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Writing assignment. 1. What
are the features of district bureaucracies?
Examples from experience? 2. What
are the consequences of the features of district bureaucracies? Examples from experience? 3. What
conditions sustain the features of district bureaucracies? Examples from experience? 4. What are some ways school administrators can
avoid the adverse effects of features of district bureaucracies? Examples from experience? Who Benefits from Failing Urban March, 2003 Summary The paper
argues that the growth and maintenance of 120 failed urban school districts miseducating diverse children in poverty for over half a
century is a predictable, explainable phenomenon not a series of accidental,
unfortunate, chance events. The extensive
resources funneled into these systems are used for the purpose of increasing
the district bureaucracies themselves rather than improving the schools or
the education of the children. This massive, persisting failure has generated
neither the effort nor the urgency which the stated values of American
society would lead us to expect. Instead, the larger society provides the
institutional and cultural setting which protects, preserves and enhances
these failing urban school systems for the purpose of providing a broad
spectrum of constituencies with a priceless set of unearned privileges. The
most valuable of these is access to economically and ethnically segregated
forms of schooling for middle-class whites which is effective and does lead
to careers, higher education and improved life opportunities. The
Problem Nationally On September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in 9/11 clearly identified who were the perpetrators
and who were the victims. In death by miseducation
the blame for failing urban school districts is placed on the victims and
their families who are accused of perpetrating their own demise. 9/11 evoked
new national priorities and new ways of reaching them. Miseducation
generates the same tired slogans and applies the same failed solutions even
more assiduously. 9/11 brought forth a rebirth of patriotism and togetherness
against those who would seek to destroy our concept of unity. Death by miseducation evokes an equally powerful commitment to
preserve our way of life by making success in school a personal rather than a
common good. In response to 9/11 Fourteen million diverse children in poverty
represent the overwhelming majority of the miseducated.
The seven million in urban poverty, disproportionately represented by
children of color, attend school in the 120 largest school districts. Every
one of these districts is a failing school system in which greater size
correlates positively with greater failure. Every miseducated
child represents a personal tragedy. Each will have a lifelong struggle to ever
have a job that pays enough to live in a safe neighborhood, have adequate
health insurance, send their own children to better schools than they went
to, or have a decent retirement. In most cases their lives are limited to
dead end jobs, or wasted away in street violence or prison. Living in the
midst of the most prosperous nation on earth, the miseducated
will live shorter lives characterized by greater stress and limited life
options. Miseducation is, in effect, a sentence of
death carried out daily over a lifetime. It is the most powerful example I
know of cruel and unusual punishment and it is exacted on children innocent
of any crime. Most Americans avoid the personal tragedy aspect of this
massive miseducation by not sending their own
children to school in these failing urban districts. This includes a majority
of the teachers who work in them! In effect, those with options cope with miseducation as a personal tragedy by fleeing the major
urban districts in order to protect their loved ones from the contamination
of miseducation. While flight can appear to be a
successful strategy for coping with miseducation as
a personal tragedy it does not address the question of how miseducating other people’s children on this massive
scale affects the survival of the total society. Every three years the number
of dropouts and pushouts adds up to a city bigger
than The question of
why a society that defines itself as caring, compassionate and committed to
equal opportunity can continue to educationally destroy the life chances of
millions of its own children is extremely difficult to understand and even
harder to explain. When the dimension of being willing to risk our very
survival as a nation is added, one can only conclude that most Americans
perceive benefits from this miseducation that
outweigh the damages they see being inflicted on individuals and society.
What might these benefits be? Who might be the beneficiaries? Every one of
the major urban school districts suffers from a disease that might
appropriately be termed dysfunctional bureaucracy. The
districts are the carriers but never die. The children and society at large
are the victims. Even when states take over particular urban schools
districts the best they can do is put the disease into remission. Takeovers
are only temporary palliatives and in a few years, or less, dysfunctional
bureaucracies reappear in altered forms ever more resistant to change
strategies and more virulent. Dysfunctional
bureaucracy is a disease which feeds itself on the resources it should be
distributing to the schools it is ostensibly serving. Failing urban
school districts are now so intricately interwoven into the fabric of our
social, economic and political institutions that to transform them would
require changing every level of government and since public education is the
biggest business in At the same
time, every failing urban school district has some successful schools within
it. But the successes of these individual schools can never be disseminated
throughout the entire district because it is the very process of scaling up
that causes the dysfunctional bureaucracy to unleash its most potent resistor
strategies. Whenever the total district system is threatened
with powerful change efforts it fights back with even more powerful resistor
strategies. For example, if threatened with serious change the school
district protects itself by showing that the proposed changes would interfere
with the implementation of federal and state laws. Or, that the proposed
changes would be unconstitutional. Or, that the proposed changes would
require a complete overhaul in the statewide funding system. Or, that the
proposed changes would threaten the legal rights of those with handicapping
conditions. Or that the proposed changes would threaten local control,
disenfranchise voters, remove constitutional protections to minorities, or
raise taxes. The most cynical of all
blocking strategies used by failing urban districts is the charge that the
proposed changes have not been fully researched, as if current school
practices reflect a scientific knowledge base and not an accumulation of unreflected-upon traditions. In those cases where
change efforts are minimal threats to the total system, e.g. changing one or
two schools, the system’s resistance is minimal and may even be disguised as
supportive of the change. In this way, all
major urban school districts simply marginalize the less threatening change
efforts by supporting them as models thus protecting the district at large
from their influence. The elements of individually successful urban schools which have been
identified by research and experience can only be built school by school if
these schools are protected from their dysfunctional bureaucracies. The
fact that the successes of individual schools in over 120 urban districts for
more than fifty years have never been translated into creating a total
district that is successful cannot be attributed to chance. Moving success
from the school level to the district level has never happened because the
district systematically ensures that it will not. Dysfunctional bureaucracy
feeds on the human resources, the funds, the decision-making authority, the
energy and the commitment which are the life blood needed for individual
schools to succeed. Dysfunctional
bureaucracy sucks up most of these resources for its own enhancement before
allocating a significantly diminished portion down to the schools it
supposedly serves. Federal, state and local funds are allocated to districts
not to schools. Regardless of the funds’ intent, districts first skim off
resources for their own growth and survival. In my city, if one were to
divide the total budget by the number of students in the district in September,
2002 there was over $12,625 behind each child. (This is a substantial
underestimate of the actual dollars behind each child since it does not
include all the grant funds. Also, there are at least 5,000 “ghosts” who
disappear after their legal attendance is taken for enrollment purposes in
September. Added to this is the fact that the truancy rate is 65% in our high
schools, 52% in our middles schools and 21% in our elementary schools.) The
budgets that elementary school principals in my city actually receive from
