There is a struggle going on in DISD right now with the Rosemont community trying to keep their principal from being fired. The Rosemont parents have no illusions on their chances of success - many other popular principals of campuses with good-to-great state ratings have been fired over the last couple of years regardless of how large the community response was.
In 2013, three of the four principals Dallas Morning News had deemed "Super Principals" were let go. One of them was Sunset's principal, the high school in Rosemont's feeder pattern. I remember parents in the Sunset community being completely blindsided by the decision. Sunset had made so many gains during his tenure.
(Read the story here:
http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/08/three-of-our-four-annointed-super-principals-have-been-drummed-out-of-disd.html/ )
Each year there are more. Communities come to Board meetings to protest, but to my knowledge, there has never been a reversal of the decision, except for the very recent case of the Franklin Middle School principal.
The stated goal of the Administration is to create a politics-free principal evaluation system that gets rid of promotion via cronyism and glad-handing. I think most agree with that goal 100%. I know I do! But... there's always a big but, right? But, what if the system doesn't measure what we think it measures?
As one parent said to me, maybe the system "replaced external politics with internal."
I have no "inside track", so I am just guessing here based on what I hear at Board meetings: I wonder if the firing offense for some principals is push-back over teacher observation and evaluation requirements? It seems to have been an issue in the Franklin case (link above). I also found this article with a letter from one of the Super Principals to her staff in 2013. The LOLs, DOLs, and MRSs are references to required teacher instructional techniques. See more about that here.
It's hard to know what is going on. It's also hard to watch yet another community be blind-sided.
Friday, May 15, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
The Epic Battle in Education is about making bricks without straw
There are two titanic forces battling over the future of American public education today. I'm sure there are official names, but I affectionately call them...
This is a shameful oversimplification, but here are the two sides:
Qualifiers:
Qualifications matter. This group includes teacher unions, anti-standardized testing activists, liberal arts proponents, the highly-educated "old guard" in the education landscape. Beloved Sage, Diane Ravitch.
Quantifiers:
Quantification matters. This group includes Teach for America donors, charter school donors, benchmarking proponents, STEM champions, the Reform movement in education. Fearless Advocate, Whitney Tilson.
There are so many differences between the two warring sides, that it's easy to forget they both care deeply about the same thing: Making sure every child in America has the opportunity to get the education he or she needs. Both groups set that "need" bar pretty high, and they both see education as the best ticket out of poverty for a disadvantaged student.
It's important to remember this core value commonality because each often accuses the other of exploiting the educational needs of poor kids out of greed. Like the Democrats and Republicans, to an outsider it seems they go out of their way to be against anything the other side is for. There are many ideological differences between the two, but to me it seems the core conflict is in the answer to this question:
Can a single teacher can be good enough to make sure every student in the classroom gets a good education?
Qualifiers say No. A good teacher can reach many, and a great teacher even more, but no teacher can guide every child to success because some things are simply out of the teacher's control. Students (with their parents/guardians) must also take responsibility for their own education. Plus, to expect teachers to be the primary weapon in the war against poverty is unrealistic, especially with classroom sizes getting bigger and funding getting smaller.
Quantifiers say Yes. If it can be measured, it can be improved. Just because something is not being measured doesn't mean it can't be measured, so a measurement needs to be found. With enough information, data-based training, and effort a teacher can find a way to reach every child in the classroom. Effective teaching is more important to student achievement than any other factor, including (to some extent) class size and funding.
The conflict of these two opposing assumptions is behind almost all of the clashes between the Qualifiers and the Quantifiers.
It reminds me of the Old Testament story about the Isrealite slaves who were required to make bricks with no straw, a necessary binding ingredient. I imagine arguments between the distressed people may have gone something like this...
1 - That's impossible! We can't do it.
2 - We have to do it. We don't have a choice. We have to find a way.
1 - We're being set up for failure. We're going to make a lot of bricks that are not going to be good enough, because we don't have the ingredients we need to get the results demanded.
2 - Very bad things will happen if we don't deliver all the bricks. Yes, it seems impossible, but we have to try anyway. And who knows, maybe we'll succeed. There is ZERO chance of succeeding if we don't try.
