Teach for America Is As Toxic Pedagogically As It Is Politically

   When I organized a panel for the Labor and Working Class History Association Conference in Washington on "Why Progressive Faculty Should Boycott Teach for America," what was foremost in my mind was the role that TFA was playing in supplying replacement labor for school districts firing veteran teachers and its training of leaders promoting school privatization, but what I came away from the panel with was a much enhanced understanding of the damage TFA pegadogy is doing in inner city schools.

   This is not a subject I had much familiarity with, since i am not a teacher educator, or someone involved with training teachers or developing curricula, but the composition of the panel, which included two teacher educators,Dave Green and Joan Croce Grim, and two former TFA Corps members, Desmera Gatewood and Annie Tan, ended up focusing much of the discussion on what TFA teachers bring into the classroom.

   And here, what i learned was horrifying. Basically, because TFA teachers are thrown into extremely challenging school settings with only five weeks of training, and no student teaching experience, they are given a template which includes cookie cutter formulas for handling discipline and class management issues,  and an approach to teaching which ONLY emphasizes preparing students for standardized tests.  TFA teachers are required to follow this template even when it isn't working, even when it alienates students, and even though it totally excludes any attempt to make instruction relevant to cultural background and traditions of the students they are working with.

     The results of this can be disastrous in any school, but they are particularly disastrous in Charter Schools, where more and more TFA Corps members are sent, where almost all the teachers are from TFA and few of them have been in the classroom more than 2 or 3 years. The results in such schools is that you vary between classrooms that are out of control, to those which practice zero tolerance discipline and expel large numbers of students, a choice which forces many charters in the second direction, and a pedagogy that is Eurocentric, stale and entirely oriented around test prep.

    It would be hard to imagine a worse scenario for students in low and moderate income communities- fearful, inexperienced teachers,  saddled with a curriculum that stifles students creativity inquisitiveness and rebellious instincts who teach in terror of superiors who demand they stick to a rigid script.

     It is a crime that we are doing this to teachers, but an even worse crime that we are doing this to children, especially children of color
What is going on in heavily TFA dominated charter schools is something straight out of Charles Dickens, and it is spreading to public schools following the charter model who work in fear of being shut down.

     Teach for America is not only toxic politically, it is toxic pedagogically

Brilliant Speech by Music Teacher Alec Shantzis to New Jersey Department of Education

Good evening and thank you for this opportunity to speak. My name is Alec Shantzis. I have taught music in Cliffside Park for 12 years and been a Cliffside Park resident for 23 years. I am secretary of the Cliffside Park Education Association, a position I have held for 5 years. I am also a single parent raising three children by myself. My youngest son attends this school, Bergen Tech. I am also an Emmy award-winning musician. As a music teacher I have had the privilege of instructing over 2,000 students that are currently enrolled in my district and thousands of other students in the past 12 years. These remarkable young people are not just my students; they are the friends of my children and the children of my friends. I have not only taught them, but I have put band aids on scraped knees and mourned the passing of loved ones in my community, most recently Mayor Calabrese. Whose grandchildren I taught and whose family I consider among my friends. You would be hard pressed to find a teacher that cares about the students and people of a district any more than I do.

When Governor Christie took office, NJ had one of the highest achieving educational systems in the country. Immediately upon his election, Governor Christie began to defund schools, institute reforms and attack the reputation of teachers. These actions are not just our Governor being his usual genteel, caring self, they are part of a coordinated national takeover of the public education system in order to profit from it. New Jersey is only one cog in a much larger wheel of greed and profit-taking led by the AmericanLegislativeExchangeCouncil (ALEC), the Gates foundation, The Walton’s, Pearson and other billionaire campaign donors and falsely altruistic foundations that comprise a quorum of the sociopathic elite.

By over testing, over test prepping and mandating “reforms”, we are depriving a generation of young people of a proper education. Worse yet, by forcing a curriculum that was not designed by career educators, but by business people, by using poorly constructed tests that were designed with profit and privatization as a main goal, and not true assessment. We are creating students that hate school and creating tens of thousands of heavily stressed teachers nationwide. This is a horrible tragedy. Assessments are a tool for teaching, not for gathering data as a weapon against teachers or a tool to dismantle hurdles in the way of profit. Education should be filled with activities that nurture student creativity, that create a lifetime love of learning, activities that build self esteem and give students a physical outlet.