the central office to educate each child in their schools turn out to be
$5,500 or 43% of the $12,625 per child that the system started out with. The
defense offered by this failing system for skimming 57% of its budget before
allocating funds to its schools is that “There are administrative costs
required of the district and besides, it’s worse in other cities.” Actually,
this 57% for administration reaches 70% when the costs of an individual
school’s administration are also included. A conservative estimate
nationally, is that in the major urban school districts the amount spent on
the salaries for professional staff, equipment and materials used in the
actual teaching of children is 30% or less of the total district budget. This
30% figure compares with 75% to 80% that small town and suburban districts
without dysfunctional bureaucracies apply to the costs of instruction and
school building services in direct support of teaching. The rhetoric that
children’s learning is the highest priority of the urban districts might lead
the uninitiated into believing that the system will actually behave as if its
primary goal is improving students’ learning. However if one follows the money it is clear that the highest
priority is always the protection and growth of the district system. This
scenario pertains in spite of the fact that the funding base increases
substantially. It has been clearly demonstrated for over half a century in
every major urban school district that even as the total district’s resource
base markedly increases there will never be sufficient resources which are
allowed to pass through to the individual schools. The highest priority is
always the insatiable demand of the system to enlarge and protect itself
first and only secondarily to allocate resources down to the schools. What
actually transpires is that the successful schools in these dysfunctional
bureaucracies have effectively competed for resources against their district
systems and in competition with the other schools in their district. It
cannot be sufficiently stressed that the relatively small number of
successful urban schools have accomplished what they have in spite of, not
because of, their dysfunctional bureaucracies. In Darwinian terms successful
urban schools represent a relatively small number which have mutated and
adapted in ways which allow them to survive in the alien environment of the
total school system. What has evolved to a new level are these individual
schools not their alien environments. To believe that the alien environments
can themselves be used to “help” other schools evolve at their expense is an
extremely naïve assumption and explains the inevitable failure of would-be
change agents and transformers. In analyzing dysfunctional bureaucracy several
characteristics are typically regarded as causes which are actually symptoms.
This is a critical distinction since fixing these symptoms will not cause the
system to operate any more successfully. Following are three of the more
frequently cited symptoms. Transient
Superintendents. While the term of the average urban
superintendent has become shorter (three years) there is no reason to believe
that when the superintendents remained for substantial periods the quality of
the schooling offered diverse children in poverty was any more effective.
Indeed, it can be argued that the systems expanded for self-serving purposes
to unworkable levels during the longer tenures of former superintendents.
Further, the lack of planning for and sensitivity to the educational needs of
diverse children in poverty by these long term leaders was a major
contributor to the present dysfunctional bureaucracies. The collective
experience of hiring new superintendents is that whether they are educators
or non-educators, risen from the ranks or hired through national searches,
whites or minorities, activists dedicated to change or functionaries
committed to expanding what works in present schools, the results are always
the same. The bureaucracy expands at the expense of the schools and the
children regardless of who the superintendent is or what s/he promises to do.
The difference between the best and the worst superintendent is only the
speed and the degree to which the dysfunctional bureaucracy will expand
during their tenures. Urban school superintendents don’t resign or get fired
because they are presiding over failed systems miseducating
children. They turnover because they have not helped the particular faction
of the school board or central office staff in power at the time to gain greater
resources and/or authority within the dysfunctional bureaucracy. Who the
superintendent is has never, does not now, and never will effect student
learning in these dysfunctional bureaucracies. The great importance attached
to who this individual is can only be understood by answering the question of
who benefits from the particular appointment. Politicized school boards. There is no longer any
question that urban school boards cannot function effectively except for
their own benefit, i.e. awarding themselves salaries, health insurance,
fringe benefits and perks; making decisions which favor the special interest
groups they represent at the expense of the district as a whole;
micromanaging; and presiding over the misuse of massive funding through ignorance
or malfeasance. The typical budget hearing in an urban district will involve
board members quietly passing items involving hundreds of millions of dollars
because they don’t understand the item and are ashamed to raise questions
about it, but then haggling far into the night over the purchase of chairs or
the hiring of a coach because it is an item they do understand. It is also
clear that school boards have clearly become more political in spite of
receiving greater scrutiny from the media and the public than in the past.
There is simply no basis for believing that urban school boards in former
times, acting without open meeting laws, disclosure laws and affirmative
action laws, were any less political. Indeed, it can be argued that lack of
intelligent policy making in the past has institutionalized the present
dysfunctional bureaucracies. The collective experience in the major urban
districts has been that who is on the school board cannot transform or even
stop the dysfunctional bureaucracy from growing. The quality of school board
members can only affect the speed at which the system deteriorates. Who
benefits from maintaining malfunctioning even chaotic urban school boards? Lack of
accountability. This is both a symptom and a cause of dysfunctionalism. Who is responsible to whom for exactly
what? This question is never clearly and definitively answered in any urban
district. When and where have school boards who have appointed
superintendents, principals and other administrators been held accountable for
the performance of their appointees? In which districts, some hiring more
than one thousand teachers per year, have the specific hiring officials been
held accountable for the performance of the particular individuals they have
hired? In which district are those responsible for inclusion been held
accountable for how well those with handicapping conditions are educated? Who
is held accountable in school districts claiming to be short of funds when
millions of dollars in unspent funds are routinely “discovered” a month
before the fiscal year ends? Who is held accountable when the math or reading
programs that have been adopted (at exorbitant costs) show dismal results, or
are never even evaluated? Neither at present nor in the past has there been
accountability, with consequences, built into any level of the urban district
systems. Indeed, the argument that the system is organized to prevent anyone
being held accountable for anything of any importance is a valid and quite
powerful one. Who benefits from maintaining these systems in which those
designated as responsible are not held accountable? Causes
of the Dysfunctional Bureaucracy The administrators who comprise the central office bureaucracies of
the schools are essentially people who have never worked in the real world.
They are people who have always been students, teachers, supervisors and
principals without any substantial real-world work experiences for any
prolonged periods. The only work they have ever performed has been in the
sheltered work places of public schools. They have never had the experience of
having to produce or be terminated. They have never had bosses who
could fire them immediately without a year of legal procedures and incredible
documentation. They simply have not had the experience of having their
productivity assessed on a daily and ongoing basis. Without any training or
experience in setting clear objectives, having time deadlines to meet those
objectives, working in teams and being constantly evaluated, they only know
textbook definitions of concepts such as “accountability.” They frequently
use terms such as “leadership” but have no idea of the behavioral
competencies they would need to demonstrate in order to manifest leadership.
