Chicago Teachers Strike

[Nemo]

What do you think about the Chicago public school teachers' strike? What broader issues does this strike highlight?

A few of my views:
1) It would be okay with me if teachers were evaluated more thoroughly.
2) It would be okay with me if it was easier for administrators to fire teachers.
3) Using test scores to evaluate teachers has all sorts of problems, so it should be only one component of an evaluation system. Overall, evaluating teachers is quite a tricky thing to do fairly.
4) If we go in the direction of more evaluation and performance based pay, administrators should also be evaluated thoroughly and fairly, and they should also be dismissed if they do a poor job.

Please be civil. Mean spirited, snarky comments will not cause people to agree with your point of view.

[Ether]

Can someone name 2 metropolitan areas in the US where the secondary education system is "working"? If not, how about internationally? And what is the cost per student per annum, and what are they doing differently from Chicago?

[Lil' Lavery]

People need to stop blaming teachers for larger cultural issues.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

People need to stop blaming teachers for larger cultural issues.

Nobody is blaming anybody (yet) in this thread.

What is your solution?

Today, we live in a culture where High School education is labeled "important", and then brushed aside, with colleges and universities known as the institutions where people actually learn things. You get what you celebrate, and society today just doesn't celebrate teaching the way it should.

(The following is my personal opinion, that does not reflect FRC256's opinion)

I think school teachers should not be characterized the way they are now. We see teachers as relatively low-paid people whose job is to teach the learning generations. In my opinion, teachers aren't seen as very important, high up in the food chain people, and they should. Education isn't prioritized because its enablers (teachers) aren't prioritized. In my idea of a "perfect" world, teaching would be one of the top priorities in the culture. Any teacher, Kindergarten to University level, would be given the esteem and respect as one today may look up to a sports hero or government figure (Likable gov't figure), and pay to reflect that. We aren't celebrating great teachers, so getting them isn't as easy as it sounds. My teachers are the greatest people in my life. Not only have I learned invaluable lessons from them, but they also volunteer their own time and money to make learning for us students better. They work hard not only for our future, but the future of our nations. Can we not give them what they deserve?

[artdutra04]

I grew up and went to school in a city that would be considered an urban, mid-size (population 60,000), inner-city area where 65% of the students were on free or reduced lunch and scores on standardized tests were much lower than surrounding (richer) towns.

The largest factor that I witnessed affecting the grades of students was the socioeconomic conditions of the student's home life. Students from middle class (or better) families were significantly more likely to be in honors courses, be involved in sports or extra-curricular activities, complete their homework and show up for school, and overall get better grades.

The biggest reason that I witnessed as to why the students from "the projects" did not do as well as those from nicer neighborhoods was attitude and the culture they were brought up in. Many of the students from the projects wanted to be rich and famous but did not understand the connection between their education and their desired success.

They rarely did homework, thought school "was stupid" (very common attitude), and overall didn't care about much about learning, education, or hard work. Many of their parents had similar attitudes, and never enforced rules or made them do homework growing up. These students grow up in that atmosphere, saw school as stupid, then fail classes and/or drop out, and then repeat the cycle with their kids.

It's a vicious cycle that continues unless something is done to break the loop, which is where an exceptional teacher/coach/etc can open the student's eyes to the world outside the bubble they've lived their entire life in.

Thus, I think there is plenty of room for improvement in our education system.

I believe that tenure is both a tremendous asset to good teachers but also can be a crutch for bad teachers. Tenure protects good teachers from being fired for [rightfully] failing a student when the parents of said student come in to yell at the school for failing their "smart" kit. Tenure also protects teachers from being fired for "bad test scores" if they are stuck with all remedial classes one school year.

Performance based bonuses and higher pay for more difficult classes are two things that should be more common. In order to attract the best possible talent, teaching in an inner-city school should pay more than teaching in a rich suburban town. Inner city classes are also much more difficult to teach for when most of the students do not care about school.

Also, I believe performance based bonuses would help reward individual teachers. However, this needs to be done VERY carefully, otherwise it could have unintended results. The performance based bonuses should only measure that teacher against that particular school/school district's average over the last X years. This way, teachers who are exceptional at lower-performing schools get rewarded.

