Dear NCLBlog,

Check out the latest Edspresso commentary and blogs!

We've exposed the grassroots power of charter parents and teachers in California who overturned Speaker Nunez' and other anti-charter administrators' attempts to lasso CA charters with moonlight politics.

Offer your thoughts on the wildfire spread of teacher merit pay across 22 states and the unions staunchly resisting to save nothing more than their power and influence.

Have a great week,

Melanie Cameron
Managing Editor, Edspresso

Dear NCLBlog,

Check out the latest Edspresso commentary and blogs!

Education and Labor Committee chairman Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) sees merit pay as the future of teacher retention. Offer your thoughts on the wildfire spread of teacher merit pay across 22 states and the unions staunchly resisting to save nothing more than their power and influence.

We've exposed the grassroots power of charter parents and teachers in California who overturned Speaker Nunez' and other anti-charter administrators' attempts to lasso CA charters with moonlight politics.

Have a great week,

Melanie Cameron
Managing Editor, Edspresso

When I first read the Education Trust�s research on disparate salary patterns in rich and poor schools, I was thrilled. Here was concrete evidence of our intuition and it gave us leverage in changing the goal of budgeting from equality to equity. It seemed a perfect opportunity for the Ed Trust to join the unions in lobbying for more resources for poor schools.

AND I STILL THINK THERE IS AN OPPORTUNITY HERE FOR A GRAND COMPROMISE. I�LL GET TO THAT AT THE END

It never occurred to me, however, that those numbers would be used to challenge the integrity of the collective bargaining system. But they have followed the logic of the drunk who looked for his keys not in the bushes where they were lost but under the street light where he could see better. If a �beggar thy neighbor� approach of helping the poor by punishing innocent children and teachers in affluent schools had a chance of success, I might consider it. But that approach is as rational as taking away the affluent schools� heating or plumbing in order to achieve fairness. Our goal should be to recruit better teachers for poor children, not to take them away from others.

Besides, even if a district�s best teachers were coerced into low performing schools, it would be a pyrrhic victory. Some of those great teachers would not miss a beat and others would relearn their craft and become effective inner city teachers, but most would leave for other districts or simply resign. After all, many of the best teachers in our magnets had been inner city teachers until they reached a state of exhaustion. In my experience, those teachers tearfully left after years of commitment and they did so after they were completely exhausted emotionally. Some would return after getting recharged in a lower poverty school if given an opportunity to actually teach the way they saw fit. But most have already given everything they had to our kids.

Again, outsiders seem oblivious to the real reasons why poor schools have younger less qualified teachers. Poor schools lose talent because teaching conditions - �teach to the test� mandates, idiotic policies mandated from above, and endless waves of disrespect - drive people away. The Chicago Tribune just published an excellent profile of an amazing 56 year old teacher committed to �whatever it takes� to raise performance in a struggling schools. She was one of an elite team which took a major leap towards turning around a school. The superintendent was effusive in his praise of their heroic efforts. But in one year they burned out their best i.e. eating their seed corn. Despite their success, the superstar teacher left the classroom and about 3/4s of her younger colleagues left the school.

If I wanted to be politically correct, I could leave it at that but teachers understand that the single biggest disincentive is the lack of disciplinary backing. I just returned from a second hospital visit of a student who is the latest victim of our current �gang war� as it was finally named. Last year this sweet girl lost her grandfather, the previous year her brother was killed in gang conflict, and her mother died the year before, and she�s not even a gang member. Last year, our 6th through 12th school of about 700 had to deal with seven murders (up from the usual two or three) Regardless of how firm the evidence, or the danger, and even when our principals do everything right in Long Term Suspension hearings, the central office has always sent dangerous kids back. Yes, our violent kids have also been traumatized and I love them just as much, but we teachers get exhausted by cleaning up the blood and comforting the innocent victims, and trying to teach in an environment where the kids are all �scary.� (And remember the Philadelphia story that was told after the teacher�s broken neck of why 80% of students on IEPS who commit infractions that merit LTS do not receive consequences. In schools with a critical mass of students on IEPs, as well as the other problems, principals find that it had been impossible to follow the law and they tend to drop the case, just hoping for the best.)

I know that a lot of AP and IB teachers in elite schools could learn the proper balance when all hell breaks loose all over the campus, and how �hard� or how nurturing you should be, and how to �shake it off� when you�ve been knocked semi-conscious, etc., but you can�t coerce them into coming to our schools. If I had biological kids of my own, I�d have never stuck it out, but I�m glad I did. You�ve got to really love this place to be effective here.

I think my experience is pretty representative. My daughter is a Black woman from generational poverty who teaches in a comparable environment in �Bed Stuy� They solved their violence problem this year by prohibiting teachers from writing up fights. I accompanied her to a wonderful workshop on hands-on science which was mandated from the central office, but she knew that her principal wouldn�t like it. The principal maintains that the only thing she knows about any teacher is their test scores. The day that New York got the Broad Award, her school�s entire math and English departments were written up of �borderline insubordination� for resisting the scripted curriculum. Nearly every evening we compare notes on our day, and the dynamics are so similar. I only intrude on one issue. I don�t want her to buy into that �whatever it takes� jargon. Young teachers must learn to mourn. If you want to help your kids over the long run, you can�t constantly take it home with you. NOW, my blood pressure goes down when I walk into a classroom. But young talent (and the veterans who might go to an urban school) have to find their own ways to �roll with the punches.�

SO, HERE�S MY THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

If we can agree that a quality teacher is the key, then why not change Comparability from an unfunded mandate to a funded one? Shift resources from testing and other reforms that focus solely on one narrow aspect of the intellect to the 15% of high schools that produce � of the dropouts.

I realize that reality is more complex, but I think that the main obstacle to this sort of idea is our assumptions about �Accountability.� If we see accountability as the cornerstone of national reform, then we are stuck with NCLB-type solutions. But if we see accountability as one factor, then it opens up a range of possibilities that are far more promising. (Like Obama�s and Milkulski�s summer enrichment legislation) Last week Bill Clinton spoke to Geoff Canada, Tavis Smiley etc. and he articulated the type of rhetoric that we need, practical but not the �tougher than thou� approach that Dems thought they needed.

And getting back to the bigger picture, even if we fully funded comparability, we couldn�t find enough teachers of the type required for urban high schools. We�d have to recruit counselors, mental health providers, nurses, probation officers, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers and others who are �born� to work with our kids. And to do that, we�d need something like Balfanz�model. The John Hopkins approach is consistent with Jesse Jackson�s old saying, �You back out of a blind alley the way you drove in.� A root of our problem is the lack of adult role models, and isolation. Attract more adults, and make our inner city schools look more like the full range of America, and you�ll have no guarantee of success. But if we really respect our poor kids right to a real education, not just test prep, and we really have faith in the power of education and democracy, we have to try something like this.

John Thompson, former social scientist and lobbyist
inner city regular classroom teacher who is in it for the long run