TIME’s Cover Story on Teacher Tenure was wrong
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| Michelle Rhee who taught RI Education Department head Deborah Gist everything she knows about screwing teachers |
In
the past four years, TIME and Newsweek have published three cover stories that
were openly hostile to teachers.
On
December 8, 2008, TIME published a cover story featuring
a photograph of Michelle Rhee, dressed in black and holding a broom, with the
implication that she had arrived to sweep out the Augean stables of American
education. (Detractors thought she looked like a witch.)
The
title on the cover was “How to Fix America’s Schools,” suggesting that Rhee
knew how to fix the nation’s schools. The subtitle was “Michelle Rhee is the
head of Washington, D.C., schools.
Her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education.” The story inside was written by Amanda Ripley. We now know that Michelle Rhee did not transform the public schools of the District of Columbia, although she fired hundreds of teachers and principals.
Her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education.” The story inside was written by Amanda Ripley. We now know that Michelle Rhee did not transform the public schools of the District of Columbia, although she fired hundreds of teachers and principals.
Simply untrue; when the first
international assessments were administered in 1964, American seniors scored
dead last of 12 nations and in the fifty years that followed, we never
outscored the rest of the world. The Newsweek story celebrated the mass firing
of high school teachers (without any evaluations) in Central Falls, Rhode
Island, a calamitous event that was hailed by Secretary Arne Duncan as a bold
stroke forward.
And
now TIME has added another cover story to the litany of complaints against “bad
teachers.” This one, dated November 3, 2014, has a cover that reads: “Rotten
Apples: It’s Nearly Impossible to Fire a Bad Teacher: Some Tech Millionaires
May Have Found a Way to Change That.” The cover shows a judge’s gavel about to
smash an unblemished, shining apple. The story inside was
written by Haley Sweetland Edwards. In addition, the magazine includes a column
by Nancy Gibbs, Editor of the magazine, commenting on the story.
The
underlying theme of all these covers and stories is that “bad teachers” have
ruined and continue to ruin American education, harming children and the
nation. They claim that unions and rigid tenure rules are protecting these
terrible teachers. Get rid of the “bad teachers” and America’s test scores will
fly to the top of the world. That seems to be the assumption behind Arne
Duncan’s insistence that teachers must be evaluated to a significant degree by
the test scores of their students. Those who get higher scores get extra money,
while those with low scores may lose their tenure, lose their job, lose their
license.
That
seems just to the folks who edit Newsweek and TIME, to the tech millionaires
and billionaires, but it seems very unjust to teachers, because they know that
their ratings will rise or fall depending on who is in their class. Students
are not randomly assigned. If teachers are teaching English-language learners
or students with disabilities or even gifted students, they will see small
gains; they may not see any gains, even though they are good teachers.
Their
ratings may fluctuate wildly from year to year. Their ratings may fluctuate
because of the formula. Their ratings may fluctuate if the test is changed. To
many teachers, this system is a roll of the dice that might end their career. A
recent Gallup Poll showed that 89% of teachers oppose test-based evaluations of
their quality. This is not because teachers object to evaluations but because
they object to unfair evaluations.
The
most recent TIME cover and story should be viewed in three pieces, because the
pieces don’t fit together snugly.
First
is the cover. Someone, my guess would be someone with more authority than the
writer, approved a highly insulting cover illustration and accompanying
language. Should the perfect apple (the teacher) be crushed by the judge’s
gavel? Is the profession filled with “rotten apples”? Is it “nearly impossible
to fire a bad teacher”? Nothing in the accompanying story demonstrates the
accuracy of this allegation.
Then
comes the story itself, written by Haley Sweetland Edwards. Edwards contacted
me to ask me to read the story and judge for myself, rather than be swayed by
the cover (the implication being that the cover is sensationalized and thus
emotional and inaccurate, although she did not use those words). She sent me a
pdf. file whose title, interestingly enough, was “shall we let millionaires
change education.” Now, THAT would have been an interesting story, and the
kernel of it is in Edwards’ article.
She
writes about the battle over teacher tenure:
“The reform movement today is led not by grassroots activists or union leaders but by Silicon Valley business types and billionaires. It is fought not through ballot boxes or on the floors of hamstrung state legislatures but in closed-door meetings and at courthouses. And it will not be won incrementally, through painstaking compromise with multiple stakeholders, but through sweeping decisions—judicial and otherwise—made possible by the tactical application of vast personal fortunes.
"It is a reflection of our politics that no one elected these men to take on the knotty problem of fixing our public schools, but here they are anyway, fighting for what they firmly believe is in the public interest.”
Now,
think about it. What she has written here is that a handful of extremely
wealthy men work behind closed doors to usurp the democratic process. No
wasting time with voting or legislative action. They use their vast personal
fortunes to change a public school system that few of them have ever utilized
as students or parents. True, David Welch, who is bankrolling the legal
challenges, attended public schools but it is not clear in the story whether
his own children ever went to public school or if he himself has set foot in
one since his own school days long ago.
