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Matt Damon, Arne Duncan and the Divisive Teacher-Quality Debate
Last weekend, two very different speeches on the future of the teaching profession made news.
The first was from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who appeared Friday before the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, the organization that runs the elite National Board certification process for teachers. The United States must follow the example of the nations that out-perform us educationally, Duncan said, and begin to recruit most of our public school teachers from the top thirds of their college classes. To do this, he argued, we will need to raise average starting salaries from $30,00 to $60,000 and average salary caps from $70,000 to $150,000.
Is that really possible in a climate of federal, state and local budget cuts? We can find the money, Duncan said, by utilizing technology to “reorganize” schools (read: raise class sizes and shrink the teacher corps); instituting teacher merit pay based in part on student test score data; loosening teacher job security protections; and cutting teacher benefit and pension packages and redirecting some of the funds toward salaries.
Duncan knows such proposals remain controversial among teachers. “I respectfully urge everyone to take a deep breath, hold their fire, and see this as an opportunity to transform the entire profession,” he said, “not as a threat or as an investment we don't need.”
The second speech was from the actor Matt Damon, a public school graduate and son of a teacher who made news in March when he slammed the Obama administration’s teacher evaluation and pay proposals in a CNN interview. Speaking at the Save Our Schools protest march Saturday near the White House, Damon brought some in the crowd to tears as he painted a more holistic, even romantic portrait of the public school teacher’s role.
“I don’t know where I would be today if my teachers’ job security was based on how I performed on some standardized test,” Damon said. “If their very survival as teachers was based [not] on whether I actually fell in love with the process of learning, but rather if I could fill in the right bubble on a test. If they had to spend most of their time desperately drilling us and less time encouraging creativity and original ideas; less time knowing who we were, seeing our strengths, and helping us realize our talents. I honestly don’t know where I’d be today if that was the type of education I had. I sure as hell wouldn’t be here. I do know that.
“This has been a horrible decade for teachers. I can’t imagine how demoralized you must feel.”
After the speech, Damon and his mom did a short interview with a libertarian Reason.tv reporter. After criticizing “MBA-style thinking” in education policy and defending teacher tenure, Damon angrily contested the cameraman’s assertion that 10 percent of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers are bad at their jobs. “Maybe you’re a shitty cameraman,” Damon countered.
The video went viral.
The Obama administration’s education policies have always been controversial among more traditional education liberals, who are disappointed to see a Democratic president pursue an agenda of standardization and weakened union protections. But the always-contentious school reform debate has gotten even nastier over the past several months, with the role of multiple-choice tests emerging as the flashpoint.
Adult test-tampering scandals in Atlanta; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Pennsylvania; and elsewhere around the country have focused new scrutiny on efforts to tie teacher evaluation and pay to student test scores. Polls of teachers’ opinions on performance-based pay schemes are divided; according to Education Next, 72 percent of teachers oppose such policies, while the National Center for Education Information finds 59 percent support them. What’s clear is that there is no teacher consensus in favor of the testing regimen created by No Child Left Behind, and that teachers don’t broadly support the Obama administration’s attempt to expand high-stakes assessments to subjects other than math and reading. Education Next found that 60 percent of teachers oppose tying tenure decisions to test scores. The NCEI poll reported that 44 percent of teachers are dissatisfied with student achievement testing in general.
Teachers (and parents, and Matt Damon) are right to be skeptical of the administration’s testing push. While “standards-based-assessment” doesn’t have to mean that students are sitting for dozens of new bubble tests—there are other ways to “test,” including portfolio-based systems, performance tasks and presentations—the fact of the matter is that some states and school districts will respond to the incentives of Obama’s Race to the Top program in ways that over-rationalize learning.
Case in point: While reporting from Colorado this past winter, I observed a school district, Harrison District 2 in Colorado Springs, that gives pencil-and-paper exams in every subject at every grade level. The second grade physical education exam asked, “Draw a picture of how your hands look while they are catching a ball that is thrown above your head,” and, “What are two rules students can follow so they do not run into others when running around in physical education class?”
