A Short Walk

I left the restaurant and headed up East 70^th Street. The challah bread French toast was particularly good and unavailable at home. A minor detail I will always miss about New York City. Challah bread. I’m sure there’s some upstate somewhere, but finding it would be a mission requiring some planning and it’s not quite that important.  This particular visit inspired more reflection than usual.

Perhaps because the garden is full of weeds.

I’d left the house at 3:30 a.m. to make my 8:00 appointment and arrived with time to spare. I was pleased to see Maria enter the waiting room. She called my name and gave me an affectionate hug. I hadn’t seen her for about two years. She was always the attending nurse for the procedure back when I was making this trip every three months. We’d gotten to know each other well as she prepped me for the doctors poking and prodding. But now, seven years later I’m on an annual schedule and the past two visits had me in another’s hands.

We can skip the details. I’m fine. Hopefully I’ll see Maria again next year.

I passed a man walking a Chihuahua, then a woman walking a Welsh corgi. I realized that all the dogs I’d seen that morning were small dogs, tiny dogs who wished they had longer legs. You could tell. They were made for lying on laps, not trying to keep up. Besides, they used to have longer legs. In my memory, dogs in Manhattan were big dogs; German shepherds, boxers, English sheep dogs. They matched their owners. Now they don’t. The man with the Chihuahua should have had a Labrador, the woman with the Welsh corgi an Afghan. No one in the city has big dogs anymore; a consequence, I guess, of the law that changed the street signs from “Curb Your Dog” to “Clean Up After Your Dog.”

One had to watch where one stepped before that. No longer. That’s good, I guess. The city is lessened without big dogs, though.

I brought up some older memories for inspection and comparison. Not adult memories, not adolescent memories, but color-faded, childhood memories of Manhattan. The street lamps were wrought iron and ornate. The cars were big and rounded. They were not brightly colored, or even lightly colored. They were dark, except for the checker cabs. (You could fit a piano in the back of a checker cab. There were two folding seats in front of the bench, so you could fit a full dozen people back there. At least that’s how big it is in memory.)There were mail boxes, phone booths and big dogs. All the women wore skirts below the knees. All the men wore hats.

The memories look like a black and white movie. Humphrey Bogart cups a match with his hands and lights a cigarette on the corner. He flicks the match confidently into the gutter.

Everybody smoked cigarettes. Littering hadn’t been invented yet.

Back in the present I looked for what was changeless. At 10:00 a.m. on a warm Wednesday morning, the street was moderately filled with people walking at the pace New Yorkers walk. They don’t stroll. People on vacation stroll. All these people had schedules and destinations. Walking amongst them is a graceful slalom, unlike Midtown where walking is more like driving in traffic or, sometimes, swimming in the opposite direction of a school of fish. This has always been the case. Walking in Midtown as a small child had always been a little frightening. A sudden current could rip you from your mother’s hand. This was a real and present danger and your mother was just as aware of it as you were. When the current was strong she grabbed your wrist and cut off the circulation. You didn’t mind because you couldn’t swim.

The people I pass are mostly fit. America, we are told, has a weight problem. I don’t know about other cities, but Manhattan does not, although certain sections of the “outer boroughs” may. Why this may be is an interesting question. Every fourth or fifth person I pass is an attractive young woman. I can’t help noticing that. I also can’t help noticing I am older than most of the pedestrians. This makes me sad for a moment, then it goes away.

I passed (I like the previous paragraph in the present tense, in case anyone with a red pen notices.) a small dry cleaners and wondered for a moment how a dry cleaners could afford the rent on the Upper East Side. The answer, of course, is that I can’t afford that dry cleaners.

Across the street from the dry cleaners is a center for seniors. All the elderly people are concentrated in this place. One man with a cane is bent and angular in a manner I have never seen before. I wondered what his story is. I assumed I am many times blessed by comparison.

I walked up 70^th to 3^rd Ave., turned the corner and walked back down 69^th to the parking garage near 1^st Ave. There are certain experiences the City will provide you with every visit. I was given three of them in double measure.

One cannot walk in Manhattan without walking under scaffolding at least once. This morning, the Upper East Side seemed to be under scaffolding with its attendant sounds: portable generators, wood banging on wood, metal banging on metal, the occasional obscenity. On 70^th, not one but two fire engines turned the corner from 2^nd Ave., lights glaring, sirens wailing, air horns blasting to wake the dead even though they were going to have to wait for the light to change on 1^st along with everyone else.

