Someone who I do not like

I’ve talked about the John Merrow podcasts before—they’re great listening, extremely well done, and I recommend them to anyone who is nerdy about education the way I am. Recently they did two podcasts where they interviewed professors at the University of Arizona to find out what they thought of university teaching today.

The one that I listened to first was Paulette Kurzer from the Political Science department, and it was one of those that made me sad and angry at the same time. I’ll give her some credit for her honesty, but at the same time I question why anyone with some of her beliefs would stay in the profession. Here’s some quotes that jumped out at me:

I know I am very dynamic and energetic, but then I read those exams and I think, yet another group of students who couldn’t care less. It’s just a performance-lecturing. I feel there are 220 students in this course and I probably perform for 20 of them.

I’ll happily grant that my experience in teaching adults is limited to some staff presentations at my school and leading a book study this year. That said, anyone who is only reaching 10% of their students IS doing something wrong, and one subset of teacher that annoys the hell out of me is the one that pats themselves on the back for doing a great job while at the same time letting that many kids go wanting.

John Merrow: Are you well paid?
Paulette Kurzer: No. No! No! My pay is a source of great discontent.
Merrow: How much do you make?
Kurzer: I’m making $65,000.

Insert primal scream here from a teacher making $35,000 a year.

Perhaps I shouldn’t judge. Maybe the cost of living in Tuscon is high. It could be that Dr. Kurzer is trying to put 5 kids through college. I don’t know the woman. What I do know is that she makes more than most, and later on you’ll see how she uses the money issue to excuse some horribly lax practices.

Merrow: Okay. Let’s argue about this. I think, for the sake of argument, students are not demanding because you professors are so boring that don’t bring it to life, and they don’t know enough to be angry that they’re just being droned at.
Kurzer: Wow! You are just the devil’s advocate, so I’ll continue to talk to you (laughs). But I don’t think I’m boring, and the students know that I invest a lot of my lectures, and that’s very clear because of my visuals.

Insert a second primal scream here, because I get the sense that she’s more interested in her visuals looking pretty than she is in them actually being effective.

It reminds me of a session I sat through last year at the OSPI Summer Institute, which is our state’s main way of sharing ideas with teachers. I had picked this particular session because it had “fluency” in the title, and that was something that I really wanted to work on this past year. The duo that presented seemed nice enough, and they had THE BEST POWERPOINT SLIDES I’VE EVER SEEN. Drop dead gorgeous backgrounds, preset animations that worked, color changes, and some of the best bullets you’ll see outside of Dick Cheney’s lawyer friend. The trouble is that it was a Tyra Banks presentation—great looks, zero content. Less than zero. It was one of those Billy Madison moments where you feel dumber for having listened to it.

My point is that it doesn’t matter if your presentation looks good if the kids aren’t learning. If she’s pouring tons of effort into the technology but still only self-reporting that 10% of her students are engaged, she’s making a mistake.

Merrow: How many do the work? How many of the 225?
Kurzer: Well you know, I don’t know exactly. Maybe ten percent. Maybe 15 percent.
Merrow: So you are teaching to that ten or 15 percent?
Kurzer: Well, I definitely address those but there is obviously a tacit understanding that they do minimal amount and in return I can get away doing minimal amount.

All I can say is wow. Incredible. Sad. I don’t care if that is the tacit agreement, if that is part and parcel of the experience, if that is the reality. I don’t think you should be putting voice to a sentiment like that if you work at any level of education.

I teach first grade, and I work awfully hard to try to get them all up to the standards that we’ve set, but then I work even harder to get them beyond. I could have ignored my upper reading group all year long and they still would have been just fine, but I’ve been able to push them into books like The Big Wave that first graders typically don’t get to. For her to have the eager ones and hope that they don’t try to stretch themselves so she can do the “minimal amount” is a damnable shame.