Then
follows a rather star-struck account of this multi-millionaire as he sets his
sights on ending due process for public school teachers, engaging a high-priced
public relations team, creating a well-funded organization with a benign name,
and hiring a crack legal team.
Now, he is repeating his strategy in New York
and other states; he is Ahab pursuing the bad teacher. The Vergara decision is
presented as a culminating victory, where everyone hugs and kisses at the
outcome, even though not a single plaintiff was able to identify a “bad
teacher” who had actually caused her any harm.
The
story fails to note that Judge Treu, in his Vergara decision, cited a witness
for the defense, education scholar David Berliner, who guessed that maybe 1-3%
of teachers might be incompetent; when the judge jumped on that number as a
“fact” in his decision, Berliner retracted it and said he had not conducted any
study of teacher competence in California and it was a “guesstimate” at best.
Too late. Berliner’s guesstimate became Judge Treu’s “proof” that the bottom
1-3% should be fired before they do more harm.
Up
to this point in the story, David Welch and his fellow millionaire/billionaire
reformers are treated heroically. But then comes Edwards’ ending, where she
concludes with almost two full columns undercutting value-added assessment and
the very idea that tests of students can accurately gauge teacher
effectiveness.
Edwards
writes about how No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have led most states
to create teacher evaluation systems tied to test scores that determine tenure,
layoff decisions, and bonuses. She writes: “This two-decade trend has not, of
course, been free of controversy.
But
what began with protests over ‘high-stakes testing’ and cheating scandals in
various public-school districts [my note: including Michelle Rhee’s] in the
mid-2000s has morphed in the past six months into an outright mutiny, driven in
large part by the controversial rollout of Common Core State Standards, which
are linked to new state curriculums, more-difficult tests and new teacher evaluations.”
She
points out that teachers have filed lawsuits in several states. “Many argued
that policies focusing on cold, statistical measures fail to take into account
the messy, chaotic reality of teaching in communities where kids must content
with poverty and violence.”
Edwards
then goes on to cite the numerous studies challenging the validity of
value-added assessment. She mentions the American Statistical Association’s
report on VAM, a review by the American Educational Research Association, even
a study published by the U.S. Department of Education finding that “VAM scores
varied wildly depending on what time of day tests were administered or whether
the kids were distracted.”
Had
she started the story with this summary, it would have been a very different
story indeed. It would have shown that the millionaires and billionaires have
no idea how to judge teacher effectiveness and are introducing chaos into the
lives of teachers who are doing a hard job for less than the millionaires pay
their secretaries.
Edwards
wrote, I am guessing, a good story about the invalidity of VAMs and the
insistence of the tech millionaires/billionaires that they know more about
education than teachers and that they are ready to deploy millions to force
their views on a public education system about which they are uninformed. For
them, it is a power trip, not reform.
Again
my guess is that her editor rewrote the story to make the millionaires look
heroic, because what they are doing is not heroic. Anyone who has any regular
contact with public schools expects it will be harder to recruit good teachers
as a result of the Vergara decision. But the millionaires don’t know that.
The
third part of the TIME story is the four-paragraph column by Nancy Gibbs,
Editor of TIME. She calls it “Honor Thy Teacher,” an ironic title for her piece
and for the cover illustration, which Dishonors All Teachers. Gibbs begins by
thanking three teachers– Mrs. Flanagan, Miss Raymond, and Mr. Schwartz–who
“seeded” her imagination and shaped her character. But she then goes on to say
that “one Texas study found that cutting class size by 10 students was not as
beneficial as even modest improvement in the teacher.”
That
is bizarre. I wish she had identified the study or its author. I don’t know of
any teacher, even the best, who would not prefer to teach smaller classes; I
don’t know of any teacher who thinks he or she can do their best when they have
35 or 45 children in the class. Gibbs then goes on to reiterate the familiar
claim that other countries draw their teachers from the top third of graduates
while the U.S. draws almost half of its teachers from the bottom third.
Again,
I would like to see her citation for that datum. Perhaps the three teachers she
thanked at the outset—Mrs. Flanagan, Miss Raymond, and Mr. Schwartz—were drawn
from the bottom third.
Does
Nancy Gibbs know that between 40-50% of new teachers leave the profession
within their first five years (perhaps those in the bottom third)? Does she
know that education programs are shrinking because young people no longer see
teaching as a desirable career, given the contempt that people like Gibbs and
legislators in states like North Carolina and Indiana and millionaires like
David Welch heap on teachers?
Does
she know that teachers in California must acquire a liberal arts degree before
they can enter education programs? Does she know that many experienced teachers
are leaving the profession because of the highly public attacks on teachers by
people like Arne Duncan, David Welch, and Michelle Rhee? Which side is she on?
Does she side with Mrs. Flanagan, Miss Raymond, and Mr. Schwartz, or with the
tech millionaires and billionaires who want to reduce them to data points and
fire them? Has the thought occurred that the tech millionaires want to replace
teachers with computers? It makes sense to them.
The rest of us would like to
see greater support for teachers, greater emphasis on recruitment and retention
of those who have the responsibility for instructing the nation’s children.