On 69^th there was the requisite jackhammer. In memory, jackhammers are worked by men with jiggling beer bellies. This one was handled by a young man of nineteen or twenty as fit as the pedestrians completely ignoring his racket (just as they had ignored the double dose of fire trucks). He was working at removing a parking meter and he was not having fun about it. The parking meter is probably the best constructed artifact of all time. The quarters are safer than in a bank, and they do not come out of a sidewalk without a determined man with a jackhammer.

A young woman wearing a low cut sundress (Again, I can’t help it.) on a bicycle confidently signals her way in front of a taxi to avoid a double parked car. That jackhammer would have caused someone from Queens to hit the double parked car.

There was more scaffolding and another jackhammer before I reached the garage. This one, however, was working away out of sight, four or five stories up. That was new.

Back in my car, I accessed my Manhattan driving gear. You need patience with an edge to drive in the City. The patience has you wait for the right moment. The edge has you slip into another car’s air cushion in a manner that gains respect from the other driver. It’s a skill. New Yorkers are very good at it. Unlike Boston, there are rules for driving in Manhattan. I am reassured I still know them.

The traffic cop on 62^nd and York signaled me with one finger, down low, onto the ramp to the FDR Drive. I raised my index finger from the steering wheel in response. 

Response to David Brooks: Stop Drinking the Kool-Aide

The following is a reply posted to David Brooks column, which wildly misrepresents Diane Ravitch's stand on education reform, in today's NY Times titled "Smells Like School Spirit."

I just want to stress one point here, David. The new New York State English Regents, taken in the 11th grade, consists of 25 multiple choice questions(1 point apiece), two written paragraphs (scored 0-2 for a 4 possible points) and an essay (scored 0-6). Now pay attention: as long as a student gets more than 20 multiple choice questions correct, at least a 1 on each of the paragraphs and a 3 on the essay, that student passes. Right. A student who writes what is basically a failing essay is good enough for New York State standards.

Here, however, is where it gets interesting. Senior year, these students will write the most important essay of their lives. No one will ever care how they scored on the Regents exam, but college admissions offices will be very interested in their personal essays, a style of writing the New York State Board of Regents does not care about... otherwise one would be on the Regents exam.

Do teachers focus on the Regents tasks at the expense of personal writing? You bet they do. The pressure is enormous and getting stronger. The state does not care about personal writing. The state only cares about critical analysis, writing exercises that have nothing to do with the student. Not that they aren't important. They are. Very much so.

But if you want the "average" student to actually care about writing that student has to feel some connection to the process. More importantly, personal writing allows students to explore their own experiences, tell their own stories and help them find out who they are. The focus on mechanical, formulaic writing is pumping out mechanical, formulaic, hollow people.

But don't you tell me that teachers should be doing personal writing anyway. When? What gets left out? Catcher in the Rye? Romeo and Juliet? The pressure to prepare these students for these tests is profound and corrupts the atmosphere of every school building.

Humanize the process instead of treating our young people like standardized parts.

Note: I ran out of characters at that point, but I would have continued with the following:

It is important also to note here that the new English Regents was constructed because of a snow storm. The old Regents was a two day, six hour affair consisting of fewer multiple choice questions and four essays. The change had nothing to do with student performance and everything to do with the loss of tax dollars due to an inconvenient January snowstorm which cancelled the second day of the test. One can compare two items on the old and new test (actual scores from a high school which will remain nameless): average score on the critical lens essay and average overall score. The last of the old exams rendered an average score of 3.5 on the essay and an overall exam average of 69. The new test rendered an average score of 3.6 on the essay and an overall average of 75. 

Hmmm...

Please understand that these scores include those of special education students, many, not all but many of whom are victims of reverse discrimination by being expected to "race to the top" as if they were no different than anyone else. 

Which, of course, is the point. The testing environment assumes no student is fundamentally any different than any other. They are, as I said above, standardized parts.

Let's add some irony here. Due to budget problems, the January Regents exams have been eliminated altogether. Not that I would want to go back to the old test. Both tests are fundamentally flawed and the old one more so.

Humanize the system from Kindergarten on up. Let teachers teach children, not subjects. Nurture self-discovery and reflection, then encourage analysis of objective material that is relevant to children's levels of development.