The results of this exam, which tested reading, writing and drawing far more than physical fitness, impacted the gym teacher’s evaluation score and pay.
Arne Duncan is aware that there is a difference between sophisticated student assessment and bad student assessment. That’s why the Department of Education should provide states and districts with much more specific guidelines about best practices in assessment, particularly in non-traditional subjects such as art, music and physical education. In fact, this would be a great subject for one of the department’s national conferences, something akin to the event the DOE hosted in Denver in February on union-district partnerships.
Absent that kind of guidance, the protests of the Matt Damons of the world will only grow louder, and the Obama administration will lose crucial public support for its teacher-quality agenda.
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39 Comments so far
Show All"Maybe you're a sh!tty cameraman, I don't know..."
Ha!
EXCELLENT POINT!
The idea that the teaching profession has some unique problem because of an assumed baseline -in ANY field!- of 10% low-quality workers is just nuts.
Absolutely the right response. Good demonstration and no excess politeness for such a fool.
Love it.
That hair better be for a movie though, he looks like some sort of Hoo-wa! Marine. ;)
-matti.
P.S. BTW I think that FAR more that 10% of USAn public school teachers are crap. And I do think it is connected to where in their graduating class at university teachers are coming from. But it is a lot more complicated than that and the cameraman's talking-point-without-argument deserved the slap-down that it got.
"FAR more that 10% of USAn public school teachers are crap. And I do think it is connected to where in their graduating class at university teachers are coming from."
I couldn't disagree more. I never had the opportunity to finish graduate school, and I never ranked high in college, or grad school. AND, my study was psychology and counseling, but I have taught English, math, reading, and specialty classes very successfully. I taught students to read who couldn't really do it very well before I worked with them. I taught special diploma students to MASTER basic math and do beginning algebra. I had immense success getting my students to do things they were certain they could not. Just because I am open-minded, willing to see things from their point of view, and tackle the problems they are facing WITH them, not based on an arbitrary standard.
First you say college is useless, then you say we have a ton of lousy teachers because they did not do well in grad school. The best teachers I have had throughout my life had less education than compassion, and more conscientiousness than knowledge. Knowledge can always be gained. The ability to use it properly needs to be practiced. Of the hundreds of teachers I have worked with, very few were "crap."
Perhaps you should try some substitute teaching. You might learn a few things about yourself you missed along the way.
Hopefully your teacher's edition was able to teach the students better reading comprehension than you yourself seem capable of!
1. I was referring to Duncan's point about where IN GRADUATING CLASS RANK most teachers come from. And it is true, if one is looking for a quick, deceptive metric to explain the difference in public school teacher quality between the U.S. and other countries, class rank can fit the bill. But it is -as I say- deceptive. There's more to it than that.
2. When did I say college is useless? Was that on another thread or something? Doesn't really matter, college is mostly useless -for its stated purpose, that is- nowadays. ;)
3. Who's to say I HAVEN'T taught children? I'm sure you know what ass-uming does.
4. I am completely disinterested in your self-eval or your take on the quality of the teachers you have worked with (both evals *shockingly* fully positive), dude, and your defensive talking-down to me tone and send off does more to demonstrate my point that yours, so thanks.
-matti.
Go DAVE!!!
The funny thing is that you posted this almost two hours after I pointed out -where you could read it- that Dave has misread my postscript almost entirely!
Isn't picking pointless sides fun? We get to feel good when our team scores a point and don't have to worry about actually solving any problems! Yay!!
Matti,
"BTW I think that FAR more that 10% of USAn public school teachers are crap. And I do think it is connected to where in their graduating class at university teachers are coming from" You know not about what in the hell you are talking about.
OYE
Excellent argument. ;)
You say : "I think that FAR more that 10% of USAn public school teachers are crap"
You "think"??
