The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  45 accused of showing standardized test questions: Leonard Buder, “Actual Tests Used to Prepare Students for Reading Exam,” The New York Times, April 3, 1971.

  46 Eagle Academy for Young Men: Information from the Eagle Academy Foundation Web site, http://​eagle​academy​foundation.​com.

  47 not much more successful, in measurable ways: Eagle Academy school data reported by Inside Schools at http://​inside​schools.​org/​high/​browse/​school/​1546.

  48 The resulting fourteen-week, 2,500-person strike: Steve Golin, The Newark Teacher Strikes: Hopes on the Line (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).

  49 Nationally, teachers unions wielded extraordinary political influence: See chapter 9 of Terry M. Moe, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2011).

  50 Central Park East School: Author interview with Deborah Meier, June 4, 2013.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: “VERY DISILLUSIONED”

  1 “bureaucratic boondoggle”: Edward B. Fiske, “Reagan Record in Education: Mixed Results,” The New York Times, November 14, 1982.

  2 President Reagan “may be using me”: Terrel H. Bell, The Thirteenth Man (New York: The Free Press, 1988), 149.

  3 Bell biographical details and Utah merit pay plan: Ibid., 7–13, 79–87.

  4 an infamous wall chart: Ibid., 137.

  5 A press conference: Reported in the Associated Press, “Bell Asks Schools to Bolster Courses,” The New York Times, February 17, 1981; and UPI, “Bell Urges Stiff Tests to Decide If Students Go on to Next Grade,” The New York Times, April 10, 1981.

  6 with polls showing that by 1980: Mehta, The Allure of Order, 119.

  7 testing programs to evaluate student achievement: See Ibid., 75–83; and U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare, Inside-Out: The Final Report and Recommendations of the Teachers National Field Task Force on the Improvement and Reform of American Education (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), 1.

  8 “competency based” evaluation: John Merrow, The Politics of Competence: A Review of Competency-Based Teacher Education (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education, 1975).

  9 California essentially prohibited: Julie Greenberg, Arthur McKee, and Kate Walsh, Teacher Prep Review, 2013 (National Council on Teacher Quality report, 2013), 33–35.

  10 “Why Teachers Can’t Teach”: Gene Lyons, “Why Teachers Can’t Teach,” Phi Delta Kappan 62, no. 2 (October 1980).

  11 “Bring God back into the classroom”: Quoted in Mehta, The Allure of Order, 88.

  12 A Nation at Risk: National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 1983).

  13 At the American Federation of Teachers: For Shanker’s response to A Nation at Risk, see chapter 14 of Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal.

  14 “I took it as a personal insult”: Author interview with Dennis Van Roekel, October 7, 2013.

  15 four-day teaching week: William K. Stevens, “Head of Teachers’ Union Bids Locals Push for 4-Day Week,” The New York Times, November 23, 1969.

  16 Shanker was calling charter schools: Kahlenberg, Tough Liberal, 308–16.

  17 In Japan the average teacher: David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myth, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 103.

  18 “Basically, no teacher wants to fail”: Fred M. Hechinger, “About Education,” The New York Times, July 6, 1982.

  19 “The Japanese have invaded”: Quoted in Wendy Kopp, “An Argument and Plan for the Creation of the Teacher Corps” (senior thesis, Princeton University, April 10, 1989), 4.

  20 Two-thirds of the states: Bell, The Thirteenth Man, 139.

  21 “a flawed idea whose time has gone”: Edward B. Fiske, “Education; Lessons,” The New York Times, August 3, 1988.

  22 studies of merit pay programs: Samuel B. Bacharach, David B. Lipsky, and Joseph S. Shedd, Paying for Better Teaching (Ithaca, NY: Organizational Analysis and Practice, 1984), 28–29, 37–38.

  23 Kalamazoo, Michigan, provides a powerful example: See Richard R. Doremus, “Whatever Happened to Kalamazoo’s Merit Pay Plan?” Phi Delta Kappan 63, no. 6 (February 1982); and United States Commission on Civil Rights, School Desegregation in Kalamazoo, Michigan (April 1977).

  24 In Texas, a 1984 guidebook: Kelly Frels, Timothy T. Cooper, and Billy R. Reagan, Practical Aspects of Teacher Evaluation (National Organization on Legal Problems in Education, 1984).