And most importantly, encourage a culture of effort. That, my friends, will require a social revolution way outside the walls of school buildings because the primary problem in American education isn't even poverty. It's a society in which getting by is good enough and being wrong is getting caught. 

It's a culture in which a few can rape a nation's economy, then convince everyone that firing 'bad teachers' will fix what they've done. 


Seems to me that ensuring we continue to produce mechanical, formulaic, hollow people incapable of reflection and critical thinking will ensure they get to do it all over again when the conditions are right. 

So. Who's winning?

America, Libya, and Economic Stupidity

I have no doubt the Powers That Be consider the Libyan uprising an opportunity to rework North African geo-politics. Tunisia, Egypt and Libya? So, sure, the Libyan rebels were going to get slaughtered, and, as usual, some untold number of noncombatants.

Maybe the humanitarian thing would actually work this time! And there's that influence on the new government that will just happen to be sitting on the largest oil reserves in N. Africa. Two for the price of one!

Of course, the assumption here is that the rebellion was inspired by the same spontaneous, Facebook/Twitter, fairly young and democratically minded demographic as the rebellions next door. I hope that's the case.

I have no problem with the intervention. I may have a problem with what it becomes. My biggest problem with it is that the United States has no business spending the money, any money, on it.

People generally don't know what killed the Soviet bear. It wasn't Ronald Reagan. It was their military and foreign policy budget. It sucked the empire dry. Ronnie just hit the fast forward button by forcing them to spend even more by increasing our defense budget.

Right now the whole dialogue on the American economy is being driven by crazy people who believe the only thing our taxes should be paying for is defense.

The rest of us can go back to the 18th century. If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it's good enough for us.

Oh. By 'us' I mean the middle class, working class and the poor.

At the heart of all of this is a little something called American Exceptionalism.

The term, if you listen to it used on Fox News, is really synonymous with chauvinism: zealous and aggressive patriotism. This idea needs to be countered passionately. Yet, the current atmosphere reminds me of Yeats', "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

The U.S. is headed toward some pretty serious social unrest. You don't hear about it on the news, but labor rallies are sprouting all over the country. The next year or so is going to be pretty interesting. 

But the bottom line is that the U.S. has to let go of the military super power thing and let the rest of the world step up.

Reagan sped up the arms race and forced the Soviets into early retirement. By cutting taxes and not planning for two wars in the federal budget, George Bush had us doing the same thing to ourselves.

Obama just grabbed the baton from him and kept running. When the Tea Party right (who most of the country disagree with but that doesn't seem to matter) spooks people who should know better into cutting spending even more (on programs that don't put a dent in the federal deficit but who cares?), does Obama step up or go belly up?

That's a rhetorical question.

I sincerely hope the Libyan people can get the kook off their backs and keep out any kooks waiting in the wings.

But here in the U.S.... we need to learn how to do some pretty simple math before it's too late, and that doesn't include firing teachers (Talk about the politics of distraction!). The cost of one cruise missile could pay a teacher's salary for about fifteen years. The U.S. has launched over one hundred in the Libya campaign so far.

That's my Sunday morning commentary for this week.

Diane Ravitch Responds

I sent President Ianuzzi's letter and my response to Diane Ravitch. She fired off a reply within minutes:

Dear Michael,

I agree with you. The campaign to destroy the teaching profession is  in full swing, as witness the story in yesterday's NY Times where Bill Gates says that seniority and tenure are problems and teachers should not be rewarded for experience or for master's degrees. This is all so wrong. The one thing that these actions would surely guarantee is an end to the teaching profession. And we would have a steady influx of inexperienced teachers, who stay for a year or two and move on; and inexperienced principals; and inexperienced superintendents. How would this improve American education? These trends should be resisted, not accepted.

Diane Ravitch 

(The one line from the Gates article that really got my attention is this: "He (Gates) also urges an end to efforts to reduce class size." Hey Bill! Why didn't you ask me how to write a decent OS when Windows Vista headed south?

That's a rhetorical question.)

President Ianuzzi Responds and I Reply

The following is from Richard Ianuzzi, President of New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) in response to my letter of October 31. My reply follows.

Michael:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and I apologize for the delayed response--I write these myself! Having spent 34 years in an elementary classroom, I appreciate the endless piles of papers--at least mine included some "artistic" projects!

