The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  The Education Trust distributed massive data books ranking states on many indicators of educational quality, to spread the word to the media that public schools were in dire trouble: In many districts half of all black and Latino kids were dropping out of high school, and throughout the nation the achievement gap between black and white children was growing. What was the Education Trust’s theory as to why? In later years Haycock would talk more explicitly about removing bad tenured teachers from the classroom. But in the 1990s her focus was on many of the factors that accountability hawks today downplay: inequalities in funding, pre-service teacher qualifications (like scores on certification exams), and years of teaching experience. In 1990 the average middle-class, predominantly white school spent nearly $1,400 more per pupil than the typical low-income school. In New York City’s high-poverty public schools at the time, a third of all teachers had failed their licensing exam at least once, compared to one in twenty teachers in the rest of the state. Eighty-six percent of science teachers in majority-white schools were certified to teach science, compared to 54 percent in majority-minority schools. Poor children were twice as likely “to serve as training fodder for inexperienced teachers,” the Education Trust reported. Another issue was the teachers unions’ treasured class-size laws, which in states like California and Florida led to a burst in the hiring of underqualified teachers, without lowering class sizes to the very low number—sixteen students—that research showed actually benefits young children.

  Haycock, who is white, often painted a grim picture of incompetent urban teachers with woefully low expectations for students, such as one who told eleventh graders to “color a poster” about To Kill a Mockingbird instead of writing an essay. In 1992 she characterized teacher’s assistants paid through Title 1, the Great Society program, as “semiliterate aides who repeatedly mispronounce words,” thus miseducating poor students of color.

  Haycock warned fellow liberals that if they did not begin holding teachers and schools accountable, the public education system would be decimated by demands for private school vouchers. “The polls among black folk around vouchers versus public education are an indication that you cannot continue screwing a whole bunch of people and have them not catch you at it and decide that the game is so rigged that they may not continue to play,” she said in 1998. She was equally harsh on the legacy of the community control movement, the last major left-of-center effort to insist on better teachers for poor children’s schools. “Twenty or 30 years ago, people really did believe that black or Hispanic kids needed something different—voodoo education, multicultural, whatever. What I think is so clear now is that what they need is the same thing white kids need, the same thing suburban kids need. It’s high-quality education with high expectations from teachers who know their stuff. There’s no mystery about this and there’s no reason we can’t supply it to all our kids.”

  Haycock often cited Texas as a state that was making positive strides. After A Nation at Risk, Texas created a statewide accountability system in which schools that failed to raise test scores could be denied funding. Sure enough, test scores rose, improvement heralded as the “Texas Miracle.” When George W. Bush spoke during his presidential campaign about using a similar approach to allocate Title I funding nationwide, Haycock was enthusiastic, telling reporter Joan Walsh of Salon in 1999 that the Clinton White House and Democrats in general had become too timid on school reform, scared to focus on the needs of poor children over middle-class children. “Bush’s message on education gives me more hope that something might happen for poor kids than what I’m hearing elsewhere,” Haycock said.

  When Bush entered the White House after a divisive election, he knew bipartisan support would be key to passing a school accountability bill—and that the Education Trust could help provide a progressive imprimatur. His administration riffed off the slogan of the Children’s Defense Fund, Haycock’s old employer, in naming its signature education proposal: No Child Left Behind. Bush introduced the law in 2001 with the beautiful promise of freeing poor nonwhite children from “the soft bigotry of low expectations”—the problem Kati Haycock had been talking about for over a decade. In a fit of irrational optimism, Congress declared that by 2014, 100 percent of American children—including poor children and those who were not native English speakers—would be “proficient” in reading and math, as measured by new state standardized tests to be given every year in grades 3 through 8, and at least once in high school.

  No Child Left Behind’s sanctions were focused not on individual teachers, but on schools. Those that did not bring all students up to proficiency would be publicly declared failing, and could lose Title I funding or get taken over by their states. Based in part on the Education Trust’s recommendation that more teachers of poor children should have majors in the subjects they taught, the law also told states that all teachers, including those in low-income schools, must be “highly qualified” and certified. Crucially, states could choose their own standards and tests for kids and decide what constituted passing them, as well as what rendered a teacher highly qualified and certified.

  The political scientists David Cohen and Susan Moffitt argue that most federal attempts to improve local schools fail because in our constitutionally decentralized education system there are few policy “bridging instruments”—like high-quality tests or national school inspectors—to provide states and districts with the expertise they would need to fulfill federal mandates. That was certainly the case with No Child Left Behind. State education departments had neither the will nor the way to take over the management of hundreds of underperforming schools. As a result, many states followed the letter but not the spirit of the law and made their new tests absurdly easy for kids to pass. In Texas a student who scored 13 percent was declared proficient. In 2009 Alabama reported that 86 percent of its fourth graders were proficient in reading, even though according to the gold standard National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 28 percent of Alabama children were proficient readers. While some states, like Massachusetts, chose on their own to adopt rigorous academic standards and high-quality tests, the top-down shaming and threats associated with NCLB, combined with lax federal oversight, discouraged states from reaching for rigorous academic goals. Parents whose children were far behind international norms for grade-level performance were told their kids were proficient. And the law did next to nothing to change the distribution of effective teachers. Perhaps the most lasting outcome of the “highly qualified teacher” provision was that Teach for America, in an early flexing of its political muscle, successfully lobbied for a loophole that defined uncertified alternative-route teachers as high-quality, as long as they were enrolled in a program that provided professional development.

