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Shame on You, Newsweek

Reader Comments at Newsweek site. There are some ignorant and mean-spirited ones but also many many very astute observations. Here are a few. Go read the rest. Better to read them than the article itself.



• Is Newsweek now another data free zone? This is just a bunch of anecdotes, not evidence. I don't intend to market for the Washington Posts/Newsweek Kaplan testing division (which is a big conflict of interest they have in this debate). What percentage of teachers is a problem? What's the distribution of problem teachers across our society? How does the correlate (statistically!), with poor education outcomes. Have you controlled for the effect of not buying books and socio-economic factors? Go back to social science 101.


• Yeah, blame the teachers. Way to go!


• First sentence, four lies. Second sentence, an admission that all the rest is a fairy tale: "Once upon a time???"
  
  Piling up the hackneyed crit that has been around for years, decades, now a full century, praising charters for successes that haven't happened, KIPP -- a school that sets the kid back a grade then "suggests" maybe the parents aren't supportive enough and should withdraw, doesn't allow a look at student records and then claims to graduate 85% -- and then the bitch slapping duo from DC and AFT (Rhee vs. Weingarten) ???. it is all so old and tired. Imagine if your reporters actually went out and discovered what happens in schools? But you stopped paying full time reporters a while ago, right?



• It's midnight on a Tuesday. I spent eight hours teaching, sitting in policy meetings, planning with colleagues, and attending a two-hour long (redundant) graduate course that is supposed to make me a more effective teacher. I came home, made dinner, and spent another 3 hours making differentiated materials for my classes tomorrow. I pick up Newsweek to get some news and relax, and I am faced with pages upon pages of brash, shameless, teacher-bashing. The authors of your story make a lame attempt to seem fair and balanced, but let's call a spade a spade: you are using test scores and achievement rates as indicators of the quality of teaching. Anyone who thinks that our current, standardized measures of mastery are legitimate is a fool.
  
  I agree with Principle1, and I know I'm not alone. Our system is unnatural. We would be far better off with schools that specialized in certain subjects, that provided opportunities for experiential learning, that involved the community and included social projects to instill a belief in students that we are all part of a social contract. Our obsession with benchmarks and data-driven instruction is driving good teachers away in droves. We would do much better to take a cue from the Europeans in this matter: stop telling our students that their teachers are stupid. Stop making students participate in boring, insipid, barely-there content for the sake of a measurable objective.
  
  Let students begin intensive study in the areas to which they are drawn. Arm a workforce not THROUGH force but through guidance.
  We are faced with so many social ills (parents who have no business reproducing, an economically depressed society, an entire portion of the population in which addiction and crime are commonplace, I could go on???).
  
  Thomas and Wingert, you are totally, utterly socially irresponsible. How dare you write such a rag of a (poorly researched) story and reinforce the notion that only the bottom of the barrel of individuals would want to be a thing as lowly and ignoble as a teacher? Only lazy, boorish imbeciles would deign to spend their life in the classroom, cleaning up all the messes that you can't imagine sitting in your policy-making offices. But, I digress. I have to get ready for another day of being lowly and mediocre.
  
  I will part with this: We must fire the bad politicians. We must fire the bad CEOs. We must fire the bad lobbyists. We must fire the bad test writing companies. We must fire the consultants. We must fire the arrogant, unabashedly biased media personalities. We must fire the parents that don't know how to read a book to their babies. We must fire the ??? you get it.
  
  FYI, I am also cancelling my Newsweek subscription during my planning period tomorrow.



• Articles like this form a consistent pattern of blaming and scapegoating public workers: teachers, police, firemen, city/county workers, etc. Want the truth? Deregulation of the financial industry, coupled with the duplicity of investment "geniuses" created a toxic asset fiasco that cost the world's financial system three trillion dollars of wealth. The perfect storm has hit the tax base of our cities and counties across the US. We can no longer afford to pay public workers, teachers--our civil servants---their modest salaries. Now that corporate America has hit the skids and so many people are lucky to have a job at all, those non-sexy public worker pensions look mighty good. Scapegoating teachers and public workers is a smoke screen for failed policies and failed political leadership. Thought we wouldn't notice? Think again. . . .
  
  Ask yourself: Who benefits from destroying public education and scapegoating teachers.
  Sorry Newsweek, you do not fool everyone.


by Philly Teacher blog

I have been subscribing to Newsweek magazine for almost 5 years now. I look forward to each week's thought provoking articles and commentary by smart, educated and well-informed journalists. This doesn't mean I always agree with everything I read, but I enjoy the discourse nonetheless.