I understand your uneasiness about test scores. Without getting into the fine line between raw scores, growth models and value added, suffice to say there is much uncertainty. A Task Force (with one third practitioners) is working on how the multiple factors impacting scores should be considered. Their recommendations are to guide the Regents in setting regulations, currently scheduled for July. What is clear is that value-added will not be in place in NY for several years and only then if it is a model that accurately addresses factors impacting the classroom. While in theory the model has potential, needless to say, it does not exist today.

You have every right to be skeptical about those who claim to embrace reform when their actions don't show a real appreciation for what goes on in the classroom. For this reason, NYSUT was careful to significantly limit the role of standardized test scores (20%) and to leave additional multiple measures to local collective bargaining (which may or may not include testing) for an additional 20%. It is also the reason we used our leverage to move the process into legislation and away from unilateral decisions from the Board of Regents.

You are right, our profession is under attack by both parties. While their is much to distrust, taking a lead in reform instead of waiting for bad "reform' to happen was our strategy.

I hope this sheds some light on our thinking.

Again, thanks for your thoughts!

Regards, 

Dick

11/16/10

 Hi Dick,

Thanks for your reply. While I am encouraged by what you say, I remain concerned over the lack of response to the current framing of the American teacher and the teacher's unions. I've been in the classroom for 26 years and the climate has never been this bad. Bad isn't the right word, though. The climate is vicious. Andre Agassi in the November 22 issue of Time Magazine said this when asked who he would choose as 2010 person of the year:

"The nominee is: the American student. I deserve better. Far better. I need my teachers to be better trained and held accountable for their performance. I want you to expect excellence from me. My future is at stake, and I'm not equipped for a 21st century world. If you all lay aside your agendas, you can create a groundswell that will lift me to college and beyond. If only there were a children's union."

The absolutism in his remark reflects the absolutist attitude the country has bought: teachers are bad and the union (made up of teachers) is to blame.

To every anti-teacher and anti-union talking point, there has been zero response. We are political pawns and the Democratic Party has thrown us under the bus in its cowardly shift to the right.

Unionism is built on passionate action. Where's the passion? Where's the action? This is a game of perception management and we're losing because we're not playing. When I read the union magazines I see all this great stuff that's going on. But we're talking to ourselves while too many people on the street believe unions and teachers aren't just the problem; teachers, not just some, are incompetent and the union is evil.

The union's assets can respond to "Waiting for Superman,"  and the political and editorial framing. If every local was involved in a carefully crafted letter writing campaign our voices would reach the public ear. I'm sure there's any number of other activities that would put, at least, some doubt where there is so much certainty. Not everyone buys the current propaganda. We still have supporters out there.

Why aren't we hitting back at the NY Times? Why has that newspaper's editorial board turned so rabidly against us? Why haven't they said anything about the disaster that Klein and Bloomberg made of the NYC school system, as was brilliantly reported by Diane Ravitch in her book? Where is this, supposedly liberal, media agenda coming from?

All the legislative dealing in the world won't save us from public opinion, and the corporatists and privatizers are in the ascendancy. I'm starting to worry that we're getting to the point where the ladder won't reach the top of the hole because when all these reforms also fail, and they will because a child is not a standardized part on an assembly line, we will still be stuck with the blame. Especially if we're seen as a passive, easy target.

As Diane Ravitch said, "Since we can't fire poverty, we can't fire students, and we can't fire families, all that is left is to fire teachers."

Let's fight back. Our target is the corporate model that dehumanizes our students into hollow test takers.

Most sincerely.

Michael Lambert

Gloversville Teacher's Association

11/20/10

Diane Ravitch's Response

I sent a copy of my letter posted October 31st to Diane Ravitch. She responded:

Dear Michael,

You are right on target. The public schools are now the focus of an intense privatization campaign. Using invalid measures like VAA/VAM to assess "teacher quality" is a central tenet in this campaign, which will turn all teachers into at-will employees, with no tenure, no job rights, no seniority, subject to the whim of administrators or whoever "owns" the school.

Unions should be fighting this campaign, not compromising with those who would destroy public education and privatize it.

Diane Ravitch

The Democratic Party, Andrew Cuomo and the Death of a Thousand Cuts

The following is a letter I just sent to NYSUT United, the magazine of New York State United Teachers:


Dear Editor:

I'm taking some time this morning, before spending the rest of my Sunday grading a pile of practice college application essays, to share a deep concern. 

