The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  In 2012 Deasy announced that Crenshaw would be “reconstituted” and the social justice academy would be shut down. Every teacher had to reapply for his or her job, and half would be removed from the school. These mass dismissals have become a common practice at underperforming large urban high schools. The policy, one of several school turnaround strategies suggested by Race to the Top, is based on a faulty premise: that veteran teachers are to blame when schools experience many years of low test scores. In fact, Donald Boyd’s 2010 study of teacher transfer requests in New York City found that teachers who choose to leave underperforming, high-poverty schools tend to have been less effective, as measured by value-added, than teachers who stay in tough assignments over the long haul, like Caputo-Pearl. A number of other studies have found similar results at the district level—teachers who flee urban school systems are less effective than those who stay. It is the constant churn of first-year teachers and administrators that makes these schools and districts so unstable. Nevertheless, at Crenshaw, Caputo-Pearl was dismissed. So were union rep Cathy Garcia and the leader of the award-winning debate team. Most longtime observers of Los Angeles politics believed the school’s activist educators were being targeted, regardless of classroom performance. Twenty-one of the thirty-three laid-off teachers were black, and twenty-seven had over ten years of experience.

  Had Crenshaw’s reform model worked for kids? Deasy said it hadn’t, citing persistently low test scores. “It is a fundamental right to graduate, and it is not happening at Crenshaw,” he said. “Students are not learning. Students are not graduating. Students are not able to read.” He wanted more Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes at Crenshaw, a potentially good idea that could have been pursued in tandem with the Extended Learning Cultural Model. What Deasy didn’t say was that the achievement data at Crenshaw was trending upward, especially for African American and special-ed students. Since 2007, the graduation rate had increased by 23 percent, and there was a 19 percent reduction in student suspensions.

  Turnarounds of comprehensive high schools are widely considered one of the toughest jobs in school reform. At Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, test scores remain abysmal three years after all the teachers were pink-slipped. But accountability reformers there are celebrated for raising graduation rates. What was different at Crenshaw was that teachers—and union activist teachers, at that—were driving the reform.

  Ultimately, it’s impossible to say if the Extended Learning Cultural Model could have revitalized Crenshaw, but it probably should have been given more of a chance to try. The plan was focused on the curriculum—what books kids read and what questions about the world they ask and answer—a crucial aspect of education that is usually neglected in debates over teacher evaluation and standardized testing. Developing new curricula is one of the most interesting, intellectually engaging aspects of schooling. It is a responsibility that, if granted to more teachers, could potentially help convince many well-educated, ambitious people to remain in the classroom. And Crenshaw’s curriculum was rigorous and aligned with the Common Core, especially its focus on teaching kids to use evidence to back up persuasive arguments. The plan had attracted positive national attention from funders and the U.S. Department of Education. What had been the problem?

  Caputo-Pearl, who is now president of the L.A. teachers union, believes he and his colleagues were targeted for challenging orthodoxies about what works and what doesn’t in education reform. Deasy “crushed” the Crenshaw reforms despite community support, Caputo-Pearl told me, “because it competed with him philosophically.”

  When American policy makers require every public school to use the same strategies—typically without confirming if their favored approaches are actually effective for kids—they reduce the discretion of the most motivated teachers, like Alex Caputo-Pearl and Lenore Furman, whose contributions to the profession should be scaled up, not shut down or ignored. This is an age-old problem in American education reform. Our system is highly decentralized in terms of curriculum, organization, funding, and student demographics and needs, yet we have expected local schools to implement one-size-fits-all reform agendas imposed from above. Since political reality suggests we aren’t likely to drastically centralize our education system anytime soon, perhaps it is time to look not just to nationally prominent politicians or philanthropists or social scientists to improve our schools, but also to teachers themselves.

  When I visited Colorado in the midst of its divisive legislative battle over value-added measurement, I talked to Christina Jean, a social studies teacher who went on to work as an instructional coach in the Denver public schools. Like many smart young educators, she was cautiously optimistic—excited about the nation’s renewed commitment to closing achievement gaps, but anxious that the imperative for meaningful collaboration to improve teachers’ practice would be overlooked in the rush to impose new canned curricula and multiple-choice tests. “A lot of the discourse is about getting rid of bad teachers,” she said. “Very rarely do I perceive teachers shown as anything other than cogs in a machine.” To improve the profession’s prestige over the long haul, she told me, it is crucial that the job feel not embattled but empowering and be “challenging and stimulating to adults. I am an intelligent person who has this love and passion for educating kids. So let me use what I know to create an experience for my students that reflects my expertise.”

  * * *

  *1 Miles has since left Harrison for a higher-profile job as the superintendent of the Dallas public schools.

  *2 The names and several identifying characteristics of Bob Lowe and the other teachers called before the Montgomery County Peer Assistance and Review board have been changed to protect their privacy.