From the superintendent down through all levels of the central office the
question, “Can you give a few examples of how your work this week has led to
greater learning in some specific schools?” will be answered with blank looks
or palaver, never factual information. If it seems unfair to compare
school district systems to those in the private sector then consider how
central office staff of urban school districts compare to those who work in
other public agencies. In my city 36% of the African American students
graduate from high school…and this is a higher rate than in many other
cities. Would other governmental agencies be allowed to survive and expand if
they only collected 36% of the garbage, delivered only 36% of the mail, or
issued 36% of the car licenses correctly? The second cause of dysfunctional bureaucracy deals with how central
office administrators and staff define what constitutes work. “Work” is
operationally defined as going to meetings.
The reason for this is that the culture of the central office clearly values
means over ends. Procedures and processes rather than outcomes and effects
are the focus of how people spend their time. In truth the procedures engaged
in by central office functionaries are severely limited to little more than
meetings. Time at “work” is spent attending meetings the outcomes of which
are neither evaluated nor in any way connected to the stated objectives of
the school district. “Work” involves getting ready for meetings, deciding who
will and who will not attend the meetings, setting meeting agendas, holding
the meetings, deciding on the next meeting dates, circulating minutes of the
meetings and then initiating the cycle again. The typical school
superintendent spends part of every day just thanking people for attending
meetings and assuring the participants they have his fullest support and
gratitude. The highest level functionaries have overlapping, even conflicting
meetings because there is never enough time in any one day to attend all the
meetings which previous meetings have generated. The top functionaries need
to have several assistants covering meetings for them and can only stop by or
drop in on these meetings. The top administrators also use teleconferencing
to participate in more meetings for shorter periods. They also attend
numerous meetings in other cities. Middle level administrators who have to
attend many of these meetings for their superiors as well as cover their own
meetings, soon find they have no time during the regular business day to get
anything else done. But if this “anything else” is analyzed most of it
involves catching up with email and phone messages…most of which are related
to the meetings. The lowest level administrators experience the most pressure
since there is a pecking order in being sent to cover meetings. Lower level
functionaries have to not only attend their own meetings but cover the
largest number of meetings for the greatest number of superiors who have
ordered them to attend. While meetings do not accomplish anything for the
schools or children’ s learning they do validate the participants’ power and
status. The first thing that happens at a meeting is that the invitees assess
who else is present. The goal is to be able to attend meetings with more
important and never less important individuals. If trapped in a meeting with
less important functionaries the first goal is to leave early and substitute
a deputy or an assistant to attend future meetings. Engaging in meetings with
individuals of lower status lowers the functionary’s status and is a serious
erosion of perceived power within the bureaucracy. Regardless of the stated content of the meeting the real agenda is for
each functionary first, to protect the power and resources of his/her
department, and second, to garner some of the resources, or authority over
resources, from another functionary’s department.
The typical ways in which these goals are achieved include but are not
limited to the following strategies: participants learn as much as possible
about how other divisions are functioning but reveal as little as possible
about their own departments; participants also learn as much as possible
about problems that other departments are having. If another department can
be made to look as if it is creating problems or a potential lawsuit for the
system there might be a realignment of authority and resources and one’s own
department may be able to take on additional functions, thereby gaining more
resources and personnel. Since there is no accountability it is always to the
functionaries’ advantage to grow. Salary, power and status result from being
responsible for more people and resources, never from accomplishments. Growth
for its own sake is the highest goal of the functionaries and regardless of
the agenda this is what they are competing for, directly or indirectly, at
the meetings. In the dysfunctional bureaucracy meetings are
rarely one-time events. To attend a one-time meeting to solve a problem and
then disband is an experience that most school district functionaries never
have in careers that may exceed thirty years. Central office culture
inevitably evolves meetings into committees that will continue over time.
They also will adopt additional members but not recognize resignations. Over
the years I have resigned from several central office committees but have
never stopped receiving minutes and agendas. Because the bureaucracy values
process not output, meetings take on lives of their own and continue on long
after the participants have lost sight of their initial purposes. The
central office culture is such powerful insulation from reality that most of
the functionaries actually convince themselves that they are “working”. The
number and length of the meetings have become the units by which “work” is
measured. I recently observed two functionaries vying over who was busier and
“working” harder than the other. The way they settled their claims was to
compare their appointment books and count up who was attending more meetings. Thus far I have argued that central office
personnel have had no experience at being productive, accountable or engaged
in real work. Since there are no successful urban school districts, there is
no advantage to hiring educators from other districts suffering from the same
syndromes since these functionaries have worked their way up through their
own failed systems. Without any models or experience in successful urban
school districts to guide them, collecting functionaries from other failing
systems can only reproduce failure. Free of any vision of what success looks
like, those from other districts readily mesh with those promoted from within
to recreate reward systems that perpetuate and reinforce the non-productive,
anti-work, unaccountable behaviors which characterize the dysfunctional
bureaucracy. No
Sense of Urgency The central offices are active places filled with people performing
roles that have been detailed in careful job descriptions and specified
further by superiors assigning particular tasks to subordinates.
There is inevitably a cabinet of the highest level functionaries who report
directly to the superintendent. There are organizational charts of directors,
deputies and department heads, all with their various deputies and
assistants. As in all offices, there are also numerous support staffs,
secretaries and clerical staff. Districts also have legal staffs or counsel
on retainer. While regular business hours are kept year round and a few
schools may be open year round, summers are less rushed because central
office people have worked their way up from the schools and are accustomed to
taking their vacations during summers. Inevitably a rhythm of work takes over
the central office as everyone settles down to doing the tasks they have
negotiated for themselves with their superiors. When the superintendent resigns or is terminated
fear and insecurity descends on the central office especially among those who
are the superintendent’s appointees. Concern about retaining their jobs also
affects those middle level administrators who were the appointees of the top
level appointees. But the overall apprehension now gripping the central
office is pervasive and affects everyone not just those whose positions are
at stake. The reason for this is that the functionaries within the hierarchy
are performing duties and assignments which their current superiors have
approved. These are tasks which cannot be validated in any way as helping
children in schools learn more; they are duties the central office people
have created for themselves which they find amenable to perform. Regardless
of what it may say in anyone’s job description, central office people manage
to transform their duties into what they would like to be doing.
Miraculously, the most vital things that need to be done match the
preferences of the central office functionaries. If the only implement in an
individual’s tool bag is a hammer it is amazing how many things get fixed by
banging. A new school board or superintendent therefore threatens the
specific “work” assignments of everyone in the central office. Some
functionaries may even be asked to do things they don’t feel like doing. The
veteran central office people are much less frightened because experience has
taught them that through negotiations, maneuvering (and going to the
meetings) they will end up doing pretty much what they have always felt like
doing. The first statement that the new superintendent of a failing urban
school district makes upon acceding to office makes clear his/her commitment
to children’s learning as the highest priority of the district.