  25 merit pay plans that were popular with teachers: See Brian T. Burke, “Round Valley: A Merit Pay Experiment,” California Journal (October 1983): 392–93; Gene I. Maeroff, “Merit Pay Draws Criticism and Praise From Teachers,” The New York Times, July 2, 1983; Fiske, “Education; Lessons”; and Francis X. Clines, “Reagan Visits Tennessee in Another Swing to Press Education Issue,” The New York Times, June 15, 1983.

  26 Gera Summerford: Author interview with Gera Summerford, September 4, 2013.

  27 the merit pay program rolled out in 1982: Details reported in Robert Reinhold, “School Reform: Years of Tumult, Mixed Results,” The New York Times, August 10, 1987.

  28 $23,500 per year: Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, A Nation Prepared (Report of the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, 1986), 37.

  29 the Carnegie Foundation recommended: See Ibid.; and Margot Slade, “Ideas and Trends: Teachers Urged to Face Change,” The New York Times, August 26, 1984.

  30 Ross Perot, for example, pushed Dallas: William E. Schmidt, “Economic Issues Spur States to Act on Schools,” The New York Times, May 5, 1986; Reinhold, “School Reform: Years of Tumult, Mixed Results”; and Linda Darling-Hammond, “Mad-Hatter Tests of Good Teaching,” The New York Times, January 8, 1984.

  31 formal evaluation programs were too expensive: Larry W. Barber and Karen Klein, “Merit Pay and Teacher Evaluation,” Phi Delta Kappan 65, no. 4 (December 1983); and David F. Wood and Dan S. Green, “Managerial Experience with Merit Pay: A Survey of the Business Literature,” in Johnson, ed., Merit, Money, and Teachers’ Careers (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985).

  32 “I always was and still am against”: Edward B. Fiske, “Al Shanker: Where He Stands,” The New York Times, November 5, 1989.

  33 “The principals were often former gym teachers”: Author interview with Chester Finn, November 11, 2013.

  34 When unions brought this suspicion: Unlike the NEA, Al Shanker supported the Lamar Alexander career ladder plan in Tennessee, with its complex rating and classroom observation systems. He also supported a similar plan in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. See Linda Dockery and Marcia Epstein, “The Teacher Incentive Program (TIP) of the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools,” in Johnson, ed., Merit, Money, and Teachers’ Careers.

  35 “takes innocent children” and “proudest achievement”: Gaillard, The Dream Long Deferred, xi.

  36 Department of Justice school desegregation suits, 1980 and 1981: John L. Palmer and Elizabeth V. Sawhill, eds., The Reagan Experiment (Washington, D.C: The Urban Institute, 1982), 140.

  37 In 1984, Secretary Bell spent $1 million: UPI, “U.S. Encouraging Merit Pay Plans,” The New York Times, March 11, 1984; and AP, “Reagan Vetoes a Money Bill for Chicago’s Desegregation,” The New York Times, August 14, 1983.

  38 Bell was even on the record: Marjorie Hunter, “Bell Will Not Push Lawsuits on Busing,” The New York Times, March 16, 1981.

  39 In September 1999, Potter ruled in favor: Gaillard, The Dream Long Deferred.

  40 According to research from the labor economist C. Kirabo Jackson: Kirabo C. Jackson, “Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation,” Journal of Labor Economics 27, no. 2 (2009): 213–56.

  41 The movement of experienced teachers: For teachers’ mind-sets on student race, see Kati Haycock, “The Elephant in the Living Room” (
Brookings Papers on Education Policy, no. 7, 2004), 229–63; and Martin Haberman, “Selecting and Preparing Urban Teachers” (lecture, February 28, 2005, available on Web site of National Center for Alternative Teacher Certification Information).

  42 A second study: Stephen B. Billings, David J. Deming, and Jonah Rockoff, “School Segregation, Educational Attainment and Crime: Evidence from the End of Busing in Charlotte-Mecklenburg,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, September 17, 2013.

  43 In a separate paper: Byron Lutz, “The End of Court-Ordered Desegregation,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 3, no. 2 (2011): 130–68.

  44 One of the most compelling: Heather Schwartz, Housing Policy Is School Policy: Economically Integrative Housing Promotes Academic Success in Montgomery County, Maryland (Century Foundation study, 2010).

