What Matters Most

This is an article written by Randi Weingarten that was published in last Sunday's NYT in a paid piece.  In it, she refers to a recently released report by Common Good (attached and at http://cgood.org/index-1150.html) which is summarized as follows on the Common Good web site:

At the request of Common Good, eight New York City public school teachers volunteered to keep diaries of their workdays in order to illustrate how school bureaucracy impacts teaching.  The following report summarizes and excerpts those diaries.

As the report states, “In recent years, great strides have been made by the New York City  Department of Education to de-regulate the City’s public school system and provide greater autonomy and authority to school leaders ….  While these initiatives are encouraging, as our study indicates, more changes are needed to reduce the adverse effects of bureaucracy on the City’s public school teachers.”

While I'm skeptical of a report that's based on a grand total of eight teachers over 10 school days, let's look at the five major points it makes:

 

1. Student Discipline: Teachers spent a significant amount of time attending to disruptive students. Current practices seem to be burdensome, ineffective or non-existent, and in need of improvement.
2. Assessments and Testing: Due to the time of year that entries were completed, preparing, administering, and grading tests was a common occurrence for several teachers. The teachers described testing as necessary but that it took too much time away from instruction.
3. Mandated Teaching Procedures: The teachers documented several required teaching procedures related to the classroom environment and curriculum. Some reported these as onerous and/or counter-productive to teaching and some questioned whether these were mainly a means to check up on teachers.
4. School Management: Teachers recorded school-wide practices that call into question how effectively their schools are being managed, such as numerous classroom interruptions, changes in schedules, and absent or unresponsive administrators.
5. Paperwork: Teachers completed all different kinds of paperwork throughout their days. Several characterized the paperwork as time-consuming and burdensome while others questioned its overall legitimacy.

Here are my quick comments on each:

1) I'm 100% in agreement on the importance of creating a safe, orderly environment -- without it, learning is virtually impossible.  Creating it is hard -- but as I've seen in countless cases, it CAN be done with a unified, well-organized, perpetual effort by EVERY adult in the school.

 

2) and 3) Here's what Randi has to say about these two points in her article:

One teacher wrote: "This situation exemplifies what education in New York City has become - preparing for tests, testing, and grading tests. What has happened to teaching?"

 

Mandated teaching requirements also created some frustration for the teachers - especially the veterans. "Sometimes I feel like I'm a robot regurgitating the scripted dialogue that's expected of us day in and day out," one writes. Another teacher restates her day despondently: "Teach mini-lesson...Student raises hand with question. Tell him to put hand down. Students not allowed to ask questions during mini-lesson. Feel guilty."

I disagree.  As I've written many times before, testing and well-designed curricula like Success for All are not a barrier to good teaching, but an essential part of it -- as well as managing and evaluating a school and the entire system.  Also, when an alarmingly high % of Randi's members are utterly failing to educate, no wonder she's leading the charge against testing, which of course exposes which teachers, principals and schools are failing to do their job.

 

4) I'm in total agreement that WAY too many schools are poorly managed and that teachers are treated poorly.  In such cases, the lousy principals need to be replaced.

 

5) I also have no reason to doubt that there's excessive paperwork.

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What Matters Most

 

By Randi Weingarten, President, NYC United Federation of Teachers

http://cgood.org/assets/attachments/Randi_Weingarten_10.15.06.pdf

 

During the year, we are required to individually assess our students in reading five times. Each assessment takes 25-40 minutes per child to administer, and that time block does not even include all the time it takes to maintain the records for each of the five assessments. I feel as if I spend more time assessing than teaching. - A New York City Public School Teacher

 

As we seek to improve American public schools and lament the statistics showing our students lagging behind their counterparts in Europe and Asia, the discussion usually revolves around curriculum changes, testing or reforming the school structure. Rarely, however, are teachers themselves asked what needs to change in order to make them better able to reach children on a day-to-day basis. Simply asking a teacher, "How was your day?" can provide an illuminating answer.

 

Recently, the bipartisan advocacy organization Common Good did just that and published a summary report based on diaries kept by eight New York City public school teachers of their workday experiences. The goal was to try to understand how school bureaucracy gets in the way of teachers' ability to do their jobs. Common Good correctly states that its study is small scale, but it provides compelling evidence that time spent on student discipline, assessments and testing, mandated teaching procedures, school management and paperwork are taking over the school day and preventing teachers from doing the very work they were hired to do.

 

Reading the teachers' diaries is an exercise in frustration: Tales of breaking up fist fights; confiscating scissors from one student threatening to stab another; a student threatening to slash a teacher's tires - and time and time again, there are no consequences for misbehavior. The offending students are simply returned to the classroom.

 

Standardized testing has consumed increasingly larger parts of the day. Some teachers were pulled from their regular teaching assignments for up to five weeks as they administered and graded tests. One teacher wrote: "This situation exemplifies what education in New York City has become - preparing for tests, testing, and grading tests. What has happened to teaching?"

 

Mandated teaching requirements also created some frustration for the teachers - especially the veterans. "Sometimes I feel like I'm a robot regurgitating the scripted dialogue that's expected of us day in and day out," one writes. Another teacher restates her day despondently: "Teach mini-lesson...Student raises hand with question. Tell him to put hand down. Students not allowed to ask questions during mini-lesson. Feel guilty."

 

The report also describes constant interruptions during class time - administrators calling seeking paperwork, PA announcements and parent visits. One Common Good researcher observed a teacher who was interrupted sixteen times in a single day. A certain amount of test preparation, disciplinary action and paperwork can and should be expected in a typical workday for any teacher, but the situations described in the diaries can't possibly be what anyone truly intended. Layer upon layer of new mandates developed without a teacher's voice - much less a real collaboration between classroom professionals and those who supervise them - have resulted in a system that substitutes time consuming bureaucratic routines for quality teaching and learning.

 

This is not unique to New York.

 

If we are serious about improving America's schools, we need to listen carefully to what teachers are telling us. We must bring order and safety to our schools, because learning suffers in an environment that is neither safe nor secure. We need to strike a healthy balance between teaching and testing, because students are denied important opportunities for new learning when testing is excessive. And we must respect the skill and commitment of our educators, providing them with the professional latitude they need to do their jobs, rather than drowning them in paperwork and micromanagement.

 

That's just common sense.