A teacher who quit is used to show that teachers stay

We know that too many teachers quit. 

Gabrielle Wooden taught for 2 years and quit and is featured
in an article about how teachers don't quit.

We know that between 40 and 50 percent of teachers in the US quit inside their first 5 years.

In Alberta, we estimate that 1 in 4 teachers quit in their first 4 years.

So when I saw an article titled "Despite Reports to the Contrary, New Teachers Are Staying in Their Jobs Longer", I was more than a little suspicious.

The article featured the picture to the right of Gabrielle Wooden. She taught in Mississippi for a whopping two years before quitting to become an account manager for Insight Global in St. Louis.

Wooden belonged to Teach for America which is an organization that undermines children's basic needs and is an accomplice to the corporate take over and privatization of public education.

This article from the Center for American Progress is yet another example of the shameful spin that corporate spin doctors spew on the public.

We treat teachers so badly they leave. This is true for many reasons. In the US, teachers are paid poorly and treated even worse by having their priceless work reduced to meaningless scores on bad tests. In Alberta, teachers are paid well, but workload is a problem.

That Gabrielle Wooden was used to show how teachers don't quit in an article that readily admits its own narrow focus when she taught for only two years highlights another glaring problem. Education is desperate for professional, honest and genuine journalism.

Shameful blog from Teach for America

As I came out of my summer social media hibernation, I came across a Teach for America blog post titled Changing Conversations For Unhoused Students. Actually, it wasn't the title that got my attention. It was this excerpt from a tweet:

What if our schools could see the trying time of homelessness as an asset of experience and knowledge that a child brings to school?

Here are 3 thoughts:

1. This attitude can only come from a position of privilege. If being homeless is such an asset, then Teach For America will waste no time making homelessness a part of their 5 week training program. Of course this is almost as absurd as spinning homelessness as an asset.

People who like to say "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade" need to remember that lemonade requires a lot of sugar and sugar is expensive. They also need to remember that it's easier to pull up your socks when you own socks.

Homeless people don't sit around talking about how being homeless is an asset. The only people who can afford to to talk like this are those who have a home with a twisted view of the world.

2. Words reveal agendas. Used cars are also pre-owned but they are only called pre-owned by those who have an agenda -- people who have a car that they don't want anymore have a used car -- those who want to sell you that car, call it pre-owned. Only those with an agenda re-label used to pre-owned, homeless to unhoused and hungry to food insecure.

3. When bad things happen to children, they are not assets to be romanticized -- they are problems to be solved. I'm all for rethinking problems and changing the conversation when that means we solve old problems with new solutions, but we should all object when rethinking problems and changing the conversation become code for seeing problems as assets that we don't need to fix.

Here's what I mean:

I taught four years in a children's inpatient psychiatric assessment unit where students were admitted by a psychiatrist for many unfortunate reasons.Too many of these children had very bad things happen to them -- some had no parents, some were sexually abused and some were psychotic (these are just three examples).

Can you imagine changing the conversation and asking how being sexually abused or psychotic could be seen as an asset for a child?

Neither can I.

Being sexually abused, psychotic or homeless are problems to be solved. Spinning these awful things as assets is an abdication of our responsibility to make things more equitable for children. These children don't need spin (and they don't need grit) -- they need their basic needs met.

New York principal Carol Burris gets the last word on all this:

Shameful. Work to fight homelessness, not celebrate it.

Teach for America looks to infect Canada

"Teach for America is no substitute for thoughtful, long-term federal and state policies to transform the recruitment, preparation, and retention of career teachers." 

~Diane Ravitch

I've been following the train wreck that is American education reform for a few years now.

I've learned that when a strategy for dismantling public education is born in the US, Canada need only wait a year or two before those same ideas look to contaminate the north. In the past, it's been standardized testing, school choice, replacing teachers with technology and/or merit pay.

Now Teach for America looks to infect Canada.

Here are some facts about Teach for America (TFA):

• Wendy Kopp created Teach for America in 1989 and since then has created an alumni of almost 30,000. 
• TFA attracts America's top college graduates and trains them for five weeks before placing them as full-time instructors in low-income, high-need classrooms across America.
• School districts agree to pay $2000-$5000 for each TFA instructor.
• TFA instructors are required to agree to a two-year commitment at their school. More than 50% of TFA teachers leave after two years, and more than 80% leave after three years.
• Check out a summary of the research on Teach for America here.

So why bring TFA to Canada?

Only 40% of First Nations students living on reserves graduate from high school. In Alberta, for example, there are many education initiatives around supporting First Nations, Metis and Inuit (FNMI) students. Canadians know that too many FNMI students are underserved and underprivileged. On a personal note, I teach in a children's inpatient psychiatric unit, and I am disheartened and disturbed by the number of FNMI children who present with a wide variety of mental health problems, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and or live in abject poverty. 