To implement this vision s/he announces his/her determination to make central
office an effective servant of the schools in the district. These statements
are precisely what every preceding superintendent has said upon taking
office. Everyone listens carefully and pretends these clichés are being
offered and heard for the first time. Nothing substantiates the charge that
the urban districts and their management is a charade reenacted every two or
three years at the expense of the children more than these initial banal
pronouncements of the new superintendent. Again, one must raise the question
of why all the constituencies pretend that these statements mean something.
The inevitable answer lies in understanding the power of the constituencies
who benefit from maintaining these failing school districts and from
installing new superintendents destined to fail in the same old ways in such
short order. Once the new superintendent’s commitment to
learning has been duly spoken and heard the first task every new
superintendent performs is to reorganize the central office. This ritual is
repeated with absolute reliability in city after city across the country. The
district needs to be reorganized! This adds to the trepidation of many in the
central office, particularly among those who have not been around long enough
to know that nothing ever really changes. The greatest fear of the
central office people is that the reorganization may result in their being
placed back into the schools working directly with children and youth.
Nothing is more frightening to central office people than this specter of
having to move back into real schools once they have escaped and been
promoted to the central office. Because this is their worst nightmare,
central office functionaries will do anything to preserve the bureaucracy and
their own sinecures. If actually confronted with a real directive
requiring they go back to the schools they take early retirement. The few
exceptions are those within a year or two of retirement who return to the
schools in some administrative capacity and in effect take early retirement
on the job. It is an iron law of the dysfunctional bureaucracy that central
office people never return to the classroom. The new reorganization involves the new superintendent taking several
actions which are also replicated in district after district. The first is to
set up a small task force to find out precisely what everyone in the central
office now does and to prepare a report. This report will not only be ignored
but lost so that the next superintendent two years from now will have to do
another survey of just what everyone in the central office does when s/he
accedes to office. The second action is to demonstrate efficiency by merging
existing departments into fewer but bigger ones. The third action is to
appoint the new heads of these departments or divisions. The fourth action is
the appointment of these new administrators to the new superintendent’s
cabinet or council. It is now clear that some new
titles and functions must be changed on the district organizational chart.
All these activities trigger a set of meetings that keep the top and middle
levels of the bureaucracy engaged for a minimum of three months but in many
cases longer. During this period the functionaries throughout the hierarchy begin
a feeling out process with their superiors to determine which of their
existing duties they can maintain. Gradually and inexorably the system begins
to settle down and slow the actions of the new superintendent down to the
rhythm of the organization. The central office people will show they are team
players by responding to every suggestion of the new administration with
enthusiasm. As experienced central office functionaries they will also see to
it that every initiative will require a new administrator with a higher
salary and title, a bigger office and more clerical help. By the end of
his/her first year the new superintendent is presiding over a bureaucracy
that is not only as big as the one s/he inherited but one that is growing
substantially larger because of the need for many new positions to perform
all the new functions that the new administration has announced it will take
on. With the exception of a very few people at the top, the new district
organization will end up with essentially the same people performing the same
functions they have always performed…but at substantially higher salaries
with many more deputies and assistants in renamed departments and divisions.
As a result of the flurry of all these new activities and people, there will
be less not more resources for the schools, and lower not higher achievement
for the children resulting from any of these new central office activities.
Worst of all, these new activities will lead to a greater percentage of the
district budget being used for the care and feeding of the central office and
an even smaller percentage of the budget finding its way out to the schools.
The major impact of all of this on the schools will be that they will be
burdened with preparing even more reports and coping with more intrusive,
restrictive policies than ever. (e.g. “No more field trips in your school
until achievement scores go up.”) Many critics, including myself in former times,
have accused the dysfunctional bureaucracy of being mindless because of its
lack of usefulness and its negative impact on the schools and children. After
carefully observing, analyzing and working with central office people in
cities across the nation for half a century it is now quite clear to me that
mindless is the least appropriate term. The responses of the central
office people can more accurately be described as measured, careful,
calculated, purposeful and highly effective at preserving their positions but
never mindless. Unfortunately, the great persistence, skill and
know-how which they demonstrate is always in the pursuit and maintenance of
their own benefits and never in any way an improvement in the education
offered diverse children in poverty. I would describe the phenomenon of the
central office people’s effectiveness at protecting and enhancing themselves
as the ultimate example of how people’s intelligence skyrockets to
unimaginable heights whenever their self interest is involved. Individuals of
extremely modest ability who are challenged by the task of following the agenda
at a committee meeting (“Are we on item 5 or 6?”), will demonstrate political
acumen that would rival Machiavelli when faced with protecting their
sinecures. So now we have a new superintendent firmly ensconced and leading the
district to a “new” vision: “We are going to raise the achievement level of
the children in the district.” But what happens when the dust has settled in
the central office? After the first few months the rhythm of life returns.
People come to “work”, go to meetings, answer their messages and prepare
reports for their superiors. Many (mostly newer people) even stay late and
come in early to complete these vital tasks. A visitor to the central office
might well see it as not much different from visiting the offices in city
hall or county government. One would never guess from observing these people
at “work” that the education of diverse children in poverty in the district
is a failure denying massive numbers of children their life opportunities. There is simply no sense of urgency either within
the central offices or emanating from the functionaries “working” in them. If
one considers what is happening to the children in these districts, it would
be more appropriate for the central offices to have an atmosphere like that
found in the control tower of a busy airport, or in the emergency rooms of a
city hospital. There we see skilled professionals who understand that
they are engaged in matters of life and death, functioning with a great sense
of urgency and feeling accountable for the outcome of their services. There
is nothing like this in any of the 120 urban school district central offices
because the functionaries make the opposite three assumptions. “What I
personally do everyday certainly does not cause anyone’s death. I am not personally
responsible or accountable for how much specific children in a particular
school are learning…the principal, the teachers and the parents are. I
believe it is more important to behave in a polite, civil, professional
manner than to run around clamoring about urgency.” The typical central
office in any of these school districts would pass for just another large
organization pleasantly going about its business. People are not working
under any deadlines which must absolutely be met…or under any pressure at
all! What can be felt and sensed in these central office environments is
congruent with what can be observed. People greet each other, chat about the
weather and families, exchange pleasantries, go through meeting agendas, get
ready for the next day and leave at the end of the day. There is a patina of
civility and cordiality that covers all the interactions. Should anyone
becomes emotional or upset, s/he would be treated with the same condescending
kindness as an angry child in school might be treated by a teacher. It is
clear that central office people regard themselves as “professionals.” Unfortunately, their operational definition of professionalism has
nothing to do with demonstrating competencies, working under horrendous time
pressures, making certain that real work is accomplished, or being evaluated
and held accountable for the learning of children and youth. While the lives
of the functionaries are not at stake those of the children are. Central
office professionalism means something quite different from the ordinary
usage of the term. It means never disagreeing with a
superior, never asking anyone a difficult question or even too many easy
ones, and above all, demonstrating an air of pleasant equanimity. They are
like the librarian who could not bring herself to shout “fire” when the
building was burning down. After a lifetime of shushing everyone there is
simply no way for her to break her conditioning and deal with reality. Central
office functionaries are people who have convinced themselves they are
successful, not because they are accomplishing anything but because they have
made it up into the central office. They feel they have paid their
dues working in the schools and have now arrived at the top of their
“profession.” The reason there is no sense of urgency demonstrated by the
school boards, the superintendents and the thousands of central office
functionaries is not mysterious. In my city the benefits of making $60,000 to
$150,000 annually (2002 dollars) plus 51% fringe benefits assuages the
occasional note of reality from outside the system. “Hey, only 10% of our
kids are proficient in math! Hey, only 13% are proficient in science! Hey
only 56% of our kids are proficient in reading! Hey, only 17% of the
graduates go to college.” These are all regarded by central office people as
trivial carps and the unfair criticism by outsiders who “don’t understand all
the handicaps we work under, who don’t appreciate how hard we work, and who
are unwilling to fund our schools at the level we need.” The reason that several hundred thousand of these central office
functionaries in 120 districts can get away with, indeed be rewarded for, the
unforgivable mass educational killing of children is that these are
children of color and children in poverty. If the suburban and small town
schools of Part II. The Direct
and Indirect Beneficiaries of Failed Urban
Beneficiaries
of Failing Urban 1.
