. . . But one program succeeded and succeeded in a big, big way. And its headmaster – Shimon Waronker is here today and I’m delighted that he is. The private word Shimon is that you are so damned good at your job, that the Department of Education just said “let him do what he wants…” And you did. And so when you walk into the New American Academy in Crown Heights, it looks like any of the 1,750 public school buildings in the city. But the children are wearing uniforms and they are smiling as they enter the building. That’s always an especially good sign. At the New American Academy teachers work in teams of four, headed by a Master Teacher – who by the way, makes $120,000 a year about 20% more than other experienced teachers earn. The Master Teachers and their three colleagues meet for 90 minutes at the beginning of each school day to collaborate over the day’s lessons while the children eat breakfast and go to gym. Yes, breakfast and gym. Just like some of us. The Master Teacher conducted the class on the day I was there while her three colleagues worked with smaller groups of children grouped by reading ability. The whole day worked that way…experience, close contact, focused individualization between teacher and child. Is it heaven? Well to a certain extent…some of that goes on in various forms in a very few other schools in the system…because there are some schools doing some wonderful things – without question! But it’s a drop in the bucket…and we want a full bucket – without a hole in it. Tiered levels of teaching based on experience and talent, rewarded by influence and salary should be the norm…not a single example in a school system with 1,750 schools and 1.1 million children . . .

http://www.liberalparty.org/newlpsite/2012/05/29/2020-vision-a-view-of-comprehensive-reform/

Here is an excerpt from the article: The Shaliach for School Reform by Julie Wiener

Remarkably, given the contentiousness of school reform efforts, Waronker has earned the admiration both of union leaders, like Randi Weingarten, and school reformers like Klein, who is no longer with the Department of Education but still serves as a mentor for Waronker and recently attended his son’s bar mitzvah.

In an interview with The Jewish Week, Klein described the New American Academy as “a very interesting and creative model,” adding that he gives Waronker “enormous credit for being innovative, visionary and willing to think very hard and put into practice a whole paradigm.”

Describing Waronker as a “man of deep moral commitment,” Klein said, “I don’t hear him making excuses; I just hear him getting the work done.”

Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and former president of New York’s United Federation of Teachers, told The Jewish Week her union “totally embraced” the New American Academy “because it’s about the how’s: how we actually increase teacher capacity to do the jobs we’re asking them to do for kids, how we create conditions that maximize a learning process for creativity, discovery and inquiry, and how we do teacher preparation in an ongoing career way that respects teacher professionalism.”

Noting that school reform requires “flexibility on all sides, not just the teachers’ side,” Weingarten says, “People try to put the union and teachers in a box, as if we don’t care about ingenuity and creativity. This is an example that shows that myth can’t be farther from the truth.”

“The good news is that most people start out with healthy creative instincts, and virtually anybody can improve their creativity if they want to. The bad news is that our education system and social mores discourage creativity. “We’re very good at killing creativity in kids,” Lehrer told me in an interview. “We kill it with ruthless efficiency. The schools have twelve years to sculpt your mind, and they end up convincing kids that they’re not creative.”

There’s nothing new about the way pragmatic concerns and conformity displace playfulness and originality as kids mature. “Every child is an artist,” Pablo Picasso once said. “The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

What is new is the emphasis schools place on rote learning, memorization, and especially standardized tests, which generate a kind of assembly-line uniformity to what kids learn in school. Creativity, by contrast, requires qualities that schools tend to discourage, such as daydreaming, uninhibited curiosity, hands-on experimentation and an unstructured, permissive environment.”

See huffingtonpost for full article.

The perfect illustration of competition writ large is war. Everyone just kills everyone. There are always rationalizations for war. Often it’s been romanticized, though perhaps not so much anymore. But it makes sense: if life really is war, you should spend all your time either getting ready for it or doing it. That’s the Harvard mindset.

But what if life isn’t just war? Perhaps there’s more to it than that. Maybe you should sometimes run away. Maybe you should sheath the sword and figure out something else to do. Maybe “life is war” is just a strange lie we’re told, and competition isn’t actually as good as we assume it is.

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See link for full article.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter.html

February 16th, 2012

Eight brief points about “merit pay” for teachers In today’s Washington Post is another story about “merit pay” for teachers. But this one, by national education correspondent Lyndsey Layton, spends some space on my own thoughts on the topic. For those new to the issue, or coming to the Pink Blog from Tweets about the article, let me summarize my views as succinctly as I can:

1. Some rewards backfire. Fifty years of social science tells us that “if-then” rewards – that is, “If you do this, then you get that” – are great for simple, routine tasks and not so great for complicated, creative tasks. Since teaching is creative and complex rather than simple and algorithmic, tying teacher pay to student performance (especially on standardized tests) flies in the face of the broad evidence.

