The Big Lies (Part Two)

Remember, when you hear the words of "educational reform" that they are carefully constructed newspeak. Who can argue with "Teaching for America," with "Leaving No Child Behind," with "Sharing a Common Core of Knowledge"? These are, of course, not policies but advertising slogans designed to convince you that those in power have your best intentions in mind. I'm here, again, to remind you, that maybe they don't. Part One

Teach for America is a "noble" idea

Even if we criticize Teach for America for "committing to doing nothing," surely there cannot be anything wrong with these eager young "volunteers." They are "passionate," "excited," "true believers" in educational possibility, right? And they bring - according to supporters - "teachers to classrooms which would otherwise have no teachers."

Only if you believe that teachers are "missionaries" whose job is to convert students into a second-class version of the missionaries themselves.

Because the purpose of Teach for America, according to its founders and funders, is twofold. First, to bring examples of societal success to the poor - this is why TFA claims to be superior to other uncertified teachers - because its corpsmembers are shining examples of "achievement" (we may want to bring back the "born on third base" thing here, but that's not the point). Second, to get this future "leadership cohort" interested in education so, I suppose, the next group of "powers that be" will not ignore schools.

But dig down a bit... these arguments are based on a couple of underlying assumptions: One, that poor children need to emulate rich people - Ivy League and other elite school graduates - in order to succeed. Two, that those graduates can represent some kind of role model for kids born without any of the resources of those who grow up like Wendy Kopp. And three, that a good way to train future educational leaders is to let them "play" traditional role teachers for two years.

(There's also the assumption that this is the best way to spend $42,000 per new 2-year-career teacher, a figure which includes TFA costs only, not teacher salaries or benefits or school district turnover costs.)

No wonder TFA "graduates" who pretend to be leaders, offer zero ideas as to how to change education for the better. And no wonder TFA teachers - even when they do raise test scores - have no impact at all on long-term student success.

Learning their place in the British Empire
Students in Govanhill, Glasgow, 1916

"As a country, I think we can attract more talented people to teaching by raising awareness of educational inequity and getting the public to understand from individual classrooms, schools, and cities that this is an issue that can be solved. When people think the issue can be solved, it becomes a moral imperative to be part of the solution," Kopp told The Economist.

So, Kopp is against systemic change (which might threaten her status), suggesting that only faith and belief are needed to convert the poor and unwashed into a non-threatening and minimally-contributing underclass. And she is filling our systems with "leaders" who believe deeply in this same British Imperial concept of economic colonialism.1 There is no shifting of resources or systemic changes which might enable minority success on a par with Kopp's social class. There are no tax changes, no funding changes, no teacher salary changes, no alteration in expectations to celebrate non-traditional skills. Just "moral imperative" to do 'just enough' so nothing will change.

The obvious fact is that, as with standardized testing, this "role model" approach is designed to ensure that students from poverty and/or differing backgrounds can never actually catch up. If forced to imitate their missionary mentors, their energy goes there rather than into moving forward along their own path. As Nigerians, Irish, Indians could never be "equal" British citizens within the Empire no matter how much cricket they played or tea they drank "properly," Teach for America celebrates no former students among its ranks of "graduate successes" after twenty years. The only people winning this game are the missionaries and their enriched leadership.

None of this implies evil intent among those who join Teach for America. Just like missionaries going off to run schools for Benjamin Disraeli in the Africa of 1875, most head into "the jungle" with the best of intentions - though surely there is at least anecdotal evidence that TFA ranks are now swelled with "CV Builders" (as the British Colonial Service was filled with "career builders"). But it does mean that the program itself is not a benign use of tax or charitable dollars, and it means that those encouraging the growth of the program don't have equality of opportunity in mind.

A Core Curriculum is essential

I don't know if E.D. Hirsch, Jr. is an evil guy or not. I know he is a bad historian and a really bad judge of what people need to know.

Likewise, I doubt most encouraging "Core Curriculum" efforts in the United States are bad people, but I know that their efforts will make education less effective, and less relevant.

The problem is, like most twistings of language, "Core Curriculum" sounds so positive. "The rigorous Core Knowledge curriculum provides school districts with a common instructional focus, and decreases learning gaps caused by student mobility. By providing a sequenced plan for coherent learning from grade-to-grade, Core Knowledge enhances shared planning among teachers and schools, which helps to ensure quality classroom experiences for all learners. The content-rich curriculum also provides a strong foundation of knowledge for success in high school and beyond."

This sounds so effectively European. One curriculum for all. Wherever students are, its all the same. You could move to a different school every day and still follow a purely sequential educational program, learning exactly what E.D. Hirsch, Jr. thinks is important to know.

Except, good European schools don't operate like that at all. Yes, there are national expectations of knowledge, often tested once, or twice, or three times by national exams, but the heart of successful schools lies in autonomy for learners and teachers regarding how to assemble that knowledge.

So, when Common Core advocates insist that Second Grade students "will" "Compare and contrast two or more versions of the same story [pdf] (e.g., Cinderella stories) by different authors or from different cultures," and "will" "By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories and poetry, in the grades 2–3 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range," they are buying into the very same destructive forces which leave students behind today via filtering. Students will operate as E.D. Hirsch's grandchildren might or they will, and their teachers will, be labelled as failures.

Why is a second grader "comparing and contrasting"? Because the Common Core is designed to preserve education as a self-contained hazing ritual for wealth and power maintenance. From the start we are preparing students to write the worthless five paragraph essay, so that those who comply best succeed best.

Similarly, I have my doubts that "Common Core" history standards will include a deep critical analysis of the sovereign governments overthrown by U.S. government actions, from Hawaii to Australia. Or that "Common Core" mathematics ("Tell and write time in hours and half-hours using analog and digital clocks." [pdf]) will explore non-Western concepts of numeracy.

OK. Let me put it this way. I believe that there are things we should all know. But making that list? Well, how do we do that? A Portuguese friend of mine insists that "no student should leave high school without knowing which nations their nation has colonized." I agree. E.D. Hirsch, Jr. does not. I believe there's value in every American student seeing a "canon" of films - from Birth of a Nation to Mississippi Burning, from Missing to 400 Blows, from The Caine Mutiny to A Few Good Men, but my guess is that E.D. Hirsch, Jr. disagrees.

Shouldn't every American student analyze the US overthrow of the Chilean government?

I'm assuming that others have "core ideas" on their lists that I don't think belong. It is the nature of the pluralist society which I think Hirsch hates.

But there is something else. These common core standards have timelines attached. In other words, they are just one more set of "grade level expectations" - and grade level expectations are the vile remnant of the Prussian system of filtering students so that all those not "raised in the right families" and those "not average" will fail.

That second grader who won't "compare and contrast"? They are a failure. Again, Hirsch's grandchildren win, the rest of our kids lose.