Employees of central offices. In some cities there is a 2:1
ratio of “other” employees to teachers. In my city there are 6,400 teachers. The district admits to 12,500
employees. A computer specialist I queried reported that
each month the system writes checks to over 17,300 individuals. The truth is
that to answer the question, “How many people work in this district?” the
superintendent would have to call a meeting. The participants would sit
around the table and rather than provide data would raise questions: Do you
mean certificated and/or non-certificated personnel? Do you mean part time
and temporary help? Do you mean substitute teachers? Do you mean employees whose
salaries we pay but who have been assigned to other institutions and
agencies? Do you mean people on leave? Do you want to include the employees
of regularly contracted vendors (e.g. bus drivers) or only those such as food
service workers who we pay? What about after school and summer employees? The
number of district employees that any superintendent or school board comes up
with should be suspect since they simply do not know how many people work in
the district. The correct answer is over 50% too many. 2.
Students outside of the urban school districts competing for college
admission.
The students in urban districts provide a built in bottom half for every norm
referenced standardized test. Because urban students do so poorly other
children can make lower scores and appear to know more, be above grade level,
or appear to have greater ability. This advantage is especially valuable when
taking ACT’s and SAT’s. 3.
Students outside of the urban school districts preparing for the world of
work. Non-urban students are better prepared to
compete for and secure entry level career positions. In my city I know of no
employers, aside from those with dead-end minimum wage positions, who hire
our new high school graduates. Employers claim that even “successful” graduates
of the city schools lack basic skills and basic work habits. 4.
Parents outside of urban school districts. Being able to
maintain small school districts empowers parents with voice, input and
control over their children’s educations. They can actually speak personally
to school board members, the superintendent, school principals and influence
what happens to their children in school. Urban parents have no way to deal
with large dysfunctional bureaucracies. With rare exception they are utterly powerless to
affect any aspect of their children’s schooling. In my city I have never
found a parent, including college graduates, who can follow the elaborate
procedures for enrolling their children in a particular school. 5.
Lawyers suing urban districts; lawyers defending districts.
The number of lawsuits is a function of the potential that lawyers believe
can be tapped for damages. Urban districts are the ones with deep pockets and
lawyers can readily prove they do not provide equal or even all mandated
services. Except for frivolous cases individual suits or class actions
against the school district in my city typically win in court and/or are
awarded a settlement. 6.
Vendors of supplies and equipment.
Nationally, this total can only be estimated in the billions. The amount
spent on public education makes it the largest industry in 7.
Contractors and builders. This includes not
only buildings, grounds, plumbing and the usual contractors but the wiring
for computers and the remodeling done for purposes of access and security.
Maintaining numerous and increasing numbers of aging structures adds to
costs. The 8.
Consultants. Endless. In my city one
consultant recently sold the school board a $750,000 program that was
terminated the following year upon change of the school board majority. The
number of consultants and their programs that are purchased by urban
districts is technically public information but extremely difficult data to
pry loose. 9.
Food service vendors and employees. In my system
of over 103,000 students there are over 80,000 meals served daily. 10.
Transportation vendors and employees.
After the two largest cities in the state, the schools in my city operate the
third largest bus system in the state 11.
Higher education institutions. By law, all
professional personnel are required to not only complete certification
programs but to take courses for renewals of licenses and for salary
increases. The lack of accountability by Schools of Education is a national
phenomena. Central office functionaries, principals, school psychologists,
guidance counselors, librarians all have degrees and certifications from
universities. In my state the 32 public and private institutions who benefit
from this continuous flow of students are in no way held accountable for the
quality of any of their graduates’ performances. Indeed, 60% of the certified
teacher graduates never even take teaching jobs. Who benefits from such
continuous built-in irrelevance? 12.
Organizations which contract with districts to operate charter schools.
In my my city the
district charters special schools serving disruptors and other specific
populations. The number of schools which benefit by being chartered by the
district is now nineteen. 13. Federal, state and
local elected officials. Candidates running for office at all levels use
educational reform issues related to urban schools for political purposes. It
is no longer possible to be elected without an educational platform and these
inevitably focus on problems that are worst in the urban districts.
Unfortunately these plans inevitably enhance the bureaucracy not the children
and make things even worse when enacted. 14. School board members.
