Idiosyncratic Explanations for Teacher Shortages

“We have examined and rejected a number of idiosyncratic explanations for rising costs in education…” Why Are The Prices So D*** High?, Helland/Tabarrok

Economics papers always make my head hurt, but because they’re focusing on my field, I’ve been following Alex Tabarrok’s posts on his upcoming book–well, maybe not following, but reading. I was pleased to see they didn’t find “bloat” in educator salaries, and grok the Baumol effect, but consider myself wholly unable to comment on their basic argument. (Except, you know, pensions?)

But a commenter, Slocum, caught my interest:

Another problem with the Baumol story is that, in education, costs are increasing dramatically even when salaries of workers providing education are low and stagnant. At this point nearly three quarters of faculty are non-tenure track. These positions are generally neither secure nor well paid. This is possible because supply of PhDs wanting teaching positions far outstrips demand. How does the Baumol explanation dovetail with a great oversupply of high-skilled workers relative to demand?

This reminded me of a question I wonder more researchers don’t wonder about.

Group A: PhDs wanting tenure track positions but settling for contracted adjunct jobs. Pay: low. Job security: horrible. Benefits: none.

Group B: public school teachers with tenure positions. Pay: a lot better than adjuncts. Job security: famed and resented throughout the land. Benefits: famed and resented throughout the land.

One would expect that Group B had the greater barrier to entry, except of course that’s why the job security and benefits are resented. High school teachers are the plebes of the cognitive elite, and elementary school teachers aren’t even granted that lowly status. Meanwhile, college adjunct professors spent at least seven years and god knows how much money earning a PhD, usually at a research institution.

In a world ordered by economists and education reformers, the PhDs who didn’t find college tenure would move down to secondary school and, thanks to their superior education and instructional training, displace the far less-educated high school teachers at high-paying suburban schools, where the principals would be delighted to hire them over mere BAs who often don’t even have a degree in the subject they teach. Those high school teachers found wanting by the suburbs would be forced into middle school or even Title I high schools–maybe even inner city schools.

All those PhDs would create a surplus in the K-12 teaching population, making it much easier for administrators to hire and fire, create more job insecurity among teachers. Oversupply of teachers would weaken unions ability to demand more pay, thus putting downward pressure on salaries.

Robbed of their desperate labor pool, post-secondary institutions would be forced to raise salaries, offer more tenured positions, favor international students over citizens, or automate instruction.  Ultimately, balance would be restored either by increased tenure opportunities for PhDs, better pay and conditions, or a near elimination of college adjuncts.

But the world is not so ordered. Only 1.3% of public school teachers have PhDs. Private schools have a slightly higher 2.3%

Why don’t these adjunct professors rebel against the crappy pay and insecurity and move down to high school level teaching?

Granted, they would still have to go back to school and get a credential–but they could get through the credential nonsense quickly, while working as a paid teacher. All that education will push them all the way to the right on the payscale, although this double MA holder advises you not to mention that education.  Better, really, would be to get the credential while going through the PhD program. I’ve often wondered why all those criticizing universities for overproducing doctorates don’t suggest something like this.

But ed school is a pretty minor barrier, really. Given the investment, why not get the security they were looking for? Instead, when they do leave, they tend to become administrators in the very universities that rejected them.

I have observed this oddness before, and answered my own question.   But if I don’t say this directly, some reader will annoy me by pointing out the obvious: yes, of course, the adjuncts see k-12 as unworthy and low status.  I don’t know how or if economists take status into account when they talk about rational actors. Accepting a low-paying, low security job when a little extra work would net them a much higher paying, low risk job certainly seems to be acting against self-interest, but maybe I’m missing something.

However, it’s also clear that principals don’t regard PhDs as inherently superior to regular garden-variety credentialed teachers. If they did, the few thousand dollars extra in salary wouldn’t deter them. But research consistently shows that hiring districts don’t have any hiring criteria that would advantage additional education. Paradoxically, private schools have more PhDs because they don’t pay more for education–and also because they don’t require credentials. Lower standards, not higher. Yeah, weird.

I am not for a moment suggesting that the solution to the K-12 teacher shortage is more failed PhDs. Even if principals were to prefer credentialed PhDs to credentialed BA/MAs, there’s no guarantee that the lower status teachers would settle for less desirable schools. It’s well known that universities produce far more elementary school teachers than needed; less well known that inner city and rural schools still go begging for teachers because many would-be teachers simply leave the field if the location or the kids aren’t what they had in mind. It might just send even more down the PhD path, this time with the express intent of teaching.

I argue instead that K-12 teaching is an entirely different animal, an art more than a skill with all sorts of non-cognitive abilities required, that demanding kids take demanding classes despite  little interest or ability in the subject matter is a terrible idea, and that teacher supply will continue to dwindle if policy makers refuse to acknowledge these fundamentals.

Anyway. Given the imbalance in these two fields, I’m just surprised more researchers haven’t explored it.

Look at that, 1000 words.

Note: Fantastic, detailed comment by JC , also by James Miller and Andrew Biggs.

 

Oh, Woe! No “Teachers of Color”!

Buffalo and Rochester Try to Diversify Their Teaching Force

Time and again, year after year, month after month, reporters and opinion writers uncritically repeat these tales of woe: Oh no! We have no teachers of color!

The reasons are always uncertain or, as in this new story, not even offered. Mention of the unending, unceasing efforts to diversify will be made. But rarely do these stories ever even tiptoe towards truthful.

At best the story might barely hint that the lack might involve the challenging (to some) credential tests.

In every standardized test of knowledge known to humankind, blacks and Hispanics score, on average, lower than whites and Asians. But state after state boosts its teaching credential cut score, convinced that they must raise teacher quality.

And then, oh woe! We have no teachers of color!!

Yes, it’s a mystery. Say, for example, a catastrophic flood closes a city down, and the city takes the opportunity to fire 7,000 teachers (about 5,000 were black). Because hey, what an opportunity! Don’t let that disaster go to waste. While education reformers and politicians celebrate the new, better, and oh so very much whiter teachers in their new, improved, city, the matched test scores show no improvement (green line) and while the post-flood scores of a different, not nearly as poor, population are improved, the district is still extremely low scoring. And 5,000 teachers, give or take–about 1% of the black teaching population–are out of work.

But oh woe! We have no teachers of color!

The stories don’t even provide the happy news. Did you know that 14.3% of the 954,000 education administrators are black? Black principals and other various boss folks outnumber black high school teachers (8% of 1.08 million). There are roughly the same number of Hispanic administrators as high school academic teachers. (BLS Stats).

Clearly, many black and Hispanic teachers prefer more money and better pensions in the world of “education administrators of color”, which represent 25% of the whole. Just 75% of education administrators are white.

And still oh woe! We have no teachers of color.

Education reporters and analysts either don’t know or don’t want to talk about the link between the scarcity of non-white teachers and states’ persistent raising of the minimumm qualifying score for teacher credential tests. Difficult to say, in so many words, that higher required test scores lead unequivocally to lower black and Hispanic pass rates. So they’ll write puzzled stories about the decline, hint darkly at racism, and ignore or underreport test cheating rings run by black principals in order to get black teachers passing credential scores.

They either don’t know or don’t want to talk about the fact that black and Hispanic principals and administrators have better represenationi. See, ed schools can’t use affirmative action to enroll teaching candidates. Districts, on the other hand, can use affirmative action to hire and promote principals. But affirmative action is so….controversial. Who wants to acknowledge that schools are hiring administrators with a diversity quota?

Is it churlish to point out that the stories themselves are applying a diversity quota? And finding the results wanting? I guess so. Also misguided, I suppose, to observe that children of color see principals of color in management positions, usually having authority over a gaggle of white teachers. Doesn’t that send a positive message? (In case it’s not clear, I do not object to school districts using race as a factor in administrator selection.

Thus we see, literally, thousands of articles bewailing the “missing minority teacher”. And none of them really say why.

They will often say, accurately, that research shows black children, in particular, seem to benefit from black teachers.

Occasionally, they’ll mention the many charter schools that hire young, usually white, two year resume boosters as they take students taught by long-term, experienced, black and Hispanic teachers. Or, taking the opposite tack, will hint that the mostly white teaching population is somehow related to those nefarious unions.

They’ll talk about the fact that white teachers rate black students’ ability lower than black teachers, without mentioning that the research didn’t reveal which teachers were more accurate in their ratings.

They may hint, around the edges, about the credential test issue. Rarely, they’ll mention there’s little if any correlation, much less causation, between teacher ability and student outcomes. I don’t think it’s occurred to anyone but me that administrative hiring decreases the blacks and Hispanics in the teaching pool.

They’re probably right to avoid stating the reality bluntly. I try it occasionally, and the results aren’t pretty.

Everyone thinks “we need to lower the credential cut score so we can have more black and Hispanic teachers” means “blacks and Hispanics aren’t smart enough to pass a test”. Hand to god, I don’t think that. I don’t care why the scores are lower. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that consistent, reliable data on teacher inputs related to student outputs shows that states set their teacher credential cut scores set too high. They are leaving out teachers who could get good jobs and help kids.

We don’t just have a “teachers of color” shortage these days. We have an honest to god all teachers of every color shortage, in nearly every state. And every day, some education reformer or worse, a politician, will bleat idiocy about raising teacher quality, while every other day, some social justice warrior will wail about the missing black and Hispanic teachers who could be helping kids at risk. Suggest a solution and the reformers will scream at you for lowering standards while the progressives will shriek “Racist!”

And like bad pennies, the stories keep turning up. Today, missing teachers of color. Tomorrow, another state wants to raise cut scores for teacher credential tests and the horrific National Council on Teacher Quality nods its collective head.

Woe, oh woe.

In Which Ed Explains Induction

So I’m at a Starbucks with my mentee, Bart. Bart looks like  Jared Leto playing Jesus. Many piercings, tattoos, big puppy dog eyes, long brown hair. We have been friends since his first day as a teacher, when I showed up in a (successful) effort to offer assistance, and I’m now mentoring him in his second year of induction (third year as a teacher.)

Some context: it is 6:15 pm. We both began our day at 7:15 am for a mandatory  75-minute staff development meeting, and not the sort where you’re surreptitiously grading papers while listening to required procedural instructions you’ve heard eight years in a row. No, this is intense department negotiations on curriculum and pacing. Interesting, but high intensity, and no checking out. Then our normal day.  Then we supervised our twice weekly, 90-minute sessions with about twenty kids working on science projects. Now we are at Starbucks, working on Bart’s induction project.  I don’t normally do the “teachers work long days” whine, but it had, in fact, been a long day.

Bart’s a great teacher, much adored by his students. He has his own idealistic values, like he still assigns homework because he wants kids to want to do it. I smile indulgently at such foolish romanticism. The guy spends hours working on lesson plans, writing extensive notes, building meaningful lessons and assessments. Not too much time–he’s not silly about this stuff–but he is a thoughtful person developing his practice, and he is in fact a really good teacher.