The fact is that there are decent ways of seeking out "common understandings." I'm a fan of the Irish Leaving Cert exams in many ways (go here, look at the 2010 Leaving Cert > English > Higher - a pdf download). (based on reading an interview with Seamus Heney - "'Early-in-life experience has been central to me.” Imagine yourself fifty years from now. You have achieved great success and public recognition in your chosen career. Write the text of an interview (questions and answers) about the experiences and influences in your youth that contributed to your later success.")

Finland has similarly effective evaluations of student achievement without implementing a play-by-play instruction manual in colonialism.

Final words... we can have common expectations, but the Common Core is more of the deadly same.

"Core" subjects are more important than other subjects

Those 'Pilgrim Fathers' of America had a very limited, obviously Calvinist, idea of what constituted "important learning." You had to read so you could read the prayer books. You had to count in order to build the mercantile (neo-capitalist) economy. You had to write in order to put down contracts. History - as it was told - was a way of enforcing views of religion and reality.

But music, art, the debate of history, the mathematics and celestial mechanics of the Jesuits, the core of learning in the Catholic world, were left out. They were unimportant - or worse - tools of the devil.

And this became the model of American education. Yes, higher maths crept in during the 20th Century as manufacturing and war required. Yes, science was introduced after Sputnik in 1958, though it remains remarkably controversial still. But we remain with our concept of "core subjects" and "extras."

And that destroys education.

It is, of course, within those "extras" that the human spirit lies. Why learn to read if you cannot read about the things which matter most to you? Why learn to write if you can not write a song? Why learn to count if you do not appreciate the value of what you are counting?

The reason we must abandon "core subjects" and embrace Passion-Based Learning is that today we give students absolutely no reason to learn anything. We have turned school into a series of chores with no purpose. Eight-year-olds hate books and reading because they've spent three years drilling in decoding - literacy is pointless effort, not a path to passions. Sixteen-year-olds hate mathematics because they've spent eleven years drilling with numbers, x-s and y-s - maths are totally irrelevant, not a link to a magical world of real and virtual construction.

Human knowledge is a real, vast, diverse thing, with many paths. Do not accept "conventional wisdom" and force all of your kids down a single, horribly boring, highway.

- Ira Socol

next: Unions and Pay

1 - "The vast majority of our 17,000 alumni are still under the age of 30, but we already have nearly 450 school leaders, several area and district superintendents (including Michelle Rhee in DC), and a number of entrepreneurs who have started some of the most significant reform organisations in the field. The KIPP charter school network was started by two alumni, The New Teacher Project was launched out of Teach For America and its president is an alum, and here's one a lot of people don't know—the IDEA schools network, founded by alumni in South Texas to serve migrant students"

Choosing Not to Create Change

I was on a panel Thursday morning in Minneapolis. One of the panelists was the director of Teach for America in Minneapolis/St. Paul. And he and I, well, yes, we clashed. The clash did not dominate the event, but I think it was there for all to see.

The topic was technology, so I'm still struggling to figure out why Daniel Sellers was there, beyond talking about videotaping teachers so they could "become more proficient."

But something Mr. Sellers said at the end, struck me. He agreed with my assessment that "schools are designed to fail students," noting that just two weeks ago in Washington he had heard someone say that, "you could not design a worse system." But then he insisted that was not where our efforts should go. "The kids we work with can't wait," he said.

So, instead of fighting to redesign the system, Mr. Sellers offers, hmmm, untrained teachers?

TFA collected $149 million last year. They expect to collect $189 million this year. They are an organization with constant access to the US Secretary of Education, the President of the United States, and powerful governors and mayors, and... they choose to do nothing.

Let's just point out that over the span 2007-2011 alone, the money spent on TFA - not on teacher salaries (which are paid by school districts) but on TFA operations alone, could have bought a million kids their choice of a laptop, an iPad, or a really smart phone.

But that's not the critical point, with all this access to power, Wendy Kopp, like Michelle Rhee, Sellers, et al, have deliberately chosen to not challenge the system at all.

Our schools are designed to filter students out and preserve the status quo wealth structure.
Millworkers, 1910, Knoxville, Tennessee

Though Wendy Kopp was 'well-enough endowed' as a 21-year-old at Princeton to be able to connect to Ross Perot and other billionaires, though Michelle Rhee had all the connections in the world, though the composite Teach for America corps of any year is born with more connections than Verizon makes each year, these people who are (the self-proclaimed) "so passionate about education" have chosen not to challenge anything about the educational system except the idea that teachers begin to do their best work after about three years in the classroom.

Why? Why, if they know that schools are a bad design, if they have all this collective power, have they chosen to take a billion and a half (or so) dollars over the past two decades and change nothing?

Because they cannot conceive of themselves being in the position of their students.

So I went back to this audio file, Michelle Rhee laughing about causing her 8-year-old students to bleed because she was so completely unready - as a first year TFA corpsmember - to be left alone with children.

Why was she laughing? Because, again, neither she nor Wendy Kopp, nor Daniel Sellers, nor anyone on the Teach for America board of directors, can imagine themselves, or their children or grandchildren, in that classroom with that TFA teacher.

Their children and grandchildren sit safely away, as they did as children, from these kinds of troubles. Which is why they choose missionary work rather than the political work of creating change.

That plus self-interest.

Because when the wealth elite of the US can convince the public that all our problems can be solved if only we stopped training teachers, and paid them less, and privatized schools, they have succeeded in preserving their position at the top of the steep American income-distribution pyramid for the rest of this century.

Wendy Kopp has done a great job for her 'home team" - those families who can afford to pay full tuition for their daughter at Princeton. She has diverted massive energy, and considerable money, away from things which might actually give a much higher proportion of students a chance at success. Wendy, Michelle, Daniel, they have all done their best to ensure that the status quo in American education - and thus wealth distribution - never changes.

Look carefully folks, this is the top-third of the pyramid

Unlike those of us who discuss abandoning age-based grades, or testing for compliance, or might use donor money to make schools available for parent-learning, or who might infuse schools with contemporary technologies which would allow for individualization and support for the widest range of learners, Teach for America speaks all day about high standards and classroom management and modeling a behavior system. They love tests (Mr. Sellers' profile is all about the test scores of his two-year teaching "career" where he claims to have, "essentially eliminat[ed] the achievement gap between his students and their peers in wealthier communities."). They prepare their teachers for traditional classrooms. They work every day to, essentially, keep the system the same because that is the system which has worked for themselves.

"Back then the prevailing notion—backed up by all of the research at the time—was that students' socioeconomic backgrounds determined their educational outcomes.," says Kopp in a depressingly unchallenging Mother Jones interview. And that is more true today then it was "back then" when Kopp began Teach for America. In fact, social mobility has slowed to a trickle, the funding gap between rich and poor classrooms has increased, and those Ivy League schools have become less and less economically diverse.

And through it all, Kopp and friends have offered us exactly what? By grabbing not just the media attention, but a huge amount of public cash as well, what they have offered us is protection for the status quo.

Some of us choose to try to create change. Some of us choose not to.