But measuring the performance is difficult; putting too much emphasis on standardized test scores makes the teachers spend too much time teaching to the test instead of teaching what is useful knowledge.

At the same time, I also believe their needs to be rigorous national standards to which every state is gauged against, rather then let every state set their own goals. When you tie education funding to test scores, and when you let states develop their own tests, you WILL see states purposely relax their standards to increase their test scores to get more funding. To an outsider, it will look like their schools improved, but they really only hid the problem through stupid shenanigans.

Another topic that really needs to be addressed is the very content of what we are teaching. I personally feel that there is way too much emphasis on memorizing facts and figures instead of analyzing and thinking critically about things. I think we should teach foreign language courses from elementary school through high school. I think students should have to take more match and science courses. I think history classes should focus more on analyzing why events happened and what were their repercussions rather than memorizing names and dates. In English courses, I think there needs to be more emphasis on critical thinking skills, such as understand when they are reading facts and when they are reading opinions. There should also be more emphasis on effectively communicating, debating, and arguing topics.

Thus, as with most things in life, this is difficult to sum up in short sound bites and doesn't fit into an exact black-and-white narrative used by many politicians.



TLDR; You are lazy. Go read everything above. Nuances cannot be summarized into sound bites.

[connor.worley]

I may be biased, but I think my school (High Tech High) really does impart a quality education on the vast majority of its students. We do a lot of things differently; some people think we're strange. Here's a video about the philosophy. Sounds sort of familiar, doesn't it?

[Nemo]

Great post, Art. I think it's a nice window into the way a rational person can mentally approach a complicated mess like our education system. Anybody interested in having conversations with other humans about addressing societal problems might note a few things from that post: he doesn't focus his energies on assigning blame, he doesn't make any naive claims about the way the world works, and he clearly recognizes the multifaceted and complex nature of the situation.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by SuperNerd256

My teachers are the greatest people in my life.

I agree, but the most influential teachers in my life aren't teachers by trade. They didn't get paid to teach me. In fact, the mentor with the largest impact barely got out of high school. Not to say I didn't benefit immensely from the professional educators in my life, but by & large the ones who have had the sustained impacts are not teachers by trade.

3) Using test scores to evaluate teachers has all sorts of problems, so it should be only one component of an evaluation system. Overall, evaluating teachers is quite a tricky thing to do fairly.

Isn't this a difficult thing to do for most jobs? If you spend two months solving a complex problem vs. someone who used those two months to pound through a bunch of busywork, who added more value? Despite being somewhat subjective, performance evaluation is a very important tool.

Any teacher, Kindergarten to University level, would be given the esteem and respect as one today may look up to a sports hero or government figure (Likable gov't figure), and pay to reflect that.

Teachers probably get the esteem and respect of state legislators, and are better paid in all the cases I spot checked.

[Rangel]

Coming from an inner city school where the 95 percent of the population is on free and reduced lunch I can relate to what Art is saying. My interpretation may be a little different since the majority of our school is Hispanic and probably half of our students in the school are undocumented. One of the first things that catch my eyes is the different culture. I came from a moderately wealthy middle school to a very down under high school so it was very easy for me to notice the different. The first thing I noticed is the difference in parenting. It seemed to me that the majority of my friend's parents were harder on them in the moderately wealthy middle school then my lower class high school. This is because of a lot of issues such as parents working longer hours and being more tired at the small amount of time they are home. This reason though is a lot harder to fix than any of the other reasons there may be.

As far as how to fix the other problems, its also a political thing. I'm sorry but having even 30+ students in a class is hard. A budget needs to be increased to have more classes and there needs to be a cap on how many students can be in one class. In my opinion as well teachers should be paid a lot more and be looked at as great in society because they are teaching the future engineers, doctors, scientists, and heck even politicians. A teacher needs to be looked at as one of the highest figures in society and they should be. Of course that's not to take away from volunteer mentors as they are teachers as well and should fall into the same height of admiration.