Induction is designed to engage and encourage new teachers to think productively about their practice. Bart and I had, up to this time, spent many hours in fruitful conversation, valuable to both of us, designing a year-long induction plan that interested him and would deepen his teaching experience.  He turned in his plan early, asking for feedback. I was pretty confident he’d be praised–my last mentee had done far less work under a different system and had done very well.

But alas, it was not to be. The induction administrator returned Bart’s plan politely, saying it showed real promise, but required a bunch of nitpicky changes.  In many cases, her changes expected Bart to be very detailed about the results of analytical or exploratory work that hadn’t yet happened.

I was very concerned. Bart thought the whole thing was absurd. So we were spending a few hours retooling his plan so that the wording pretended to comply with her demands. My years in corporate America have given me a thorough grounding in this task as well as an acute fear of failure; Bart has no such protection.

“What is the point of rewording all this?”

“Satisfying a bureaucrat without, you know, sex or money or drugs involved.”

“But why? I mean, why do we even have this induction nonsense?”

“Well, it all started with the achievement gap.”

“Induction will fix the achievement gap?”

“Of course not. Nothing will fix the achievement gap. So while there were some early successes, things mostly stalled out about twenty-thirty years ago.  Meanwhile, we started spending far more on education–bilingual education, increased academic requirements, special ed. Increased teachers–while our pay is about the same, we’ve had way more growth in teachers than in students. Many people noticed we had nothing to show for it, but no one seemed to notice that we are making far more demands on our students.”

“Completely unrealistic demands!”

“Of course. ” (Note: my original history here: The Fallacy at the Heart of All Reform on this topic is still one of my favorites.)

“But what does this have to do with this crappy makework?”

“Well, back in the 80s, when the Nation At Risk declared that we were destroying our country and Russia would win…”

“A Nation at Risk?”

I sighed. “That’s right, you went to one of those online ed schools. It was this huge report written by conservative Repulicans arguing, basically, that American high schools are destroying the country by making school too easy. So that began a wholesale upgrade of required high school courses–except, of course, many kids weren’t capable of learning advanced material. Schools tried tracking, but they were sued out of it in diverse districts, leading us to try things like differentiation and group work and resulting in the wide range of abilities you see in your classroom today.”

“Anyway, back in the 90s, it finally began to occur to folks that not all kids were ready for this material, but rather than change the requirements, they started a big push for “readiness” at the middle school and elementary school level. This is where charters had a lot of success; it’s how KIPP made its bones. Turns out  that if you cream highly motivated kids of average ability and push testing, you can bump test scores, and back in the 90s, everyone screamed that oh, my lord, this is proof that our public schools are disasters and teachers are morons.”

“Did they have success in high school?”

“No, but of course higher test scores in elementary scores would lead to  better high school performance.”

 

“That’s idiotic. High school is much more difficult. So is that when credential tests began?”

“Well, high school teachers have had difficult credential tests going back to the 70s, a fact conveniently ignored by reformers. High school teachers are well-qualified, so we already knew that boosting teacher cognitive ability doesn’t lead to higher student test scores. But what means these pesky facts in face of enthusiasm and certainty? It’s when credential tests for elementary and middle school teachers began, though. (You can read all about it here.)”

“But induction isn’t a credential test.”

“Yeah, I’m getting there. Because, as you’ve no doubt anticipated, a wholesale increase in teacher cognitive abilities didn’t have the desired result–although it did result in a huge decrease in black and Hispanic teachers, once the fraud ring was discovered and broken up.”

“Fraud ring? Like taking tests for teachers?”

“Yep. Long story. Never mind that, while the evidence for smarter teachers getting better results is fuzzy,research shows a much stronger link for achievement if teacher and student race match…”

“Teacher and student race? You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Particularly low achieving blacks. Sucks, huh.”

“Jesus.”

“Where was I? Oh, yeah. Anyway, at some point in there progressives and conservatives found something they could agree on. It was ridiculous to assume that teachers could just….teach. They sit in ed school, which is widely agreed to be a waste of time…”

“Mine was.”

“…and do a few weeks of student teaching, and suddenly, shazam. They’re teachers! Once all the professionals sat and thought about that, they decided it was stupid. After all, these professionals had insanely great test scores and got into terrific schools, but teachers, who have our nation’s kids’ future in their hands!–go to crap schools, have low SAT scores, and then we just put them in a class. This has to change. Some of them are terrible. Some quit. Let’s  invest in their success!  Give new teachers more support. Improve student achievement.Blah blah.”

“Ah. Here’s how induction comes into it. But hasn’t it always been that way? I mean, we’ve always just put teachers into a classroom. Were they smarter? I’ve heard that in the old days teachers were smart women who couldn’t get other jobs, and now we’re all idiots.”

“In fact, teacher ability has been pretty constant. While it’s true that fewer really smart women become teachers, a whole lot of reasonably smart men did, along with the existing reasonably smart women.”

“And you’re right. It has always been this way. In the very early days, teachers were taught content. But for sixty years or more, prospective teachers have spent a year or so thinking and reading about pedagogy, six to ten weeks student teaching, and then entered the classroom.”

“All so America could invent the Internet and go to the moon.”

“Win World War II, outlast Communism, make AIDS a manageable disease, and elect a black president. But yeah, faced with the choice of accepting cognitive ability or pretending that teachers are ludicrously unprepared for the classroom, it’s an easy pick: spend billions on a useless training program for new teachers.”

“And so here we are.”

“Well, be happy Linda Darling Hammond didn’t get her way. She wants teachers train for three years after graduation before getting a job. And she’s a liberal!”

“What the hell? Here’s what I don’t get. Teaching isn’t that hard…well, it is hard. But it’s not hard in a way that training helps. It’s incredibly difficult but….exciting.”

“Well, of course.  Teaching is a performance job. Teachers have an audience. And as any actor can tell you, facing a hostile audience is a hellish proposition. Facing a hostile audience every day, eight hours a day, can’t long be borne. Facing a hostile audience of 30 or more children? Sane people run screaming if they can’t do the job.”

“So teaching has its own quality control built right in.”

“Exactly. If you are completely inept, you will quit or be fired in the unlikely event you made it past student teaching.”

“But you’re not saying everyone is a great teacher.”

“No. Everyone who continues teaching is at least an adequate teacher. And beyond adequate, no one can agree on the attributes of a great teacher. Manifestly, great teachers aren’t necessary. Adequate to good teachers are sufficient.”

“But we could do better. I mean, I would have loved to have talked to you before I started work, to get a good idea of what I was facing.”

“You wouldn’t have believed me. In fact, you didn’t believe me! Remember when I gave you that assessment test to give your kids the first day, and you were shocked because it was pre-algebra? These were geometry kids, you said. They’d finish it in 20 minutes. Um, no, I said, they’d need at least 45 and my guess more. You were polite, remember? Like who is this crazy loon.”

Bart was chagrined. “My god, you’re right. I doubted you back then. And then the test took them an hour and the average score was thirty wrong.”

“You still doubt me! You shouldn’t, of course, but teaching is hard to believe until you do it. Which is why induction is a waste.”

“Well, at least they pay you to do this. I do it for free!”

“Yep. Teaching is pay to play. Anyway, it’s seven. Let’s send this off and hope it pleases the bureaucrat.”

****************************************************

(It didn’t. The bureaucrat demanded more nonsensical changes. I wrote a cranky note.)

 

 

Great Moments in Teaching: The Third Dimension (part I)

“How many other dimensions are there?”

“Well, four, according to Einstein, and five according to Madeline L’Engle, if you’ve read A Wrinkle in Time.”

“I have!” Priya’s hand shot up. “It’s a tesseract!”

I was impressed. Not many girls read that classic anymore. “But we’re going to stick to three dimensions.”

“Isn’t real life three dimensions?” asked Tess.

“Yes. But if you think of it, up to now, we’ve only been working in two. We’ve spent a lot of time in the coordinate plane thinking about lines. In two dimensions, a line can be formed by any two points on the coordinate plane. We’ve been working with systems of equations, which you think of as algebraic representations of the intersections of two lines. We can also define distance in the coordinate plane, using the Pythagorean theorem. All in two dimensions.”

Now, no mocking my terrible art skills” and I put up this sketch, the drawing of which occurred to me the night before, and was the impetus for the lesson.

Everyone gasped, as they had in the previous two classes. My instincts about that clunky little sketch proved out, beautifully. No clue why.

“Holy sh**,” groaned Dwayne, the good ol’ country boy who offered to paint my ancient Honda if I gave him a passing grade. He doesn’t like math. He’s loud and foul and annoying and never shuts up. That last sentence is a pretty good description of me, so I’m very fond of him. “What the hell is that? Get it off the screen, it hurts my eyes.”

“That is awesome,” offered Talika, a senior I had last year for history. “How long did it take you to draw that?”

“What is that white stuff spread everywhere? Did someone get all excited?” asked Dylan, a sophomore whose mother once emailed me about his grade, giving me the pleasure of embarrassing him greatly by describing his behavior.

“Ask your mother,” I replied, to a gratifying “ooooo, BURN!” from the class, who knew very well what had happened.

“How did you draw that?” asked Teddy, curious. “It’s not ordinary graph paper, right?”

“No, it’s isometric paper, which allows you to draw three dimensional images. So…”

“This is really stupid,” said Dwayne. “I’ve taken algebra 2 three times and no one’s ever taught me this.”

“Best I can tell, no one’s ever taught you anything , and not just not in algebra 2,” I replied, earning another “Oooooo” from the class and an appreciative chuckle from Dwayne.

“It’s weird, though, because in two dimensions, you start in the middle,” offered Manual, who was consulting with Prabh, another bright kid who rarely speaks.

“That’s a good point! For example, if we were going to plot seating positions in this room in two dimensions, we’d start with Tanya,” I said, moving to the class center and indicating Tanya, who looked a bit confused. “So Tanya would be the origin, and Wendell would be (1,0), while Dylan would be (1,-1).”

“I’m not negative!” Dylan said instantly, talking over my attempt to continue. “You’re saying I’m negative. You don’t like me.”

“Hard to blame anyone for that,” said Wendell who is considerably more, er, urban than Teddy, with pants down to his knees and a pick that spends some time in his hair. Despite his occasional class naps, he maintains a solid C+, and could effortlessly manage a B if I could just keep him awake. “S’easy, dude. It’s like one of those x y things, like we’re all dots on the graph.”

“You’re one down and one to the right of me,” pointed out Tanya.

Dylan was interested in spite of himself. “So Talika’s, like, (0, 4)?”

“Yes,” several students chorused.

