I’d like to begin by thanking my teachers in 5th, 6th and 7th grades, Mrs. Pulaski, Mr. Burke and Miss Elmer. They taught us percentages and showed us how to ‘round down,’ which I am doing now, because the US population is 312,624,000, and we have 3,198,000 public school teachers, which computes to 1.02%.
That’s right. More than one out of every 100 Americans teaches in our public schools.
What, you thought I was talking about Wall Street fat cats, professional athletes, entertainers and other rich people? (If interested in some thoughts on the intersection of business and education, you should listen to a new podcast we posted with Doug Lynch of UPenn.) That’s a different one percent, and I guarantee there’s no overlap between the two groups. The average teacher today earns about $55,000. At least 75 CEOs earn that much in one day, every day, 365 days a year. According to the AFL-CIO’s “Executive Paywatch,” the CEO who ranked #75, David M. Cote of Honeywell, was paid $20,154,012, for a daily rate of $55,216.47.
The CEO at the top of the heap, Philippe P. Dauman of Viacom, was paid $84,515,308. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Krepela, taught me how to compute averages, so I can tell you Mr. Dauman earns a daily average of $231,549, which is more than four times what the average teacher earns in a year.
Unlike wages for teachers, CEO salaries have been soaring in recent years. Forty years ago, the average public school teacher earned $49,000, adjusted for inflation. That’s a raise of a whopping $150 a year for forty years, or about one quarter of one percent annually.
Here’s another way that the other one percent is different: teachers spend their own money on supplies for their classrooms. That came to $1.33 billion in school year 2009-2010, or $356 per teacher, according to the National School Supply and Equipment Association.
I will wager several packs of colored pencils that Mr. Dauman, Mr. Cote and the other high earners do not drop by Staples to pick up office supplies for their secretaries.
The teaching profession is often criticized because salaries are not based on performance, meaning that the best teachers earn what their less-than-stellar colleagues take home. While that’s generally true, it’s also changing fast. Twenty-four states now base teacher evaluation in part on student performance, and Denver, Washington, DC and other localities have created ‘pay for performance’ systems that reward individuals or entire schools when students do well. Connecting teacher effectiveness with student outcomes is the wave of the future, and it’s becoming easier to remove ineffective teachers than it was just a few years ago.
That doesn’t seem to be true on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms, where the pay of the CEO is often at odds with his company’s performance. Take Cisco and John Chambers. The website 24/7 Wall Street ranks Chambers the most overpaid CEO, based on his total compensation of $18,871,875 even though the price of Cisco common stock fell 31.4 percent.
In fairness, some teachers are actually overpaid, because they have ‘retired on the job’ and are just going through the motions until they can retire for real. Of course, there’s a big difference between being overpaid at $55,000 and being overpaid at $20,500,000, which is what Carl Crawford of the Boston Red Sox earned for hitting .255 with just 11 home runs last season. Like the CEO of Honeywell, Crawford is earning about $55,000 a day, every day, 365 days a year. He ranks only 28th on the list of athletes, according to Sports Illustrated’s “Fortunate Fifty.”
As may have occurred to you, public school teachers — the group I am calling the other one percent — are actually part of the 99 percent. However, they probably were not occupying Zuccotti Park. At least not during the day, because that’s when they are otherwise occupied — teaching our children and grandchildren.
Stop reading right now If you are a strong ‘back to basics,’ no-frills education person, because this column is about as far away as humanly possible from your notions of what should be happening in schools.
However, if you teach in high school or middle school — or if you are worried about the narrowing of the curriculum — please stay with me.
In a given month, between 30,000 and 40,000 people read this blog; I am hoping that at least a few of you are H.S. or M.S. teachers who are committed to the arts. Or perhaps, non-teachers who share that enthusiasm and are in a position to help.
In a recent post about the threats to the arts in the schools, I suggested that we needed to ‘energize the 80,’ my shorthand for the need to get the 80 percent or so of households without school-age children involved in supporting public education.
Many of you liked the idea, which was gratifying for a day or two — but now it’s time to do it. Or rather, for students to do it. I envision a squad of middle school or high school students, armed with a decent video camera, going door to door and persuading apartment owners and shopkeepers to look into the camera and recite poetry. A couple of lines each, to be edited together, with the speakers identified on the screen.
(For fun, we will get a couple of recognizable people — think pro sports stars, like Derek Jeter — to contribute as well)
There’s just one rule: the students must recruit adults who do not have school-age children. They are members of the 80 percent that have to be energized in support of the arts.
I ask you to imagine watching the video described below on YouTube (I’ve used characters from my Manhattan neighborhood, but you should picture folks from your world):
Mrs. Andrews in Apartment 9B: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?