2. Contingent pay for teachers just isn’t effective. What’s more, the specific evidence – a cluster of recent studies that have examined “if-then” pay schemes in schools – has shown them to be failures. See, for instance, this piece of research by Vanderbilt University or this one by Harvard’s Roland Fryer or this study by Rand that prompted the New York City public schools to abandon its pay-for-performance plan.

3. Money is still important. The fact that “if-then” motivators often go awry doesn’t mean that rewards in general or money in particular are bad. Not at all. The research shows that money matters. It just matters in a slightly different way than we suspect. Paying people unfairly — say, when Jane makes less than June for the same work — is extremely demotivating. And, of course, low salaries can deter some people from pursuing certain professions. Therefore, the best use of money as a motivator, at least for complex work, is to compensate people fairly and to try to take the issue of money off the table. That means paying healthy base salaries – and in the private sector, offering some non-gameable variable pay such as profit-sharing.

4. There’s a simpler solution. My own solution for the teacher pay issue, which I’ve voiced many times both in writing and in speeches, is to strike a bargain: Raise the base pay of teachers – and make it easier to get rid of underperforming teachers. Not only is this approach more consistent with the evidence, it’s easier to implement and doesn’t require a new bureaucracy to administer. (To her credit, Michelle Rhee launched some efforts to move in this direction.)

5. We’ve got the wrong diagnosis. The notion that the central problem in American education is lack of teacher motivation is ludicrous. The vast majority of teachers in this country are some of the most hard-working, dedicated people you’ll ever meet – folks who work their butts off in difficult conditions for little recognition. Pay for performance is a weak prescription in part because it’s based on a faulty diagnosis.

6. What really ails us. The real problems, at least in my opinion, are twofold. First, the American education system itself, which is based on 19th century principles and structures, is woefully antiquated. Second, we’re ignoring the issue of poverty and the overwhelming evidence that, absent comprehensive and expensive interventions, socioeconomic status is what drives much of educational attainment and performance. (This is one thing I actually liked about No Child Left Behind. It held someone’s feet to the fire for schools that were criminally negligent in serving low-income kids.)

7. Teaching isn’t investment banking. I find it peculiar that we single out teachers for “if-then” pay when we wouldn’t consider it for other public servants. Should we pay police officers based on how many tickets they write or whether the crime rate in their district drops? How about compensating soldiers based on whether our borders have been attacked or how many of their colleagues have been injured or killed? Would legislators, who are behind much of the bonuses-for-test-scores push, ever agree to hinge their own pay on whether budget deficits rose or fell?

8. Turn down the heat, turn up the light. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the people on both sides of this issue are men and women with good intentions. Nearly everyone I’ve encountered is trying to do the right thing. Reasonable people can disagree about weighty matters. And most people are reasonable. The trouble is that much of our education policy — from how we finance it down to how we schedule buses — seems designed more for the convenience of adults than for the education of children. If we reckon with that unpleasant truth and have an honest conversation that places our kids at the center of our efforts, we can make a lot of progress.

http://www.danpink.com/archives/2012/02/eight-points-about-merit-pay-for-teachers

Re “The Relationship School” (column, March 23):

It was an honor to have David Brooks visit our pilot school and share his insights on our model. The components of our model have been explored in different schools.

In many ways, what we are doing is not new; instead, we bring a renewed commitment to exploring how the research-based elements of our model can best function in classrooms, and how we can bring the model to scale without increasing school budgets.

Together with our partners at the New York City Department of Education and United Federation of Teachers, we have created a unique contract that allows for a 15-to-1 student-teacher ratio and higher teacher salaries on a standard public school per-pupil allocation.

As Mr. Brooks described, the cornerstone of our model is relationships — particularly between teachers and students and within the teaching teams. We are firmly committed to proving this relationship-based model, which includes exploring how this educational structure works in other environments, with different teachers and a different principal.

We are very optimistic about our future and remain deeply dedicated to working within the system to change education for our nation’s young people.

SHIMON WARONKER
Headmaster
The New American Academy
Brooklyn, March 23, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/opinion/model-for-school-reform.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss