By Tom

I went for a bike ride recently in Eastern Washington. It was a pleasant, sunny day and I was riding alone on a quiet, country road into a scenic canyon. After an hour or so of gently rolling hills, I began to notice that the canyon walls were steadily closing in around me, and the lazy river that I'd been following was starting to take a more active attitude. Things were getting steep. Now, anyone who's ever ridden into a canyon can tell you that there's only two ways out: the way you came, or up the hill at the end of the canyon. And what a hill it was; steep switchbacks as far as the eye could see. I could have turned back; there was no one around to impress, and there were plenty of flatter roads to choose from.

I decided to go for it. It was difficult, grueling and painful. But I eventually made it, and when I got to the top I was exhilarated. I had successfully done something difficult. I also found that the rest of my ride was defined by my decision to take the climb. I got to spend the next two hours going generally downhill, and the slopes I did encounter paled in comparison to the monster I had climbed earlier. It was well worth the effort.

As I was coasting along, I began to reflect that this experience was not unlike how it is in education today. For the first 25 years of my career, things have been going relatively smoothly. I've felt respected and supported by the press, the policy-makers and other stake-holders. But things right now are as discouraging as I've ever seen. We've got climbing class sizes, RiFs, lower funding, program eliminations, heightened accountability, ridiculous merit-pay schemes, wholesale faculty firings; not to mention climbing healthcare premiums and retirement account statements that we don't even want to look at. And to top it all off: copy counts! We're getting in trouble for producing the very materials we need to do our jobs. An outrage!

I feel like we're at that hill at the end of the canyon. Some of us are tempted to turn around and ride back out. Most of us, however, are plodding on, even accelerating, despite the slope. Why? because we know we're supposed to. We know we're doing something important. Something that needs to be done, no matter how difficult it seems.

And we'll do it. We'll get over this hill. Not right away, but eventually. The funding will return, the pressure will ease and class sizes will come back down. The good teachers that got Riffed will come back and we'll get to use the copier when we need to.

And just like my bike ride, we'll find that the next decade or so will be defined by the way we deal with things right now. If we quit on each other, quit on our students and quit on ourselves, we'll have lost; we'll have taken the easy road out. But if we stick together, focus on our students and stay true to what got us into this wonderful profession in the first place, we'll be fine. We'll look back on this period knowing we took the tough way out. We'll know we climbed the hill at the end of the canyon.

I'll end with a line from Winston Churchill, who was talking to a far more discouraged group during a far bleaker period of time:

"When you're going through hell," he said, "Keep going."

By Tom

Never mind the fact that we can’t afford it. And set aside for now the reality that it’s ridiculously complicated and incredibly unfair. The most important question to ask about merit pay is the one we should have asked in the first place: Does it work? Do people actually perform better when they know that the results of their efforts are directly tied to their salary?

Well, apparently not.

I just finished an outstanding book by Daniel H. Pink called Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. He makes a compelling case that most of us are absolutely not driven by the desire to make money. Especially those of us who work in fields where we’re required to make decisions and solve problems. Like teachers.

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By Tom

This is Teacher Appreciation Week, which means the coffee cart guy will pull up outside our school on Monday and we’ll all get a free espresso drink, courtesy of the PTA. And then on Friday, those same wonderful people will provide us with a delicious sandwich buffet. And between the coffee and the sandwiches we’ll get cute little notes and pictures from our students and maybe an apple-themed mug or two. It‘ll be a great week.

But while we’re being appreciated, I’d like to raise a glass to the teachers who won’t be getting the free coffee and the free lunch; the unsung heroes of the education world: the subs. The folks who take over when we’re sick in bed with the flu or attending a reading workshop in Yakima. The people who let us get our wisdom teeth pulled on a Thursday in November, and let us take our own kids to the doctor on a Monday in March. Or the teacher who takes our class on a field trip across Puget Sound to Blake Island with two hours notice while we were in the Emergency Room having an appendix removed. (Thanks Ms Nelson!)

Subbing is hard work. As Ned, a guy who used to sub a lot in my building put it, “I wanted to be a teacher in the worst way, and now I really am a teacher…in the worst way!”

I should know. I was there. Back in 1984, fresh out of college with the worst interviewing skills in America, I started my career with a phone by my bed in my old room at my parents’ house, waiting for those early-morning calls; telling me to teach second grade in Kent on Monday and high school math in Everett on Tuesday. There were some good experiences and a lot of bad ones. And a few nightmares.

But I’ll never forget the gerbil incident.

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By Tom

Let me start by laying my cards on the table: I eat school lunch every day. And it’s not just because I‘m too lazy to pack my own lunch (which is true) or too poor or too rushed to go out for lunch. (Both of which are also true.)  I actually love the whole school lunch experience: the smells, the lines, the clatter of trays and the bad jokes that my third graders and I tell while we eat. But I especially like the food. Seriously.  

Recently, however, school lunches have come under fire; the most recent attack coming from the military. (Pun intended) Apparently, 27% of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are too overweight to join the armed services, which, unless you’re a die-hard pacifist, is discouraging news.  A group of retired generals and admirals who call themselves "Mission: Readiness" wants to combat this trend with more money for more nutritional school lunches. (Their motto: “Fit to Fight!”) They believe that the chief culprit for childhood obesity is the National School Lunch Program and its insidious campaign to stuff our youngsters with bad food.

I disagree.