  45 In 1980 American school integration reached: Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2010), 35.

  46 “In the sixties and seventies”: Wendy Kopp with Steven Farr, A Chance to Make History (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 4–5.

  47 he sought to push the standards: David K. Cohen and Susan L. Moffitt, The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 139.

  48 Kati Haycock: See Karin Chenoweth, “In Education We Trust,” Black Issues in Higher Education 15, no. 22 (December 1998): 14; and Kati Haycock, “ ‘Five Things I’ve Learned,’ ” Pearson Foundation Web site, http://​www.​the​five​things.​org/​kati-​haycock/​#.

  49 The Education Trust distributed massive data books: New York Times News Service, “Test-Score Gap for Minorities Widening Again, Study Finds,” December 29, 1996; Chenoweth, “In Education We Trust”; and Dale Mezzacappa, “In Poor Schools, Lower-Quality Teachers Abound, Report Says,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 22, 2000.

  50 Another issue was: A good summary of research on class size: Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, “Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for Public Policy” (paper, Brookings Institution, May 11, 2011).

  51 “color a poster”: “Alums Making a Difference: Kati Haycock,” GSE Term Paper (fall 2001).

  52 “semiliterate aides”: Mary Jordan, “Panel Says Poor Children Disserved by School Aid,” Washington Post, December 11, 1992.

  53 “The polls among black folk” and “Twenty or 30 years ago”: Chenoweth, “In Education We Trust.”

  54 “Bush’s message”: Joan Walsh, “Surprise: Bush Could Be the ‘Education President,’ ” Salon, September 17, 1999.

  55 “bridging instruments”: Cohen and Moffitt, The Ordeal of Equality, 142.

  56 In Texas: Ibid., 168.

  57 In 2009 Alabama reported: See table at http://​nces.​ed.​gov/​nations​reportcard/​studies/​statemapping/​2009_​naep_​state_​table.​aspx.

  58 Perhaps the most lasting outcome: Alexander Russo, Left Out of No Child Left Behind: Teach for America’s Outsized Influence on Alternative Certification (American Enterprise Institute report, October 2012).

  59 “I know this is a poem”: Linda Perlstein, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade (New York: Henry Holt, 2007).

  60 Research confirmed: Jane L. David, “Research Says … High-Stakes Testing Narrows the Curriculum,” Educational Leadership 68, no. 6 (March 2011): 78–80.

  61 In Florida, schools were more likely to suspend: Tiffany Pakkala, “Study: Suspensions Can Often Help School’s FCAT,” Gainesville Sun, June 14, 2006.

  62 “Texas Miracle”: Michael Winerip, “On Education: The ‘Zero Dropout’ Miracle,” The New York Times, August 13, 2003; Rebecca Leung, “ ‘60 Minutes’ Report Investigates Claims That Houston Schools Falsified Dropout Rates,” CBS News, January 6, 2004.

  63 By 2005 the NEA’s: The American Public School Teacher: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darrel Drury and Justin Baer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2011), 43.

  64 “The key to measuring is to test”: “Remarks on the No Child Left Behind Act” (speech by President George W. Bush, Philadelphia, January 8, 2009). Available at http://​www.​gpo.​gov/​fdsys/​pkg/​PPP-​2008-​book2/​html/​PPP-​2008-​book2-​doc-​pg1522-​2.​htm.

  CHAPTER NINE: “BIG, MEASURABLE GOALS”

  1 Wendy Kopp: Wendy Kopp, One Day All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach for America and What I Learned Along the Way (New York: Public Affairs, 2001); and Donna Foote, Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

  2 “the new idealism,” a “yuppie volunteering spirit”: Kopp, “An Argument and Plan for the Creation of the Teacher Corps,” 10–11.

  3 “politicized nature”: Ibid., 46.

  4 “the brightest minds”: Ibid., 45.

  5 “the best possible job”: Ibid., 2.

  6 “break” from “fast-paced lives”: Ibid., 45.

  7 “send the signal”: Ibid., 49.

  8 sent her a cautious letter in response: Reproduced in Ibid., 159–60.

  9 “an emergency response”: Ibid., 50.