Since I teach such a large number of students, I have a unique overview of student behavior and attitude. I have seen is a rise of stress in students, a rise of misbehavior, a growing lack of interest in school and loss of respect for school and schoolwork. How can a student respect a school that in effect disrespects them, wasting their childhood wonder, turning it empty and cold? How can we ask teachers to say, “this test is important and meaningful and you should take it seriously” when we ourselves do not believe it? By tying evaluations to test scores, then tying evaluations to job security, underfunding schools, forcing millions of dollars in hidden costs as unfunded mandates onto districts (such as bandwidth, laptops, tech staff, evaluators, evaluative systems, and training sessions…) by reducing benefits, forcing payins into benefits, increasing meaningless paperwork for teachers and administrators alike, we have created a pressure cooker that is not only not in the best interest of our students or our teachers, it is doing horrible damage.

We have seen a mass exodus of the most experienced teachers because they will not bear witness to the destruction they see all around them. Teachers with 30 plus years of service forced to submit to punitive evaluations sometimes in the hands of brand new supervisors half their age that approach their new position as if there is a majority of teachers that are ineffective. “If the only tool you are given is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” and teachers are getting hammered. Now that the state has “shed” all its senior educators, our work force is young, less expensive, and living in fear. These young educators carry huge amounts of student loan debt and are questioning if they made the right decision. This is not the teaching they saw as children and aspired to grow up to be. It is, for many young teachers a sickening realization. There are so many facets to this issue that I do not have time to cover or even skim over. If time allowed, I would discuss charters and the investment opportunities they present which are the real reason so many Governors are pushing them and lifting caps on Charter schools. But, I must save that for another time.

I finish my testimony by saying; Pearson is no friend to education. PARCC is a mistake. Common Core is a mistake. To think that “the answer” is to have all students nationally adhere to the same curriculum, and a poorly written one at that (especially in the lower grades) is a huge mistake. I urge you each to consider our commitment to the lives of these young people. The ruse of the terms “college and career ready”, “21st century education”, “increased rigor” and other reform lingo is just meaningless chatter. We owe our young people joy in learning, we owe them a place to explore the wonder of learning, and we owe them a chance to enjoy the strong points of each of their different teachers. A cookie cutter, Walmart-ized approach to education is tragically flawed. These tests are wrong. These reforms are wrong. Making decisions about education without teacher input is flawed and unethical.

With that I say. I am happy to meet with any of you to discuss these matters in more depth. I thank you for your time and attention.

A Poem for Cuomo, Tisch and the Regents

They keep
underestimating
us
Think they can
buy us
Intimidate us
Make us
fight with one
another
But when children's
futures are
at stake
When you want
to smother the spark
within them
There is no
compromising'
No giving
up
We will stop
them
We will frustrate

them

We will

win.

Educational Malfeasance at John Dewey HS in Brooklyn- Letter from a Teacher

I recently came across some of your publications while looking for NYC educators who might be interested in a cause some teachers are pursuing at our school, John Dewey High School. The current principal, Kathleen Elvin, has engaged in a number of activities which have been severely detrimental the education of our students as well as the pride we all once took as educators. One of the many issues on which a few of us have been brave enough to challenge her is a credit recovery program. We have put in an enormous amount  of time and work into documenting her and her administrators illegal efforts to grant students diplomas even though they have come nowhere close to meeting state education standards. Some of their deeds have included creating classes that never actually met and giving all of its students passing grades, assigning teachers courses that cover over a dozen different subject areas for which they are not legally licensed to teach, and handing student packets of rudimentary work that they completed over the course of a few hours in order to receive credit for a full semester class. Teachers who have been assigned these classes have been predominantly non-tenured and therefore unable to say no.

We reported this to the Department of Education’s Office of Special Investigations in February of 2014 and provided them a continuous flow of evidence in order to strengthen our case and assist in their investigation. Then last December, OSI told us that they no longer required anymore evidence. We immediately realized that they were probably going to do nothing at all to properly address this issue. Someone in a supervisory position probably told them to let it die. We have now seen hundreds of students, most of them black and Latino, receive diplomas over the last three years who rarely attended class and were in no way near having legitimately earned the proper number of credits required for a high school diploma. We know that initiatives that would have required spending more money and time could have had very positive results although not quite as impressive as the fraudulent results our administration fabricated. However, they would have been legitimate.