  In the years after NCLB became law, more schools adopted scripted or so-called teacher proof curricula, like Success for All, which standardize lesson plans and materials across all the classrooms in a school and provide prescriptive day-to-day, even minute-to-minute schedules for teachers to follow. But most teachers noticed NCLB primarily through its annual testing mandate, the first of its kind in American history, which required that all fifty states adopt testing schemes for grades three through eight. In elementary and middle school classrooms, test questions sometimes became the de facto curriculum, especially in the low-income schools that were under the most pressure to raise scores and had the least rigorous curricula to begin with. The education journalist Linda Perlstein described this phenomenon in Tested, her book about a third-grade teacher working diligently to bring her low-income students up to “proficiency” on the Maryland State Assessment. The teacher knew from past exams that students would likely be asked to identify the “features of a poem,” such as rhyme, stanzas, and rhythm. On more than thirty occasions the students copied some variation of the following from an overhead projector: “I know this is a poem because it has stanzas and rhyme. I know the text has stanzas and not paragraphs because they didn’t indent.…” The clas
s wrote actual poems three times—one haiku and two acrostics—and did almost no lessons from the science curriculum because science tests were not yet required by NCLB.

  Research confirmed Perlstein’s anecdotal evidence that the curriculum had narrowed. A survey of administrators found that 65 percent of all districts, and 75 percent of those with at least one school in danger of “failing,” increased instructional time for reading and math while decreasing time for social studies, science, art, music, physical education, and even recess. There were signs of other perverse incentives, too: Schools transferred some of their best teachers out of the earliest grades, kindergarten through second, and into the tested grades, third through eighth, despite evidence that good instruction in those early years has the most profound impact on children’s long-term reading ability. Teachers showered attention on so-called “bubble kids,” those right beneath the proficiency threshold, while ignoring the needs of high-ability students who would pass the tests no matter what, or low-ability ones who had little chance of rising to the proficiency bar. And there was cheating. In Florida, schools were more likely to suspend struggling students in advance of test days so they wouldn’t bring down school averages. In 2003 it turned out that the “Texas Miracle” of higher standards and swiftly rising test scores for minority children had been a sham: Schools fudged dropout rates and gave struggling students special education designations just so that their test scores would not affect accountability ratings. Other students were told to stay home on test days.

  By 2005 the NEA’s national survey of teachers showed that 60 percent identified “testing demands/teaching to the test” as the single biggest hindrance to public education. In a 2009 valedictory speech reflecting on his education legacy, President Bush addressed NCLB’s anti-testing critics. “The key to measuring is to test,” he said. “And by the way, I’ve heard every excuse in the book why we should not test: Oh, there’s too many tests; you teach the test; testing is intrusive; testing is not the role of government. How can you possibly determine whether a child can read at grade level if you don’t test? And for those who claim we’re teaching the test, uh-uh. We’re teaching a child to read so he or she can pass the test. Testing is important to solve problems. You can’t solve them unless you diagnose the problem in the first place.”

  Bush had not acknowledged the law’s true shortcoming: that it tied high stakes to low-quality academic standards. That said, the greatest legacy of No Child Left Behind was making the problem of the achievement gap visible on a national scale for the first time. The law required that states collect comprehensive achievement data and break down the results by race, class, English-language status, and disability status. Weaknesses among certain groups of students could no longer be masked by a school’s overall good test scores.

  Four decades of presidential leadership on education had raised the public’s expectations about what schools could do to close inequality gaps, and had finally resulted in a national treasure trove of student achievement data. Policy ideas like desegregation, parent leadership, and the multicultural curriculum were out. Standardized testing was in. Meanwhile, outside Washington a network of renegade education researchers was beginning to use student test scores in a whole new way—to measure the success not only of schools, but also of individual teachers.

  * * *

  *1 The National Teacher Exam, published by ETS, was the same test southern states used post-Brown to effectively pay black teachers less or deny them credentials entirely.

  *2 The spirit of the data wall continues with President Obama’s Race to the Top program, in which states compete to enact school reform agendas built according to the administration’s specifications. For teachers, this now means evaluation and pay tied to student test scores and other measures of academic achievement.

  *3 Nine years later, Wendy Kopp would cite “Why Teachers Can’t Teach” in her Princeton senior thesis, laying out a plan for the organization that would become Teach for America.

  *4 In July 2013 Teach for America invited me to its alumni conference to moderate a panel on school integration. By then, Kopp had stepped down as CEO.