  10 “Something to Think About”: Flyer reproduced in Kopp, One Day All Children, 36–37.

  11 TFA’s inaugural class: Author interview with Alex Caputo-Pearl, February 27, 2011; and Kopp, One Day All Children, 50–52.

  12 Of the first class of TFA recruits: Michael Shapiro, Who Will Teach for America? (Washington, D.C.: Farragut Publishing Company, 1993), 189.

  13 “What Teach for America had accomplished”: Ibid., 75.

  14 “Giving the least experienced teachers the toughest classes”: Jonathan Schorr, “Class Action: What Clinton’s National Service Program Could Learn From ‘Teach for America,’ ” Phi Delta Kappan 75, no. 4 (December 1993): 315–18.

  15 Kopp dismissed this suggestion: Shapiro, Who Will Teach for America?, 79.

  16 “a frankly missionary program”: Linda Darling-Hammond, “Who Will Speak for the Children: How ‘Teach for America’ Hurts Urban Schools and Students,” Phi Delta Kappan 76, no. 1 (September 1994): 21–34.

  17 certain types of education classes: See Linda Darling-Hammond’s review of the effects of various teacher qualities and training experiences on student achievement: “Teacher Quality and Student Achievement: A Review of State Policy Evidence” (University of Washington, Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy report, 1999), 8.

  18 10 percent of entering teacher-ed students: Berliner and Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis, 105–6.

  19 “We need an entirely new”: Samuel Casey Carter, No Excuses: Lessons from High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools (Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, 2000), 17.

  20 “Generally, the TFA teachers”: Patricia Sellers, “Schooling Corporate Giants on Recruiting,” Fortune, November 27, 2006.

  21 “They work in service of a corporate reform agenda”: Catherine Michna, “Why I Stopped Writing Recommendation Letters for Teach for America,” Slate, October 9, 2013.

  22 Teaching as Leadership: Quotes are from Steven Farr and Teach for America, Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010); and the Teaching as Leadership Web site, http://​www.​teaching​as​leadership.​org/.

  23 The research consensus on TFA: There have been two randomized control trials comparing TFA recruits to teachers from other pathways, both of which were conducted by Mathematica; they found TFA teachers were more effective at producing test score gains in math. A possible shortcoming of these studies is that TFA teachers were compared not only to traditionally trained teachers, but also to teachers with alternative certifications from other programs, some of which are of very poor quality. A 2005 Linda Darling-Hammond analysis of student-teacher data compared Houston TFA teachers explicitly to teachers who studied education in college or graduate school. It found that students of uncertified TFA corps members were two weeks to three months behind their peers in classrooms with certified t
eachers. Teach for America teachers who earned certification in their second or third years on the job appeared no different from other teachers, however, and were perhaps slightly stronger in math. See Paul T. Decker, Daniel P. Mayer, and Steven Glazerman, The Effects of Teach for America on Students: Findings from a National Evaluation (Mathematica report, June 9, 2004); Melissa A. Clark et al., “The Effectiveness of Secondary Math Teachers from Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows Programs” (Mathematica study, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, September 2013); Linda Darling-Hammond et al., “Does Teacher Preparation Matter? Evidence About Teacher Certification, Teach for America, and Teacher Effectiveness,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 13, no. 42 (2005); and Dylan Matthews, “Teach for America’s Teachers Are Besting Their Peers on Math, Study Shows,” Washington Post, April 5, 2013.

  24 A cache of studies: Andrew C. Butler and Henry L. Roediger, “Testing Improves Long-Term Retention in a Simulated Classroom Setting,” European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 19, no. 4/5 (2007); Henry L. Roediger and Andrew C. Butler, “The Critical Role of Retrieval Practice in Long-Term Retention,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15, no. 1 (2010): 20–27.

  25 “developing a strong desire to control”: John Hattie, Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (New York: Routledge, 2009).

  26 The KIPP schools: For a fascinating narrative of KIPP’s history and role in the contemporary education reform movement, see Jay Mathews, Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2009).

  27 “education can trump poverty”: Kopp, A Chance to Make History, 109.

  28 “We … control our students’ success”: Farr and Teach for America, Teaching as Leadership, 198.

  29 “the difference between entry into a selective college”: Testimony of Kati Haycock, President, the Education Trust, Before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness, May 20, 2003.