On a side note the moderation of teacher evaluations needs to be moderated as well. We had a new evaluation system last year in our school that evaluated teachers on the number of kids failing and if they taught on what is essentially a script or teaching to the test. So teachers got docked as a result of getting a higher number of kids that don't care more than the other teachers, they were criticized for teaching kids valuable skills such as critical thinking or just simply thinking. This much evaluation led to the eventually quitting of some of the best teachers we had on campus and a lot more retirements than usual. The best people to come up with evaluation methods are the teachers themselves in my opinion. That's how this year our school has a new attendance and grading policy which has been working fantastic in my opinion at least. Those were the main things I see as a student anyways.

[Al Skierkiewicz]

The Chicago school system is getting a bad rep based on the variety of neighborhoods, schools and the students and families. You are not hearing about the magnet schools needing to evaluate bad teachers. You are hearing (in an off handed way) that there is a distinct difference in test scores, quality of education and percentage of students moving to higher education. It is difficult to teach students that have so much outside influences against learning. One of the things that talking about economic differences doesn't address is the malnutrition some of these students have lived with for their whole lives. It is impossible to use the same teaching skills with these students that work well with well nourished brains and bodies. There are a number of FRC teams in Chicago schools and I talk regularly with the teachers on those teams. They have a really difficult time working against these outside pressures. But what is really never discussed is that some of those teachers choose to teach in those schools in attempt to make it better for everyone. To evaluate one of those teachers on test scores and reading level alone does nothing for the students they help through life each day.

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Ether

Can someone name 2 metropolitan areas in the US where the secondary education system is "working"? If not, how about internationally? And what is the cost per student per annum, and what are they doing differently from Chicago?

http://www.forbes.com/2003/02/14/cx_bs_0214home.html

This article lists 4 cities above Chicago, but reading through the article these are the Top 10 of a whole lot of cities (hundreds).

This is a great report on a state basis for cost per pupil. Total revenues and what not.
http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/10f33pub.pdf
It also does a break down of costs associated with Instruction vs. Support Services vs. Other Costs.
Overall it appears to be about 60% going to Instruction, 34% Support Services and 5-6% Other.

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by Ether

Can someone name 2 metropolitan areas in the US where the secondary education system is "working"? If not, how about internationally? And what is the cost per student per annum, and what are they doing differently from Chicago?

Well, yes... and no. By and large, I'd say the secondary education system is working pretty good across British Columbia. It costs the province about $8,700 per FTE student in Vancouver, with slightly varying amounts in other parts of the province.

I don't know what we are doing differently from Chicago, mainly because I don't know a lot about Chicago, but all of the 40,000 public K-12 teachers in BC belong to the BC Teachers' Federation, a respectably strong union that isn't afraid to go on strike, or withdraw extracurricular activities, when they feel it is needed. Typically the reasons for withdrawing services tend to centre around working conditions, such as class size and support for special needs students, but the BCTF is also quite willing to point out that if you don't pay teachers a decent, professional wage then it makes it difficult to recruit decent, professional people.

On the other hand, I can tell you lots of reasons why the B.C. school system isn't "working". Some will blame teachers, some will blame government, everyone will believe they are right. Some will call for more detailed testing, others will point out that standadized testing reduces the room for innovation and creativity. Some will say the solution is to hire more teachers, others will say the solution is to fire more teachers. In public education there are no shortage of opinions!

One thing I am pretty confident of, however, is that if you tell someone over and over and over that they are stupid and useless... that they will start to believe you. And once they believe you, they'll pass that on to their kids. And once you believe that you are stupid and useless, well then what's the point of going to school? Why try when you know you suck before you even start? Canada did that to our native peoples for generations, and while we are now starting to realize the harm that we did, and are trying to find ways to undo it, it is an uphill battle.

On the other hand, the school I taught at, David Thompson Secondary, was largely populated by immigrants who came to Canada so that their children would have a chance to get an education, study hard, and prosper in a free and open democratic nation. Although their parents might not have had a great education, the kids were told that education was important, and that hard work would be rewarded.

I taught some awesome kids, and we did some great things. If someone had swung by my shop, they would have said, "Wow. Education is sure working here! This guy is a great teacher!"

I wonder what they would have seen and said if the students were coming in without breakfast, from broken homes, with the idea that they were stupid and useless.

The amazing thing is that there are schools in these situations where teachers are accomplishing wonderful things for many kids.