  • Chapter Nine •

  “Big, Measurable Goals”

  A DATA-DRIVEN VISION FOR MILLENNIAL TEACHING

  Though she would later write that she felt like an outsider at Princeton—she never joined one of the college’s storied eating clubs—Wendy Kopp was well known on campus. A petite blonde from Texas with a Princess Diana haircut, she was the publisher and editor in chief of Business Today, a nationally distributed magazine for college students, founded in 1968 by Steve Forbes and two other Princeton undergrads. Each year Business Today ran a national essay competition for college students interested in corporate careers. The winners attended a conference in New York, where they networked with executives. In an early example of her fund-raising prowess, Kopp grew the publication’s annual budget from $300,000 to $1.4 million. Her secret was asking the CEOs she interviewed for articles to buy ads in the magazine, instead of having her salespeople get in touch later with lower-level staff. Going straight to the top worked.

  During her senior year Kopp joined her classmates in applying for jobs on Wall Street and with consulting firms. Then at Business Today’s fall 1988 conference she attended a session on the national teacher shortage. As Kopp and the other conference-goers learned about the crisis in teaching—12 percent of first-year teachers across the country were uncertified, clustered in urban and rural areas—they started to discuss whether they should teach. Most said they’d be open to the idea, as long as they didn’t have to major in education. (Princeton had a teacher certification program, but Kopp hadn’t heard much about it.) Though their cohort of college students had been parodied as the Me Generation, motivated by money above all else, they were also enthusiastic about community service. Kopp called it “the new idealism,” a “yuppie volunteering spirit” that inspired even New York City bankers to staff soup kitchens. But what if elite young college graduates could be convinced to do more—to teach in low-income public schools, even for a short period of time?

  That conversation turned Kopp into a public policy entrepreneur, one who would come to dominate the long-running debate over teaching in America. Skipping classes, she withdrew from the world to produce an extraordinarily ambitious senior thesis, “An Argument and Plan for the Creation of the Teacher Corps.” The paper’s rhetoric was filled with moral panic borrowed from A Nation at Risk: Compared to Japan, the United States was suffering from a dilapidated school system. Companies like Motorola and Xerox had trouble finding workers with decent literacy skills. Poor teaching was to blame, she wrote, since education majors had low SAT scores and grades.

  Kopp crafted her thesis to suit a small-government era. Unlike the national Teacher Corps, which had existed from 1966 to 1981, the teacher corps she imagined would not be federally funded, but would instead be supported by foundations and corporate donors—just as in the nineteenth century, Catharine Beecher raised money from wealthy individuals to send East Coast girls to teach in western frontier schools. Nineteen-sixties postcollege antipoverty programs, like the old Teacher Corps and the Peace Corps, had taken on a “politicized nature,” Kopp critiqued, and had asked recruits to live among the poor. Her teacher corps would not be radical but pragmatic. While the old Teacher Corps had aimed to bring innovative ideas, like the culturally relevant reading list, into schools, Kopp’s corps would be simply a straightforward effort to prepare “the brightest minds” to do “the best possible job during the two years they would be teaching,” using established methods conveyed during a summer training institute. Under the terms of the Higher Education Act, recruits would be able to defer repayment of their college loans, an arrangement that would be especially attractive to graduates from low-income and minority backgrounds.

  Kopp thought it would be wonderful if corps members chose teaching as a long-term career. Some surely would. But for most, the program would prov
ide a “break” from “fast-paced lives to serve the nation,” she wrote. Later in life, as lawyers or business leaders, former corps members would be able to speak with passion and authority about the importance of public education, and this would seed a nationwide, elite-driven movement for school improvement.*1 What’s more, the media attention sure to fix on an effort to place Ivy Leaguers in poor kids’ classrooms would “send the signal that [teaching] is fulfilling and meaningful, that it is challenging, that it is important and respectable.”

  Kopp’s thesis relied on a comparison between teaching and volunteer work. Since the nineteenth century, this conception has worked against efforts to pay teachers more and attract more men and more ambitious women to the profession. It was all well and good to assert that teaching deserved higher prestige. But if recruits to Kopp’s program entered the classroom as if on a missionary vacation and left after only a few years, wouldn’t the opposite seem true—that for the smartest, most ambitious people, teaching was not prestigious but a pit stop on the way to a real job?

  While researching her thesis, Kopp reached out to the NEA, and Sharon Robinson, the national union’s director of instruction, sent her a cautious letter in response. Although the concept of a new teacher corps was “an interesting one,” Robinson wrote, it would be effective only if it attracted “career educators” to the classroom. “Even a suggestion that acceptable levels of expertise could develop in short termers simply doesn’t mesh with what those of us in the business know it takes to do the job—much less with what our young people need and deserve.” Kopp took note and made clear in her thesis that union cooperation would be crucial. The new teacher corps was merely “an emergency response to a shortage of experienced, qualified teachers” in high-needs schools, she wrote, “and would therefore not be telling the nation that its inexperienced members were preferable to, or as qualified as, experienced teachers.”