Juan Gonzalez recently wrote two articles in which he exposed this malfeasance to the public, yet we still believe that Chancellor Fariña simply intends to let the issue die. I am acting on my own in writing to you, but a few of us are preparing a letter to the mayor and chancellor expressing our outrage. We plan to forward it to any organizations inside and outside of New York City who would listen and possibly apply a little bit of pressure. Maybe you could suggest some of these organizations.

Please excuse me for writing to you anonymously.  I’m sure that someone with your background can understand why I would want to do so at this point. We have already attached our names to various initiatives and we will do so again of this initiative shows promise.

Below are links to that Juan Gonzalez article.

Thank you in advance for any advice you might be able to offer.

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/gonzalez-protesters-aim-classes-boost-grad-rates-article-1.2202945

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/no-action-15-months-grade-fixing-john-dewey-hs-article-1.2205777

Should Business Leaders Be Put in Charge of Education?

During the last 15 years, elected officials of both parties decided that business leaders would be better equipped to transform our public education system and make it "globally competitive" than teachers and school administrators. Their reasoning: why not put education policy in the hands of the most successful people in the country- people like Bill Gates, the Waltons, Eli Broad, and Michael Bloomberg.

Not only did this policy show a profound misunderstanding of and lack of respect for what educators do, it gave our "business leaders" far too much credit. During the last 30 years, when these business leaders have been given free reign to reshape the American economy, we have seen:

Millions of jobs exported or outsourced.
CEO's enrich themselves to an unprecedented degree
Whole sectors of the economy- e.g. Hedge Funds- emerge which produce nothing and accumulate an unconscionable proportion of national wealth
Wages and incomes remain stagnant for the majority of American workers and families.
The housing market crash and millions of families lose their homes to foreclosure
Tens of millions of people be saddled with credit card and college tuition debt they may never be able to pay off.

In short, the rich got MUCH richer, the poor got poorer, and the middle class shrunk.

Do you really want to hand over  control of our public schools to people who enriched themselves while living standards for most people deteriorated?

High School Students in the Bronx Deserve a Full Array of School Teams

During the last year, an organization called NYCLetEmPlay has burst into the public eye by mounting a number of loud and effective protests demanding that high school students of color have the same access to athletic teams as students at the few remaining predominantly white public high schools. The organization, which began at a small South Bronx high school, has eloquently presented the plight of Black and Latino students, mostly from immigrant families, who have been unable to compete in the sports they are skilled in at the high schools they attend. 

   This problem is particularly acute in the Bronx, where almost of the borough's high school have been turned into campuses where 5 or 6 "academies" share a building, and where a large proportion of the students are from first or second generation immigrant families.  The Bronx today, whose population was once predominantly African American, Puerto Rican and West Indian is the site of four new  waves of immigration- one from West Africa, the other from Mexico, the third from the Dominican Republic, the fourth from South Asian nations.  Young people from these groups compose the majority of the student population at many Bronx schools and the sports they are passionate about should be available in the form of interscholastic teams to every student who wants to play on them. Every high school in the Bronx should have boys and girls soccer teams, to represent the African and Mexican students; boys baseball and girls softball, for the Dominican students, and  in the East Bronx, where the South Asian population is represented, schools should have boys and girls cricket.  Along with this, every high school should have a track team.

 This may not seem to be so much to ask for, but right now, these sports are not available to thousands of Bronx high school students who want to compete in them

 This is not only a terrible blow to their morale, it is depriving the best of them of opportunities for college scholarships, or  college admissions advantages, that they could gain though interscholastic competition in sports they are skilled in.

  The New York City Board of Education, and the New York City Council, needs to assure that this denial of rights and opportunities ends NOW. For students in the Bronx, and students in similar circumstances all around the city.

What High School Students Want

If you actually talk to high school students they want

Teachers who care about them

An opportunity to express themselves
Teams they can play on
Arts and music programs which allow their talents to blossom
School counselors they can talk to
Less tests and more alternative paths to graduation.
Opportunities to learn skills which lead directly to employment
Respectful treatment from instructional staff and security personnel
After school programs where they can study, play ball, do art work,
learn skills.
Lunch hours at a reasonable time which actually give them time to eat
Regularly scheduled physical education classes which have activities for students at all levels of physical fitness.

Classes which incorporate cultural traditions they are familiar with

How many of those things are they getting now?
You tell me