“Then I’m negative 8.” said Dwayne, unhappy with any conversation that doesn’t have him at the center.

“More like….(-2,2), yeah,” says Cal.

Ben speaks up, “But how come Tanya’s at the center for mapping the room’s people, but your sketch is, like, from the left?”

“Or right?” Sophie, from the back.

“Or is it….outside?” asks Manuel.

“Yes, it’s kind of like you’re standing on a desk in Ms. Chan’s room and the walls are transparent,” says Ben, more certainly. Ben is repeating Algebra 2 after having taken it with me last semester. Very bright kid who clowned incessantly, confident in his ability to learn without really trying, only to learn that Algebra 2 was different from other nights, and he wasn’t finding the afikoman. I advised him to repeat. The big sophomore not only agreed, but specifically asked to repeat with me. His attitude and behavior is much improved. I ran into him while walking across the courtyard a few weeks earlier, and he said “I just realized I was Dwayne and Dylan combined last semester, and it’s so embarrassing. I’m really sorry.”

“I’m not enough of an artist to know if I could have drawn this any other way. It just seemed intuitive to me last night, when I came up with the idea.”

“See, I knew it,” trumpeted Dwayne. “You’re making this up!”

“Yeah, I know this isn’t in any algebra book” said Wendy, a sophomore whose excellence in math is often hard to discern beneath her complaints. “This is just some weird thing you’re doing to make us think about math.”

I picked up at random one of the four algebra 2 books sitting on my desk (I’m on the textbook committee) and walked over to Wendy’s desk, opening it to the “Three Dimensional Systems” chapter. She looked, and said “Ok, maybe not.”

“So just as we can plot points in two dimensions, we can plot points in three. Take Aditya here,” my TA, who was watching the circus in amusement. “How could we represent him as a point on my graph?”

Teddy said instantly, “Yeah, I’ve been working that out. I can’t figure out which the new one is, and what do we call it? Where’s x, where’s y?”

Sanjaya said, “I think the part along the ground is x. Like if you go along the bookshelf?”

“Like this?”

“Yes,” Sanjaya said, confidently. “That has to be x. So you could count to Aditya, right?”

“Count which way?”

“The bottom!” “The bottom line!” “the bottom..axis, thing. The X!” comes a chorus of voices.

I start counting, and while I do, Sophie objected. “But hang on. I still don’t see what the new thing, direction, is. What’s the third?”

“Up! said Calvin, who rarely participates and often tunes out so far he can’t keep up. But he was watching this with interest. “You know how the class map with Tanya was going north and south and east and west. But it’s all flat, like. This picture has an up.”

“Yeah!” Ben got it. “Cal’s right.”

Dwayne has begun to grasp this. “So you can’t just draw a line? You have to follow along the…things?”

“The axes.” I finish counting along the “bottom” axis and go over to my bookshelf in the furthest corner of my room. “So the sketch starts here…QUIET! One conversation at a time, and I’m the STAR here. The origin starts at this bookshelf. I am walking along the wall, hugging it, on my way to Aditya. Does everyone see how they could track my progress on the axis?”

“YES!” from various points of the room.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dwayne is watching me carefully hug the wall.

“Everyone except Dwayne?”

“YES!” much louder.

I walked along the wall to the table where Aditya sat (fourth along the wall) and stop.

“So now what?”

“You’re there.”

“No, not yet.” countered Nadine. You have to go out….” she waved me towards her. “this way.”

“Yeah, towards Aditya,” this from Talika.

I stepped out 2 steps or so. “That all?”

Josh frowned. “Yeah. You’re there. Except…”

“UP!” Sophie shouted from the back. “That’s the third axis!” General approval reigns loudly, until I wave them all quiet, or try to.

“You go up 4!” Teddy shouted.

“OK. So Aditya is about 40 units out along the wall, 2 units out towards…the door, and 4 units up. Yes?”

“Yes!”

“So let’s draw that.”

Of course, while I’m drew this, general mayhem is ongoing with my back turned. I shouted “QUIET! or “Could someone stick a sock in Dwayne?” a few times.

“Wow, so it’s a…cube?”

“A prism, yes. So here’s what we’ve done. We’ve taken the two dimensional x-y coordinate plane and extended it.”

“We extended it up,” from Sophie.

“Yes. And now, instead of a rectangle, we have a three-dimensional rectangular prism. And we can describe things now in three dimensions. But we can do more than that. So let’s step away from my classroom sketch….”

“Whoa. What’s that?” Dylan.

“Man, that’s f***ed up. I just started to get this, and now you’re….” Dwayne, of course.

“No, it’s fine,” Manuel said. “It’s just like the whole thing moved to the center.”

“Oh, I see. It’s like there’s four rooms, all cornered.” Wendell.

“Yes, exactly. Except now, you want to stop thinking about it as a room and think of it as a coordinate plane. As Sophie says, the new plane is the up/down one. So the old x is now here. The old y is now here. The z is the straight up and down one. I think of it as taking the 2 dimensional plane and kind of stepping back and looking down on it.”

“That’s just….”

“DWAYNE BE QUIET. One thing to remember: when you see a 3-dimensional plane, they may be ordered differently. There’s a whole bunch of rules about it that make potentially obscene finger orientations, but I promise I won’t test you on that.”

“So let’s say we’re plotting the point (8,4,5). I’m going to show you how to do it first. Then I’ll go through why. Start by plotting the intercept along each of the planes.”

“Man, does anyone else get this?”

“YES. Shut up, Dylan,” says Natasha.

“The trick to remember when you’re graphing in 3-d is to stay parallel to the axis you’re drawing along. So never cross over the lines when plotting points. Now let’s add the yz and xz planes.

“What? This is weird. Why are you drawing so many rectangles?” Patty, frowning.

“What you have to visualize is that it’s like we’re drawing sides. So far, I’ve drawn,” I look around and grab three of my small whiteboards, “the bottom and two of the sides. Hold this, Natasha, Talika.” and I build the walls. The kids in the back stand up and look over.

“Oh, I see,” Teddy again. “You’re drawing the prism again.”

“Right. It’s just looking different because the axis is in the center.”

“You do all this just to plot one point?” Sophie, ever the skeptic.

“Yes, but remember this is more just to illustrate, to see how you can extend the dimensions. So after you draw the three sides, joining the intercepts for xy, yz, and xz intersections, you extend those out–again, along the lines.”

“So the point we’re graphing is going to be at the vertex, the intersection of the three planes, the furthest point from the origin–just like in two dimensions, the point is at the intersection of the two lines.”

“That’s really complicated.” Wendy sighed.

“No, it’s not” “Don’t you see the…” Ben, Manuel, Teddy, Wendell and others jump in at the same time, while Dwayne bellowed, Wendy and Tess were asking questions of the room, and, as the writer says, pandemonium ensued. It was a shouting match, yes, but they were shouting about math. The Naysayers, the Doubters, and the Apostles were all marking their territory and this was no genteel, elegant, “turn and discuss this with your partner”, no think-pair-share nonsense. This was a scrum, a brawl, a melee conducted across the room with the volume up at 11—but just like any good fight, there was order beneath the chaos, a give and a take at the group level.

And for you gentle souls wondering about the quiet kids, the introverts, the shy ones who need time to think, they were enthralled, watching the game and making up their mind. It may not look like everyone gets time to talk, but pretty much every time you read me call on a kid, it’s a quiet one. And I shush the room. Then the quiet kid sits there in shock as he or she realizes oh god, I’ve got the mike and I can’t be a spectator anymore.

Anyway, the story goes on with a second great moment, but I’m getting better at chunking and this half had too many details I didn’t want to give up. I’ll stop here for dramatic effect. Because oh, lord, I was high as a kite in this moment, watching the room, realizing I was riding a tremendous wave of energy and excitement. Yeah. ME. On Stage. Making Drama.¹

Now I just had to come up with a good ending.

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¹I’m not congratulating myself, saying I’m proving kids with the great moment. No, the great moment is mine. I’m standing there going oh, my god, this is a great moment in teaching, in my life. For me! The kids, hey, if they liked it, that’s good.

Teaching Oddness #4: Student Teachers

Student teaching is definitely an oddness, but it’s an oddness with an old history. In the early days of public education, prospective teachers were given a smattering of content in a “normal school”, and then sent out under the tutelage of a more senior teacher to learn the ropes. Then, as now, the actual mechanics of a student teaching experience had a ridiculously broad implementation range, from getting a few weeks learning how to take attendance to a legitimate practicum with an experienced teacher giving advice and feedback.

Here’s what anyone can tell you about student teaching, the stuff that’s so obvious even the hacks at NCTQ can figure out: Cooperating, or mentoring, teachers are hard to find. Undergraduate ed school programs, in particular, are desperate for any warm bodies to shepherd teachers through the practicum.

My own (excellent) ed school provided an entire 12 months of student teaching, first in a summer school program and then a full school year in a classroom. We all had total responsibility for at least one class for a semester. This school had a relatively small program, turning out fewer than a hundred teachers a year. And their search for cooperating teachers was….intense. Generally, the priority was for teachers committed to group work and complex instruction, progressive teachers. But even with the school’s considerable prestige, finding sufficient cooperating teachers by September often meant unseemly begging and attitudes common to businessmen in bars at 2 am.

And that’s a well-regarded ed school. At online schools, the students themselves are required to find cooperating teachers. My current cooperating teacher gig began because I got an email, funneled through the district and the department chair, asking for a teacher with more than three years math teaching experience. Why this district? Because that’s where my student teacher lives. Why my school? Because it’s Title I. They were pleased to learn I was squishy and went to a great ed school, but there were no other takers.

(BTW, I’ve mentioned the need for “warm bodies” before, in other contexts. Quality control expectations of public education shrivel away in the blazing inferno of the billion suns generated by “we are legally required to have a warm body present for X activity”. Grasp this fact, and much becomes clear.)

Researchers don’t often bother with student teaching; this Goldhaber work on student teaching vs. employment locations is interesting, but doesn’t give any insight into the practice. Much of what I find is qualitative research on student teacher experience (everyone I know says their student teacher experience was the most important part of their training). But no one has really written meaningfully on the challenges I found with my first student teacher.

Arthur is my age, which means he’s a second-career teacher starting seven years in age later than I did. He’s retired early, financially comfortable (he takes me out to lunch in his Mercedes!), and relatively unconcerned about getting a full-time job, although he’d certainly like to. He’s Chinese, but a long-time immigrant, having moved here in the 70s. His language is a bit tough to follow sometimes, which I have issues with, but he’s dedicated to working with at-risk kids.