In many cities as well as in my own, school board members receive salaries,
full health benefits and numerous other perks. Many boards also have their
own research staffs since they don’t trust the reports of their own central
office people and superintendents. 15. Superintendents. Inflated
salaries and perks are common. It is typical for urban boards to buy out
contracts of failed superintendents who then take jobs in other districts and
collect salary checks from their former as well as from their current
employers. 16. Media. If 17. Professional
organizations. The Great Cities Council, its Director and staff are just one
organization with a budget in the millions. There are countless other
professional organizations whose existence depends on its urban school
district constituency. 18. The “helping”
professions and those who train them. There are several professions involving
health and human service workers who “serve” the poor in our cities and
schools. Small town and suburban school districts do not employ or contract
with social workers, nurses and other health professionals, community
agencies, child care professionals and others to the same extent as the major
urban districts if at all. All these constituencies have careers because the
urban bureaucracies exist. The community colleges and universities which train
and certify this wide variety of individuals are also beneficiaries. 19. The test
manufacturers have a billion dollar industry which continues to grow. This
industry supports a range of professionals with advanced university training. 20. Employees of the Victims of the Failed Why Do the Victims
Support These Following are some of the
reasons the victims continue to support systems that are clearly
dysfunctional bureaucracies. Strange as it may seem,
most urban parents and caregivers still trust the system. They see many
school people who are people of color, who may have grown up in their
neighborhood or even attended the very same schools that their children now
attend. Latinos may find a community person in the school who speaks Spanish
and “helps” them. African Americans see people of color in important
positions. Many parents and
caregivers work in the school district or have family members who work in the
district. They have a direct financial stake in the well being of the
district. In my city and in many others the school district is the employer
of more minorities than any business or governmental agency in the city.
These parents and caregivers are cynically exploited by systems that know if
they hire minorities these employees will help protect the entire system from
significant change. Districts in effect trade off jobs to people in poverty
or to college graduates of color who experience discrimination in the private
sector as a strategy for making parents and community think twice about
attacking the district. Many parents and caregivers
were themselves victims of miseducation. With no
model of what a successful education would look like they have an
insufficient basis for understanding how the system is damaging their
children. Low income people of
color cannot find affordable housing in suburbs or the transportation and
jobs needed to live in small towns. Their only choice is to keep trying to
improve urban districts no matter how impossible they find the task. The
parents and caregivers who have grievances have no chance against the bureaucracy,
even if they organize. They cannot win any battles against these large school
district organizations any more than they can improve their garbage
collection, health care, or the services of any other branch of local
government. In my city the school district maintains one high school with an
18% graduation rate and claims it is the parents who will not let the school
be closed. The parents and
caregivers are low income people whose major time and energy must be devoted
to earning a living. It is typical for individuals to work long hours or hold
several part time jobs. They simply don’t have the time or energy to monitor
the district’s policies and procedures. In some cases parents and
caregivers are bribed with government grants. Several categories of special
education make parents eligible for monthly checks once they agree to have
their children labeled. Parents and caregivers
are manipulated, directly lied to, or controlled. The pretense is that they
are being given voice when in reality their ideas are not heard and their
stated choices are simply not delivered. In my city in 2002 there were 64
schools defined as failing according to the Leave No Child Behind
legislation. The law required that 45,000 parents and caregivers be informed
by letter that they were entitled by federal law to select new schools and
move their children out of the failing schools to new ones. When the delays
and procedures engaged in by the local district system were completed, only
163 of the 45,000 parents were able to transfer their children to other
schools. Whether these were actually transfers to “successful” schools has
not been documented. Many parents and
caregivers may have accurate insights regarding how the system is failing
their children but approach it as they would the lottery. There are enough
one-in-a-thousand examples of a youngster who does get to college and becomes
a lawyer or a banker; or an athlete who gets a scholarship; or a teenager who
is adopted by a local business and is trained for a career. These rare
exceptions are enough to keep hope alive no matter how great the odds are
against most children. Many parents and
caregivers are simply used by the school. They are involved as classroom
helpers, school volunteers, parent assistants on field trips and in other
unpaid capacities. This leads many of them to feel involved and useful. It
also provides them with some first-hand experience seeing many teachers who
do care and who do work very hard. Finally and most
pernicious are the influences exerted on parents and caregivers by community
leaders, religious leaders, educational leaders, the media and the general
society to regard the miseducation of the district
as their fault and the fault of their children. In effect, the school
district blames the victims by convincing them that the school district is
doing the best it can to educate children lacking in the appropriate life
experiences, raised by inadequate parents in chaotic communities. While this
would be an amazing and unbelievable explanation if a school district tried
to offer it to non-urban populations, it is not only offered but accepted by
many diverse, low income parents and caregivers who frequently feel
inadequate and helpless in protecting their children from negative
influences. While it is easy to understand the motivation of the urban
districts to blame their failures on the victims of their miseducation
it is more difficult to comprehend why so many of the victims agree with and
support the district’s explanation of failure. It is only when we understand
that parents and caregivers are under a constant barrage from every source of
information telling them that if there were less violence, drugs, unstable
families, gangs and community instability then their children would do better
in school. The dysfunctional bureaucracy is extremely effective at evading
accountability and convincing parents that miseducation
is their own fault my city the district charters special
schools serving disruptors and other specific populations. The number of
schools which benefit by being chartered by the district is now nineteen. 13. Federal, state and
local elected officials. Candidates running for office at all levels use
educational reform issues related to urban schools for political purposes. It
is no longer possible to be elected without an educational platform and these
inevitably focus on problems that are worst in the urban districts.
Unfortunately these plans inevitably enhance the bureaucracy not the children
and make things even worse when enacted. 14. School board members.
In many cities as well as in my own, school board members receive salaries,
full health benefits and numerous other perks. Many boards also have their
own research staffs since they don’t trust the reports of their own central
office people and superintendents. 15. Superintendents.
Inflated salaries and perks are common. It is typical for urban boards to buy
out contracts of failed superintendents who then take jobs in other districts
and collect salary checks from their former as well as from their current
employers. 16. Media. If 17. Professional
organizations. The Great Cities Council, its Director and staff are just one
organization with a budget in the millions. There are countless other
professional organizations whose existence depends on its urban school
district constituency. 18. The “helping”
professions and those who train them. There are several professions involving
health and human service workers who “serve” the poor in our cities and
schools. Small town and suburban school districts do not employ or contract
with social workers, nurses and other health professionals, community
agencies, child care professionals and others to the same extent as the major
urban districts if at all. All these constituencies have careers because the
urban bureaucracies exist. The community colleges and universities which
train and certify this wide variety of individuals are also beneficiaries. 19. The test
manufacturers have a billion dollar industry which continues to grow. This
industry supports a range of professionals with advanced university training. 20. Employees of the Victims of the Failed Why Do the Victims
Support These Following are some of the
reasons the victims continue to support systems that are clearly
dysfunctional bureaucracies. Strange as it may seem,
most urban parents and caregivers still trust the system. They see many
school people who are people of color, who may have grown up in their
neighborhood or even attended the very same schools that their children now
attend. Latinos may find a community person in the school who speaks Spanish
and “helps” them. African Americans see people of color in important
positions. Many parents and
caregivers work in the school district or have family members who work in the
district. They have a direct financial stake in the well being of the district.