Mr. Young of Mr. Young’s Cleaners: To die, to sleep, No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to …
Kimberly Wong in Apartment 17C: … ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream …
Augie Ramos at the Deli: … ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause – there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life.
Angela Packer at Equinox Gym: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office …
Jacob Epstein of Epstein Jewelers: … and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin?
Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees: Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?
Fifth grader teacher Alice Gotteswold: Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought …
Richie O’Connor, 201 East 79th doorman: … and enterprises of great pith and moment, With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.
This could obviously be done for an assortment of literary elements.
You can be certain, every one of those performers will be boasting about their roles and urging others to watch. And, even more important, they will be shaking their heads in amazement at what school kids are doing these days. They will now be the schools’ advocates.
Shakespeare can be intimidating, but because everyone can relate to passion, I’d suggest the kids bring along Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Vicki Hennigan, florist: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace.
Archie Samuels, counterman at Wrap ‘n Run: I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
Victor Reynoso, 235 East 79th doorman: I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
Peggy Sydak, age 83, in Apartment 21B: I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
And Robert Frost is a natural. Here I would break apart the verses, divide them among performers.
Alfonso Gonfriddo, postal carrier: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler …
Amanda Morales, office manager: … long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth …
Joan Zrodowski, businesswoman: … then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear …
Ted Bauer, web site developer: … Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same …
Jerry Flanigan, owner of 81st Street Hardware: … and both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Joe Quinlan, salesman: Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.
The kids will quickly figure out the importance of videotaping each performer reading lines from several different poems, with multiple takes of each reading. They will figure out that doing it well will not be easy, but this is the real world, and their work product will be up there for all to see, up against lots of other student productions. A little competition is a good thing, particularly when it’s team competition.
I have stressed that these videos will build support for the arts, but it’s just as important to point out that the process will teach valuable lessons to the students. In addition to the obvious ‘soft skill’ of working on a team with a real world product, producing these videos will add to their skill set, because they are going to have to persuade the adults to relax, persuade them to ‘do it again’ quite a few times, stroke their fragile egos when they mess up (which will happen a lot), and generally persuade them to take their minds off the camera — even as they are looking into the lens.
School will be more valuable and interesting, and the enthusiasm will rub off and carry over into other aspects of their school experience. They will be become better and more discerning consumers of education, precisely because they are now producers.
As they search for talent, and as they edit on their computers, I am sure that some of these young producers will start to take some chances, let their imaginations run free.
Perhaps, they will have the dry cleaner saying “Out, damned spot.’
Or the local watch repair guy reciting ‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time…’
How about some pre-schoolers on the playground intoning “When shall we three meet again in thunder, lightning or in rain? When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won?”
Just don’t ask the school principal to intone ‘it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’
I understand that at least two school groups have begun working on this. That’s a start, but this is a big country with a lot of bored school kids out there, kids with drive, brains and energy.
Learning Matters will create a dedicated channel on YouTube, and we’ll try to get the big arts groups behind this.
Long ago the novelist E. M. Forster told us what matters. ‘Only connect,’ he wrote, getting it right.
If we want our children to perform better academically, we need “better parents.” That’s what Tom Friedman wrote, perhaps ironically, on November 19 in the New York Times. The column provoked hundreds of readers to comment, and those comments provide insight to how far apart we are as a nation, at least, when it comes to public education.
Friedman cites an OECD study that reveals that “Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.” (My use of the verb ‘reveals’ is my effort at irony, in case you are wondering.)
Friedman cites another study, “Back to School,” from the American School Board Journal, which says that, when parents are involved in children’s learning, the kids do better. “Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” the study reports. It adds that these things matter more than attending PTA meetings, volunteering in classrooms, or helping raise money for the school.
There is a certain “Duh” factor — yes, involved parents make a difference in their child’s education, but what struck me was the heat and intensity of the responses, some of which I am excerpting below.
A few readers responded to Mr. Friedman’s comments about ‘better parents’ by changing the subject and preaching about the need for ‘better teachers.’
Janet of Salt Lake City was an early responder who wrote, in part: We need to place the responsibility for teaching squarely where it lies — on the teachers. A great teacher can teach anything to any child. Rather than wishing to turn every parent into the perfect parent, a goal that can’t be achieved. We need to provide the training and salaries that will attract the best and the brightest of our college graduates into a career in public education.
Moreover, suggested another respondent from Salt Lake City: It’s the fault of the schools that parents aren’t involved. He wrote, in part: Unfortunately, most of these uninvolved parents were educated in the same school systems that are now failing our children, so naturally they lack the kinds of skill sets needed to instill in their children a thirst for learning. And it’s a vicious cycle: these same parents will then go on to elect next year’s school board members who will determine next year’s under-performing curriculum when compared to the rest of the world, thus setting up their children for failure in an ever-changing world.
Many readers attacked Janet, often in a ‘what planet are you living on?’ vein.