Arthur has largely taken over my geometry class. I was initially happy to turn over the job to Arthur and just watch from afar. My job is to be as disconnected from the classroom as possible, consulting with him on curriculum and objectives before and after, but to let him operate independently, sinking or swimming without interference, in the main. I did this well at first. Then I realized that the impact of having a student teacher was going to be an issue in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

In one sense, my geometry class is tailor-made for him: relatively small, just 21 kids, 8 speds, 1 ELL (Chinese). In another sense it’s a tough class for any student teacher. The ability distribution isn’t a normal curve, but rather clumped: (1) too bright for the class, (2) ready for the class and motivated, (3) ready for the class and unmotivated, (4) unmotivated to the point that readiness is irrelevant. A histogram shows groups 1 & 2 combined is n=8, group 3 also n=8, and group 4 is n=5. Much better to have a bigger group 2 to balance out group 3 and drown out group 4. This is why I like big classes. This small class is an extraordinary management challenge.

And so, I find myself wondering constantly about when or where to jump in or pile on. Not obviously, not in the “stepping in because Arthur can’t cope” manner, so that the kids would notice. But this would be a hard class for anyone to teach. What to do when he doesn’t wrap it up in a way that will hit it home, get the kids to see what they’ve been doing, give them a mental link to access the next day? What to do when I can see the kids aren’t attending, that he’s explaining too much? Meanwhile, both Arthur and I can both see that a couple of the unmotivated are just itching for a chance to cause trouble, say that they’d be doing great if it wasn’t for the dumb new student teacher.

Which brings up another issue, one that I’m also quite conscious of: how do parents feel about their kids being subjected to a trainee? Then I think about TFA trainees, who don’t have an experienced teacher in the room, and I feel better. Back at ed school I knew cases of parental complaints about a classmate taking over that led to….difficulties. From the parent’s point of view, the training teacher as damaging their child’s learning experience. From everyone else’s point of view, the student was using the newbie teacher as a scapegoat, and that was indeed usually the case. But my school doesn’t often train student teachers, and I don’t want to have that complaint aired.

And then, there’s the problem of my curriculum. Specifically, much of it is in my head. I’m not an easy teacher to learn from; my skills lie in explanation and seemingly random curriculum development. I can’t give Arthur a textbook and tell him to check out chapter 6 to pick some lessons to run. He can’t anticipate what I’m going to do; half the time I’ve just decided it the night before.

As he’s taken over more of the planning, we’ve found a routine. I’ve told him what topics I want him to cover. He researches and develops a lesson. I offer suggestions and changes. Mostly, EXPLAIN LESS. Either give them foolproof tasks to do, or do it together with explicit instructions. But no lecture, here’s a worksheet, go. Not just because I don’t like it, but because (and he sees this readily) the class can’t handle it and sits around doing nothing.

In addition to curriculum development, he’s getting a solid course in teaching delivery. My own advice to him often sounds like stage direction: “Work the room. Own it. Make your presence bigger.” and he has really done well in that regard, becoming more expansive and performance-oriented, while not distorting his natural style. I just closed up a lesson for him a couple days ago, and he said he’d finally started to grasp what I meant about punching the finish, closing with a big picture, not a repeated explanation. So there’s that.

Since I’m not a planner, to put it mildly, I sought out a new teacher I’d previously mentored (the second one in that essay), and asked what he did to plan. His method struck me as very sensible, so I sent Arthur to him for some consultation. This was a resounding success, so now Arthur has another resource.

Do other teachers have this problem? Or do they hand over curriculum, either pre-developed or in textbook form, and just let the student teacher prepare in advance? Maybe I should just tell Arthur teach from the book. But he doesn’t want to, and his ed school is actually quite happy that he’s working with a curriculum developer. Besides, Arthur does pretty well. He’s made improvements to my switch and stay game that were so sensible I instantly adopted them. He picks good model problems.

Anyway. I leave the room at times when I see things are going well to give him full authority. Other times, as mentioned, I “close up” for the lesson, to illustrate key issues or transition to the next day’s work, with him turning it over to me. I film him other times, which forces me to shut up.

These issues are never really discussed, and maybe they don’t have to be. Why should parents be alarmed at having a student teacher, when they might have a TFA candidate with no training, or a bad first year? For the most part, I subdue my classroom control freak tendencies, and Arthur runs the room. I’ll keep getting better at it. And he sez that he’s learning a lot, so there’s that.

Another really, really important thing for student teachers to understand about their apprenticeship: student teaching has an incredibly wide range of acceptable outcomes, provided the cooperating teacher doesn’t complain or in some way declare the student teacher unacceptable. If the CT rejects the student teacher, it’s game over. Even if the CT is a jerk. Even if the CT is wrong. Even if the ed school agrees that the CT is a total jerk entirely in the wrong.

Timing is everything in student teaching. An approved stint has to happen in that semester, in that quarter, in that pre-determined time period. If it doesn’t happen then, consider the impact the equivalent of the damage a Mack truck does to a bunny rabbit. The student teacher has to pay for another quarter, has to find another teacher, and oh, by the way, usually has to delay graduation. There’s really no equivalent in anything other than maybe med school with no appeals system. Student teaching is required–ironic, in a world where schools pay a premium to hire TFA.

Student teaching is one of the few genuine apprenticeships left in the modern workforce. Even before unpaid internships got a bad name, we all know they weren’t really about learning the job. But even the worst student teaching gig with an obnoxious cooperating teacher and unwilling students gives the candidates some small sense of the job. Without question, some gigs are better than others. But life twas ever thus.

My advice to teaching candidates is keep your head down, don’t complain, recognize your near complete powerlessness and if you sense any weirdness early on, do your best to find someone else before you’ve lost too much time. Because most cooperating teachers, like me, can’t imagine rejecting a student teacher for anything other than outright cruelty. We know it’s a rite of passage. We want to help.

Yes, it is an oddness.

Why would I approve a student teacher in almost case? I remember my own (excellent) cooperating teacher saying that the really important thing was that the kids loved me and thinking yeah, fine, but so what? And now here I am, watching a fifty-something Chinese immigrant pay a metric ton of money for the right to get up every morning, put in 4 hours a day at an unpaid practicum, and explain geometry to generally uninterested and unmotivated adolescents and you have to know what I’m thinking, right? I’ve actually said this, to others: “Arthur’s doing okay, making progress, but the really important thing is that the kids like him.” Now that I’m a teacher, watching someone learn the job, the empathy and connection needed for this job stand out starkly.

Most everything else, you’ll learn. Or quit, leaving little damage behind.

TFA Diversity and the Credibility Gap

As I’ve written, the available pool of black teachers is small because ed school can’t commit affirmative action and still produce teachers that can pass the licensure tests. This leads to a question that’s been plaguing me for a few months: how the hell can Teach for America have recruited around a thousand African Americans?¹

Of course, to even raise the question is to offend with the premise. But then, that’s why I’m anonymous, to offend in the name of explanation. So let me be Vox:

Here’s 4 charts that explain everything you need to know about Ed’s perplexity:

Cite

What you see right away: most blacks are getting credentialed as elementary, special ed, or PE teachers.

The average math/reading scores of blacks passing the Praxis in these 20 states² is 482/459. The average math/verbal scores for all elementary school teachers, regardless of race, are about 520/480, and for high school academic teachers about 580 in the related content section (math for math/science, reading for history/English) and around 560 in reading regardless of content. As the chart shows, the average SAT score for college graduates is about 542 on both tests, meaning that despite the rhetoric, high school teachers in academic subjects aren’t just above average on the SAT, but above the 50% mark for college graduates.

About 13% of African Americans scored above 550 on the math and reading sections of the SAT each year, give or take.

Most researchers wisely refrain from putting all these numbers in one place, the better to avoid drawing obvious conclusions. But considering all these numbers, and remembering that African Americans have many other occupations to choose from, most of which without a content knowledge test, one can perhaps see why I find TFA’s claim of 1000 black teachers to be worthy of inquiry.

I don’t doubt their numbers. Perhaps I should; lord knows Gary Rubinstein has ample evidence that TFA cooks its stats. But I accept the numbers at face value, and also accept that these numbers reflect corps members who have passed their credential tests.

Then how?

Well, as an obvious starting point: TFA is committing affirmative action. I know this partly because of the dog that didn’t bark. If black TFA corps members have ever had an average 3.6 GPA and a 1344 SAT (math and reading), then TFA would trumpet this fact on every brochure. I also know this because of the numbers I just provided–only 13% of African Americans are getting over 550 on any SAT section, and a smaller number is getting 550 over both (can’t tell how many, but it’s a percentage of a percentage, usually).

Besides, any time I see an article celebrating TFA’s high credential test passing rates, those passing rates aren’t 100%. Some TFAers are failing these supposedly simple tests. I imagine I know more about the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, and LSAT than most and can score in the 98th percentile or higher on all of them. The elementary school credential tests in the linked articles present no challenge for anyone with a 1344 SAT.

So TFA commits affirmative action because the available pool of minority candidates simply doesn’t allow them to use the same criteria. Hence, lower SAT scores for blacks and Hispanics—except not too low, because of those same pesky credential tests.

Then what? How does TFA thread the needle to recruit African American can didates, given the tremendous opportunities in much better paying careers that exist for blacks with the cognitive skills necessary to pass the credential tests?

Here’s what I came up with.

1. Find top-tier candidates with goals TFA can serve.
   Whites and Asians might take on teaching for a couple years to burnish their resume on the way to grad school, but black college graduates who can pass high school math and science credential tests are shoo-ins for law and med school. They don’t need TFA as a resume sweetener.

   But strong African Americans and Hispanics with “soft” degrees might see TFA as an obvious path to management that only requires a couple years in the classroom. I could also see TFA making a pitch on entrepreneurial grounds—teach for a couple years, then get in on the ground floor of an education business or consulting practice. Or management—black administrators outnumber black high school teachers, and that might be a great path to starting a charter, then maybe a chain, and build an empire.

   That’s a small number, I’m thinking, but it happens.

2. Find blacks who have already passed the credential test.

   A while back, I noticed a big jump in already-credentialed teachers, aka education majors, getting accepted to TFA. In 2009, 3% of the TFA corps had education degrees; in 2014, education majors had more than tripled to 10% of a larger population.

   If a black education major has a credential, he or she has passed the necessary tests. Just make sure the candidate gets assigned to the same state and hey, presto. I can’t find any stats on the race of TFA’s ed major candidates, but certainly this would be a great way to increase the number of black candidates.

   But why, you might ask, would a black college graduate with a credential go to TFA? Yeah, geez, why would a black candidate sign up with the organization that brags about its demand for high SAT scores and excellent qualifications? I do believe the word is “signaling”.

3. Hire second career folks who have already passed another demanding test.

   TFA has also started pushing hard for veterans, who worked for an organization that trains personnel based on cognitive ability. I imagine that TFAers know the link between ASVAB score and speciality, for example. Lawyers and accountants and other professionals who haven’t found the career advancement they expected—or who just wanted to give back to the community—might also be interested. Possibly related: a third of this year’s recruits are career changers. Five years ago, 2% of recruits were over 30. I wonder if the career changers are more likely to be black or Hispanic?