I was appalled, however, to unfold this week's cover as I pulled it out of my mailbox. The Key to Saving American Education with We must fire bad teachers written over and over on a blackboard like the intro to a Simpsons episode. (When was the last time a teacher actually used this method of punishment, I wonder?)

I turned to page 25 and began reading.



Much of the ability to teach is innate--an ability to inspire young minds as well as control unruly classrooms that some people instinctively possess (and some people definitely do not). Teaching can be taught, to some degree, but not the way many graduate schools of education do it, with a lot of insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy.



These two statements back to back make absolutely no sense. In one sentence, the authors state that the ability to teach is innate and then proceed to blame schools of education for poor teaching skills.

The article is rank with these kinds of non sequitur statements. The sentence following the quote above states, "...within about five years, you can generally tell who is a good teacher and who is not." What they don't mention is the fact that many young teachers, who graduate from these programs with 'insipid or marginally relevant theorizing and pedagogy," don't receive any kind of support within their first years of teaching to help them become successful teachers.

The article should state: "....within about five years, you can generally tell who can teach themselves how to teach and survive their first few years alone to become a good teacher." I say this from experience as a teacher in one of the schools the authors keep referring to.



Over time, inner-city schools, in particular, succumbed to a defeatist mindset. The problem is not the teachers, went the thinking--it's the parents (or absence of parents); it's society with all of its distractions and pathologies; it's the kids themselves. Not much can be done, really, except to keep the assembly line moving through "social promotion," regardless of academic performance, and hope the students graduate....



How is this an issue with teachers? How does this statement justify the authors' viewpoint that we need to fire bad teachers? To me, it's a perfect description of how the problem is NOT the teachers. First of all, letting parents off the hook is the worst thing a school can do. Second, did they mention that this 'society' often comes with hunger, violence and hopelessness? Did they mention that most teachers don't WANT to push kids through an assembly line, but are forced to by district constraints on what to teach and how to teach it? Did they mention that the poorer performing a school is, the less freedom teachers have in what they teach and how they teach it?

In my school, teachers only 'teach' for about 2 hours a day. Students spend over 2 hours a day receiving scripted Direct Instruction programs mandated by the regional superintendent. So is it REALLY the teacher's fault if these programs don't work?

Then, of course comes the school model of Biblical proportions: KIPP.



KIPP schools don't cherry-pick--they take anyone who will sign a contract to play by the rules, which require some parental involvement.



Another non sequitur. Isn't that the definition of cherry-picking? Being able to only include people who 'play by the rules?' Which require some parental involvement. Translation: If you aren't involved in your child's education, you're not welcome here.

Translation: regular public schools get overwhelmed with all of the students and families who don't play by the rules.

One more. This one is about Teach for America.



Her idea was to hire them for just a couple of years, and then let them move on to Wall Street or whatever.



How does this help make a point for how wonderful the TFA program is? This is followed by, "Some (about 8 percent) can't hack it, but most (about 61 percent) stay in teaching after their demanding two-year tours." What the authors fail to mention is how long this 61 percent stay in teaching as well as what kinds of supports are in place to support these teachers. ("We provide the training and ongoing support necessary to ensure their success as teachers in low-income communities."--from TFA's website)

In addition, the authors state:



It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out.



In Philadelphia, we are experiencing our own hurricane: the Renaissance School Initiative. What the authors don't state is what "educational progress" means. Does it refer to test scores? Filling classrooms with highly-qualified teachers? School climate? Improved buildings and improved school environments? No one knows what these schools will look like in ten years.

Granted, there are some statements in the article with which I agree.

For one: "Many principals don't even try to weed out the poor performers..." I also agree that unions need to stop protecting bad teachers. For their own sake. It's those 'poor performers' that make the rest of us have to work harder.

I also agree that we need to ensure that we have highly qualified teachers in every classroom. However, it's not the teachers' fault that there are ineffective teachers in the classroom. The hiring process in Philadelphia is ridiculous. Principals cannot always choose all of their staff and are stuck with whoever shows up in August.

In addition, teachers enter the classroom after taking classes, passing some tests and spending about 6 weeks in a real classroom. Often, student teaching is done in a suburban school, but the new teacher finds him or herself in an inner-city school, completely unprepared for what he or she faces on a daily basis.

When it comes down to it, I am disappointed that Newsweek's cover story was so poorly written, poorly argued and contained such generic cliches. I look forward to reading the comments on the article as well as any letters printed in next week's edition. I hope someone can explain to me how this article ended up in the magazine.

For more reflections on this article, check out Larry Ferlazzo's post: Did You Know That THE Key to Saving Public Education is Firing Bad Teachers? There are some great comments there, too.






— Philly Teacher
blog
2010-03-10
http://philly-teacher.blogspot.com/2010/03/shame-on-you-newsweek.html

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