Somehow, I doubt it, given that you made such a statement -- one that is certainly not based on any actual research.
How would one even measure "crap"? (perhaps you would like to fill us all in on this critical metric)
And "USAn" ??!!
The accepted term is "American".
Maybe you should have listened to your "crappy" English teachers a little more closely in school (or listened to them, period).
Thanks to Matt Damon for defending our teachers.
No thanks to Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, the Tea Party and corporate Republicans and Democrats for helping make teachers scapegoats for the failed anti-democratic economic policies and standardized testing mania/foolishness of the Bush and Obama administrations.
As a veteran teacher of 32 years in public schools (now retired), I know that smaller class sizes and support of parents are the two most important ways teachers can be helped to succeed in teaching students to become lifetime learners and critical thinkers, which must always be the goal of education in a true democracy, not the militaristic, authoritarian, anti-science, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist corporatocracy preferred by the traitorous Ruling Class Parasites and their willing, traitorous tools in all branches of the U.S. government.
For this despicable, murderous Ruling Class, it isn't enough that their pervasive propaganda organ, Corporate Media, has "entertained", misinformed, and distracted USans to mindless ignorance for seven decades. Now they want to destroy the public school system and complete their pernicious task of reducing our children to non-thinking consumers of corporate garbage in ideas and beliefs as well as in unhealthy, G.M. food and other planet-depleting products.
For our children's sake as well as for the sake of democracy (even as it ceases to exist here) we MUST oppose these efforts to destroy our public schools and vilify our teachers.
Actually for democracy and our children, we need far, FAR better education than our public schools currently provide -even the best- or really EVER provided.
The current public schools -the actual buildings and systems and equipment AND the organizational structures- are mostly decaying copies of medium-security prisons located unsustainably in the auto-suburb hinterlands that educate children mostly to be obedient to arbitrary authority, consume reflexively, constantly divide themselves, and see education as job-training that doesn't really work.
The current teachers -at all levels, but Primary and Secondary are the big concerns- are mostly badly miseducated themselves (like any adult USAn) and are in desperate need of retirement, almost total retraining, or a new career outside of education.
The folks attacking schools and teachers are total greedy bastards.
But that doesn't mean we are obliged to waste our time defending such thoroughly broken systems when we should be pro-actively remodelling or rebuilding them.
-matti.
Think about your comments. First you say that the public schools have never provided a decent education, because the schools themselves are not maintained or designed adequately, and because the teachers are not well-educated, like any American (you say).
Well then, who is well-educated? How could anyone be well-educated if your criticisms are representative of the entire country? If no one passing through the schools could get a decent education, who is going to design new curricula?
I think you have painted yourself into a logical corner.
Remember that the OP was talking about bettering our democracy and children through our education system. Well, how are democracy and children doing? What has been the trend since the current form of public education began in the '50s and '60s?
That doesn't mean no one is well-educated!
That's actually a logical fallacy, I believe, since learning and education can and do happen outside the current U.S. Public education system.
I mean, for starters, there is always the private schools. G.W. Bush went to them and look at how smart he turned out! ;)
-matti.
Again, you know not what the hell you're talking about.
Sure I do, I'm talking about the systemic problems in the Public Schools in the U.S.
Thanks for helping the discussion so much! ;)
i remember reading about some research that was done in the 60's where one group of children were taught in a classroom without normal desks or right angled furniture. the children could take any body position they pleased. their results were far higher than the control group...
Exacto. Hit the nail on the head and drove it completely in on one swing.
I still recall - in my one year in public schools when I was thrown to the wolves, so to speak, without any mentoring (even though the dept. head earned a stipend to mentor me). When I discussed some creative lesson plan ideas I had (which, incidentally, followed the state standards and benchmarks) and another teacher in my dept. frowning and saying, "That sounds interesting but it's not going to be on The Test." Needless to say, she still has her job-- my position was cut, and I'm currently working part-time -- after having been unemployed for 9 months.
