’m working.  Over the years, [I’ve gathered] an experience base in thinking like a leader of a local, of thinking like a leader of a state affiliate, or thinking like a superintendent or thinking like a governor’s education policy aide.

So the union experience is double.  I understand the aspirations of the people that unions represent and I also understand the motivations and sentiments of people who represent large numbers of teachers.

JL: Can you think of some practical ways and avenues that you might suggest for teachers to understand, influence and implement policies….in our school districts at the local level?  How do we make policy less abstract and how do we understand it, influence it and implement it?

BJ: Be a building rep for your union, be on your building faculty senate or building committee, partner with people in the central office so that you are a practitioner [figuring out] the difficult problems of execution with administrators, because just like teachers don’t want reform to be done to them, they want it to be done with them, administrators want policy implementation to be done with them, not policy implementation arguments done to them.  And we should assume that no one wants to be part of that kind of loud argument.

And don’t hesitate to use those opportunities to be building reps and union leaders and district leaders as vehicles for career advancement.  The ambitions of teachers to be successful and efficacious are the things that actually animate the best things about their career.  And we should always be encouraging teachers to act on those aspirations.

JL: What can we do, as teachers and as members of our teachers union, to make this happen more often in general? 

BJ: In a sentence, navigate towards your best hopes and away from your worst fears.

Too much of the adversarial discourse in public education is discourse buttressed by worst fears.  ‘What if the worst principal in the world were in charge of that school?’  We need a rule to protect all teachers against the possibility of the worst principal in the world.

It’s the wrong way to be organized.  [We] should be organizing instead on ‘how do we get the best principal in the world in as many schools as we’ve got?  That means that we’re going to need really great incentive packages for principals, and by golly they might need to be paid more than teachers and as maybe as a teacher union leader, I need to advocate that we accelerate the pay for high school principals so that the working conditions in my high schools get better.

It’s a simple example, but if you begin to think like that, then you can begin to proliferate other examples.

JL: So is it up to the individual teachers in our buildings as building reps, as partners with district officials, to talk and frame the conversation in that way?  Because sometimes a lot of the rhetoric out there is very negative, as you’re probably already aware….how do we break through that?

BJ: We didn’t say, when we negotiated ProComp, ‘let’s embrace the arbitrary and capricious.’  We said instead, ‘let’s embrace the reasonable, the consistent, the credible…’ and then we said, ‘let’s make sure we’re protecting against the arbitrary and capricious by embracing [the] reasonable and consistent and credible.’  We never said anything about getting it all right.  We always said though, we want to keep our antennae up and avoid treating people badly.  And what’s more, we made a commitment to use data as a way to inform our future decisions so that we were not being arbitrary and capricious.

Again, check out the original interview!