Canadians also know that attracting qualified teachers to work in native and rural communities can be very difficult. Sometimes the problem isn't just low-quality teachers -- sometimes the problem is that there is no teacher at all. 

At first glance, it would appear that importing Teach for America might be a great solution to Canada's challenges and inequities for FNMI students.

However, if this is an important problem, and it is, than we better be incredibly mindful about the solutions we employ.

So let's take a closer look at Teach for America.

In her book Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, Diane Ravitch devotes an entire chapter titled The Problem with Teach for America. She writes:

It's hard to be critical of Teach for America (TFA) because the idea is so positive and the young people it attracts are so terrific. Who could possibly object to an organization that recruits thousands of smart young college graduates to teach for two years in some of our nation's most distressed urban and rural schools? Who could question the sincerity and idealism of these young men and women? 

It is necessary, however, to distinguish between the young people who join TFA and the organization itself.

Let's examine Teach for America's grand ambition. Ravitch continues:

TFA is not content to send out young people to do useful work in the schools. Flush with media acclaim and corporate largesse, TFA sells its brand as the best means of changing American education and ending educational inequity. It maintains that its teachers are singularly equipped to save children's lives, because TFA teachers have high expectations, clear goals, and a sense of purpose. It portrays itself as a prominent actor in the new civil rights movement, a force to abolish inequality and establish a new civil justice. It is as though the Peace Corps claimed that its young volunteers are more successful than seasoned diplomats, know how to bring about world peace, and should be making foreign policy. 

On the face of it, such claims should have been laughable. No first year teacher, especially one with only five weeks of training, is fully prepared for the challenges of a classroom filled with boisterous students in the nation's poorest communities. How can these young people expect to close the achievement gap and establish equality across the land when they agree to remain only for two years? Even though some stay for three or four years and a few decide to become career teachers or move into administrative roles, this makes no sense. 

It seems even more improbable to say that TFA is leading the new civil rights movement when Wendy Kopp often says that we don't have to fix poverty, we have to fix schools. What civil rights leader would say that? What civil rights leader would assert that we can "fix" the schools instead of improving jobs, healthcare and housing?

In her book A Chance to Make History, Kopp writes that when she started, "many assumed that fixing education would require fixing poverty first." She is now convinced, however, that TFA teachers, "even in their first and second years of teaching, are proving it is possible for economically disadvantaged children to compete academically with their higher-income peers." This actually isn't true, but no matter. She asserts there is "hard evidence that we can ensure all of our children in urban and rural communities have the opportunity to attain an excellent education." She maintains that "over the last twenty years we in the United States have discovered that we don't have to wait to fix poverty to dramatically improve educational outcomes for underprivileged students." When she appeared at Harvard in 2012, Harvard Magazine summed up her presentation: "Two decades ago, many educators thought urban schools could improve only if progress was made against poverty. Wendy Kopp thought there was another way to make a difference." 

But Kopp was wrong. The educators who thought we could improve schools by making progress against poverty were right. We must work both to improve schools and to reduce poverty, not to prioritize one over the other or say that schools come first, poverty later. Children are more likely to do well in school if they arrive in school healthy and ready to learn. TFA teachers are no substitute for jobs, nutrition, good housing, and healthcare. Poverty rises and falls in response to the economy, not in response to smart young people who teach for two or three years in poor communities or work in the state department of education, even state commissioner. 

It's important to note the most prominent alumni of Teach for America:

• Michelle Rhee who is a prominent opponent of teachers' unions and teachers' tenure and an outspoken advocate of high-stakes testing and privatization.

• John White who is the state superintendent of education in Luisiana and graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy who helped launch an effort to privatize education by diverting money from public education to charters and vouchers and for-profit online businesses and private vendors. 

• Michael Johnston is a member of Colorado's state legislature who wrote legislation that made student standardized test scores count for 50% of every teacher's and principal's evaluation -- despite evidence that this is a very bad idea.

Wendy Kopp brought TFA to America, but it is Kyle Hill and Adam Goldenberg who are co-founders of Teach for Canada. When I visited their website, they name a four-member board of directors (which includes Hill and Goldenberg) and mentions, but does not name, a "core group of two dozen volunteers from across the country". Of the four named to the board, only two biographies hint towards anything that resembles teaching experience, and that is limited to Hill who "volunteered as a summer teacher in Jamaica and Ukraine" and Christie Kneteman who was a "former volunteer teacher in Ghana".