4. Send black candidates to states with low cut scores on credential tests

   No doubt TFA has carefully reviewed the required cut scores by state for the Praxis tests , and observed that Alabama’s cut scores are remarkably low. This might be completely unrelated to why TFA established an Alabama presence in 2010 and doubled that presence in 3 years. (Why did it take TFA so long to move into Alabama anyway, given its demographics? Not suggesting nefarious motives, just wondering.)

I don’t have proof for any of this, and of course, people get very offended at the very idea that anything other than attrition explains the dearth of black teachers. For the reasons outlined, blacks who can pass the credential tests have many opportunities other than teaching, so it makes sense they’d have a lower tolerance and higher attrition. That said, I’m asserting, based on all available evidence, that it’s the tests keeping blacks out of teaching, and thus TFA’s claim of a 20% black teacher corps meeting the same selection standards needs…clarification.

I would love to be wrong. Proving me wrong would require TFA to provide racial breakdowns for SAT scores, college major, credential subject, and credential state. By all means, bring it on and I will happily recant if needed. If TFA provides hundreds of African American high school math teachers to California, I will gladly shout my wrongness from the rooftops. If the average African American SAT score for this year’s recruits is 1300, then I will paper Twitter with links announcing my error.

But suppose I’m right.

Someone’s surely going to ask, so what? So what if TFA is committing affirmative action and not using the same caliber test scores for blacks as whites? So what if they are recruiting blacks who already have teaching credentials? And why the hell do you have a problem with black veterans becoming teachers?

I have no problems with TFA recruiting veterans, career changers, credentialed teachers, and dedicated prospective teachers with lower test scores. But if black candidates make up a big chunk of these recruits, TFA should make this clear.

Because I get really tired of people like Michael Petrilli, Andrew Rotherham, Dana Goldstein, and all the other education folks praising TFA to the skies for its ability to be both selective and diverse. Whoo and hoo! TFA fixes both the major problems that our broken ed schools can’t be bothered with. Further evidence ed schools suck.

I can’t tell whether sheer ignorance or cunning disingenuousness drives these folks, but if reality disrupts that nonsensical narrative, so let it be done.

If TFA is bulking up its black and Hispanic candidates using the methods described, ed schools can’t compete and for more reasons than black credentialed teachers are counted twice.

Everyone tends to forget the one huge advantage TFA has over traditional credential methods. Corps members attend ed school—the same “broken” ed schools that credential traditional teachers. The difference lies in the practicum. Traditional teachers work for free as student teachers for six weeks to a year. TFA corp members’ “student teaching” is actual employment. They get seniority, resume experience, and best of all cash dollars for learning on students—and they do it without constant supervision.

So if you’re thinking of being a teacher but have bills to pay, would you rather take loans and go to ed school while working for free? or get a paid job in five weeks?

Not a tough call.

I’m a career changer who tried all sorts of ways to get into the classroom until I finally threw in the towel and went to ed school once my tutoring and test prep work allowed me to keep my “day job” while working for free as a student teacher. I considered TFA, but was told that the odds of getting in at my age were nil.

Ed schools can’t compete with any internship program that pays for classroom teaching time. Full stop. And before sneering about the marketplace, ask yourself how many people would pay for law school if they could easily practice law by taking a test and passing the bar exam.

But TFA is almost certainly not accepting all second career folk, and call me cynical, but I’ll bet they take black veterans and lawyers with mid-500 SAT scores over white career changers with high 700 SAT section scores but no PR value.

What TFA offers black candidates is the same that it offers white candidates—the imprimatur of a “select” organization, a chance to get a paying job more quickly. But if TFA is using different criteria to hire black candidates, then the selectivity is a lie. The black candidates are serving TFA’s purpose not by being “select”, but by being black, the better to shut down critics.

So the next time TFA trumpets its diversity, demand details.³

If I am wrong, if TFA is actually recruiting top-tier black talent away from law and medicine as opposed to just allowing reformers to pretend it is, that’s worth knowing.

Of course, if I’m not wrong, then everyone is forced to acknowledge the real reason we don’t have many black teachers.

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¹–I’ve been focusing on black teachers because there’s far more data. Everything I’m describing here holds for Hispanic diversity as well.

²–The largest states don’t use the Praxis and aren’t part of this report. CA has just 4% black teachers, and blacks have dismal passing rates on its credential tests. Texas has a low teacher diversity index, sixth to California’s first. New York had a fairly diverse teaching force. Except, have you heard? NY’s credential tests just got tougher. As you may have gathered, harder credential test = higher SAT scores needed = fewer black and Hispanic teachers New York’s change will lead to fewer black and Hispanic teachers.

³–I am both intrigued and puzzled by the enrollment decline in ed schools, although TFA’s decline makes more sense. But ed schools shouldn’t be seeing this dramatic a drop-off, and I’m unsure as to the cause. I’d really like to see the numbers by race. But I left both declines out of this analysis, for now.

Mentoring Teachers

Last August, our new AVP asked me if I wanted to be an induction mentor. I fought off the urge to look at her in shock and said sure. I am not a fan of induction, but what the hell. My views on ed school have changed round the edges since that post, so maybe I could re-examine my firm belief that induction is the devil. Besides, neither of my induction mentors taught math, and if I’d refused this assignment the new teacher would have been assigned to someone Not a Math Teacher. Plus, amazingly, I get paid extra.

I would have done it for free, simply for the novelty of having been asked. Apparently, the move to my third school mad me a terrific teacher. All the administrators say hi unprompted and look at, rather than through, me. They ask my advice and want my feedback on interviews. I’m in my third year here and still haven’t really gotten used to being considered a valued resource. And the only thing that changed about my teaching practice was the address.

My mentee is a third year teacher who was very nervous that her induction mentor would treat her like a newbie whose ears needed wiping. Once we got past that, I think we’ve been doing well.

Induction itself has been a challenge. I’m a good mentor for new teachers (more on that in a minute), but she doesn’t really need mentoring on the basics. She needs me to play the other half of the induction process. Order. Following instructions. Attention to detail. Listening more than speaking. All attributes missing from my toolbox. I actually wake up nights every so often worried I’ve neglected something, that I’ll have let her down. Which means, I think, the exercise is good for me.

In addition, induction requires regular conversations about teaching practice, conversations that require give and take, as opposed to just jabbering about my own teaching which, it will come as little shock to regular readers, I am very fond of doing. I have to think about asking good questions of a peer, to be probing and challenging without dominating the conversation.

And at some point, I’ll have to observe her which means getting a substitute. Not crazy about that part. Still, this has really been useful professional development. Quite apart from just being thrilled to be asked, I’m learning a lot and working outside my comfort zone.

Meanwhile, we finally hired a full-time math teacher to replace the long term sub who was being terrorized by her Discovery Geometry class. Watching that go down was to witness a grueling demonstration of student brutality that I felt helpless to stop.

I met with this sub on many occasions. I personally handed her referral slips and wrote down the number to call to get students removed. I called supervisors to the room when the thumping and banging went on for more than two minutes. I told her not to let the kids even go to the bathroom and certainly not to let them go twice. Instead, she kept her door open in defiance of rules we’d been repeatedly told of, and kids came and went as they pleased. The other teachers in the surrounding classrooms were equally troubled; one of the most respected teachers on campus came in the classroom when the kids were throwing paper and empty water bottles at the sub. She told me privately she’d never shown so much contempt for students as she did in yelling at them—and that she could see some of them were ashamed. But they were at it again the next day. Those two months were an exercise in abuse psychology I’d just as soon have skipped, thanks. I learned that some teachers who can’t manage their classrooms just….go somewhere weird in their brains. They see themselves as helpless, even when they aren’t.

All of the teachers who witnessed this met with the administrators at various times to formally report the problem. I asked that supervisors stop by the classroom each day once or twice and just randomly remove kids who were acting out. Doing that a couple times would get kids leery waiting for the next supervisor appearance. It would have worked, I think. But no such action was taken.

While I wish our administrators had responded more vigorously, I’ve heard of this happening at other schools and it seems to be a universal response. I have concluded tentatively that administrators simply can’t bear to deal with the problems that occur when teachers—long-term subs or out-of-their-league probationaries—can’t control their classes. They look away. They have other things to do—including hiring replacements so they won’t have this problem next year.

What administrators ignore–or maybe just don’t let themselves think about or worst of all do think about and don’t ignore but can’t prevent—is the damage done to the kids. Never mind whether or not they lost instruction time (in fact, this sub was good on content). Kids in control of a classroom upsets the natural order. Students are troubled by this. Even the defiant nasties, the ones who’d do their best to disrupt in any circumstance, are bothered by teachers who just sit there and let it happen.

Anyway. When the new teacher came in, I came by to see him in his first hour on campus and recounted this history. He’s an intern, so he’s finishing up ed school while teaching (we should all be so lucky), a mild-mannered young guy with long hair and multiple piercings. I told him that I had zero authority over him, that he could take or leave anything I said, but that I believed he could permanently destroy himself as a teacher if he didn’t make classroom management his top priority. I don’t know how teachers recover from the memory of entire classes that hold not just their authority but their very existence in such contempt. I’m not convinced that most of them do.

I told him to come see me if he needed anything at all. He asked what he should do for the first day, and I suggested my algebra assessment test.

“But I don’t want to give them a test they haven’t had time to prepare for.”

“Tell them the only way they can get a bad grade is if they don’t try, and that you’ll be able to tell if they aren’t trying.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea. So this gets me through the first 20 minutes, then we can grade it, then what?”

“It will take them 45 minutes, then you can grade it, then you can go over class rules, which start with no one goes to the bathroom for a week in your classroom. Again, suggestion, I promise. But a strong suggestion.”

“This assessment will take them 45 minutes?”

“Your geometry class. The Discovery Geometry kids probably will need an hour, but some of them will just stop after that point.”

The next day, he reported with considerable astonishment that the geometry kids took 45 minutes; the Discovery Geometry kids took longer. I had street cred now.

He came by and asked for advice and curriculum frequently. Time and again, I was proven correct in suggesting he was being too ambitious in setting instructional rigor, ensuring he had a backup plan in case he needed to slow things down. He tells me this has helped him not only gauge student ability, but keep his classes successful—thus ensuring he keeps the students’ trust. He’s not a great classroom manager yet–the most disruptive class is still giving him trouble—but he’s male, which helps, and the classes are now well in hand.

He’s not eligible for induction, but it turns out we have another program to help intern teachers. Our school rep for that program reached out to him to see if he wanted a mentor and damned if he didn’t say “Hey, I already have one.” So now I’m getting paid to help him, too. I’m hoping I can combine all the observations for this and my induction mentee in one day.