Two comments. First, Duncan is right that if salaries were doubled, the average GPA of teachers would go up - some students would go into teaching who otherwise would think of accounting or engineering. And with that shift, the faculty at teachers' colleges would have to change their curricula - no more micro-lesson plans pretending to be challenging exercises.
But salaries are not set in Washington. They are set in a few thousand school districts, by school board members who tend to be conservative with regard to tax monies.
Second, grades on standardized tests reflect how well teachers can teach students how to take them. Nothing more. So basing teachers' salaries on the grades does not accomplish what it is supposed to.
But Arne Duncan has never taught in a classroom, so he cannot be expected to know that. He has his job because he used to play basketball with President Obama. An interesting way to develop credentials.
Good to make that point that Duncan has never taught school but played basketball with the president. The fact that the relationship was mentioned in articles about the guy just after Obama's election left me cold. If he managed the Chicago system as well as the national, I can imagine Chicago has some really serious problems. In that same speech mentioned elsewhere here, Duncan spoke of salaries of 60,000 to 150,000 for teachers - I assume he wasn't referring to ivy league docents - my thought was that this guy comes from some alternate universe.
With regards to salary, I was able to observe the primary and secondary school systems in Germany when I was a lot younger. The teachers i met were held in high esteem by the students, the students' parents and the public in general, and my impression was that they were paid as well as engineers from the BASF works down the valley.
TESTS TESTS TESTS... In school students are required to pass tests. In life, students are expected to have skills. Teach skills, test skills, and remediate where needed and students will have a shot at being productive citizens. There is such a massive disconnect between the current education system and the needs of our society that we are producing a majority of under-prepared graduates. Added to that must be the fact that skewed incomes and wealth distribution in this country are making it increasingly difficult for graduates to find even minimum wage jobs, let alone the jobs they deserve after working through 13 years of "academic rigor."
Skill based education needs to be a priority. A good mechanic may have some reading and math abilities, but it's unlikely they will be a Rhodes scholar, if even a college student at any point. Students who do not find their niche in schools drop out. How often does that happen? 1/3 of the time. If testing-based curriculum is more important than 33% of students not graduating, we're on the right track.
Get rid of the standardized tests as a measure of student achievement, and implement a selection system so that college-able students can choose that path, and non-college-able students have an alternative based on their interests and skills. That is step one.
How do you judge a teacher? By the classroom, not testing, performance of their students. It kills me that 180 days of instruction, 6 hours a day, equaling almost 1100 hours of class instruction boils down to one three hour test in reading, and another in math. That is the equivalent of holding a regular employee accountable for their entire year's performance based on one report or presentation that they make. If it's good, they keep their job. If that one report or presentation is bad, no matter how good the rest of their work is, they are fired.
This type of system is politically expedient, but socially destructive and can only fail.
"How do you judge a teacher?" The way I evaluate (judge) my teaching every year is to survey the students at the end of the year. I read what they have to say and go from there. I can do that do to the nature of what I teach-secondary Spanish. Personally, at the elementary level I would survey the students and their parents.
Teachers should be evaluated by principals who should be master teachers with plenty of time and resources to spend time in classrooms, work with students and interact with parents.
Instead our principals are being turned into pencil pushing bureaucrats forced to jump through hoops by distant administrators who've never taught a single lesson or walked the halls of a school observing the children day after day. These distant administrators want to turn our principals into clones of themselves.
Teachers need clean water, healthy food, comfortable clothes and housing, and all the same other things that we all do.
Their jobs as public school teachers may or may not be needed and may or may not be in need of defending. ;)
I sent my children to very expensive private schools so that they would not be subjected to large class size or to standardized testing. I am sure that if you had exchanged the entire faculty of the private school with the faculty of the local public high school the results for the students at the private school would have been the same, an excellent high school education.
i didn't send my children to any school at all... entirely self educated , they speak two or three languages and have far above normal communication skills,..their lives are interesting and rewarding...