- Ira Socol

Barack Obama's Belief in the Least

On National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation on Thursday the topic was "How have discussions about race changed?"and Leonard Pitts, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Miami Herald, said this:

"I actually want to go back to something that Mr. Gergen said because I think he touched on something very important. He was talking about the fact that so many people take it for granted that African-American and Latino kids are ineducable, and that this feeling persists, even in the light of empirical proof that this is wrong. I think when he says that, what he does is he hits on sort of a very fundamental truth about why we still have trouble with race in this country. We tend to make our decisions and tend to base our perceptions on caricature, which is impervious to fact.

"I've been writing in my column recently, about the drug war and about the fact that the overwhelming majority of drug users and drug dealers in this country, statistically, are white. And it is so difficult to get that past peoples filters, because in our minds and the popular imagination the, quote, unquote, drug user and drug dealer are some black kids on a corner in Baltimore.

"That's not the common - or the most common picture. But we have these caricatures, these, sort of, narratives in our head that we are absolutely stuck on and invested in. And we got to get beyond those before were going to make any kind of progress."

"so many people take it for granted that African-American and Latino kids are ineducable, and that this feeling persists, even in the light of empirical proof that this is wrong"

I listened to this the day after the Obama Administration announced its Educational Innovation ("I3") grants, and after I spent the day working - albeit remotely - with the principals of the Albemarle County Public Schools on expanding access to learning.

The winners of the "innovation" grant program: Teach for America - which provides untrained teachers for America's most vulnerable minority students while pumping up the resumes of rich kids; KIPP Schools - today's recreation of the US "Indian School" program for the "retraining" of minority children; and Success for All - a scripted reading program devoted to teaching reading as a skill, not a life function;  all have a few things in common, from campaign contributions to rich folks behind them, but especially, that they are all emblematic of the Obama Administration's belief "that African-American and Latino kids are ineducable." 

If Obama thought differently he would not be pouring education funds into reductionist programs that no middle class or wealthy parent would accept for their child. If Obama thought differently he would be pouring funding into what we were doing in Virginia yesterday - dreaming about how to give all of our kids all that they need.

We can't, of course, be surprised. After the British election American friends were stunned that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg would make a deal with the Conservatives, who after all, differed from the Lib Dems on every policy position. I had to point out that "class trumps all," and that Clegg and David Cameron went to the same schools, grew up in the same social class. There's nothing in Clegg's life experience or education to connect him to any other social class than that which he shares with the Tories.

Similarly, as Susan Ohanian notes while quoting Frank Rich of The New York Times:

"Obama suffers from a cultural class myopia. He's a patsy for "glittering institutions that signified great achievement for a certain class of ambitious Americans." In his books, he downplayed the more elite parts of his own resume—the prep school Punahou in Hawaii, Columbia, and Harvard—but he is nonetheless a true believer in "the idea that top-drawer professionals had gone through a fair sorting process" as he had. And so, Alter writes, he "surrounded himself with the best credentialed, most brilliant policy mandarins he could find, even if almost none of them knew anything about what it was like to work in small business, manufacturing, real estate, or other parts of the real economy." Especially education." [italics are from Ohanian]

I listened to candidate Barack Obama speak in "The Circle" of Michigan State University's old campus in September 2008 and he told the students there that he had been "lucky" as they had been. "Lucky" to have this opportunity to attend a great institution of learning. And I loved that. Those of us who have had the chance are lucky. We are not "better," for the most part, we've had better chances.

But deep down Obama doesn't know that. He still sees himself working incredibly hard for his chances - which, yes, is true if you compare his life story to his presidential predecessor's - but he forgets that when he was woken up very early to do schoolwork with his mother, he was being tutored by one of the most brilliant and highly educated women in America. That he was surrounded by educated family. That he was off to an elite prep school when the bell rang. Even that he was living in a place where his mixed race status was much less an impediment to success than it might have been in many other places in 1970s America.

He only remembers his own effort. And that is all he sees when he "listens" about education. He assumes that the Ivy League (or Johns Hopkins) elites have "risen to the top" because they are the "best" - when, in fact, they are often simply the "luckiest."

The inevitable - essentially unavoidable - philosophical flip side of this is that non-Ivy Leaguers, non-elites, are less intelligent, that, in America's mythic Horatio Alger belief system - if you are poor it is because you are lazy and less worthy.

So, in Obama's world, those "African-American and Latino kids are ineducable." Thus they won't get fully trained teachers. They won't get the arts and music and creativity that Michelle Rhee thinks they don't deserve. They won't get tech-supported access to literature or reading for fun or reading for the information they're interested in. They'll get the scripted drill and kill teaching methods the United States has always used for kids society has determined have no chance to move ahead. They'll get the abusive colonialism of white role models and training in how to be white - which, I'm sorry President Obama, is NOT the only way.

In Virginia yesterday we were trying something different. In a diverse - racially and economically - school district we were hunting for the best ways to give it "all" to every kid. To find ways to let "everyone into the club." We were working on how to increase the training and skills of an already highly-trained teaching staff. We were looking for ways to add flexibility and student-centered learning to all phases of education. And everyone in the room was committed, equally, to every student. Of course this district's innovation grant applications were not funded.

Listen: I campaigned for Barack Obama. I voted, with delight, for Barack Obama. I appreciate what he's done for America in many ways. And Barack Obama has me in a bind. Can I really vote the other way in America when the only other choice is a political party so right-wing extreme it would be banned in most other "NATO" nations?

But Barack Obama is hurting America's most vulnerable school children because, in his heart, he does not see them as his equal, he does not believe in their potential. And that is a terrible, terrible thing.

Way back in 1969 there was a series of television ads: "In the "Give a Damn" campaign for the New York Urban Coalition, a black narrator suggests to white viewers: "Send your kid to a ghetto for the summer. Want to see the pool? C'mon. The kids clog up the sewer with garbage, open a hydrant . . . You don't want your kids to play here this summer? Then don't expect ours to."

Well, 41 summers later, Barack Obama, if you wouldn't send your children to a KIPP Academy. If you wouldn't accept an untrained teacher for your daughters. If you wouldn't want your kids - if faced with a learning problem - to be read a script which disregards their needs. Then don't send our kids to these schools either.

All of our children, even if they are poor, are black, are latino, are "disabled," even if they have "disinterested" or incompetent parents, deserve our very best. So please, let's stop "racing" - and let's stop dividing - and let's start creating opportunity.

- Ira Socol
if you agree - send this to The White House and send it to all of your local/state Democratic candidates.

Inexperience and Reproduction

Most of you know that at one point, in what I call a former life, I was a police officer in New York City. Luckily, I believe, I began my job there in the days before Rudy Giuliani twisted the concept of New York policing into what I tend to describe as a neo-fascist control system.

I started thinking about this as I read a New York Times article about policing in one part of Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. And I began thinking about education too. 

"Sure we have order, but at what price!'' - Milhouse in the Simpson's famous "Bart the Hall Monitor" episode

Three basic ideas come through in this NYT piece: One is the value of trained and experienced people when "society" (the dominant societal group definition) intersects with social groups which are somehow "different." The second is the nature of "difference" itself. The third - what actions can change?