Veteran teachers rarely reach out to help “the new guy” (or girl). At my last school, in just my third year of teaching, I was the go-to resource for two new math teachers whose induction mentors couldn’t be bothered. They both mentioned often how much they appreciated my help. One of them is now a department head (See? Told you he was a rock star) and he makes a point to give new teachers the support I provided him.

Key information:

1. Copier information
2. Referral slips
3. Tech guy contact
4. Principal’s secretary
5. First day activity
6. What to do if you don’t have logins to attendance system, grading book, and email. (First rule: Don’t let anyone make this your problem.)

In parenting, Jean Illsley Clark has defined assertive, supportive and conditional care. This paradigm works well with any kind of mentoring relationship, too. I could tell that my inductee was worried I would be assertive or conditional—that is, tell her what to do or withdraw my support if she didn’t share my teaching values. My other newbie told me apologetically he didn’t feel ready to teach a geometry subject the way I suggested, that he was more comfortable “just explaining it”. I told him that was fine, that methods like mine need commitment and confidence, that he shouldn’t extend himself until he feels ready.

I work hard to be purely supportive. I’m there to help, not make a teacher into a mini-me. Short of seeing a teacher break the law or endanger student well-being, I would never offer “assertive care”. And if there’s one thing that long-term sub taught me, it’s that “assertive care” doesn’t work without authority to back it up.

The upshot of all this: I’m an experienced teacher. I mean, I knew that. But now it’s official. I don’t want to go into management, have no interest in being a department head, and I’m not into sports. So I guess mentoring new teachers is where I go next. Huh. Not what I would have expected. But it would be fun to do this in a methods or classroom management course.

Note: Yes, it’s been a long time since I’ve written, for a number of reasons. I’ve been doing all sorts of research but couldn’t settle on anything. I’m going to take on undemanding topics for a while to break the block.

The Available Pool

(This is by far the most Voldemortean topic I’ve taken on in a while. Brace up.)

Some readers might have noted a potential flaw in my observation that ed schools can’t commit affirmative action. If the average elementary school SAT score is 500 per section, and the average content SAT score is 580 in the relevant subject, then there shouldn’t be a shortage. Plenty of African Americans have those scores, right?

Well, it depends on what you mean by “plenty”.

Just ask Malcolm Gladwell.

Four words I’d never thought I’d say. I liked Gladwell’s article about ketchup. I also find him useful as a predictive sorter: when I meet someone who admires his work, I run like hell.

But recently I came across a page I’d either missed or forgotten about since the last time I flipped through his book.

Gladwell even cites Jensen.

Conceding what he sees as a minor aspect of IQ to make a larger point, Gladwell acknowledges that regions, or thresholds, of IQ exist. But beyond these broad ability differentiators, IQ differences are irrelevant compared to factors like luck, birth, language, rice paddy history. Given certain thresholds, IQ is relatively unimportant in outcomes.

And given certain thresholds, Gladwell’s not terribly wrong, as Jensen confirms.

There’s just one pesky little problem still left to plague modern society: the thresholds. The regions, as Jensen describes them, that differentiate between broad ability levels. The ones that even an IQ pishtosher like Gladwell accepts as given. They’re kind of an issue, if by “issue” you mean the fatal flaw lurking in most of our social and education policies.

Jensen’s regions correspond to the IQ standard deviation markers. The average IQ is 100, with a standard deviation of 15. An IQ of 70 is 2 SD below the average of 50 (2nd percentile), 85 is 1 SD below average (16th percentile), 115–the marker for graduate level work, according to Gladwell and Jensen—is 1 SD above the mean.

Translating Gladwell and Jensen into standard deviations: in order for an American student to be ready for a college graduate program, he needs to have an IQ at the 84th percentile, with “average” (this is Gladwell’s word) as the 50th percentile. Give or take. IQ tests are finicky, no need to be purist. These are broad strokes.

Using those broad strokes, we know that average African American IQ is a little less than one standard deviation below that “average IQ” (again, Gladwell’s term), which means that the 84th percentile for all IQs is attained by just 2% of blacks. Test scores consistently prove out this harsh reality. While the mean African American IQ has risen five points since 1970, test performance has often remained stubbornly 1SD below that of whites. As Chistopher Jencks observes, “typical American black still scores below 75 percent of American whites on most standardized tests”, and often as much as 85% (or 1SD). Much has been written about the 1 SD difference; you can see it in the SAT, the GMAT, and the LSAT. (The SAT is much easier these days; before the recentering, just 70 blacks got over 700 on the verbal, whereas today it’s 2100, or 2%. In 1995, 90% of African Americans scored below 430 on the verbal section whereas the unrecentered LSAT has a score distribution chart registering no black scores over 170.)

(You’re thinking oh, my god, this is Bell Curve stuff. No, no. This is Gladwell, remember? Secure position in the pantheon of liberal intellectual gods. It’s all good.)

We are oversupplied with whites with IQs over the 115 threshold, all of whom have the requisite tested ability to be lawyers and doctors and professors. Since these fields are highly desirable, the educational culling process weeds out or rejects all but the most cognitive elite candidates. Thus all the cognitively demanding fields have a sorting process for whites: medicine, law, academia, science, technologists, executives, politicians, venture capitalists, mathematicians, yada yada yada all the way down to high school teachers, the peasants of the cognitive elite.

The available pool of blacks with the requisite Gladwellian-approved IQs to test into graduate education is barely toe deep.

To build cohorts with blacks exceeding single digits, graduate schools in law, medicine, and business, to name just a few, commit deep discount affirmative action, regardless of legal bans. Ed schools can’t, for reasons I described in the last post. Given the wide range of choices blacks with anything approaching the requisite cognitive ability have, it’s hard to say if any sorting occurs at all.

Much has been written of the supposedly low standards for teacher licensure exams but what do we know about the standards for becoming a lawyer in Alabama or a doctor in Missisippi?

I often ask questions for which data is unobligingly unavailable. Sometimes I just haven’t found the data, or it’s too broad to be much good. Sometimes it’s like man, I have a day job and this will have to do.

Med school: Not much data. See Razib Khan’s efforts.

Law school: For all the talk about mismatch or the concern over dismal bar exam passing rates for blacks, the reality is that low LSAT scores, law school, and persistence can still result in a licensed black lawyer. State bar exam difficulties aren’t uniform (which is also true for teaching). This bar exam predictor says that a law school graduate with an LSAT of 139, three points below the African American mean, attending an Alabama lawschool not in the top 150, graduating in the bottom tenth of his class, has a 26% chance of passing the bar. In Iowa, the same person has a 17% chance–in California, just 4%.

If that predictive application has any validity, the cognitive abilities needed to pass the average high school math or science licensure test in most states are higher than those demanded to pass a bar exam in states filling out the bottom half of the difficulty scale. Passing the math or science licensure exams with an SAT score below the African American mean would be next to impossible in most states. English and history probably compete pretty well on that front as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if the cognitive demands needed to pass elementary school licensure tests in tough states (California) are greater than those needed to pass the bar exam in easy states (Alabama). (sez me, who has passed the tests in three subjects, and sez all available information on average SAT scores for passing candidates).

Here we are back at the cognitive dissonance I mentioned in the last post. Received wisdom says teachers are stupid. Reality says teacher credential tests have significant cognitive barriers, barriers that appear to exceed those for law and may do so as well for medicine—and the other professional tests are presumably easier still.

Before I looked into this, I would have assumed that licensure tests for law and medicine weeded out a “smarter” class of blacks than those weeded out of teaching. Now I’m not as sure. It seems law schools and med schools keep out the “not-as-smart”whites and Asians while admitting blacks and Hispanics who would only be “not-as-smart” if they were white or Asian. The med and law school licensure exams, in knowledge of this weeding, are gauged to let in the “not-as-smart”, secure in the knowledge that these candidates will be mostly black and Hispanic. (A number of “not-as-smart” whites and Asians will make it through, assuming they paid a small fortune for a low-tier law school, but jobs will be much harder to find.) Understand that I’m using “smart” in the colloquial sense, which means “high test scores”. And most evidence says these are the same thing. I’ve said before now I’m not as certain of this, particularly with regards to African Americans.

This isn’t enough to prove anything, of course, and I wanted more. What else could I could use to—well, if not prove, at least not disprove, what seems to me an obvious reason for a dearth of black teachers?

Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and ethnicity

I made some predictions going in:

1. Blacks would be a higher percentage of elementary/middle school teachers than of high school teachers. I couldn’t sort out academic teachers from special ed and PE teachers, and I wasn’t sure whether sped teachers would be included in the count. But given the easier licensure test, I was betting the percentage would be higher.
2. There would be more black school administrators than black high school teachers.
3. The ratio of black lawyers and doctors to black high school teachers would be higher than the ratio of white lawyers and doctors to white high school teachers (in absolute numbers).
4. The ratio of black social workers to black teachers would be much higher than the same ratio for white teachers.

So this table shows the total employed in each category, the percentage black and white, the absolute number black and white:

This table calculates the ratio of each non-teaching occupation to K-8 and high school teachers by race. So the number of black high school teachers is 25% of the number of black K-8 teachers, and the population of black high school teachers is 65% the number of black education administrators, and so on.

I didn’t want to over-interpret the data, so this is just simple Excel, pulling the numbers right off the table (calculating white percentage by subtracting the other races). And I was right about a lot, except I underestimated the number of black professionals in the highly cognitive fields of doctors, dentists, and lawyers and I didn’t know this basic fact:

There are more white lawyers than white high school teachers!

Still, this data mostly bears out my predictions. I threw in some other categories: entertainment/media, and nursing, just for compare/contrast.

Many blacks become social workers, far more than become high school teachers or even K-8 teachers. Now, I know teachers complain about low pay, but social work has really low pay, less attractive vacations, and a client base even less cooperative than the average high school student.

I was wrong about lawyers, obviously, but less wrong on doctors. White and black doctors/dentists have roughly equal parity compared to white and black high school teachers–black doctors and dentists are about 85% of black high school teachers, whites about 87%. In med school, Whites have to compete with Asians, who are 20% of doctors (and just 5% of lawyers), but if the professions were cognitively sorting on anything approaching an equal basis, there should be a lot more black high school teachers, shouldn’t there? And if you go the less cognitively demanding but still intellectual field of nursing, black nurses outnumber black high school teachers by nearly twice the ratio that white high school teachers are outnumbered by white nurses.

So blacks are choosing skilled health care work over teaching at considerably higher rates than whites are making that same choice, and the number of black doctors/dentists have near parity with black high school teachers compared to whites in the same professions.