Something about President Iannuzzi's essay, "Courage in the Classroom", in NYSUT's October magazine, didn't sit well with me. His explanation that using "multiple measures," including teacher effectiveness, to account for student test scores seems reasonable. But what are those factors? How will they be accounted for? 

There is a term for the type of measuring I believe President Iannuzzi is referring to; "value added modeling" or VAM. According to the Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org) there are concerns, discussed in an August, 2010 briefing paper titled "Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers," in utilizing this model:

"For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors." (Baker, Barton, et al)

I am highly skeptical about the origin of both Washington D.C.'s and Albany's impulse toward education reform, and my skepticism was firmly justified the moment Education Secretary Arnie Duncan and President Obama endorsed the wholesale firing of teachers at Rhode Island's Central Falls High School back in February. That was a milestone, and should have been a profound wake up call for every chapter of every union across America.

But it wasn't.

Historically, the Democratic Party has been a staunch supporter of public schools and progressive education. The Party's candidates have depended on our support for one successful election campaign after another. But now something insidious is happening, and no good will come of it.

Why did President Obama select Arnie Duncan secretary of education? According to Diane Ravitch, in her excellent The Death and Life of the Great American School System, he was not Obama's first choice:

"...For a brief time, it appeared that the new president might pick his main campaign advisor on education, scholar Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. This prospect alarmed the champions of corporate-style reform, because Darling-Hammond was known as an advocate of teacher professionalism and a critic of Teach for America; the new breed of reformers thought she was too friendly with the teachers' unions. Consequently, writers in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications warned President-elect Obama not to choose Darling-Hammond, but to select a "real" reformer who supported testing, accountability, and choice. True reformers closed low-performing schools and fired administrators and teachers. True reformers opposed teacher tenure. Never mind that these had long been the central tenets of the Republican approach to education reform.

...The same views might as well have appeared in conservative journals, such as National Review or the Weekly Standard. Slogans long advocated by policy wonks on the right had migrated to and been embraced by policy wonks on the left." (Ravitch)

Once President Obama was sworn into office, a well organized opposition campaign began delivering body blows to him, his administration and the Democratic Party. Using well written talking points distributed widely and delivered on the Sunday morning news programs, the political right backed the Democratic Party, which to this day hasn't a clue how to respond to a well organized opponent, into a corner. Rather than push back, the Democrats began, incrementally, co-opting those talking points in a cowardly attempt to maintain its constituency, much of which assumed that no aggressive defense must mean the Republicans were right... no matter how absurd the claim. This is why the Republicans are poised to make political gains on November 2nd.

This is why the Democrats have abandoned the teachers' unions. This is why Andrew Cuomo, as President Iannuzzi states in his November column, supports a property tax cap, changes to the pension system and holds across the board, anti-union positions. 

For two years the mainstream press and both political parties have been hammering our profession. It is my own perception that the teachers' unions have, at every level, instead of standing up and pushing back hard with facts, been drawn into the Democrat's slipstream to the right.

We do this at our own peril. The Republican agenda includes the elimination of the Department of Education, the extinction of the teachers' unions and the privatization of the public school system. 

Yes, we can do much to improve our effectiveness and police our own ranks. This should be done. There are other ways that will actually work. But in the meantime, I have 140 students. During open house, eight parents showed up.  I hope this doesn't shock anyone. If all parents hear is "teacher accountability," why should they assume any accountability on their part? If the problem is defined as the "bad teachers," fueling the anti-teacher sentiment running rampant across America right now, why should students feel accountable?

There is irony in my next task for the day. So much emphasis is placed on test performance that many of my seniors cannot write a competent college application essay, the most important writing product of their lives. They are uncomfortable writing about themselves. The focus on formulaic, test prep writing is so ingrained I have to start the school year with a crash course on personal writing. 

This is the tragedy in our high stakes testing environment. We need to ask ourselves if, in our individual classrooms, we have bought into it by allowing the assembly line testing machine to rip the heart out of our profession. Are we allowing the testing madness to force us into creating hollow men and women who have no idea who they are because all we do is train them to perform on tests that have no relevance to their lives?

Are the current crop of "reformers" actually forcing us into destroying ourselves? If so, we are, indeed, "going gently into that dark night."

Sincerely,

Michael Lambert

Gloversville Teachers' Association