Persam1197 of NY was pretty typical: Janet, you said: ‘The public school system of every community has the responsibility to teach every student, regardless of the quality of the home life.’ I agree wholeheartedly, and that’s why placing the burden and responsibility of squarely on teachers, as you suggest, is misguided. It takes a village to raise a child, and, until our communities accept responsibility for our children, expect more of the same.
Predictably, teachers — like Malcolm in Pennsylvania — responded defensively to the criticism. I have taught in public schools for more than 20 years, in an inner city and in a rural setting. I wouldn’t mind being held highly accountable for achievement seen in children for 150 hours a year (50 minutes a day for 180 days), if the parents who are responsible for them for the other 8,610 hours out of the year were also held highly accountable. “Accountable” means more than showing up for a 10-minute parent conference once a year.
A more common response, however, was supportive of Mr. Friedman’s point, often with hand-wringing. Here’s what Judy C. of Phoenix wrote:
It goes without saying, when parents are actively involved in their child’s education, the children do better. Unfortunately, for many reasons, many parents are uninvolved, and child raising is, essentially, left up to the school. Sure, there’s nothing better than a good teacher; but really, a child’s primary, and most important, educator is his or her parent. Parents need to step up.
Don Myers of Connecticut agreed: How the parent respects learning is the key to how the child perceives and respects learning. Learning is a 24/7 deal, not just limited to the school and related activities. We treat the school with disdain and with no more respect than we do the baby sitter.
Dale, a former teacher in Idaho, suggested that parents actively instill anti-school attitudes in their children: Many students regard school and their teachers as adversaries.
Jim G. in DC agreed: Hostility toward education does not come from the great teacher. It comes from the parent, or lack thereof. We must break the cycle of poor student performance in economically disadvantaged homes, and we cannot expect the preschoolers in those homes to do the fixing. The parents must change.
Which prompted a question from Josh Hill in Connecticut:
Sure, but how do you improve the parents?
If the challenge is to improve parents, whose job would that be?
Susan of Eastern Washington noted that “Parents often do not acknowledge that they, and not any school, are ultimately responsible for their children’s educations.”
Why is this happening? Don't parents know they are responsible, are they aware but incapable, or are they willfully ignoring their responsibilities to their children in their mindless pursuit of money and status? (Those were all popular explanations, by the way.)
None of the comments I read addressed, what to me is, a critical issue, and that is a false distinction between ‘education’ and ‘schooling,’ a distinction that, I believe, has been perpetuated and reinforced by many educators. That is, too many educators act as if they are in charge, a kind of “Leave your children — and your tax dollars — at the schoolhouse door, and don’t bother us.”
(Many superintendents and principals then set up ‘parent involvement committees’ and other patronizing activities that actually reinforce the barriers between parents and schools. It’s like saying ‘yes, we will let you be involved in your child’s education, but only through channels and by serving on committees.’ No wonder so many parents are fed up with educators!)
So what’s to be done? Ken of Hobe Sound (FL) suggested: “One powerful change a parent from an at-risk family can apply to transform their child’s defeatist approach to school is to become very involved in their student’s education on a daily basis.”
Bingo! But how can that happen? Mr. Friedman quotes from his conversation with Andres Schleicher of OECD:
“Just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter their education level or social background.”
Sure, every parent can do that if they know they’re supposed to, but I believe that schools and teachers can actually make that happen, organically and naturally, with a carefully designed curriculum in the early grades that continues up through secondary school.
I have written about this elsewhere but here’s a short summary: beginning in kindergarten, teachers should create ‘homework’ that involves the parents or guardians of their students. It can be as simple as asking mom or dad about their favorite movie for the first-grader’s ‘show and tell’ the next day. Early writing assignments can be on family-connected topics: What was Mom’s favorite food growing up, and why? What was the first trip Dad or Grandma took? Why is XX your favorite (athlete, actress, political leader)? And so on. And this is not a one-off but a routine, at least once every week.
This works for math as well, with shopping and cooking and anything else that involves numbers.
When ‘homework’ is organic, the families cannot but help ‘fulfill their responsibilities, but not in an ‘eat your peas’ way. Parents will want to see what their children write, and what the teacher writes on the paper. More connections emerge.
I am thankful that we live in a country where we can speak freely, but in public education the ‘them versus us’ approach isn’t working. We all can and must get better, but finger pointing won’t get us there.
The phrase “conventional wisdom” is often an oxymoron, at least in education. At a bare minimum, conventional wisdom ought to be questioned. Which is what I propose to do here about ‘Time on Task’ and the new Common Core standards.
‘Time On Task’ is a concept educators love to talk about. It often goes this way: someone asks about extending the school day and/or the school year, prompting this response: “Good idea, because more time on task produces academic gains.”