I don't know whether those comments are relevant to Chicago or not, but I think it is important to say that teaching students who think learning is important is much easier than teaching those who don't... and those values are instilled and reinforced outside of the school system by family and community far more loudly than they are by the school.

I suspect the teachers in Chicago, just like my colleagues here, just want to do a good job in an environment where they can have some success, be respected for their hard work, and receive a decent, professional wage for doing it.

I really have no clue what the specific issues are in the Chicago strike, but I'll bet I've touched on some of the big ideas... and perhaps contributed a bit of insight into where education is "working" and where it isn't.

Education isn't a production job... it isn't a sales job... it isn't an engineering job or a banking job. It is really tough to put metrics to it, and it is almost impossible to calculate the "value add" that an individual teacher provides their students.

But it is really easy to make a few bold statements about education and turn it in to a political football.

Jason

[Ether]

Canada did that to our native peoples for generations, and while we are now starting to realize the harm that we did, and are trying to find ways to undo it, it is an uphill battle.

What ways have you found so far, and which ones have been most effective? Who or what is battling against it?

teaching students who think learning is important is much easier than teaching those who don't... and those values are instilled and reinforced outside of the school system by family and community far more loudly than they are by the school.

How should society solve this problem? Do you have some good ideas?

But it is really easy to make a few bold statements about education and turn it in to a political football.

That's a bold statement. Seriously though, if people are shouted down or ridiculed for presenting factual statements, or even expressing an opinion, they're not going to be drawn into the consensus and be part of the solution. That's part of the painful process of having a public discourse about the problem.

[Nemo]

Originally Posted by Ether

How should society solve this problem? Do you have some good ideas?

I'll take a crack at this. In no particular order:

1. Wide availability of birth control. This includes subsidizing it for the poor and teaching students about birth control in sex education. It’s much easier to be a good parent if you don’t have kids until you have your life setup well enough to do a good job of it. Barriers to acquiring and using birth control cause people to have kids when they aren’t prepared. No amount of blaming those parents for making bad decisions is going to change the fact that these kids exist, and many of those kids would have been better off if they had been born to older parents with a more secure life situation. Assuming that this is true for even a small percentage of those kids, the return on investment for birth control is enormous. The difference between a kid who shows up to school with a “bad” upbringing (possibly ending up on welfare or in prison) and a kid who shows up to school eager to learn is huge.

2. Wide availability of preschool. Achievement gaps exist on the first day of kindergarten, and they only get bigger as years pass. Preschool offers the best bang for your buck if you’re a government trying to improve educational achievement.

3. Reduce poverty. You can’t properly fix education without addressing poverty. And we could, if we cared to. This is not the same thing as growing the economy. Address urban decay. Find ways to cause people with practically no skills to become productive. It is a very difficult problem, but poverty is the cause of so many other problems that it’s senseless to ignore it. Has anybody talked about reducing poverty at all in an election in the past two decades? Related to reducing poverty: make health care and food assistance available to all kids that need it (programs exist - make sure they work properly). Call me draconian, but I think a rational society with finite resources provides health care to kids first and the elderly second.

4. Wide availability of programs that get kids excited about STEM, including FIRST.

5. Create better curriculum, including rethinking the subjects we teach in school. The stuff we’re using is antiquated in many ways, and smart people have written many words about what’s wrong with it and proposed ways to make it better. As a country, we’ve spent many dollars and much time writing tests, analyzing test data, writing standards, commissioning reports, etc. Instead of describing generalities of good curriculum (yes, it’s only one aspect of good education), let’s actually create it. Throw some serious resources toward making an outstanding national curriculum for every subject. Make the curriculum free to any school that wants to try it. Make it a resource for teachers and let them use whichever parts they deem appropriate to go along with whatever else they’re using. Don’t make it a required checklist or a script.

5b. Once we have a national curriculum, put it out on “education.gov” or something and use that site to connect teachers and foster collaboration between teachers everywhere. Create good message boards; create a setting where teachers post more curriculum pieces, but somehow moderate/vet the lessons so the site doesn’t turn into a hodge-podge of junk like some of the existing sites that I’ve visited – have a style guide, have editorial guidelines, whatever. Right now there are a bunch of sites that haven’t really taken off, but an online national curriculum could become an instant hub for a great online teaching community. There are so many teachers that we really ought to have a great online collaboration place in the same way that FRC has chiefdelphi.com.