Then there’s my amazing perspicacity in predicting the overrepresentation of black education administrators. Pretty obvious, really. Districts can only practice affirmative action in teacher hiring to the extent they have black candidates. But administrative positions are wide open for affirmative action. While I’m sure there’s a test, it’s got to be a piece of cake compared to the high school subject credential test. I can’t really take all the credit, though.

CJ Cregg first alerted me to affirmative action in principal selection. But before you shed all sorts of tears for Tal Cregg, remember that the Brown decision resulted in thousands of black teachers and administrators losing their jobs, all in the name of racial equity and equal access.

I only had one surprise. When I started this effort, I figured that I’d include a snarky remark like “Want more black teachers? Raise the cut scores for the bar exam.” But no, lawyers, it turns out, are whiter even than high school teachers. That might explain why the cut scores are set so low on the bar exam, and it suggests that the predictive application knows its stuff. The legal profession in many states is doing its best to bring in more black and Hispanic lawyers by lowering the cut score—in others, not so much.

Steve Sailer noticed something I’d missed in my original post on teacher SAT scores—namely, teachers had strong verbal scores regardless of the subject taught. Law, too, is a field heavy on the reading and talking. So maybe whites are drawn to fields that reward this aptitude. It’s arguable, in fact, that America’s entire educational policy through the century was informed, unknowingly, by its unusually large population of unambitious smart white people who like to talk. We might want to consider that possibility before we start demanding diversity.

Anyway.

Step one in investigating the lack of black teachers should start with the oversupply of black social workers and see why, given their strong interest in community work, they aren’t going into teaching. The uninformed yutzes who presume to opine on education policy think ed schools are either prejudiced against or just uninterested in recruiting black teachers. Those actually interested in creating black teachers think it’s the licensure tests. I’m with them.

So go find out. If I’m right, we can start talking about lowering the cut scores for k-3 licensure tests. Once we realize that the Common Core goals are a chimera, we might create high school teaching tiers, with easier tests for basic math and English classes. (In exchange, maybe, for loosening up the affirmative action grip on administrative positions, if such a grip exists.)

Given the tremendous overrepresentation of blacks in our prisons, I’d argue we need to spend our time and policy creating more black lawyers, not black teachers. Better pay, better status and who knows, maybe better justice.

The available pool of black cognitive talent is small. Tradeoffs must be made. If we want more black teachers, we’ll have to lower the cognitive ability standards required for teaching or reduce the number of black professionals in better-paying, higher-status jobs. To a certain extent, the first of those options make sense. The second one’s just stupid.

I got into this because of that damn TFA announcement saying that 1 in 5 of their teaching corps was black, and the congratulatory nonsense that spewed forth in the announcement’s wake. And you still should be wondering how TFA is getting so many blacks that can pass the licensure tests. Next up, I promise.

Ed Schools and Affirmative Action

Education policy rarely—hell, let’s say never—results in anticipated consequences. But usually, this acknowledgment turns our thoughts to bleak, dark places.

So let’s think of the one time when an education policy’s unanticipated consequences actually had a reasonably positive outcome—and opportunity for a chuckle. I speak, of course, of the 1998 Higher Education Act, specifically Title II, section 206: “Increasing success in the pass rate for initial State teacher certification or licensure, or increasing the numbers of highly qualified individuals being certified or licensed as teachers through alternative programs.”

The plan: force education schools to report their students’ licensure pass rates.

The pass rates were widely expected to be dismal. According to Sandra Stotsky, the 60% failure rate seen in Massachussetts, which had instituted a similar requirement a few years earlier, had provoked the federal law. The Democrats behind the bipartisan bill expected to see a tiered system result, with ed schools ranked by their licensure test pass rates. Those schools with pass rates below 80% would improve or be shot and put out of their misery. It’d be like law school.

The Republican politicians and reformers of all denominations saw this as a means of destabilizing the evil cartel. They were certain that all the ed schools would have low pass rates. It was not a coincidence that the 1998 law required states to provide alternative certification paths to a credential. Alternative certification was actually the secret sauce of the 1998 law which would, its advocates fantasized, enable an organic move from ed schools to alternative certification programs. Parents would learn that ed schools turned out students with abysmally low pass rates on simple tests, so they’d demand that their children’s schools hire from only those schools with high pass rates. Faced with the realization that traditional ed schools turned out simpletons, parents would join reformers in a push for alternative certification.

So you can imagine the anticipation back in November, 2001, when the first Title II report was released online. It got 7000 hits—no doubt all of them from ed school critics, eager to curate a list of dismal passing rates, looking for a high-profile target.

and…what’s this? They all passed?

Well. I laughed, anyway.

Ed schools had been accepting and graduating students who they knew wouldn’t pass the licensure test, in the name of affirmative action. Faced with a threat, they sacrificed their ideology and commitment to collect money from underprivileged students wanting a college degree, and made a new rule: No pass, no diploma.

And so, the much-anticipated Title II reports showed that most ed schools had 100% passing rates. All but a very few easily bested the 80% barrier. Far from showing a picture of unprepared, low quality candidates, the Title II reports gave a glowing picture of competence.

The “tiered” results dreamed of by the law’s supporters? Useless. As an example, just one of Kentucky’s 25 ed schools that first year had a low passing rate of 55%, while the others were all above the minimum. So schools with 93% passing rates were in the third tier. Definitely not planned. Several states reported 100% passing rates—California, for example, which doesn’t credential teachers with an undergraduate education degree, simply required all candidates to pass the tests to gain admission.

A simple policy change rendered the law irrelevant. And expensive, alas–states spend lots of money turning out largely useless reports.

(Here’s a more measured account of the law’s intent and why it went off the rails.)

Much gnashing of teeth ensued, much castigation, many claims that the tests were incredibly easy, testing just basic skills, so of course the passing rate was so high. They accused ed schools of gaming the requirement, states of lowering the pass rate. They castigated ed schools for having such low standards, for cheating, for wasting the government’s time. For a taste of the frustration and near rage of the enjoy this 2002 Edtrust diatribe or the NCTQ wishlist.

Critics regrouped. Subsequent retoolings of the law attempted to thwart the ed schools—for example, ed schools now have to report their student score average against the state average– and lord knows NCTQ knows how to push for meaningless requirements, but it’s been pretty much game over ever since. While alternative teacher certification programs have grown, ed schools aren’t worried about their market share. It still takes a lot of work and education to become a teacher. (Before you wave TFA at me–they all still go to ed school, Relay or otherwise.)

But the attempt to destabilize or “improve” ed schools was lost, and the proponents knew it. How extremely annoying. No differentiation, no high profile targets, no rationale to get the public pushing for alternative certification programs.

Ed schools were angry right back, of course, but you have to figure they had a whole bunch of smug in there. I mean, seriously, who could get mad at ed schools for requiring their candidates to pass the licensure tests? Wasn’t the point to raise teacher quality? In your face, Snidely. Foiled you again.

That’s the end of the funny part.

The strategy wasn’t free. Ed schools couldn’t commit affirmative action, at least not as most colleges do.

Ironic, really, that the profession notorious for its supposedly lax standards, is the only profession that denies itself the opportunity to give underrepresented minorities a chance at a good government job. This reality is utterly obscured liars or fools like Arne Duncan (your choice) complaining that a 95% pass rate shows the lack of rigor.

Reality: most of the tests are appropriately rigorous, and the pass rate is considerably less than 95%.

When people refer to the “high passing rate” of licensure exams, they’re either deliberately deceitful or extremely ill-informed. The exams leave carnage in their wake when all testers are considered, not just ed school graduates, and a substantial portion of that carnage is black and Hispanic.

We all know that many college students, indeed, many college graduates, lack basic skills. We all know that these individuals are, overwhelmingly but not exclusively, black and Hispanic. Colleges let them in and then graduate them anyway, both out of ideological zeal and a reasonable fear of lawsuits.

But alone among all the professions, the majority of prospective undergraduate teachers are now required to demonstrate that they have a given skill set (set by each state, much to the feds’ chagrin) at some point before they graduate. At the graduate level, they have to pass the test just to get in. Ed schools can’t use a different standard to accept black and Hispanic candidates. They are limited to those blacks and Hispanics that can both pass the tests and want to be teachers. And most ed schools aren’t selective, so those candidates are in, anyway.

I’m oversimplifying. Some ed schools are dedicated to underrepresented minorities: HCBU ed schools , and some smaller colleges who swallow the low pass rate on their Title II report for the tuition. Alternative credential programs, once envisioned as the elite corps of folks too good for traditional ed schools, are more commonly a means to produce black and Hispanic teachers, as they are immune from the Title II reports, and passing the tests is their primary curricular objective.

But traditional ed schools, both public and elite, the ones producing the bulk of all teachers, can’t realistically provide that extensive training for a small number of students, so they “counsel out” those who don’t pass the Praxis by a certain date–or require passage for admission.

But, you say, the tests have cut scores, set far below the average. Well duh. That’s because the states don’t want to shut out blacks and Hispanics. That’s where the affirmative action sneaks in—not by ed schools, but by the states, in setting the cut scores.

I don’t know the specifics of the math involved in setting the cut score. But it seems obvious that the bulk of whites (and Asians determined to infuriate their parents) are easily clearing the cut score—or the mean would be lower. It seems equally obvious that very few blacks and Hispanics are easily clearing the cut score—or the cut score would be higher. I suspect the cut scores for elementary school are letting through more than optimal, but I can’t find any data on this. The cut score is lower than the average, but not that many people are scoring far below that average—and they are disproportionately black and Hispanic, just as the states want.

Not only did most ed schools begin to require a passing score prior to graduation, but states raised the cut scores (still below the average, though) in response to No Child Left Behind. The mean scores jumped dramatically, both as a group and by race:

The average scores by race, coupled with the average SAT scores for each type of teacher, suggest that the bulk of Hispanic and black passing the test are elementary school teachers.

Before the 1998 Act, many blacks and Hispanics ed school graduates who didn’t pass the test got an emergency license, which doesn’t require a test, and hired by schools on that basis, using the fiction that they were working towards their credential. No Child Left Behind cracked down on emergency credentials and closed this loophole. The ETS report points out that a disproportionately high number of Praxis testers from 2002-2005 were employed teachers who either had an emergency or otherwise unqualified credential, and these testers were disproportionately black. The Clarence Mumford ring’s clients were often black teachers with emergency credentials, as well as clients who couldn’t pass the original test.

This may be why there wasn’t a huge fuss about the failure of many black candidates to pass the Praxis in the 90s–they were able to get teaching jobs. Or maybe there was a fuss and google just doesn’t like me.

So most public and elite ed schools can’t commit affirmative action, can’t accept wholly unqualified candidates in the name of the diversity, take their money, push them through classes they don’t really understand, pressure professors into giving passing grades, graduate them, and let them figure out after it’s all over that they can’t pass the licensure test.

In other words, ed schools can’t be law schools.