While Kyle assured me via twitter that Teach for Canada is "working with educators to build our program", I have a hard time finding confidence in such a vague and hollow statement. If Teach for Canada was working with an impressive list of teachers, why not make that known on their front page? I don't know too many organizations that are humble or bashful about the impressive people they are working with.

It's also important to note that Kyle Hill is a Strategy Consultant at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). So who is the Boston Consulting Group and what do they have to do with education?

BCG is one of those companies that helps corporations do strategic planning -- and when it comes to education, they have an agenda that includes:

• closing public schools
• recommending privately managed charter schools
• eliminating collective bargaining for teachers and due process (tenure)
• merit pay that links teacher pay to students standardized test scores
• heavily promoting online learning

BCG has done this in Delaware, North Carolina, Dallas, Arizona, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Memphis. Consultant groups like BCG have immense influence in the US, which is why some have dubbed No Child Left Behind as No Consultant Left Behind -- one analysis concluded that 25-35% of federal funding for School Improvement Grants went not to the schools but to consultants. And Kyle Hill, co-founder of Teach for Canada, is a consultant with BCG.

Any Canadian who is proud of our public education system and our efforts to make education more equitable for everyone should be at the very least concerned that the alumni of Teach for America are such advocates for reducing education to standardized test scores and privatizing public education.

More specifically, I enjoyed Alex Usher post where he pointed out that:

The idea that what First Nations need are a lot of well-meaning but inexperienced white kids showing up in their communities saying, “we’re here to help!” is plain ludicrous. There’s no doubt that education for First Nations, particularly those from more remote communities, is in a desperate state, and deserving of vastly more money and policy attention than it currently receives. But youthful enthusiasm just isn't a substitute for money and teaching experience.

With all the baggage that Teach for America carries around, it makes sense that Hill is trying to show how Teach for Canada is different from Teach for America. The first example comes from an e-mail Hill sent me. Hill writes:

We have many reservations about the Teach For America model. The big one is that Teach For America sees its mission as addressing teacher quality, while we're focused on teacher supply.

The second example is from Teach for Canada's FAQ:

Will you be doing the Teach for America five-week summer training model? 

No. 

We will equip our teachers with the very best pedagogical techniques, taught in an intense setting over an entire summer.

If these are differences from Teach for America, they are differences without distinctions.

Firstly, Teach for America's original mission was to address teacher supply, but a bad case of mission creep has twisted and bastardized Teach for America into thinking they can address teacher quality.

Secondly, let's be crystal clear, an "entire summer" is 8 weeks of training. That's a whopping 3 weeks more than Teach for America. That's hardly something to brag about especially when Canada's already strong teacher workforce comes from Universities with 4 or 5 year Bachelor of Education programs, and that doesn't count another 1 or 2 more years to get a Masters.

The Alberta Teachers' Association's Research tells us that one of the major causes of early-career teacher attrition is inadequate pre-service preparation (which traditionally has been a greater concern in the US than in Canada) and difficult working conditions (particularly in under resourced schools) and professional isolation. Canada doesn't necessarily have a teacher shortage problem -- we have a teacher leakage problem. Because of systemic problems, anywhere between 25-50% of teachers leave inside of before five years on the job.

Many beginning teachers experience what some call "praxis shock" which describes the challenge of coping with classroom realities for which pre-service training has not adequately prepared them. Many beginning teachers may come to feel betrayed by their professional preparation after being faced with the hard realities and complexities of teaching.

Programs like Teach for America and Teach for Canada are at best unhelpful and at worst harmful because they misidentify the problem (teacher supply vs teacher attrition) and employ solutions that ignore and exacerbate the real problems.

We need a stable and well-educated teaching profession, not a revolving door of graduates who see teaching as a bullet on their resume before they move on to bigger and better things. When it comes to complex problems like educating Canada's First Nations, Metis and Inuit children, there are solutions like Teach for Canada that are clear, simple and wrong.

How GERM is infecting schools around the world

This was written by Pasi Sahlberg, author of “ Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland? and director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation. He has served the Finnish government in various positions, worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. and for the European Training Foundation in Italy as senior education specialist. Sahlberg has also advised governments internationally about education policies and reforms. He is also an adjunct professor of education at the University of Helsinki and University of Oulu. He can be reached at pasi.sahlberg@cimo.fi. You can follow Pasi Sahlbeg on Twitter here and read his blog here.

by Pasi Sahlberg

Ten years ago — against all odds — Finland was ranked as the world’s top education nation. It was strange because in Finland education is seen as a public good accessible to all free of charge without standardized testing or competitive private schools. When I look around the world, I see competition, choice, and measuring of students and teachers as the main means to improve education. This market-based global movement has put many public schools at risk in the United States and many other countries, as well. But not in Finland.