Merrow: Is it discouraging to be there and thinking that only ten percent are…
Kurzer: No. No, no. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. No. It’s not discouraging. The only thing that discourages me is my pay (laughs). Not this (laughs). Only my pay.
Merrow: Is there something you could do different that would change this?
Kurzer: Uh, well, I could create course requirements where they have to do more writing, or they have to come and see an instructor. I could make them work harder. But why should I? Why should I? I’m not getting paid in order to have a bigger load unto myself.

I’m so liberal I voted for Nader twice, but here’s where my inner conservative runs riot. You should make them work harder because THAT’S WHAT THE TAXPAYERS ARE PAYING YOU TO DO! IF YOU WANT TO MAKE MORE THAN $65 GRAND A YEAR, SHOW YOU DESERVE IT! RIGHT NOW YOU’RE PUTTING OUT ABOUT AS MUCH EFFORT AS A STUMP, AND YOU WANT MORE FOR THAT? IN REAGAN’S NAME, I CURSE THEE!

Huh. That was actually kind of refreshing. I think I’ll vote for Jeb.

Merrow: How many “A’s” do you give?
Kurzer: Well, I grade on a curve. We all do, I think. So, usually ten, 15 percent.
Merrow: Is it really “A” work?
Kurzer: No. No. But I grade on a curve.

I can understand the temptation. Using a curve, at least you’ll have some kids get an A, a 4.0, whatever the scale may be. I’d love to know just how prevalent a practice this is in the college ranks.

Merrow: Are the students not engaged because they’re too busy doing something else?
Kurzer: I think so.
Merrow: What are they doing?
Kurzer: Well, many of them work. I think all of them work. And I don’t know what else they do.

This is another reality of college life today. When I was working my way through my Master’s program it was terribly diffiult sometimes to balance the class work, the teaching work, and the family commitments, especially with what we go through to renew our certificate any more. Plus, I was on the pay-as-I-went plan with no student loans, so the beginning of the quarter was always extra tight.

Merrow: How much work outside of class does your course require?
Kurzer: I personally think very little. I think very little.
Merrow: Time?
Kurzer: I don’t know. An hour? Maybe an hour a week.

An hour a week, for college level work. This is probably part of the “You do less so I can do less!” bargain she has with her students, but it’s obviously not the way it should be.

The next quote is the unforgivable one that really sends me over the edge.

Merrow: Do you ever say to yourself, “Okay, so these kids can’t write very well. I’m going to do whatever it takes. I’m going to go the extra mile. I’m going to make them rewrite their papers. I’ll stay up nights…”
Kurzer: No. No. No. No.
Merrow: Why not?
Kurzer: Why should I? I’m making $65,000.

Oh

God

Damn

Why should you? Because it’s an ethical responsibility. Because you owe it to your students. Because you owe it to the people of the state of Arizona who are paying your salary. Because there’s an army of adjuncts out there scraping by and accomplishing great things while you sit on your dead, tenured butt and complain about how much money you make. Because it’s how you earn the title teacher. Because it’s the right thing to do.

And as a union member, I know that there are limits. You can’t let yourself get taken advantage of, and you can’t let yourself be used up. What Dr. Kurzer describes, though, is only doing the bare minimum because she doesn’t feel like she makes enough to do any more, and that’s not acceptable.

The other Merrow podcast, which I’ll write about later, is of a professor who is a diametric opposite to Dr. Kurzer. It'll make for a great comparison.

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow Writes a Commentary

I'm a big John Merrow guy. Everyone should be; the videos that he puts out for the NewsHour on PBS are a great resource and an important voice in the chorus.

In the December 3rd issue of Education Week John gets the back page commentary to talk about some of the things he's witnessed in the New Orleans Recovery District. He talks fondly about a classroom he observed where the 1st graders were reading fluently from Nate the Great; he contrasts that with another classroom in the city where the kids droned through what little reading they could do. It's a nice story, and you can watch the video the article is based off of here.

The bridge too far that he goes, though, is towards the end:

Our national goal—all children reading by the end of 3rd grade—is a ludicrously low floor that may have become a ceiling. Children don’t learn to walk to get somewhere more efficiently. So too with reading: Children want to learn to read so they can make sense of the world around them. Good teachers capitalize on that intrinsic motivation.