Odds are good that what comes next is an emphatic statement about the importance of quality time on task — which strikes me as akin to supporting motherhood and apple pie.
Everyone nods approvingly at this conventional wisdom.
But they have it backwards. It’s not ‘quality time’ that matters so much. It’s ‘quality tasks.’ Anyone who’s spent much time in high school lately knows that much of what goes on there is mind-numbing. It’s the tasks, not the time, that ought to take precedence.
You may have read my earlier comments about creating knowledge, so I won’t rehash them here, except to say that teachers have remarkable opportunities to work with young people on tasks that build their skills and knowledge, tasks that challenge their creativity, and tasks that help them sort through the flood of information that surrounds them 24/7 and turn it into knowledge.
So it’s not ‘quality time on task’ that we should be talking about. Instead, it’s ‘Time on Quality Tasks.’ See that the tasks are meaningful, and we won’t have to worry about time — most students will want to complete quality tasks.
The second example of conventional wisdom that ought to be scrutinized involves the Common Core (national) standards for math and English, which have now been endorsed/adopted by 45 states. Bandwagons in general scare me, and the Common Core bandwagon is moving at high speed, endorsed not just by most states but also by teacher unions and many other education associations. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and I talked about it at our Twitter Town Hall this past Monday, and he was lavish in his praise, while taking extreme care to point out that the federal government had not written these standards.
(However, his Department of Education has thrown a lot of money at this and also made acceptance of ‘higher standards’ one of the four requirements for qualifying for its “Race to the Top” competition. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…)
Is this a sign that our children should be seeing year-to-year?
The Common Core will be a game-changer, the Secretary asserted. Perhaps they will be, but I have to wonder how many people have actually read them? (The PDFs, available for download at the site linked in the first paragraph above, are quite lengthy.)
One thing is clear: What we have now in public education is unacceptable. It’s a hodgepodge of standards, many quite low because of the ‘dumbing down’ effects of No Child Left Behind. As Robert Rothman makes clear in his valuable new book, Something in Common, America has been wrestling with this issue for years. So I am not arguing for the status quo. However, I am afraid that we are missing an opportunity to re-examine our 19th-century approach to school organization. Let me explain.
Because I taught English in high school and college at the beginning of my career, I have been poking around in the ELA standards (English Language Arts). They are very detailed, by year, and ‘strand’ and category. So be prepared to crack the code, ‘Rl.5.4,’ ‘Rl.9.10.10,’ and so on.
On the subject of ‘Range of reading and level of text complexity,’ by the end of the year, fifth graders are expected to “read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 4–5 text complexity band independently and proficiently.”
Before you say ‘huh’, read on.
In that same category, this is what’s expected of 9th graders: “By the end of grade 9, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 9–10 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.”
“Scaffolding” is educational jargon. Think building blocks. First you learn to add and subtract, then you build on that scaffold and learn to multiply and divide, that sort of thing. An awful lot of learning does NOT occur that way, but that’s probably beside the point here.
Leaving aside the mind-numbing jargon that makes my eyes glaze over, I have a serious issue with the Common Core and the conventional wisdom that these detailed national standards are just what we need. They are pouring concrete around our antiquated, age-segregated approach to learning. Just when modern technologies allow students to move at individual and different speeds, the Common Core standards seem to set in concrete the notions of 5th grade, 6th grade, 7th grade, and so on.
I worry that these markers will become stop signs, just as the grade demarcations now operate. Not long ago I heard a school principal complain that he had to tell his 9th graders to ‘motor down’ to get ready for the 9th grade test — because they were doing 11th grade math. All they will get credit for, naturally, is the 9th grade. Isn’t “Slow Down!” a horrible lesson about the irrationality of the world for those young people to absorb?
Schools work around age segregation by creating programs for ‘the gifted,’ which allow precocious 9-year-olds to do work that’s usually for older kids. Sometimes kids skip a grade, but no one seems to question age- and grade-segregation.
I want to be clear here. I am not arguing for ‘fewer standards,’ something the writers seemed to have anticipated, because they write, “It is important to recognize that ‘fewer standards’ are no substitute for focused standards. Achieving “fewer standards” would be easy to do by resorting to broad, general statements. Instead, these Standards aim for clarity and specificity.”
‘Specificity’ they’ve achieved, but ‘clarity?’ Re-read the excerpts quoted above.
I have a suggestion. Rather than perpetuate grade-based learning, could we set standards for age groups? Standards for children ages 6-10 that say, ‘This is what every 10-year-old is expected to be able to do.’ Standards for kids ages 11-14 that say ‘This is what every 14-year-old is expected to be able to do.’ And graduation standards for those ages 15-18: ‘This is what every high school senior is expected to be able to do before getting a diploma.’ Then our system could actually be learner-centered.
