A bad idea about teaching children doesn’t become a good idea just because someone calls it a reform.
That’s why I am proud of the fight the UFT has put up to protect our schools and our children from the wrong-headed and often destructive strategies embraced by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his allies — and excited to work with Mayor Bill de Blasio and a new administration that has shown a real understanding of what works for students.
There’s much work to be done. Just consider some of the misguided notions the so-called reformers pushed over the years.
Closing schools
While most leaders see their job as fixing struggling schools, the former mayor made closing schools a centerpiece of his educational agenda. He did so even though parents protested and a consultant study paid for his own Department of Education predicted that shutting down struggling schools would mean concentrating the neediest kids in other schools.
That study showed that two factors — a high school’s size and its concentration of low-achieving and overage students — were the best predictors of its graduation rate, and that a high concentration of struggling students in a school reduced the chances for graduation not only of the struggling students, but also students in that school with average test scores.
Nevertheless, the closing schools strategy went forward. The administration opened new, smaller schools to replace some of the more 100 schools he closed. However, the smaller schools did not accept as many of the highest-need kids, who were shuffled off to other big high schools where their increasing numbers brought down overall performance and — to no one’s surprise — put those schools on the next closing list.
A study by the Annenberg Institute found this “reform” was especially damaging to “over-the-counter” late-enrolling students who came into schools from other countries, other states or from the criminal justice system.
The report found that “compelling evidence suggests that the DOE’s inequitable assignment of late-enrolling students to struggling high schools reduces the opportunities for success for both the students and their schools,” and that the process meant that the DOE was “essentially setting up the students and schools for failure.”
Our lawsuits helped slow the Bloomberg school-closing juggernaut. And we worked with parents and community groups to make sure the next mayor understood that wholesale school closings were not a way to help our kids succeed.
Pitting charters against public schools
As a major proponent of charter schools, the former mayor shoehorned dozens of charters into public—school buildings, and helped promote the fiction that charters are by nature superior to regular public schools. The fact is that national studies that show that most charters perform no better than neighboring public schools, and many charters do worse.
Charters that do out-perform traditional public schools often do it by playing by another set of rules — accepting fewer special-education students, English-language learners and other high-needs students than the local district school.
The UFT has been blowing the whistle on the practice of selecting students more likely to be successful, and then claiming credit for their success. We have also been working with legislators to ensure that charters will be subject to the same oversight by the state and city comptrollers as public schools.
Substituting test prep for real education
Like many in the so-called reform movement, Bloomberg and his Department of Education never saw a test they didn’t like. A single test result — not class participation, homework, attendance, projects, extracurricular activities or anything else during the school year — was all that counted for promotion to the next grade or admission to a specialized school or program.
With their professional future on the line, principals reacted by ordering teachers to devote every waking minute to relentless test prep.
The irony was that in the long run test prep didn’t work — particularly when new and more challenging state tests saw New York City scores drop dramatically. And over the entire period of Bloomberg’s tenure, the city’s progress on the gold standard for standardized tests — the National Assessment of Educational Progress — was far below that of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles.
We supported the new Chancellor, Carmen Fariña, in her decision to make sure students are now promoted to the next grade based on all their classroom work — including but not limited to test scores. We fought to ban the use of standardized test for the youngest students, and worked with state officials for a three-year moratorium before the results of the tougher Common Core tests become part of a students’ permanent school record.
Discredited data
After first promising not to do so, the Department of Education reversed itself and published teacher rankings based on a “value-added” statistical formula that grossly distorted teachers’ contributions to children’s learning. We fought that movement in court, and eventually in the state Legislature, which passed a law making sure that this experimental method did not mislead parents and the public.
Supporting our long-held position, two prestigious national studies recently concluded that there was little or no relationship between teachers’ value-add scores and student achievement.
School report cards
The previous administration’s school Progress Reports assigned a letter grade to each school, and tried to reduce living, breathing institutions to a single data point. This may have worked to terrify teachers and principals but it gave them no information on how to improve. The grades bounced wildly, didn’t match state reports, and the calculation was so complex no one could tell what they meant.
Bloomberg argued the grades would help parents make decisions about schools. But often the grade simply reflected the school’s demographics while overlooking what was special in a poorer school.
Recognizing the failure of this strategy, new Chancellor Carmen Fariña has said that while the progress report process will continue, single letter grades will not. “There will be no more scarlet letters,” she promised.
Finally, a real plan for the future
Under our new contract, now going through the ratification process, students will benefit because teachers will have more time for professional development and parent engagement. “Accountability” paperwork will be reduced so teachers can do what really matters — helping students learn.
The master teacher program we have created is a step in our long campaign for a “career ladder” that will give great teachers a way to remain in the classroom rather than move into administration. It will identify and train expert teachers who can mentor new colleagues, demonstrate lessons and share what works.
In addition, a new program will empower some 200 school communities to innovate by letting them change certain DOE regulations and contract provisions so they can find new ways to engage their students and prepare them for college and careers.
Teachers, administrators and parents working together have a chance now to make New York City’s public schools the best large urban system in the nation. But we’ll only get there with real cooperation and innovation, not with stale and discredited ideas.
Mulgrew is president of the United Federation of Teachers
http://ift.tt/RpiI3x
via Great Local News: New York http://ift.tt/1iZiLP1
No comments:
Post a Comment