This is an assertion that sounds great on the surface, but doesn't always stand up to the reality of the classroom.

This is my 8th year of teaching first grade. In my time I've bent over backwards to try to get some of the kids to read, but it doesn't always happen despite the best efforts of every adult in that child's life. The trick is that for a good percentage of them, by the time they got to 3rd grade they were doing....OK. I've never had a struggling first grader become an advanced reader by 3rd or 4th grade, but I have had bad readers become average readers, and sometimes that's a laudable accomplishment in and of itself.

I reject the idea that Merrow puts forth, then, of 3rd grade as a floor. It's a realistic goal with some legitimacy behind it that acknowledges the different rates that kids develop at, and it's something that I think teachers can legitimately get behind. Where Merrow is going above--"If we'd only build on their motivation, they'd all be reading like the one class I saw!"--is a dead-end path.

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow on Gay Teachers

This podcast from the always excellent John Merrow is an incredibly interesting look into the past when a teacher could be fired for being homosexual. It's from a radio program that Merrow did in 1976; they've reposted it in light of the recent dust-up over Proposition 8 in California. The recent release of the Harvey Milk bio-pic, and the new light that it's brought to Proposition 6, also make the podcast a timely piece.

This is the sort of education history that I can't get enough of. I'd love to see more of these old reports re-issued as podcasts in the future; it's a great way to preserve the voice.

Read more here, if any.

A Professor That I Do Like

Another one of the John Merrow podcasts was on H. Michael Gelfand, an adjunct at the University of Arizona. He makes a nice comparison to Paulette Kurzer, who I wrote about a couple of days ago. It's an interesting podcast, because he's one of those who have been hanging around academia for years trying to get in the door to one of those tenured positions. Some of the quotes I really liked:

John Merrow: And had anybody trained you to teach?
H. Gelfand: My preparation began with a professor at the University of Georgia who said to me, "H., you're going to teach Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'll do Monday, Wednesday and Friday." And I had never taught before. And it was a classroom of 500 students. And it was a sort of a semi-circular room with a balcony, so that when you looked around, there were people looking down at you from every direction, and I felt about that big, I was nervous as heck, and ever since I've just had a good time with it

I like stories like that. On a much smaller scale it's what I've tried to do with my student teachers, because that's teaching--you're on your feet and you go. My master teacher went on a 2 month coffee break, and I was better for it.

Here he talks about his relationship with his students:

Now, some people critique that and say, you need to establish that firm wall between the students and the professor. I have found that by breaking that wall down a little bit, the students become more comfortable, you get more interaction. They are more interested in learning the material if they feel comfortable.

This guy gets it. Dr. Kurzer talked about how no one would participate in her classes and blamed it all on them, but Dr. H here thinks about what he can do on his end to get them to participate. He talks more about his role in their learning here:

Merrow: So if they don't learn it that's their fault, or yours?
Gelfand: Both. I look at it this way. If they're not learning something then probably I may not be achieving my goal of attempting to really inspire them and to draw them into the topic.

Later on in that section he goes on to talk about the work that the student has to put in, but I like how he begins with what he does.

It's a great piece that's well worth listening to. You can also download the transcript here.

Read more here, if any.

More John Merrow Podcast Love

Week in and week out Merrow delivers the goods. This time there's a great pair of podcasts talking about effective teaching in the community college ranks, an accompaniment to his recent 1-hour special Discounted Dreams which has been running on stations locally.

The podcasts are called A Right To Fail?. They're each about 12 minutes long, and both very thoughtful. Highest recommendations!

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow and Jim Webb on the GI Bill

If you use ITunes, subscribing to the John Merrow Education Podcast (see here) is a great way to spend your time. I've praised their work before, and the newest posting where they interview Senator Jim Webb on what the GI Bill means for our veterans is a brilliant program.