This all came about because reformers and politicians had this bizarre delusion that the quality of the ed school had something to do with the licensure test pass rates, when in fact the licensure pass rates have everything to do with the quality of the student body.

So the 1998 law and the follow-on restrictions of NCLB, restrictions based on a profound underestimation of an average teacher’s intellect, didn’t even come close to having their desired impact. Meanwhile, the laws inadvertently took away the dream of teaching for many black and Hispanic teachers. The media steadfastly ignores this and wonders gravely where all the black and Hispanic teachers went.

I can’t see the change as a bad thing; while some of the black and Hispanic ed school grads who couldn’t pass the test found jobs with emergency credentials, I doubt they all did.

This way, eventually, the feds and the states will be forced to realize they need to lower cut scores, at least for elementary school teachers, if they want to have more black and Hispanic teachers. This, too, I see as a good thing.

But as I started with a chuckle, so I shall finish: the idea that Teach for America’s “diversity” is in some way comparable and thus superior to ed schools. That’s really, really funny.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’re wondering how the hell TFA recruited so many blacks capable of passing the license tests. Yeah, me, too. I have some ideas. Another post.

Education Schools: Prescriptive Training and Academic Freedom

I’ve been mulling over my thoughts on ed school, when someone retweeted Peter Sipe’s op ed about his ed school training, which he went through at the same time his wife went through med school.

It’s a good piece that accurately captures, not caricatures, graduate ed school (the only type I’m discussing). My ed school did not make us throw around a medicine ball. I recall posters and drawings and gingerbread men.

But I part ways with the second half of Sipe’s article, and our difference characterizes an important philosophical conflict in teacher training.

The difference begins and ends here: “The thing is — and it’s the thing that still bugs me — I don’t recall learning how to do anything.”

Ed schools, the complaint goes, want their teachers to “reflect” on their philosophy and methods, but don’t teach the “hows” and the “what’s”. I find this charge to be somewhat misguided. While most ed schools don’t spend a lot of class time on these topics, they require apprenticeships in the form of student teaching where plenty of hows and whats are discussed. Leave aside the issue of the quality of student teaching experiences for the minute. Ed schools as currently designed explicitly allow for teachers to experiment with the hows and the whats. But yes, ed schools do not mandate a specific list.

A second charge against ed schools is their lack of academic freedom. Ed schools are disastrous and keep FIRE in business, say the critics, because the “teacher dispositions” criteria allows them to expel anyone who just, well, doesn’t have the personality or the right qualities to be a teacher, providing a convenient tool to reject or expel students lacking the correct ideology.

So ed schools are insufficiently prescriptive on technique and overly prescriptive on political ideology.

But wouldn’t prescriptive teacher training decrease academic freedom?

As Paul Bruno observes, both reformers and progressives argue that teachers should be more like lawyers and doctors. But law schools and med schools aren’t exactly bastions of academic inquiry and experimentation. Peter Sipe’s wife spent all her free time memorizing madly. Law and medicine have huge bodies of knowledge, and candidates don’t get to challenge the professors or argue about the necessity of given approaches and techniques.

In ed school, teachers are actually encouraged to examine approaches and try them out. Paradoxically, despite the legitimate complaints about ideological demands, ed schools grant teachers far more academic and intellectual freedom than law and medical schools do (at least in their early years), and are in that sense more like MBAs. Think of ed school as the equivalent to the last year of law or medical training, when students have demonstrated mastery of the basics and encouraged to explore options and specialize. (this is necessarily simplified, I know). In ed school, the content knowledge tests are “the basics” and we demonstrated that competency as an admissions requirement. From that point, all we have to do is explore options, find our identities as teachers, develop an education philosophy.

So why is ed school so open-ended? And here we come to the issue that has plagued education policy since its inception: teaching doesn’t have an extensive body of knowledge. It never has. The profession has no best practices. I started to expand on this, but really, it’s best to just read David Labaree. I may put some more thoughts down in a second post, whenever it arises. For now, even those who disagree with this assertion would not dispute the lack of agreement about best practices.

Given the lack of any accepted body of knowledge, any attempt to put a stake in the ground is necessarily ideological. .

As an example, consider an ed school that mandates one particular set of hows and whats: Relay Graduate School of Education. (Facts pulled from various places but mostly here)

Charter schools that can’t or won’t hire credentialed teachers hire college graduates who are then shuttled through an alternate certification program while they teach. Back in 2005, Norman Atkins of Northstar and David Levin of KIPP decided they could eliminate the middle man. Rather than using alternative credential programs, they built their own program. They began by running their program through a university (Teacher U), but it was pretty clearly their goal from the start to have their own ed school.

Relay’s teacher “trainees” are put through a largely scripted curriculum, the instructors often literally reading from a script. The program is “competency based” (critics would say bereft of theory or any intellectual exercise).

I put “trainees” in quotes because Relay students aren’t actually training. They’re teaching, usually at a charter school, often KIPP, ACHIEVE, or Uncommon Schools. Students must be full time elementary or middle school teachers—that is, students must have obtained a teaching job without a credential, which limits their hiring pool almost entirely to charters. They can only graduate when they have demonstrated that their students make a full year of academic progress—which again, limits their hiring pool to schools that will boot absentee kids, troublemakers, and unmotivated low achievers.

Is Relay using an accepted body of knowledge? No. They don’t claim to–and in some cases, they are using the same content that ed schools would use anyway. Does Relay have a research base to prove its effectiveness? No. Were Relay’s methods developed to enforce a strong ideological bias about education? Yes. Relay’s ideological canon includes notions like test scores are the only accurate measure of effective teaching (not a given at all) , that more time on task is equivalent to more learning, that rigid control is essential for effective teaching, that effective schools must have uniform education philosophies, and that teachers and schools can and should make behavior demands of low income children and parents as a condition of their education, to name just a few.

Could Relay’s techniques be used to educate all teachers? Oh hell no. Relay’s techniques are designed for mid-ability, low income black and Hispanic children in elementary and middle school whose parents are desperate to remove them from schools that aren’t allowed to expel troublemakers. In return for a guarantee of expelled troublemakers, the parents sign up for all sorts of commitments and expectations that parents with any other choice would laugh at. And Relay’s methods won’t work without that anvil hanging over the kids’ heads. Or, as I said in my last post, white kids don’t do KIPP.

Leaving aside the parents, a significant chunk of the potential teaching population would never sign up for Relay’s ideology. As just one example: Relay provides videos of what it considers exemplary teaching—most of them from Doug Lemov, whose taxonomy drives a lot of Relay’s methods. (at the link, look for Strong Voice, Transitions, or Supportive something or other, as examples. Or check out Doug Lemov’s videos).

Regular teachers often find these exemplaries…..unconvincing. My terms range from “flatly incompetent” to “pretty damn creepy”. Carol Burris goes further and while I don’t agree with everything she says here, my general vibe is way more “right on” than “don’t be ridiculous.” Paul Bruno feels this characterization is extremely unfair. You do not need to agree with me about the videos, but understand that many teachers vehemently disagree with the methods and ideology on display.

But remember, Relay doesn’t want typical teacher profiles. No Excuses charter schools are pulling in a fairly high-performing group for their two years and out teachers. The teacher “trainees” drawn to this approach are, as a rule, control freaks who have just (checks watch) two years to save the world before they go to law school or work for a hedge fund. They are the best of the best of the best, to quote Lieutenant Jake Jenson, and they want no truck with those slouchy teachers who didn’t even get straight As and don’t make baggy pants look nearly as cool as Will Smith does. It doesn’t matter that Doug Lemov isn’t a professor, what matters is the man has an MBA from Harvard. He’ll show the way, and they’ll get it done, just like they always do, unlike those idiot teachers who created this mess they’ll have to fix. They are usually privileged, usually white recent college graduates who just want to know the best way of drilling simple facts and good behavior into “disadvantaged” (read really, really poor) black and Hispanic elementary and middle schoolers using a required set of procedures.

As a university, Relay must guarantee its students academic freedom, but as the alert reader may have noticed, Relay’s students want methods and answers, not intellectual challenge. They don’t give a damn about academic freedom.

But good form demands we inquire whether Relay guarantees its students academic freedom. We are assured of its existence. I’m skeptical, but not because I doubt Relay’s commitment to the idea.

Say a teacher at an Uncommon Schools charter is required to use those creepy finger waves that you see in the video. He wants to try to manage his class without the finger waves. But if he doesn’t use the finger waves, he gets fired, and if he doesn’t have a job, he can’t complete his education at Relay.

If all charters that accept Relay mandate that behavior and Relay mandates employment in order to be in the program, and the only jobs for uncredentialed teachers are at charters, is Relay offering academic freedom?

If other charters allow their teachers the freedom to decide on their own methods and techniques, then maybe Relay will see a test of its values at some point. Would Relay tolerate a teacher in its program saying “the finger waving is some sick stuff and I won’t do it. And the countdown nonsense? I didn’t get into teaching to turn out robots. White parents wouldn’t put up with this crap.”

Suppose a teacher decides her students are better served by teaching them more slowly, giving them time to explore additional content. Her students don’t make a year of academic progress. She gets excellent results, has few discipline problems, accomplishes miracles with students who would otherwise be expelled and sent back to comprehensive schools, but Relay won’t give her a credential because her students didn’t make a year of progress. Where is her academic freedom, her ability to make pedagogical choices for her students?

These are all just hypotheticals, because most Relay students are Koolaid drinkers who bought into the ideology before they started.

But if you want to skip ed school and Relay’s your only choice, keep FIRE on speed dial.

I am being deliberately flip. My disdain for Relay is irrelevant as anything other than illustration of a basic truth: many, many people are repelled by the school’s techniques. If you want a considered assessment of the different approaches, read this excellent Stephen Sawchuk piece on intellectual vs. technical teacher preparation. And the charter demand for a prescriptive approach goes way beyond No Excuses schools; progressive charters are just as ideologically biased.

A prescriptive method for producing teachers simply won’t work as anything other than a specialized fringe method with a guaranteed market. It’s one thing to mandate a fixed procedure for subcuticular stitches, quite another to mandate weighting homework as 40% of the grade or requiring students to sit in groups or in rows, still another to make teachers force kids to perform transition steps in unison or use a 3-second “wait time” with “strategic narration”.

I believe an open-ended approach to teacher training is the only possible method of preparing teachers. Like legions of teachers, I felt entirely prepared to walk into my first classroom and can’t figure out what the hell Peter Sipe is complaining about. That doesn’t mean traditional ed schools couldn’t be improved. But it’s worth remembering that most of them do a lot of things pretty well, and that many teachers—good ones, even—don’t agree with the prevailing “received wisdom” of the chattering class. Which is what I’ll be writing about the next time I take the topic on.

Okay, I’ve been chewing on this long enough. Posting. Maybe I’ll edit later.