  *3 A year after I visited the Abington Avenue School in Newark, it was investigated by the state for possible adult cheating on standardized tests, and its principal was removed. The investigation was of grades three through eight, not kindergarten, and there is no suggestion the class or teacher portrayed here was involved.

  *4 In addition to TFA’s partnerships with corporations like Google and Bain and Company, which allow recruits to defer employment while they serve as TFA corps members, TFA now sends some of its alumni directly into fellowships in congressional offices, where they advocate on education policy.

  Epilogue

  LESSONS FROM HISTORY FOR IMPROVING TEACHING TODAY

  Throughout this book I have tried to be more analytical than sharply opinionated. Nevertheless, my study of over two hundred years of the history of public school teaching has led me to draw some conclusions about the policy pitfalls that have dogged education reform, as well as the potential paths forward. Here are some ideas for improving both the teaching profession and, consequentially, the quality of our schools.

  TEACHER PAY MATTERS

  There is a mantra in education policy circles: “Money doesn’t matter.” Accountability reformers love to cite evidence that the United States spends more per student than many other nations, whose kids kick our kids’ butts on international tests. It’s true that there are many things American schools spend money on that don’t improve academic achievement, like cheerleading uniforms and football equipment. But education finance expert Bruce Baker has demonstrated that one particular type of spending—higher teacher pay—is absolutely associated with better student outcomes. We must take this evidence seriously, because we are not paying teachers the upper-middle-class salary that would align with our sky-high expectations for their work.

  In 2012 the median income of an American teacher was $54,000 per year, similar to the salary of a police officer or librarian, but significantly less than that of an accountant ($64,000), a registered nurse ($65,000), or a dental hygienist ($70,000), not to mention a lawyer ($114,000), a computer programmer ($74,000), or a college professor ($69,000).

  While the incomes of American teachers do not look all that bad compared to teacher incomes in Europe or Asia, economists
know people choose careers based less on the raw salary than on the perceived gap between what they could make in one job versus another. In that sense the growing inequality in the American labor market has undoubtedly hurt the prestige of teaching. In the 1940s, male teachers earned more than half of male college graduates, while female teachers earned more than 70 percent of female college graduates. Today teacher salaries are in the thirtieth percentile for male college grads and the fortieth percentile for female grads. These big pay gaps between teachers and other professionals are unique to the United States. In South Korea, teacher salaries of $55,000 to $155,000 over the course of a career provide 250 percent of the local buying power of an American teacher. This puts South Korean teachers between engineers and doctors in terms of pay.

  Another problem is the way teacher pay is structured. Typical pay ladders, known as the single salary schedule, reward teachers for time on the job and further education, forcing a teacher to wait decades to achieve peak pay. High-profile districts like Baltimore and Newark have moved away from the single salary schedule through negotiations with their teachers unions. These cities now reward performance and extra responsibility, like mentoring peers, alongside seniority. This should happen across the board.

  Consider this: My first full-time job in magazine journalism paid $21,000. I thought my friends who were public school teachers were rich! Five years later, at twenty-seven years old, I was earning three times my starting salary. Meanwhile, a New York City public school teacher with my same level of education, a bachelor’s degree, got a raise of less than $5,000 over the first five years of her career, from $45,530 to $50,153. In North Carolina, a teacher must work fifteen years to move her salary from $30,000 to $40,000. The worst part is that teachers’ incomes stagnate in comparison to their college-educated peers just as people begin to think about starting a family or buying a home. This is undoubtedly one reason why some ambitious people leave or never enter the profession, and why teaching is less culturally respected than it should be.

  CREATE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

  Teaching is not just one profession but several. To understand what I mean, consider medicine. All prospective doctors take the same test, the MCAT, to apply to medical schools. Those schools are certified by a single body, and they move students through a familiar sequence of courses, licensing exams, and clinical rotations. All doctors serve as interns and residents and go through medical rounds at hospitals. Ethically, doctors agree to uphold the Hippocratic Oath.

  Education is so very different. Some prospective teachers major in education at teachers colleges; others major in subject areas and earn master’s degrees in teaching; still others become teachers through alternative routes like Teach for America or teacher residencies. Some prospective teachers serve as student teachers for a year, others for a semester or not at all. Many teachers believe the goal of their profession should be to close achievement gaps between rich and poor children; others would dispute this, saying that doing so means neglecting gifted kids or is irrelevant in homogeneous, affluent schools. Still other educators would emphasize social-emotional development, critical thinking, or citizenship over measurable academic gains. All these views have relevance and legitimacy and are rooted in American culture and history.

  Considering that teaching is more decentralized in training methods and aims than other formal professions, like medicine or law, the Harvard sociologist Jal Mehta and Johns Hopkins political scientist Steven Teles have put forth the idea, still speculative, of “plural professionalism” for teachers, in which communities of practice form around specific pedagogical schools of thought, such as project-based learning or “no excuses.” In this mode, teacher prep programs and K—12 schools would work in alliance. They would select a school of thought to emphasize and develop evidence-based best practices that can be shared among researchers, working teachers, and trainee teachers. “Plural professionalism” would give teaching intellectual heft, by inaugurating prospective teachers into communities of practice that use a single vocabulary, share an ethical alignment, and agree on questions like how to assess students.