Man, I love podcasts. I wish Terry Bergeson and the EFF would pick up the pace.

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow is teh Awesome

Over at YouTube the folks from Learning Matters have been posting videos from John Merrow, the PBS education reporter. Currently there for your viewing pleasure is a 19-part series on school reform in Philadelphia that is absolutely gripping viewing for anyone involved in education.

You can get to the videos directly from the subpage off of YouTube, here.

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow on the Value Added Model

I think pretty highly of John Merrow; the podcasts that he puts out are always well worth listening to, and the segments that he does for PBS are quality education journalism. In the June 13th edition of Education Week he has an interesting commentary on using growth models to measure the progress that schools and the students in them make; a part that resonated with me was this:

...to have a valid growth model, schools need what families have: a common yardstick. But schools also need a generally agreed-upon (and nourishing) curriculum. So if we want to develop a valid “growth model,” we first need to debate what belongs in the curriculum and figure out what sort of performance measures make sense.

It’s perhaps the most important question since the rise of NCLB: should the testing drive the curriculum, or should the curriculum drive the testing? The limitations and strengths are nearly identical with either approach:

*If we base our tests off of the curriculum, we can accurately measure how well they learned what was taught. This allows for discussions of teacher effectiveness, because they’re the ones who taught the material. The weakness in this approach is that the curriculum might not cover everything that is believed essential for that grade level, which creates gaps in learning that can have a terrible cumulative effect if allowed to grow over time.

*If we base our curriculum off of our tests, we can help to ensure that kids are being shown what has been deemed important, because what’s tested is what’s taught. If we believe that’s what tested is important, this is a good thing. This allows for discussions of school effectiveness, because the yardstick is the same for everyone statewide and we can see which buildings “get it” and which don’t. The weakness in this approach is the overwhelming number of learning requirements, more than can realistically be taught in most grades, which perhaps leads to a narrower curriculum.

This is why I’d like to see more school around the state using the MAP assessment from NWEA, and school-wide scores being made more readily available for study. One of the biggest weaknesses I see in the WASL is that a 1, 2, 3, 4 scale doesn’t tell you nearly enough about where you’re at as a school. The MAP breaks the scores out into the basic areas of reading and math and can be used to measure their growth from the beginning of the year to the end, which is also much more useful than the WASL, which comes back 5 months later.

Growth models: I like ‘em!

Read more here, if any.

The Education Gadfly Podcast for 4/13/06

Podcasts are a new thing for me. I installed the iTunes reader a couple of weeks ago and went looking for podcasts related to education, but didn’t have much luck beyond the Merrow Report and a TV news show from England. That being it, I was pretty excited to hear that Edexcellence.net was going to be starting a podcast to accompany the always-interesting Education Gadfly column that Chester Finn does every week.

The results so far aren’t bad, and I hope the show sticks around. It’s a little too jocular for my tastes sometimes, and I do wish Mike Petrilli would be more than the Colmes to Rick Hess’ Hannitty. They could learn a lot from the John Merrow podcasts, actually—they’re excellent shows that combine informative and entertaining in a very tight package.

There is one segment this week that I’d like to talk about, based off of this new report from Robert Gordon at the Brookings Institute:

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Petrilli: So, here’s the question though: we now know that a teacher who is horrible in their first or second year in the classroom is most likely going to be horrible 5 years later. They’ll get a little bit better, but they’re never going to be as good as the teacher that looked pretty good in the first couple years, you can predict. So if we see teachers who are flailing in their first couple years, more so than their peers, that are clearly not getting any results in student achievement, we should just do them a favor and fire them on the spot.

Hess: You know, a lot of this is just common sense. In any walk of life people can and do get better, but certainly when we’re talking about how we want to invest money and who we want to keep and who we want to pursue, there’s a bunch of this common sense stuff, and what we’re seeing is bi-partisan agreement on what it looks like.
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My first year of teaching was spectacular. I’d never really wanted to be in the lower grades, but when my first principal called me up and offered me a 1st grade position I jumped at it just to get my foot in the door. It was great. Heck, it was magic. The kids made spectacular gains across the board. They were diligent, intelligent, and every single last one of them gave an incredible effort day in and day out. They made the job easy.