For the first idea, the question is, can we bring differing peoples in without being colonialists? For the second the question is, can we have identity while still being part of a whole? For the third, what should we be investing in?

"The school is a police state. Students are afraid to sneeze. And I have you to thank."- Principal Skinner to Hall Monitor Bart Simpson, Separate Vocations 

  

  The Simpsons: Bart the Hall Monitor
- Watch more Funny Videos at Vodpod.

In both policing and education there is a constant tension between the desire of the powerful for "social reproduction" (Rudy Giuliani wanted New York to be "One City" where everyone behaved like an Upper East Side white conservative, KIPP wants to make sure all minority students know how to "act white") and the need to craft a new and better society. When this line is walked well it is usually by mixing a few common needs (laws against murder and robbery, a common core of knowledge) with a wide range of both group and individual adaptation. When I joined the NYPD it's 75 precincts (OK, OK, back then it was just 73) all operated very differently, based on community needs, and within even that "justice" and "policing" was a very individual things, built up by an apprenticeship system in which new cops learned the precinct and its people from experienced officers, and thus knew how to approach and deal with different individuals. "It ain't one city," a lieutenant once told me, "it's 8 million cities, plus all the commuters and tourists." Just like - standardized tests and educational statistics be damned - your school isn't one school, your class isn't one class: you have a community of individual learners.

If you are building a better city, or building a better generation, you do that by engaging and empowering individuals. If you are attempting social reproduction, you are concerned with enforcing common codes efficiently. If you are building a better city or a better generation you are adapting rules so that they work to support individual needs. If you are attempting social reproduction you are creating rules for the benefit of the power structure.
(White Plains Road in the 47 at right >>)

Now, the Giuliani idea, still embraced today (though routinely simultaneously denied) by the Bloomberg administration, was that social reproduction was the goal because society divides into superior and inferior sections, and the only way to improve society is to force the norms of the superior group onto the inferior group. Thus Rudy was deeply annoyed that officers in a neighborhood like the 47th Precinct would accept that kids would hang out on the street at night or might smoke pot outside. These behaviours just weren't acceptable on East 75th Street in Manhattan (at right >>).

We cops argued that we knew better. We knew the norms of our communities. We had learned them the hard way, by day-after-day and night-after-night of interacting with our neighbors. We knew that life was really hard for most of our community, and that most of our community wanted things safe and relatively peaceful, and we had no interest in antagonizing any of those people for picking on them by harassing them for - in a literal take from the Times article - crap like "spitting on the sidewalk." "Why would you want to bust their chops?" a veteran cop told me early on, "We want them on our side." "Never give a ticket to a guy if kids are in the car," another veteran told me, "The dad drives away cursing you and you just made two generations of enemies. Say "be careful" and leave them alone and you've made two generations of friends."

Of course we didn't think we were superior to the residents of our precincts, we realized that we were much like them, just luckier to be a few generations removed from the ghettoes ourselves.

In the same way good teachers know that there can be, for example, very different forms of story telling, reading, and writing. In the same way good teachers vary their lesson plans based on student needs and response. In the same way one evaluation method (say, a test, or homework completion) might be very telling about one student and completely irrelevant when applied to another.

Of course this requires training and knowledge. If you believe in social reproduction instead, enforcement or teaching is best carried out by automatons who will simply do as they are told - or, in reality - by these rookie cops in New York or the untrained Teach for America resume builders in schools.

"The United States Supreme Court established the legal basis for stops and frisks — reasonable suspicion of a crime — in the 1968 case of Terry v. Ohio. But the officer in that case had a far different level of experience than many of the officers walking the streets of Brownsville. He had patrolled the same streets of downtown Cleveland for 30 years looking for pickpockets and shoplifters.

"By comparison, the nearly 200 officers who operate in the neighborhood as part of Mr. Kelly’s “Impact Zone” program — flooding problematic crime pockets with a battery of police — are largely on their first assignment out of the academy.

"The data show the initiative is conducted aggressively, sometimes in what can seem like a frenzy. During one month — January 2007 — the police executed an average of 61 stops a day." - The New York Times

These rookie cops in Brownsville lack the veterans to surround them and say, "don't do that kid." Just as the Teach for America "corps" lack the experience in ed schools which might lead to systemic doubt. And both abuse with their consistency, especially abusing the most vulnerable.

But it works if you've been born into the winning class and want to make sure you stay there. Because it pretty much guarantees that those "on the bottom" cannot possibly catch up - they are starting behind, and by forcing them onto the same path trod by their better born competitors, you are keeping them behind.

Breaking the mold of society, breaking the traps minorities fall into requires new paths, and new power structures. In policing it requires police-community cooperation on goals and tactics, and it requires investment in things other than policing (if you read the Times story you might wonder why so many cops and so few locksmiths, intercom repair people, and housing corridor cleaners, for example). In schools it requires learner-teacher collaboration which finds the best way for kids to get where they need to go.

But both require individual vision, and both require massive training and hard experience, and "shortcuts" are just an excuse for not doing the right thing.

- Ira Socol

Who's Behind the Curtain?

I ended up in two big educational debates this past week. One was about "clickers" - those "Classroom Response Systems" that are increasingly infiltrating our classrooms. The other, about Washington, D.C. Schools' Chancellor Michelle Rhee and "the reform agenda for schools" coming from America's financial elites.

In these debates I was abrupt, and cruel (sorry, David Brooks, I know you are only doing your job keeping Wall Street Republicans reading The New York Times, I shouldn't have gotten personal - and a very big apology to Roger Cohen, another NYT columnist, who I blamed in bizarre mix up), and perhaps, in a few moments, coherent and convincing. I read wonderful stuff from passionate people too.

But stepping back, I want to bring both these debates together, because, in the end, they are both about power, about who gets to control education in the United States (and thus who the "winners" in education will be), about who is pulling those levers from behind the curtain.

Michelle Rhee is riding the broomstick, but it is a different Wizard of Oz image I'm interested in...

We have two tidal events occurring here, but these are not natural tides, they are invented ones. And when people seek to create tides, I think we should always ask why.

So, in a higher educational establishment which, for example, has refused to even load their computers with free universal design software technologies, much less invest in those systems which might transform education for a vast array of students now failed by the system, we see broad adoption and massive spending on "clickers."

And, in a climate of broad K-12 system failure, with hundreds of fascinating alternative success examples from around the world, the US media establishment (Disney, Time-Warner, GE, Viacom, NYT Company) has declared one "leader" - a leader with no measurable accomplishments and a confrontational style which seems to drive almost everyone away - as education's messiah.

hero worship

But let's start with the "clickers." Michael Bugeja, a friend and technology in education sparring partner (and the Director of the Greenlee School of Journalism at Iowa State University) wrote a piece this past week in the Chronicle of Higher Education - a paid publication I rarely read and a paid website I rarely visit. His commentary, Classroom Clickers and the Cost of Technology, tracked the adoption pattern of these one-way communication systems on university campuses.