6. Change school funding to make it more equitable. Schools in better areas are funded better, which makes it easier for them to hire good teachers, build nice facilities, get decent materials, etc. Schools gets around half of their funding from property taxes, leading to big inequities. I’d like to see state and federal taxes increased and local property taxes decreased by offsetting amounts (would be extremely difficult to achieve in real life) and see school funding distributed centrally in some way that is more fair. Equal amounts per student isn’t necessarily fair, but I think some sort of formula could be more fair than what we currently have. This isn’t going to happen any time soon, because the better funded schools/communities would stand to lose a portion of their funding to fund the schools that are currently underfunded. It needs to happen, though. Right now, poor people live in poor neighborhoods with schools that get less funding when they actually need more funding to service their more challenging student populations. That is not a formula for creating a society in which everybody has a fair shot at life, regardless of where or to whom they were born.

7. Pay teachers according to the difficulty of the population they serve. As teachers move through their careers, they typically migrate to schools with better funding (including better teacher pay) and easier, more motivated student populations. And within schools, they move from teaching lower achieving students in lower level courses to teaching higher achieving students in higher level courses. Result: on average, the lowest achieving students get the least skilled, least experienced teachers - and in the schools with the least funding, to boot. We need to reverse that situation. Some poor areas actually do have well paid teachers, and I think Chicago Public Schools is an example. Where I’m at, though (Iowa), the smaller communities have less funding, and they can have problems attracting and retaining, for example, good science teachers because of lower salaries and more challenging teaching conditions.

8. Pay teachers according to performance and dismiss poor performers. Unions: go to bat for the good teachers and don’t spend your resources defending lousy teachers (FYI, I am a union member). Use testing as one component of evaluations, but also use performance reviews and classroom visits and other sensible pieces of evidence. In the evaluations, find ways to give teachers credit for doing extra stuff like teaching citizenship and character, communicating well with parents, motivating kids to get involve in extra activities, and causing kids to be more curious and inspired in addition to scoring in a certain way on tests. Otherwise test results dominate, and it causes teachers to crowd out other important educational goals in favor of achieving narrower content goals. When using test results: use the right sorts of tests (some of the newer tests are getting good at measuring high level thinking skills – tests like that can be a useful tool); average scores over a sufficiently long period to make it fair (students vary a lot from class to class, and their performance on a single test can vary randomly from the kid’s true ability depending on what sort of day they’re having); set a fair bar according to the type of students a teacher is working with; give teachers detailed reports to indicate not just the scores, but which specific sub-areas their students are strong or weak in so they will actually know what they need to change to improve their students’ performance. I would be okay with additional scrutiny and evaluation (I don’t think I will get fired) – I should point out, however, that I will hate it if a new evaluation system causes me to do tons and tons and tons of paperwork and meetings, because that subtracts from the time I use to do stuff that actually helps me improve my teaching.

9. Attract more top-notch people into the teaching profession. Maybe this means paying teachers in some content areas more than others, based on supply and demand (this idea is incredibly unpopular among certain groups, as you might imagine). Maybe it means paying off college loans for people who switch careers into high need areas (programs like this exist – expand them). Pay is an issue, too. The pay isn’t completely dismal – factor in pension / vacations / yearly raises and many teachers are compensated well. The problem is that we’d rather have our best people teaching. Those top people are going to look at the pay for different career choices, and the pay differences will cause many of our best and brightest to go into sectors of the economy where there’s way more money to be made if you’re really good, especially banking, real estate, and law. Each time you increase teacher pay, you’re going to attract a few more of the best people – and if you’re producing enough teachers, when you add a few great teaching candidates to the pool, you’re going to bump a few of the very worst candidates out of consideration for teaching jobs.
[Some people think teacher pay doesn’t need to be high, because the people who truly want to do it will do it no matter what - it’s not about the money. First, they're correct about some of the potentially great teachers – but only some. If you apply this logic to other professions, you must conclude that any truly important job should have lower pay than its required qualifications would otherwise seem to call for – a dubious conclusion, no? Also, remember that most people have families, and providing for one’s kids can and does come out ahead of doing a noble career for a great many of the really talented people in this world.]