Year 1 was heaven, and year 2 was hell. I could tell from the first day that this was a completely different group of kids and I was never able to establish control. My biggest problem was a little girl with pre-adolescent bipolar disorder, which I wouldn’t have believed existed until I met her. She was a kicker, a biter, a thrower, a screamer, and she sent me home bruised on several different occasions. Compound that with the seizure disorder and Oppositional-Defiance that she also had, and we had a grand time.

The kids weren’t learning, and I was burning out fast. I remember sitting at my desk with tears in my eyes one night at around 8:00, trying to figure out the right buttons to push. It had been so good the first year; how could it have gone so wrong, so fast?

My principal took notice, but anyone could tell that the group I had was difficult. It was a difficult time in a lot of places that year; this was the 2002-2003 school year, and the buildup to the war in Iraq meant that a lot of the moms and dads would be leaving soon. When June came and the kids moved on, it was a happy thing for everyone involved.

Then came year three, and I sucked again. Screwed the pooch, as my high school football coach used to put it. Again, I had no control. Again, the kids weren’t making gains. One year you can call an aberration, but two years is a trend, and my trend was sinking like the Titanic. Happily for me I had passed the two-year probationary period and couldn’t be non-renewed outright.

Here’s where the public policy aspect comes into play. If my principal had fired me then and there I would have left teaching, and I couldn’t have blamed the guy a bit if he had let me go. I was doing a bad job and everyone knew it. The trick is that I got better. Love and Logic saved my career by teaching me a better way to talk to the kids and handle the problems that came up. Here in the northwest Dr. Gib Bennington is pretty famous for teaching a class called “Disrupting the Disruptor”, and it too made a great difference. Year 4 was great. The behavior problems that had ruined the last two years were nearly non-existent, and this year I think I have a real shot at getting 85% of my kids to pass the end-of-year DRA reading assessment. The majority can be above average, and that’s cool.

The neatest thing is that this year the staff picked me to be the teacher of the year for our school. That meant an awful lot to me, being recognized by the people who I work with for the things that I do.

So, despite two bad years, I’ve improved. I’m making a positive difference with all of the kids and my scores prove it. If I’d been let go after that 2nd or 3rd year, I wouldn’t have had that chance. Could my school have found someone else? Sure. Would they have been better than me? Quite possibly. Would they have been doing me a favor, or my kids a favor, by firing me as Petrilli suggests? Debatable. Is this clearly common sense, as Hess calls it? In my opinion, no.

My point is that so much of the success of a class is based on the type of kids you have. I'm a better teacher now than I was three years ago, but I still don't think I could have done much with that group even if I knew then what I know now. The two ladies that teach across the hall from me are both incredible teachers, but one in particular has felt like she's really struggling this year, and it's based off of the kids more than anything.

This is leading me into a post about value-added models and getting the teachers who are the best to the kids who need them most, but I'll leave that alone for now.

Read more here, if any.

John Merrow on Al Shanker

I just got done listening to John Merrow’s podcast about the life of Al Shanker. It’s a very slow download, but you get an excellent, 45-minute piece that gives a great overview of the last 30 years. Shanker sounds like he was a neat person to know. You can download the podcast here.

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If You're Not Watching Learning Matters on YouTube, You Really Should Be

It's the channel where ace education reporter John Merrow shares the clips that normally run on the Newshour on PBS. It's always great, it's always thought-provoking, and it's always worth your time.

The clip above is on first grade reading in New Orleans. For anyone who has taught early elementary, you'll appreciate the scenes on teaching beginning reading. Part 2 gets into the struggles that low readers go through; it's a neat set, and if I were principal I'd think this would be perfect beginning-of-year staff meeting material.

You can find it all on the LearningMatters YouTube channel, here.

Read more here, if any.