"Marketers seem to know our business better than we know theirs. That was apparent a few years ago, when publishers introduced infrared clickers bundled with specific textbooks or series of textbooks. In a class of 400 students, each of whom would spend $40 for a clicker, many institutions paid for the purchase and/or installation of receivers, in effect helping to sell the company's products. Companies suggested clickers for multiple-choice questions based on a book's content, an easy adaptation from previous instruction booklets with answer keys — not exactly innovative, but cost-effective, making books appear interactive overnight."

Bugeja - who I often debate regarding technology adoption in the classroom - but whom I deeply respect on the subject, even when we disagree - is concerned with the cost/benefit calculations behind the "clicker decision" as well as the key question of who is pulling the strings.

I have been "clear" about my position on clickers - calling them "Instant Anachronisms" and "Coercive Technology." Even when I see some possible benefit - bad lectures may be marginally better with clickers than without - I regard this technology as "insufficiently transformational" - that is, not worth the costs in a nation where students already can not afford higher education.

But the key issue here is "why"? Who has pushed this technology, and to what end. I joined in a fascinating debate on this at the blog of Derek Bruff, a math professor and director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, and major "clicker advocate). If you follow that debate, you'll see where it leads. Why is Turning Technologies selling clicker receivers cheaply? Is it because it hopes to tie Vanderbilt's faculty to the textbooks of its partners? Those partners? Thomson Learning, Glencoe McGraw-Hill, Dell Computers, Steljes Group. Oh. The primary distributors of the $150 textbook are "giving away" (sort of) systems which will seemingly guarantee the continued sale of $150 textbooks.

Those marketing Universal Design Technologies - Freedom Scientific, Text-Help, Kurzweil, etc, can't afford to "persuade" universities this way, but Thomson Learning (or is it Cengage now?) sure can. And thus we find "clickers" everywhere, and struggle to discover transformational technologies on our campuses.

Dr. Bugeja would want me to suggest that we always follow these trails. And when I sat in a meeting with Google's Jeff Keltner regarding Google Apps for Education this semester, I heard all the questions. Why would Google give away a campus email and collaboration system (stripped of the advertising which is Google's only real revenue stream) for free? What's the catch? Keltner (as Google execs tend to be) was blunt. People who use their tools tend to use their search engine and, quote, "we're pretty good at monetizing that." And, "we see students as future leaders, if they become comfortable with our tools now, they'll tend to use them later in their lives."

Yes this is insidious seduction, it sure is, but let's consider this cost/benefit balance. What does your university (or school) spend on email? If that email system was free, could you not raise tuition? Could you hire more faculty? Could you put WYNN on more campus computers? But here's the thing, Google will seduce, but they won't bribe. They won't hand a toy to a faculty member at a conference which transforms that prof into "a techie" in the eyes of his or her peers. They won't give out free books either. So their "leverage" in campus decision making is limited. As we may deduce from observing the number of campuses spending their own and student dollars on "clickers" vs. the number cutting costs by adopting Google Apps for Education.

The Universal Design Tech companies? Without the profits from 700% textbook markups, or the alternative revenue stream of Google, they struggle to bribe or seduce. Even when their products are free, they remain of little interest to universities - despite, well, what's the cost/benefit relationship there?

Which brings us back to Michelle Rhee. Who's marketing her, and why?

Rhee is part of a broad push by America's true "old guard" to ensure that education doesn't really change. The same folks at Harvard and Penn who offer our minorities the lowest educational expectations possible through Teach for America and KIPP Academies, are selling you Rhee, and lowered expectations for all schools - except of course, for the schools attended by the children of those elites.

There is a reason the television networks and New York Times and Time-Warner love TFA and Rhee. These organizations are run by people with power, and by people who would rather not share power.

So they have adopted the ultimate in reductionist standards. "If we had even decent education - or even enough teachers of any kind - in most of the places it places its students, then [TFA] would be a step down," a commenter on this blog said yesterday. Right, so here's the standard: Teach for America, or Michelle Rhee's DC school system, is better than not having schools at all.

Rhee's own words: '"People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job."'

No, she doesn't give a crap. She wants her African-American students prepared for the lowest possible jobs on the economic ladder. That way (perhaps, in her unconscious thinking) they will not threaten the success of her small minority group - a group which has found itself accepted by the powers-that-be because it isn't big enough to be threatening.

Of course I have a different view of reading than Rhee, and of language itself. First, I know that there are lots of ways "to read," and second, I know that when children are inspired to learn about things, they tend to want to learn to read (in one form or another). As opposed to the Joel Klein-Michelle Rhee-KIPP Academy-George W. Bush notion that reading is a skill which should be learned outside of the context of interest-based education.

But then, my goal is opportunity, and my belief system - not being market-capitalist in nature - doesn't think an underclass is a good idea (to hold down upward pressure on wages).

Rhee is not important, of course. She's racist in her expectations and racist in her strategies, she's not an educator at all in the real meaning of that term, she talks a great deal but has little actual impact in her job. But Rhee being hailed as the educational messiah is important.

Like those who favor TFA solutions - the Rhee idea is to NOT change US society. Yes, we'll make impoverished minority groups marginally more competent - thus improving profits at the top and reducing the cost of the dole. But no, we will not empower those groups by empowering their children. Teaching them to be creative 'will have to wait' (forever). Teaching them to find their own learning styles - thus accepting cultural change instead of social reproduction - is dangerous (as it always is for those at the top).

We lower expectations. We test meaningless things (Time: "The ability to improve test scores is clearly not the only sign of a good teacher. But it is a relatively objective measure in an industry with precious few. And in schools where kids are struggling to read and subtract, it is a prerequisite for getting anything else done." Really? Anything? You can't teach the physics of a bouncing ball to a non-reader, or the love of literature?). We strip time away from what is precious to children and force them into chanting. We enforce white majority cultural norms and deny identity. We argue that teachers should be paid according to the "short term gain" rules that worked so well for traders at Citigroup and AIG.

And this is all brought to you by the wealthiest people, and the largest old-line corporations in the country. Because, I'll say it again, they have no incentive to allow those below them to succeed.

Follow the money my friends. When information flows freely to as many people as possible, Google makes money. When information is expensive, those who sponsor "clickers" make money. When the kids in Washington, D.C. schools fail, there are fewer challenges to the children of New York Times and Time editors for slots in Ivy League schools. When Washington, D.C. schools focus on "the basics" students from there will not beat out the son of a GE exec for a spot at Carnegie-Mellon.

When you see invented trends, pull back the curtain, see who's pulling the levers. It is important.

- Ira Socol

Why Michelle Rhee is dangerous to children

I don't know why I read David Brooks' New York Times column. He is that kind of faux intellectual who mistakes travel for observation, and reading for learning, and no matter what he discusses, his conclusions drive me wild.

Today I read his love letter to "educators" Joel Klein (of New York City's school system) and Michelle Rhee (of Washington, DC). You can tell by Brooks' tone that he really wants President-Elect Obama to pick Michelle Rhee (or "Ms. Merit Pay" as we might call her) as Secretary of Education, though he is nervous about coming out and saying it, lest his dreams not come true.