Well, congratulations, isn't that sweet.
You really don't see how THAT anecdotal evidence is the same as the OP's and all of the self-evaluating teachers on this thread?
It also makes the point that education can be found outside of either the public or private schools. Seems pretty relevant to me.
After having taught on and off since 1956, I now believe that home schooling - or very small neighborhood schools- is the best way to go. The public system is so bad that it often does more harm than good. A salary of a million dollars will not change a bad teacher into a good one. Some of the best teachers I have worked with, had no college degrees and some of the worse were experienced and degreed. In addition to that, the culture in most middle and high schools is loaded with violence, drugs, and bullying. A fair voucher system (not the one backed by the repubs) would allow parents options and choice. The value of self education should not be trivialized. If you want something done right, do it yourself.
"Arne Duncan is aware that there is a difference between sophisticated student assessment and bad student assessment." Living out in the countryside I can guarantee you that I would never find a bigger pile of bovine excrement in a field with 100 head of cattle than that statement. Duncan knows absolutely, yes absolutely effing nothing about teaching and assessment. He's another Kochsucker type who thinks he knows what's best for everyone else. I hope I never encounter him (nor the principal who tried to have an assistant file false sexual harassment charges against me-luckily for me the assistant has morals and a conscience) because I would definitely be accused of "bad form" (see the movie Hook) in my interaction with them.
OYE
This article and thread are effective demonstrations of the utility of the "Teacher-Quality Debate" -for those who wish to fully break our public education systems for their own future profit.
As soon as you opine that some or many people working as teachers in the Public Schools are not that great at it (or...crap ;) ) -even if you immediately qualify such a statement by asserting that "teacher-quality" is an effect of the bigger problems in public education- the "teachers" and "teacher defenders" come out of the wood work to report how wonderful they themselves and the other teachers they know are doing and/or scold or insult you.
They then opine from their supposed position of expertise -as workers in the broken system!- about all the problems of testing, funding, etc, that are the "true cause" of the breakdown.
Then, having defended themselves from the mean monster, they can rest easy.
Meanwhile nothing -not even a short discussion of the systemic problems- has been done to fix anything, and the greedheads and the privatizers can continue unopposed.
Lame. ;)
I assure myself that it must be even worse on "rightwing" sites where the "hate on teachers" crowd plays a similar role.
Reflexive defensiveness is better than habitual scape-goating,...right? ;)
-matti.
Arne Duncan is a knucklehead when it comes to education structure. He is clueless. He recently argued that one way of dealing with teacher competence and children's access to good teachers was to drop the class size of the bad teachers and increase the class size of the good teachers: "That way more kids would have the good teachers," argued Duncan. I am an experienced teacher. Over the course of my career I have had classes of 38 and classes of 16 and 17 students at various age levels in the elementary school. The research supports my argument that class size is crucial to the quality of education the children receive.
Duncan's suggestion that the better teachers be given a more difficult workload is so completely asinine that he should have been fired immediately for saying something that stupid which so clearly shows that he has no knowledge of teaching or education research, either from the experience side or training. The relevance of class size is one of the most central principles in any graduate program in the field of education. His proposal would make bad teachers out of good teachers because at some point, no one can teach when there are just too many kids for one person to work with successfully.
One of my best friends is a retired principal and superintendent. When I told him about Duncan's suggestion, he said, "I would not want to chair the staff meeting where that idea was presented."
"To do this, he argued, we will need to raise average starting salaries from $30,00 to $60,000 and average salary caps from $70,000 to $150,000."
The proposed salary raises would bring them into line with Australia where there is argument that they are too low and should be bought into line with those in Finland.
Really?
As a Finnish-USAn with some considerable experience with Suomi, this is news to me.
Here's an article from Scholastic.com that mentions the point:
http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3749880
The relevant paragraph:
"A member of the National Education Association on the CoSN trip inquired about the teacher salaries, no doubt expecting that Finnish counterparts would be better paid. But it wasn’t the case. Salaries are roughly comparable, and in total Finland spends about $1,200 less per student than the United States’ $8,700 per-pupil average."