  Today’s “no excuses” charter schools have come closest to implementing the plural professionalism model. In New York City and Chicago, a coalition of charter networks launched the Relay Graduate School of Education, which teaches “no excuses” techniques to first-year teachers seeking an alternative certification. There are other legitimate pedagogical practices for teaching low-income children, but they get much less attention. The High Tech High network in San Diego emphasizes connections between school and the world of adult careers, and it now operates its own teacher training program. The Bank Street College of Education in New York City teaches a Deweyite, progressive, learner-centered pedagogy, and it operates a K–12 school where student teachers hone their craft. Other teacher prep programs have a lot to learn from these institutions, which imbue prospective teachers with specific strategies for running a classroom and specific ways of thinking about their work. Since there is no one effective ideology of teaching—but there are many research-backed effective teacher behaviors, like high-level questioning—teacher education should be much more concrete and skills-based than the status quo. Yet it should remain intellectually diverse, since different communities have different expectations of schools, ranging from strict discipline to Montessori. Communities of practice should be able to demonstrate to states that they are rigorous and evidence based. Once they are, they could earn the freedom to choose their own curricula, assessments, and teacher evaluation practices.

  KEEP TEACHING INTERESTING

  A set of job responsibilities that remains stagnant over the course of five, ten, or twenty years can leave teachers feeling burned out and bored and drives some high performers uninterested in becoming administrators out of the profession. If we expect ambitious, intellectually engaged people to become teachers and remain in our public schools, we must offer them a career path that is exciting and varied over the long term, and which includes opportunities to lead among adults, not just children. In Singapore, after three years on the job a teacher selects one of three leadership paths to pursue, in curriculum writing, school administration, or instructional mentoring. Here in the States, cities like Baltimore are offering teachers promotion opportunities that allow them to remain in the classroom for part of the day, while spending more time leading their colleagues in lesson planning and instructional coaching. Opportunities like these should be available to all good teachers who want them, not just to a handful of administrators’ favorites.

  The most powerful form of performance pay would reward proven teachers for taking on useful new responsibilities that help other teachers improve student learning. And in a reform climate in which teachers are more and more expected to work together toward school improvement—whether through group lesson planning, peer coaching, or team teaching within the classroom—it makes less and less sense for incentives and pay to focus narrowly on measuring an individual teacher’s impact on individual students’ test scores.

  DEAL WITH THE LEGACY OF THE NORMAL SCHOOL

  Susan B. Anthony and W. E. B. Du Bois knew back in the nineteenth century that it was a bad idea for teachers to be educated separately from other college-educated professionals, both for the prestige of teaching and for the good of students. This remains true. During the mid-twentieth century, the old normal schools began evolving into state colleges that granted bachelor’s degrees, but their admissions and scholarship standards typically remained low. Since these schools are now producing a huge oversupply of prospective elementary school teachers—in some states, as many as nine times more prospective teachers than there are jobs—states ought to require these institutions to raise their standards for admission or to shut down their teacher prep programs.

  That said, high SAT scores or grades should not be the only qualifications teacher-ed programs seek. Preliminary data from New York City linking student achievement back to the universit
ies teachers attended found that graduates of some less elite schools, like Hofstra University and Hunter College, outperformed, on average, the graduates of prestigious institutions like NYU and Columbia. We should not forget Martin Haberman’s research showing that long-serving “star” teachers are often from low-income backgrounds, have graduated from non-elite colleges, or are people of faith. Others, like Alex Caputo-Pearl, have somewhat radical politics. What makes these nontraditional teachers special is that they are mission-driven to help struggling students succeed, and they are enthusiastic about holding all children to high intellectual standards. Those are the attributes teacher preparation programs should seek.

  FOCUS ON THE PRINCIPAL AS MUCH AS THE TEACHER

  There should be a principal quality movement that is as aggressive as our teacher accountability movement has been. Almost every expert agrees that the one ingredient all successful schools have in common is a dedicated, highly respected leader who articulates a clear mission teachers believe in and strive to carry out. A McKinsey study shows that in choosing where to work, reporting to a better principal is just as motivating for top-third teachers as securing more pay. There is also evidence that teachers are more likely to respect and work productively with principals who have been teachers, especially in the same school or neighborhood. It has recently been popular to recruit principals from fields outside education, but this could be a misstep. Instead, effective teachers with exceptional leadership and organizational skills should be identified through the evaluation process and encouraged, after a number of years, to consider transitioning into administration—while acknowledging that becoming a principal should not be the only way for a teacher to expand his or her responsibilities or pay.