Read this paragraph: "On the one hand, there are the reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, who support merit pay for good teachers, charter schools and tough accountability standards. On the other hand, there are the teachers’ unions and the members of the Ed School establishment, who emphasize greater funding, smaller class sizes and superficial reforms."

Wow. Here's what Brooks is in favor of, the very same system that has worked so well for Wall Street this year, that "market-based solution," that has caused us to spend about $550 billion dollars to save Brooks' Manhattan and Connecticut friends and leave us with no money to save ten million manufacturing jobs.

"Merit Pay" - which brings to education the same "bonus for short term gain" strategy that enabled AIG, Bear Sterns, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, et al, to somehow misplace $7 trillion. we are already awash in the nonsense of "Scientific Research in Education" which provides studies that prove that if you do this this month the results on a perfectly matched test will improve next month (so what if the kid drops out five years later and hates reading for his lifetime?).

"Tough Accountability" - which means we offer educators incentives to teach to the test, to fake student results, to lie about what is going on in their schools, to limit what the forms of inquiry and education which are happening on in their schools. This is the same incentive system which encouraged Wall Street bond raters to claim everything was "AAA" and local real estate appraisers to claim that every house was worth double its value the previous year.



Michelle Rhee is also a graduate of the worst bit of in-nation colonialism currently being practiced, the Teach for America program. The basic assumption behind TFA is that teaching is so easy, any rich kid can do it with six weeks of preparation, but the basic philosophy is that if only poor kids had rich white kids to model themselves after, they'd be fine. No need to change education, no sir, changing education would (to use Brooks's words) be "superficial. Let's insist that the kids change instead - change into, well, yes, people just like David Brooks - white, male, wealthy, and comfortable at a cocktail party on Fifth Avenue.

And Rhee believes in compliance. It has not mattered whether schools "work" or not in DC, what matters is that her administrators follow her rules.

Yup, that's the "reform we need." That's all much less superficial than, say, funding education as if it was a national priority, or paying beginning and experienced teachers in a way which suggests the value of all the education they need to be good at their jobs (thus upping status and helping recruiting and retention - would we have gotten more out of our money if teachers had been paid like bankers and brokers this decade, and vise-versa?), or bringing global technology into our schools, or decreasing class size to allow for greater individualization, or providing better support for parents so they could spend more time with their children, or even rethinking when we teach what we teach (consider Scandinavia and literacy).

Yes, Mr. Brooks, superficial indeed.

Now I don't really know Michelle Rhee. But I do know that the depths of the challenges faced by the District of Columbia cannot be solved by schools alone, nor by the application of "market-based solutions" to a fundamental function of our society. And I know what Michelle Rhee has come to represent - another generation lost while conservatives try to prove that government doesn't - and shouldn't - work.

And I think our children, and our future, are too important for this kind of nonsense.

- Ira Socol

for reasons I can't quite explain, Roger Cohen's name was in this blog post rather than David Brooks's. While this post isn't really fair to David Brooks either, blaming another - unrelated, New York Times columnist, was surely bizarre and very wrong. I apologize to all.

Doctors for America

Many of those in poverty in America really need better access to medical care.

"At Doctors For America, we are working with a great sense of urgency to build the movement to eliminate medical inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort. We recruit aggressively to attract outstanding recent college graduates of all majors and career interests to commit two years to serve as doctors in urban and rural communities, and we invest in the training and professional development necessary to ensure their success as doctors in our highest-poverty communities. Our doctors, also called corps members, go above and beyond traditional expectations to lead their patients to significant health improvement, overcoming the challenges of poverty despite the current capacity of the health care system."1

"We have found that the most successful doctors in our communities are those who operate as a successful leader would in any context. They set big goals for where patients will be physically at the end of the year, invest patients and others in working hard to realize that vision, plan purposefully and work relentlessly with a sense of urgency to maximize medical services in pursuit of the vision, and continuously increase effectiveness to reach the vision in spite of the multiple challenges and obstacles along the way. Knowing this, we carefully select those individuals who we believe have demonstrated strong leadership and therefore have potential for success in the examination room and the operating room."2

In order to create these new doctor/leaders: "We operate rigorous five-week summer preparation institutes in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, and Phoenix. Through opportunities for practice, observation, coaching, and study — as well as careful planning and thoughtful reflection — corps members develop the foundational knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed to be highly effective beginning doctors."3

"Corps members (during that five week summer program) provide medical services to patients for approximately two hours each day, under the supervision of experienced doctors. For the first hour, most corps members work directly with four to five patients with significant health issues, which also builds the doctor's skills for patient interaction. For the second hour, corps members take charge of an operating theater, which also builds the doctor's skills in delivering the highest levels of medical care."4

Are you excited now? Your child just got sick, are you ready to rush them to your nearest Doctors for America hospital?

Well, you might be, assuming that your choice is no medical care for your child. Assuming that the real doctors in your community won't take patients on Medicaid or won't take uninsured patients. When your choice is bad or nothing, people will often choose bad. But imagine that you run a hospital in the kind of neighborhood where people like this live and work:

Stephen Bollenbach Retired Co-Chairman & CEO Hilton Hotels Corporation Don Fisher Founder & Chair Emeritus Gap Inc. Lew Frankfort Chairman & CEO Coach, Inc. David Gergen Professor of Public Service Director of the Center for Public Leadership Harvard University Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies Princeton University Leo J. Hindery, Jr. Managing Partner InterMedia Partners Walter Isaacson (Chair) President & CEO The Aspen Institute David W. Kenny Chairman & CEO Digitas Inc. Wendy Kopp Chief Executive Officer & Founder Teach For America Sherry Lansing CEO Sherry Lansing Foundation Sue Lehmann Management Consultant Michael L. Lomax, Ph.D. President & CEO United Negro College Fund Stephen F. Mandel, Jr. Managing Director Lone Pine Capital Anthony W. Marx President Amherst College James M. McCormick Founder, CEO & President First Manhattan Consulting Group Richard S. Pechter Alumnus, Teach For America Maxine Clark Retired Chairman, DLJ Financial Services Nancy Peretsman Managing Director Allen & Company, LLC Alma J. Powell Chair, America's Promise Alliance Paula A. Sneed (Vice Chair) Retired Executive Vice President Kraft Foods, Inc. Sir Howard Stringer Chairman & Group CEO Sony Corporation Lawrence H. Summers Charles W. Eliot University Professor Harvard University G. Kennedy (Ken) Thompson Chairman, President & CEO Wachovia Corporation John Thompson Chairman & CEO Symantec Corporation Gregory W. Wendt Retired Partner Goldman Sachs & Co. Lawrence J. Stupski Chairman Stupski Foundation Senior Vice President Capital Research Jide Zeitlin (Treasurer) Company Founder and Chief Executive Bear Build-A-Bear Workshop [the Teach for America Board] 5

In that case, your hospital probably hires people who have actually been to medical school, who actually have more than five weeks of training. (In World War II US Navy corpsman went through four months of training.6) In your neighborhood's hospital you probably wouldn't imagine that because, say, a person ran the Sony Corporation or was the grandchild of someone who ran the Sony Corporation and could thus get into a prestigious US university, that she or he could instantly be a great doctor due to leadership skills. You would expect more. You would demand more.