1 - What?! Are we suppose to create straw out of thin air with wishful thinking? Bricks are made with clay and straw. We have NO straw. Trying to make bricks without it is stupid.
2 - Giving up is cowardice!
1 - Look, let's go scavenge our own straw. We can at least make some of the bricks properly.
2 - That's a huge amount of time and effort for not enough bricks. That doesn't get our quota met.
1 - No, but the bricks we make will be up to specs.
2 - Look, we have clay. Let's do some tests on different ways to make clay-only bricks. If we approach this methodically, we can find a way to get the quota met with what we have.
1 - Talk about a huge waste of time! We need straw, we aren't being given it, so we go find it ourselves and make what we can.
2 - That's not good enough! We have make quota!
1 - The quota's impossible! We can't do it!
2 - We have to do it! We don't have a choice! We have to find a way!...
... and so it goes, around and around and around.
Qualifiers vs Quantifiers
This is a shameful oversimplification, but here are the two sides:
Qualifiers:
Qualifications matter. This group includes teacher unions, anti-standardized testing activists, liberal arts proponents, the highly-educated "old guard" in the education landscape. Beloved Sage, Diane Ravitch.
Quantifiers:
Quantification matters. This group includes Teach for America donors, charter school donors, benchmarking proponents, STEM champions, the Reform movement in education. Fearless Advocate, Whitney Tilson.
There are so many differences between the two warring sides, that it's easy to forget they both care deeply about the same thing: Making sure every child in America has the opportunity to get the education he or she needs. Both groups set that "need" bar pretty high, and they both see education as the best ticket out of poverty for a disadvantaged student.
It's important to remember this core value commonality because each often accuses the other of exploiting the educational needs of poor kids out of greed. Like the Democrats and Republicans, to an outsider it seems they go out of their way to be against anything the other side is for. There are many ideological differences between the two, but to me it seems the core conflict is in the answer to this question:
Can a single teacher can be good enough to make sure every student in the classroom gets a good education?
Qualifiers say No. A good teacher can reach many, and a great teacher even more, but no teacher can guide every child to success because some things are simply out of the teacher's control. Students (with their parents/guardians) must also take responsibility for their own education. Plus, to expect teachers to be the primary weapon in the war against poverty is unrealistic, especially with classroom sizes getting bigger and funding getting smaller.
Quantifiers say Yes. If it can be measured, it can be improved. Just because something is not being measured doesn't mean it can't be measured, so a measurement needs to be found. With enough information, data-based training, and effort a teacher can find a way to reach every child in the classroom. Effective teaching is more important to student achievement than any other factor, including (to some extent) class size and funding.
The conflict of these two opposing assumptions is behind almost all of the clashes between the Qualifiers and the Quantifiers.
It reminds me of the Old Testament story about the Isrealite slaves who were required to make bricks with no straw, a necessary binding ingredient. I imagine arguments between the distressed people may have gone something like this...
1 - That's impossible! We can't do it.
2 - We have to do it. We don't have a choice. We have to find a way.
1 - We're being set up for failure. We're going to make a lot of bricks that are not going to be good enough, because we don't have the ingredients we need to get the results demanded.
2 - Very bad things will happen if we don't deliver all the bricks. Yes, it seems impossible, but we have to try anyway. And who knows, maybe we'll succeed. There is ZERO chance of succeeding if we don't try.
1 - What?! Are we suppose to create straw out of thin air with wishful thinking? Bricks are made with clay and straw. We have NO straw. Trying to make bricks without it is stupid.
2 - Giving up is cowardice!
1 - Look, let's go scavenge our own straw. We can at least make some of the bricks properly.
2 - That's a huge amount of time and effort for not enough bricks. That doesn't get our quota met.
1 - No, but the bricks we make will be up to specs.
2 - Look, we have clay. Let's do some tests on different ways to make clay-only bricks. If we approach this methodically, we can find a way to get the quota met with what we have.
1 - Talk about a huge waste of time! We need straw, we aren't being given it, so we go find it ourselves and make what we can.
2 - That's not good enough! We have make quota!
1 - The quota's impossible! We can't do it!
2 - We have to do it! We don't have a choice! We have to find a way!...
... and so it goes, around and around and around.
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