In my city and in many others the school district is the employer of more
minorities than any business or governmental agency in the city. These
parents and caregivers are cynically exploited by systems that know if they
hire minorities these employees will help protect the entire system from
significant change. Districts in effect trade off jobs to people in poverty
or to college graduates of color who experience discrimination in the private
sector as a strategy for making parents and community think twice about
attacking the district. Many parents and
caregivers were themselves victims of miseducation.
With no model of what a successful education would look like they have an
insufficient basis for understanding how the system is damaging their
children. Low income people of
color cannot find affordable housing in suburbs or the transportation and
jobs needed to live in small towns. Their only choice is to keep trying to
improve urban districts no matter how impossible they find the task. The
parents and caregivers who have grievances have no chance against the
bureaucracy, even if they organize. They cannot win any battles against these
large school district organizations any more than they can improve their
garbage collection, health care, or the services of any other branch of local
government. In my city the school district maintains one high school with an
18% graduation rate and claims it is the parents who will not let the school
be closed. The parents and
caregivers are low income people whose major time and energy must be devoted
to earning a living. It is typical for individuals to work long hours or hold
several part time jobs. They simply don’t have the time or energy to monitor
the district’s policies and procedures. In some cases parents and
caregivers are bribed with government grants. Several categories of special
education make parents eligible for monthly checks once they agree to have
their children labeled. Parents and caregivers
are manipulated, directly lied to, or controlled. The pretense is that they
are being given voice when in reality their ideas are not heard and their
stated choices are simply not delivered. In my city in 2002 there were 64
schools defined as failing according to the Leave No Child Behind
legislation. The law required that 45,000 parents and caregivers be informed
by letter that they were entitled by federal law to select new schools and
move their children out of the failing schools to new ones. When the delays
and procedures engaged in by the local district system were completed, only
163 of the 45,000 parents were able to transfer their children to other
schools. Whether these were actually transfers to “successful” schools has
not been documented. Many parents and
caregivers may have accurate insights regarding how the system is failing
their children but approach it as they would the lottery. There are enough
one-in-a-thousand examples of a youngster who does get to college and becomes
a lawyer or a banker; or an athlete who gets a scholarship; or a teenager who
is adopted by a local business and is trained for a career. These rare
exceptions are enough to keep hope alive no matter how great the odds are
against most children. Many parents and
caregivers are simply used by the school. They are involved as classroom
helpers, school volunteers, parent assistants on field trips and in other
unpaid capacities. This leads many of them to feel involved and useful. It
also provides them with some first-hand experience seeing many teachers who
do care and who do work very hard. Finally and most
pernicious are the influences exerted on parents and caregivers by community
leaders, religious leaders, educational leaders, the media and the general
society to regard the miseducation of the district
as their fault and the fault of their children. In effect, the school
district blames the victims by convincing them that the school district is
doing the best it can to educate children lacking in the appropriate life
experiences, raised by inadequate parents in chaotic communities. While this
would be an amazing and unbelievable explanation if a school district tried
to offer it to non-urban populations, it is not only offered but accepted by
many diverse, low income parents and caregivers who frequently feel
inadequate and helpless in protecting their children from negative
influences. While it is easy to understand the motivation of the urban
districts to blame their failures on the victims of their miseducation
it is more difficult to comprehend why so many of the victims agree with and
support the district’s explanation of failure. It is only when we understand
that parents and caregivers are under a constant barrage from every source of
information telling them that if there were less violence, drugs, unstable
families, gangs and community instability then their children would do better
in school. The dysfunctional bureaucracy is extremely effective at evading
accountability and convincing parents that miseducation
is their own fault. Distributing Scarce
Resources In our society, families
in the top 25% in income send 86% of their children to college while families
in the bottom 20% send 4% of their children to college. But there are other
gaps that must be addressed which also contribute to the achievement gap:
language development, early childhood experience, health care, parent
education, school size, and class size. While the majority of the 14 million
children in poverty are white, there are disproportionately high numbers of
African American and Latino children represented. The diverse children in
urban poverty represent about half of these 14 million. The recognition that
selected constituencies derive more benefits than others is not new or
strange in American society. Our basic assumption is that in a free society
some will inevitably fare better than others. We live with the unequal
distribution of goods and services every day of our lives. Inevitably the
goods that are most desired and the services that are most vital are a scarce
resource. There is never enough of what is most wanted or needed to go
around. We solve this problem of “Who gets what?” by raising costs. If, for
example, the scarce resource to be distributed is a limited number of
downtown parking spaces then the parking fees on lots and in garages increase
until only those who can pay for the limited spaces are able to park. We
satisfy our sense of fairness by providing the public equal access to a
limited number of metered spaces on a first come first serve basis but these
spaces are less conveniently located, metered by the hour and ticketed for
overtime lapses. We have mollified both the god of individual initiative by
providing those with the means to have access to highly desirable limited
parking and the god of equity and access by providing the public with the
opportunity to compete for public parking. We have learned to accept this
dual process as the best way to distribute a scarce resource. Our commonly
held value is that those who are paying a great deal should be able to park. As we mature we become
cognizant of more than how material goods are distributed. The distribution
of many services affecting our day-to-day existence and futures are
recognized as vital. Access to health care, legal services, insurance
coverage, police and fire protection, transportation, housing and educational
services come to the foreground of our consciousness. Various levels of
government take responsibility for providing these services and everyone is
deemed to be entitled to these basic services. Frequently, we go even further
and espouse the goal that everyone is entitled to “high quality” services in
these and other vital areas. As politicians spend their careers reiterating
such lofty promises it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile reality
and rhetoric. Our stated values of equity and access for all don’t match the
actual availability and distribution of services declared to be entitlements
for all at a level of “high quality”. For example, in health care high
quality refers to having the most qualified doctors in the best hospitals
utilizing the latest treatments on a personal and thorough basis. This
definition of high quality makes it clear that health care is a scarce
resource since there is a limited number of the best doctors, treatments and
services available. As in the more simple parking example, the problem of how
to distribute top quality health care is solved by enabling those who can pay
the highest, escalating costs to secure the service. Those who can pay less
receive basic but something less than the highest quality care. The 43
million without health insurance have equal access to compete for the health
services provided by emergency rooms and other public services. As a matter
of life and death, health care is infinitely more important than parking so
there is more political activity and public discourse about its availability.