The value of great teachers

Who does more damage? The bad doctor or the bad teacher? Well, I'm not sure. I'm not sure in terms of individuals and I'm not sure in terms of society. I have seen great teachers save the lives of students, including, perhaps, mine. I have seen bad teachers destroy the lives of students - lots and lots of students.

But because I am not sure I am demonstrating how much I value the role of teacher. How much I respect that as a profession. I know that being a great teacher, even a good teacher, is incredibly difficult. It takes massive commitment, a tremendous knowledge base regarding how humans learn and develop, significant content knowledge, a lot of observation, and, in almost every case, substantial experience. (I've had a number of jobs in my life. In every case I might have thought I was doing a great job in my first year, but by my third year I realized that had not actually been true.)

There is the fact that in Cuba teachers are among the highest paid people in society. That suggests something about the value that nation puts on education. In the US we value bookies above all others. No profession earns more than those who place bets on the stock markets and other exchanges for others. Those in charge of preparing the next generation for our collective future? Even when we pay then decently, we complain about it, and whine about their amount of "time off."

We don't value teachers. And Teach for America's people - well, they despise teachers. Hell, anyone born rich can be a teacher the way they see it, or at least anyone who can get through Harvard or the University of Michigan. Teaching requires no particular skill set, at least no more of one than it might take to learn a hobby. It is easier (and faster) according to TFA, to learn to teach than to drive, or become the grill person at McDonald's.

This hatred of teaching is rooted in a belief in American education as missionary work. Skills, individual capabilities built from experiences, knowledge base, none of that matters. The best missionaries are the truest believers, and TFA people? They are true believers. "Just behold us, for God loves us, and we are blessed," they say, followed by, "Just act like us, and you too might be eligible for (at least a tiny bit of) God's love." An understanding of who they are teaching? Not important. An understanding of pedagogy? Equally ridiculous. Attention to special needs? Who cares. We believe and we offer them the word. And when we measure them our way we find that they are "improved" above the jungle condition we have otherwise consigned them to.

While poor kids in America's poorest communities get Teach for America, these leaders of society have something different in mind for their own children. the same weekend that The New York Times praised Teach for America, the paper's Real Estate section said this about Scarsdale, New York's schools, "The school system remains tough to beat and is clearly doing all it can to stay that way. SAT averages run more than 100 points higher than the nation’s, and the level of the high school curriculum is such that this year the faculty has begun phasing out Advanced Placement classes and replacing them with a more demanding homegrown version."7

I wondered if the students of TFA teachers outperformed the students of Scarsdale teachers - where teacher pay averages six figures, or 40% higher than even the communities which surround it in Westchester County. The Times called teacher preparation programs "diploma mills," but I guess somehow those "mills" are working - according to the same newspaper - for the children of the Times's editors and their friends and anyone else who can afford a school district with an average house price around $1.4 million (US).

Of course, as you'd expect with the medical analogy I began with, the higher the needs of the students involved, the worse Teach for America hurts: Linda Darling-Hammond: "It is common for these teachers to create a setting in which the kids are under very, very tight control. Special education students and non-native English speakers had the lowest academic growth rates when taught by under-qualified teachers."8

Maybe every 22 or 23-year-old university graduate I've met is a moron compared to the geniuses chosen for TFA, but perhaps, just perhaps, five weeks isn't enough for anyone to learn everything one might need to know about second language acquisition, about the range of cultures in American classrooms (a range not likely to be encountered on the campuses most TFA recruits come from), plus Aspergers, plus ADHD, plus dyslexia, plus dyscalculia, plus CAPD, plus Autism, plus EBD, plus the spectrums of all of these "issues" and the deep variety within each... well, we can't really expect these five-week wonders to do positive things for every student. I think it is a crime that many teacher preparation programs devote only one or two semester courses to the kinds of special needs students who will make up between 25% and 50% of many classrooms. And TFA with just five weeks for the entire study of education? I'm guessing those "teachers" might be missing a few facts about human difference and how those differences mesh with learning needs.

Lowering that bar

I had an email debate about 18 months ago with a dean at an Ivy League university. He's a big TFA fan. Many of the Ivy League elite are. He's not a fan of teacher preparation programs. But then, his university doesn't offer one. They don't really want to think about what teachers need as they enter the classroom, or about how students learn. They don't want to do the work of preparing better, or better equipped teachers. They, like Teach for America, want to create "leaders." Oh good.

I said to the dean, "It seems to me that an MSU teacher ed student spends almost as much time in high needs schools before certification - before beginning to teach - than TFA teachers spend in total." And he told me that was, "probably true," but MSU wasn't 'the norm.' "Wouldn't that make them at least somewhat better prepared?" I asked. He said, "TFA teachers do better than other badly trained or unqualified teachers." Yup. You can't possibly set the bar much lower than that.

Outside of the Republican Party ("You can't expect government to work!" "You can't expect leadership to be competent!") and the TFA-related KIPP Foundation, no one in America sets the bar for success lower than Teach for America.

Here is the key phrase in Teach for America's Mission Statement: "...the training and professional development necessary to ensure their success as teachers in our highest-poverty communities."9 Obviously that is not the "the training and professional development necessary to ensure their success as teachers" in the schools of those who run Teach for America. Those schools, those students, require something more. Of course those schools are filled with wealthy white kids.

Because here's the other key phrase: "The most rigorous study on Teach For America shows that corps members are having a greater impact on students than typically would be expected in a year."10 Than typically would be expected. Yes, they're doing better than a bunch of rich white elitists might expect from a bunch of stupid minority kids. Not - of course - what they'd expect from their kids, but, remember, we're devoted to the idea of "good enough for these types of children."

Let's go back to the hometowns of that TFA Board. Want to become a teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts? "Teachers are required to have a Bachelor’s degree and to hold appropriate Massachusetts teacher licensure/certification."11 Stamford, Connecticut has certification requirements and approved course lists. Tom's River, New Jersey says, "All applicants must possess a NJ LDTC Certification."12 Funny, rich white kids deserve trained, certified teachers. Of course, because rich white districts want to compare their student successes with those of the best districts in the nation. TFA and KIPP don't need trained, certified teachers. Of course they only compare themselves to the worst schools they can find.

This is colonialism at its worst. Imperial reductionism. Just as Iraqis should shut up about conditions created there by American idiocy because, "Saddam was worse!" and Black Rhodesians in the old British Empire were told to shut up because life was, "worse in the Belgian Congo," the students (and parents) offered TFA and KIPP are told to shut up because, "otherwise you get nothing at all."