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By Tom

I read a fascinating article in Time magazine last weekend. It was about a Harvard economist named Roland Fryer, Jr., who ran an experiment on a bunch of public school children in which he set out to pay them to achieve in school.  The actual experiment was fairly complicated and somewhat unique in the education world, since he actually used randomized control and experimental groups in hundreds of classrooms in four different cities.

The results were surprising, and again, somewhat complicated; but the bottom line was this: the kids who were paid to do the little things that they could control; things that we all know contribute to long-term success, did far better than the control group, both in the short term and the long term. Second graders, for example, who were paid to read books and answer comprehension quizzes, outperformed their peers by half a grade level on their summative reading test, and their success continued into the following year. On the other hand, the kids who were paid to achieve a long-term goal, like “getting a good grade,” didn’t; presumably because they were “flying blind,” unclear as to what they were specifically supposed to do.

I see three serious implications from this research. The first is uncomfortably obvious: we can get kids to succeed by simply paying them. Like most of you, I find the idea repugnant. I see learning as both an end and a means; being paid to learn is like being paid to visit with your family. But as distasteful as the idea is, you can’t really argue with the results. It apparently works. Fortunately, I suppose, we’ll never have to deal with that moral dilemma, since we can’t even afford to pay the teachers right now.  

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By Tom

Imagine living exactly next door and directly downwind from a combination slaughterhouse and rendering plant. Your days and nights are plagued by the haunting cries of doomed cattle and the fetid stench of rotting roadkill.

And then one day you come home from work to find that the owner and his wife have put the place up for sale and moved to a condo on Lake Chelan.

The air clears. You can have friends over.  But you’re unsettled, wondering what will move in next door. 

A year passes. Then you see the real estate lady, whom you’ve gotten to know fairly well, stapling up a “Sold!” sign. You ask her who bought the place. She smiles and asks what you’re hoping for. You describe a funky, independent bookstore with a wonderful coffee shop that also sells pizza and chicken teriyaki in the evenings. And they have live jazz on the weekends.

She laughs and tells you that your new neighbors include a dry cleaner, a nail salon and a doughnut shop. Although you’re disappointed, you realize it could be, and in fact was, much worse.

This is the best way I can describe how I feel about the pending debate over the reauthorization of ESEA legislation. Now that the health care bill has been passed (or “crammed down your throat,” if that works for you) our country’s domestic agenda will likely focus on education and the president’s Blueprint for Reform.

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By Tom

I read the whole thing. All forty-one pages. Twice. And frankly, I kinda like Obama's "A Blueprint for Reform." It's not as cool as "A Blueprint for the Batmobile" (pictured to the left) but it's a heck of a lot cooler than the mess the last president left in his wake.

Let's take a closer look at some of the highlights:

In the (autographed!) introduction, Obama states "My Administration’s blueprint for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is not only a plan to renovate a flawed law, but also an outline for a re-envisioned federal role in education."And he's not just saying that. This is by far the boldest move since 1965, when the federal government first stepped into the education arena. Obama knows that that he can't directly affect schools, but what he can do is use money, lots of it, as leverage to get school systems to do what he wants.

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By Tom

Let's take another look at Race to the Top, (RT3) but this time from a student's perspective.

RT3, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's educational policy, is a federal initiative in which states compete for grant money by showing that they have put into place certain school reform measures that the administration values. Among these measures are liberal provisions for charter schools, merit pay for teachers based in part on student test scores and state-level authority to take over so-called "failing schools."

For the sake of argument, let's pretend that these provisions actually add value to a state's school system. And for the sake of comparison, let's consider two different states, who've taken two different approaches to the administration's challenge: Illinois and Washington. 

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By Tom

I am a wonderful teacher this year. My students are focused, hard-working and smart. They've produced some excellent test scores and I couldn't be more proud of them. And myself.

It started in the fall at Curriculum Night. My presentation was so convincing that the parents have been carefully checking their children's homework each night, helping them practice their spelling words and drilling them with flash cards. They all showed up for parent conferences and many of them took notes. They've made sure that my students are well-rested, well-fed and well-prepared for school each day.

I think I know another reason for my success. I don't waste a lot of my time with classroom management. I mostly focus on teaching and the kids (most of whom are girls!) listen.

I wasn't always this good. A few years ago, in fact, I stunk. My class was rowdy and unfocused. My Curriculum Night presentation was not compelling; I consistently had kids coming in hungry, sleepy, cranky and unprepared. I had failed to get their parents to support me at home.

Moreover, I was frittering away the day on classroom management activities that did nothing to bring my students closer to the state standards. I had a hard time getting that class (most of whom were boys) to listen.

Oh well; live and learn. When I work hard, my kids learn. When I slough off, they don't. One event causes the other. Just like breakfast causes lunch.

By Tom

Just when you think you've seen every School Improvement Plan imaginable, someone comes along and proves you wrong. In a remarkably innovative move, Frances Gallo, the superintendent in charge of Central Falls School District in Rhode Island, fired every single teacher in the district's only high school. She now plans to hire a brand new staff by September in her bold plan to turn around the under-performing school.

Central Falls, a town of 19,000 people, is the state's poorest community. 40% of its children live in poverty. The high school has a graduation rate of only 50%, and a mere 7% of the juniors are proficient in math.

Obviously, it's the teachers' fault, and clearly, something had to be done. Fortunately, Ms. Gallo stepped up to the plate.

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