You may ask what has madeFinland’s schools so extraordinary. The answer has taken many by surprise. First, the Finns have never aimed to be the best in education but rather to have good schools for all of children. In other words, equity in education comes before a ‘race to the top’ mentality in national school reforms.

Second, Finns have taken teachers and teaching seriously by requiring that all teachers must be well trained in academic universities. All teachers should enjoy professional autonomy and public trust in their work. As a consequence, teaching has been a popular career choice among young Finns for three decades now. Today the Finnish government invests 30 times more in professional development of its teachers and administrators than testing its students’ performance in schools.

Third, Finnish educators have learned systematically from other countries how to reform education and improve teaching in schools. The United States has been a special source of inspiration to Finland since John Dewey a century ago. Such American educational innovations as cooperative learning, problem-based teaching and portfolio assessment are examples of the practices invented by teachers and researchers in the United States that are now commonly found in many Finnish classrooms.

One thing that has struck me is how similar education systems are. Curricula are standardized to fit to international student tests; and students around the world study learning materials from global providers. Education reforms in different countries also follow similar patterns. So visible is this common way of improvement that I call it theGlobal Educational Reform Movement or GERM. It is like an epidemic that spreads and infects education systems through a virus. It travels with pundits, media and politicians. Education systems borrow policies from others and get infected. As a consequence, schools get ill, teachers don’t feel well, and kids learn less.

GERM infections have various symptoms. The first symptom is more competition within education systems. Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

The second symptom of GERM is increased school choice. It essentially positions parents as consumers empowering them to select schools for their children from several options and thereby promotes market-style competition into the system as schools seek to attract those parents. More than two-thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for families with the perceptions that market mechanisms in education would allow equal access to high-quality schooling for all. Increasing numbers of charter schools in the United States, secondary school academies in England, free schools in Sweden and private schools in Australia are examples of expanding school choice policies. Yet according to the OECD, nations pursuing such choice have seen both a decline in academic results and an increase in school segregation.

The third sign of GERM is stronger accountability from schools and related standardized testing of students. Just as in the market place, many believe that holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ learning will lead to improved results. Today standardized test scores are the most common way of deciding whether schools are doing a good job. Teacher effectiveness that is measured using standardized tests is a related symptom of GERM. According to the Center for Public Education, standardized testing has increased teaching to the test, narrowed curricula to prioritize reading and mathematics, and distanced teaching from the art of pedagogy to mechanistic instruction.

Healthy school systems are resistant to GERM and its inconvenient symptoms. In these countries, teaching remains an attractive career choice for young people. My niece Veera is a good example of this.

Seven years ago, when she was graduating from a high school in Helsinki, she called me and asked my advice on how to get into the teacher education program in the university where I had been working as teacher educator earlier. I told her that as a straight-A graduate, she should feel comfortable with the entrance examination and be herself in the interview.

In Finland primary school teacher education is a master’s level academic research-based degree similar to degrees in law, economics or medicine. She read required books, took the exam and was invited to the final interview where only the top candidates were selected. A month later, she called me in tears and told me she was not accepted. I asked her what was the toughest question in the interview. She said: “Why do you want to become a teacher when you could become a lawyer or doctor instead?”

Afterwards she wrote me a letter about her interest in teaching. This is what she wrote: “First is the internal drive to help people to discover their strengths and talents, but also to realize their weaknesses and incompleteness. I want to be a teacher because I want to make a difference in children’s lives and for this country. My work with children has always been based on love and care, being gentle and creating personal relations with those with whom I work. This is the only way that I can think will give me fulfillment in my life.”

The following spring she applied again. She was accepted from a ten-fold number of applicants and she recently earned her master’s degree as a primary school teacher. If the Finnish education system had been infected by GERM like many other countries, Veera and many of her peers would never have chosen teaching as their life career.

Addressing pandemic disinterest in the teaching profession with Teach for America and Teach First programs may be a solution to local shortcomings but will not cure the systemic infections that cause current educational underperformance in many countries. We should instead restore the fundamental meaning and values of school education. Without public schools, our nations and communities are poorly equipped to value humanity, equality and democracy. I think we should not educate children to be similar according to a standardized metric but help them to discover their own talents and teach them to be different from one another. Diversity is richness in humanity and a condition for innovation.

A growing number of students in Korea and Japan are taking their own lives because they can’t take the pressure by the adults anymore. Recent suicides of two 14-year-old Kenyan schoolgirls, Mercy Chebet and Sylvia Wanjiku, add a sad chapter in the book of the victims of GERM.

We must stop the GERM that puts such a pressure on children in schools through competition, choice, and accountability. Choosing collaboration, equity and trust-based responsibility as the main drivers in education reforms enhance immunity of our school systems to stop GERM and have good school for all children.