Social Reproduction

TFA and KIPP embrace these very low expectations because those behind these organizations believe in elite divinity. As inheritors of wealth and privilege in America's Protestant mindset they believe that they must colonize and convert America's poor communities. Scratch the surface of the TFA and KIPP argument and you'll find these assumptions: (1) In order to become truly useful in America minority groups must become as much like white Protestant Americans as possible. (2) There are two ways to speed this conversion, through the forced compliance of repeated ritual (the KIPP school), and through appearing before these poor folks as magnificent white leaders who the poor can emulate (Teach for America).

We shouldn't be surprised. Both these efforts are standard colonial liberalism. Yes, the kind of liberalism associated with Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton and Lawrence Summers. Those born rich and powerful who will come down from their summer places to toil and sweat on behalf of the poor, who will give them the gifts of white culture, who will teach them to dress and speak and act in ways unthreatening to those in power. These people could put their efforts into the struggle to alter the circumstances of poverty - re-writing the tax code or equalizing education funding or eliminating the affirmative-action-for-the-rich which dominates Ivy League admissions and corporate hiring - but those are tough things to sell. It is so much easier to givet charity to the poor than to grant them rights.

Alternatives

None of this is to imply that I think America's teacher preparation programs are good. In most cases, they are not. Nor is it to imply that I do not believe in alternative certification programs, I do.

Teacher preparation programs must get much better. They must begin by revolting against the tyranny of a political system that destroys their ability to individually support learners. They must also revolt against a research funding system which defines success by measurements of industrial processing. Then they must help their future teachers to understand the vast, individually-variable world of cognition and child development. They must help them know the fullest range of possible learning routes. And they must help them to know how to fight against the ways in which schools demean and limit children.

And then they must demonstrate it. Every teacher preparation course needs to operate via universal design and differentiated instruction techniques. You can't not model these structures in every course and think that you'll ever change perceptions and practice. And every teacher preparation institution should be running at least one school which demonstrates what is possible, and must stop relying on student teaching apprenticeships which reproduce the system that we know does not work.

And every teacher preparation program must also reach out. If Teach for America actually wanted to improve the schools it is involved in, it would offer alternative routes to certification via community-located teacher training to those from those communities who have proved their commitment, but because of opportunity limitations are now working in the schools driving busses, or serving lunches, or working as classroom para-pros. Yes, I know, if they did that, Gregory's grandson wouldn't have this great line on his resume that proved how much he cared about the poor. But then, the school might have a twenty or twenty-five year teacher, a teacher who would get better and better with support and experience. And a teacher who would actually prove possibility to the children of that community.

It might also be important to note that if 5% of the endowments of the universities at the top of the contributors to the TFA corps was spent annually on actually trained, certified teachers, about 25,000 teachers costing about $150,000 per year could be added to America's schools (in other words, they could do it with a bit of their investment income). And they might be able to pay off the student loans of those teachers as well. In other words, the same people most in love with the TFA idea could solve the problem instantly, if they were willing to make a sacrifice. But that would be, a sacrifice. Instead, they choose the minimalism of charity.

So, the kind of people who now think Teach for America is "good enough for those kids," could be giving all kids the same things they want for their own rich kids. They could. But if you try to point that out they will scream at you, "This is all that's possible right now! And you want to take it away and leave the kids with nothing!" They will never actually start to discuss other ways of using the money which they control. This is important: Teach for America builds dependence - as all charity does. Re-directing resources can, on the other hand, alter the social order, and that has damn little appeal for those who currently sit at the top.

If it is a problem, it demands an actual solution

Teacher training in the United States is not good. It is almost universally conducted in ways that reinforce traditional practice - the kind that doesn't work. In-service teacher education in the United States is not good. There is not the time allotted, nor the money, nor is it situated in place and adapted for each teacher. Teacher pay - and thus teacher recruitment - in the United States is not good. If you want to attract and hold the best you must combine great pay (at least in capitalism-worshiping America) and good working conditions and a bit of status, and we rarely offer any of that. School funding in the United States is awful. The schools with the highest needs consistently have the least money, a system which guarantees a lack of social mobility.

With all those problems, Teach for America and its cheerleaders will tell you that the best solution all of their money and power can deliver is a bunch of untrained bright college graduates sent to be teachers of poor kids for two or three years.

"They" could do different things. "They" - those who fund and run TFA - could fight for real change, or they could use their own wealth and the wealth of the endowments of their favorite universities to fund real change. "They" - those young academic stars who join TFA - could volunteer or accept VISTA-like positions in schools across America, working in classrooms with small student groups, serving as one-to-one student support, providing curriculum extensions in schools which do not have a variety of extra programs, painting and repairing the buildings, driving students without dependable parental transportation to charter schools which might be better individual fits, watching playgrounds, supporting teacher and classroom technology use. But none of that would fit the political or social needs of those involved in TFA. Those actions might not be proof of their inherent superiority, and those actions might not look the same on a resume.

But I think there are better solutions. Just as I know that KIPP is "just good enough for the poor" because Greenwich, Connecticut's schools don't operate that way, I know that TFA is "just good enough for the poor" because Scarsdale, New York doesn't pick teachers that way. And I just don't believe anything that actually encourages the gap between rich and poor in America to be any sort of solution at all.

I think that Teach for America hurts the most vulnerable students in America, not just because it asserts that untrained short-term teachers are "good enough," but because it pretends the easy solution. A solution without sacrifice for the haves in the United States.

But if you feel differently, I'll happily sign you up for the nearest Doctors for America hospital. Trust us. We're bright, we're committed, we've got a bachelors degree in economics - I'm sure your operation will go just fine. Or if not that, perhaps you'd like to drive across the bridge built by our new Engineers for America. You could get there by flying with Pilots for America.

If it's good enough for you to recommend it, shouldn't you risk your life, our your child's life, to prove your point?

- Ira Socol

1 - http://www.teachforamerica.org/mission/mission_and_approach.htm with a few words changed.
2 - http://www.teachforamerica.org/corps/teaching/becoming_exceptional_teacher.htm with a few words changed.
3 - http://www.teachforamerica.org/corps/training.htm#institute_overview with a few words changed.
4 - http://www.teachforamerica.org/corps/training.htm#institute_overview with a few words changed.
5 - http://www.teachforamerica.org/about/our_boards.htm
6 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_Corpsman
7 - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/realestate/18livi.html
8 - http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2005/4/15/studyRaisesQuestionsAboutTeachForAmerica
9 - http://www.teachforamerica.org/mission/mission_and_approach.htm without changes.
10 - http://www.teachforamerica.org/corps/teaching/becoming_exceptional_teacher.htm without changes.
11 - http://www.cpsd.us/HR/Emp_Overview.cfm
12 - http://www.trschools.com/administration/employmentops.asp

Blog Alert! On BBC-Ouch! Goldfish sums up this year's Blogging Against Disabilism Day.
at Schooling Inequality there's a look at some of the recent blogosphere Social Justice debates.
Paul Hamilton on Flypaper. Lon Thornburg on the new text-to-speech phone from Kurzweil.
Karen Janowski's essential Thought for the Day. James Hollis has a great new IWB application.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

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