The article does mention several other possibilities to explain the difference in educational outcome Suomi vs the U.S., however, some quite interesting.
-matti.
Public school for me was a disaster. Not that I didn't do well, I did, though I had to struggle to learn the ropes in order to survive. My desire to do well was motivated by fear and not creativity. The creative, expressive spirit I had was squashed and suppressed the day I walked into kindergarten and continued for 13 years. My parents didn't know any better and thought they were doing the right thing. But I, as happy go lucky creative 5 year old, had the joy of learning destroyed within weeks, at least within the structure of school. I learned to fear the authoritarian teachers and administrators. I learned that one had to compete for grades and acceptance which often meant non cooperation with classmates and sometimes meant having to learn crafty gamesmanship. Yes there were a few teachers that stood out, that were sincere in their desire to see us learn, but they were few. Most seemed frustrated with constantly having to battle the few troublemakers. Though I wasn't a troublemaker I quietly enjoyed their rebellion as a break from the tedium of the school day.
My children attended a small private school that focused on critical thinking and creativity in a non authoritarian environment. They flourished there. They loved it and as adults have become successful at what they love. We were poor, but still managed to find ways to afford the tuition, and it often wasn't easy. I know not everyone can find nor afford such places. My kids were very lucky and fortunately now as adults they realize that.
Public education ought to be about learning critical thinking skills, a place to explore life and one's creative potential, to learn cooperation and conflict resolution, to learn to question everything, including authority, and to explore what a free society really is. Instead it seems predominantly a place of propaganda and coercion by the corporate state, subtle at times and other times it's blatant. " Pass these tests, move along, don't ask why."
Consequently I have very mixed feelings about the entire public school enterprise. What I think it ought to be, it isn't. Some can still manage to flourish despite those early educational environments, like Matt Damon, but how many others cannot?
There are numerous problems with the Obama plan to "reform" education.
But the primary problem is that it is not based in reality.
The reality is that Obama knows NOTHING about the problems facing public education and what is required to fix them.
Nor has he bothered to consult those who do -- Diane Ravitch, for example:
"Race to the Top [The Obama plan] went even beyond NCLB [ No Child Left Behind -- Bush's plan] in its reliance on test scores as the ultimate measure of educational quality. It asserts that teachers alone—not students or families or economic status—are wholly responsible for whether test scores go up or down. Now teachers rightly feel scape-goated for conditions that are often beyond their control. They know that if students don’t come to school regularly, if they are chronically ill, if they are homeless or hungry, their test scores will suffer. But teachers alone are accountable.
The Obama agenda for testing, accountability, and choice bears an uncanny resemblance to the Republican agenda of the past 30 years, but with one significant difference. Republicans have traditionally been wary of federal control of the schools. Duncan, however, relishes the opportunity to promote his policies with the financial heft of the federal government."
//end of Ravitch quote
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/03/20/obama-s-war-on-schools.html
Obama has taken the same know-nothing approach to reforming education that he has taken to everything else: financial reform [sic], health care reform [sic], tax reform [sic], and on and on.
His decisions are driven by "free market ideology", not reality.
And instead of consulting subject experts, he consults CEOs and other corporate representatives.
Or "MBA thinking" as Damon put it in the clip.
BTW "reform" does not mean "improve" so your (sic)s merit a (sic). ;)
Kudos, to Matt Damon, for standing up and speaking out, on behalf of teachers.
Many of us went into the field, not for monetary rewards, but for the joy of being a part of the learning process.
I believe a fair, appropriate, "public education" is the framework for a free, open and democratic society.
As the Fascists continue their march to kill public education, Amerikan empire slides further and further from my ideals and dreams.
Back to the pipe for a good dose and dream. ;0
Gotta LOVE Matt Damon! Too bad more intelligent "famous people" don't speak out.