But when the talk about everyone being entitled to high quality or even basic
health care has subsided, the actual distribution of scarce health care
services is determined on the basis of who can pay for them. In spite of the
fact that some health care professionals contribute pro bono services, the
government provides subsidies and the private sector makes substantial
contributions, the correlation between ability to pay and access to high
quality service is high and not due to chance: the more one can pay the
greater the likelihood that one’s health care will increase in quality. Many
typically pay more than half of their total assets in their last year of life
just to secure even basic health services. The fact that there is
always a finite amount of the highest quality of any service is what makes it
a scarce resource. Access to scarce high quality resources is controlled by
three factors: 1) awareness that the service or opportunity exists, 2)
knowledge of the method (set of steps, procedures, hurdles) for securing the
service and 3) sufficient resources for buying the service. Nowhere is this
three step process for distributing high quality service more assiduously
followed than in deciding who has access to high quality education. In the
case of public education what is purchased is the location of the family’s
housing. Education as a Personal
Good The achievement gap is
not an aberration of American society nor is it an unintended consequence.
Quite the contrary. It reflects the will of the overwhelming majority of
Americans who believe that education is a personal not a common good and that
the highest quality education is a scarce resource. Schooling is the means we
use to produce winners and losers. Who gets into the prestigious colleges is
the critical question at the top achievers’ level. Who goes to the other
colleges or to post secondary institutions reflects the competition at the
next levels down. Who gets training for a decent job or any job at all is the
next level and so on. When we get to the poor and diverse children in urban
schools the lofty mission of advanced knowledge, citizenship and
self-actualization we want for our children has been narrowed down to “get a
job and stay out of jail.” At this lowest level there is no longer any
competition for a future of any substantial value. This level is miseducation and the future “opportunities” it leads to
are far from a scarce resource. School systems state
goals as universals but their actual work is sorting students not equalizing
their opportunities to learn. Failing public schools in urban districts
function in ways that ensure that diverse children in poverty will be kept in
the bottom half on standardized tests of school achievement. They function as
custodial institutions rather than as places where learning is the primary
activity. The “pedagogy” offered in these “schools” is a set of cultural
rituals that bears no resemblance whatever to the knowledge base in teaching
and learning. As in other exploitative situations, most of the parents of the
14 million diverse children in poverty in the 120 largest school districts
and in poor rural areas honestly believe that their schools are treating
their children fairly. In my own city parents and community tolerate a high
school which had an 18 percent graduate last year in a district that has an
overall 36 percent high school graduation rate for African Americans -and
this is a higher rate than in several other urban districts. Maintaining and
supporting failure in our urban school districts over decades cannot be
attributed to chance. Typically, scholars writing in the field of school
change assume that the school functionaries maintaining these urban districts
miseducating the bottom half are well intentioned;
they just don’t have sufficient knowledge and understanding. Even the most
scholarly analysts of why school reform has failed stop short of attributing
motive and assume that school functionaries are benign and caring individuals
who just need to know more and that once they do they will then act more
wisely. But objective analysts observing the realities of life in urban
schools must conclude otherwise. The long-term institutionalization of
failure for diverse children in poverty can only be the result of systematic
design and purposeful, committed resistance to change. For over half a
century failed urban school districts and teacher education efforts directed
at improving urban teaching, have spent billions of dollars from federal and
private sources specifically directed at equalizing the quality of the
schooling offered diverse children in urban poverty. While soliciting and
accepting the funds, urban school districts have systematically pursued
policies and practices which have effectively withstood serious change
efforts. I have reports and analysis of major urban school districts dating
from the 1960’s which describe the very same problems and advocate the very
same solutions as analyses made of these districts after 2000. The fact is
that the change efforts have not been as effective as the urban districts’
blocking strategies and that as urban schools continue to worsen the
achievement gap has become solidified, predictable and worst of all…generally
accepted as if a law of nature. Part III. No One to
Blame: Institutionalizing the Miseducation of
Diverse Children in Urban Poverty Whenever any serious,
objective, data-based analysis of the urban schools is presented there is
common agreement that the systems are indeed failing. School people cannot
mount a credible defense against the mountain of evidence revealing students’
low achievement, the achievement gap with advantaged students, the dropout/pushout rate, the attendance/truancy rate, the
suspension/expulsion rate, teacher turnover, the graduation rate, or the low
number of “successful” graduates who never move into the world of work or
higher education. Given the stated purposes of public education, these
systems are readily shown to be massive failures on the basis of any criteria
using any data sets. How then can these failed systems resist the onslaught
of data supporting their failure and do so effectively in so many different
cities over such an extended period? The answer does not lie in understanding
why the victims support these failing systems since the victims have little
or no power over these organizations and their supporting institutions. The
answer lies in the power of the beneficiaries who derive unearned privileges
from maintaining the present systems. A secondary explanation is in the naïve
behaviors of the would-be change agents and transformers who do research,
publish reports and then present their findings to the very beneficiaries of
the failed systems-as if the school boards and the functionaries
administrating these failing school district systems are open minded,
consumers eagerly waiting to be informed of still another problem they should
be solving. In truth, the problems and criticisms which may be new to the
critics and the researchers are already much better known to the school
people who not only understand these problems from personal experience but
are in possession of substantially more data than they have allowed the
critics to see regarding the extent of their failures. The strategy used by
school people to counter any serious criticism is to begin by admitting to
the validity of the data but then deflecting critics’ calls for stopping
their malpractice into discussions of precisely how the critics would solve
these problems in the context of the existing school district’s system. The
assumption they lead critics into making is that the only option for those
who claim to support public education is to support the existing school
district systems. The content of any criticisms showing that specific system
practices are seriously damaging the children is quickly lost. The focus is
shifted from the criticisms to the critic’s advocacy for changing the
district bureaucracy given the complexities of the system’s administrative
structures, the multiple funding mechanisms, the state and federal mandates,
the system’s contractual obligations, and the body of state laws giving the
district the responsibility for these functions. Using this ploy school
people shift the onus for solving the problems raised in any research report
from themselves to the critics. Whatever critics now propose as remedies must
meet two conditions: they must be solutions that will work given the
continued existence of the present school district; and they must be
practical and feasible. And since the school district employees and their
representatives know these systems best they make themselves the arbiters of
whether the critics’ solutions are realistic and will work. School people’s
“logic” now dominates the interchange. If the critic doesn’t have solutions
that the school people approve of his/her diagnosis of the problem is
“proven” incorrect. In these forums, dialogues and debates, the very
constituencies that cause and benefit from the school district’s failures are
able to preserve and protect their systems from change by shifting the focus
from their miseducation of children to analyses of
the inadequacies in critics’ plans for redesigning their dysfunctional
bureaucracies. Inevitably, critics fall
into the trap and begin presenting ideas for how to solve the problems they
have raised within the current school systems forgetting or not understanding
that it is the present systems that have caused the problems. The
constituencies representing the dysfunctional bureaucracy, with the help of
other beneficiaries of the failing school district, now become the
questioners and judges of the critic’s solutions for changing the system. One
by one the critics’ suggestions are shown by the beneficiaries of dysfunctional
bureaucracy to be unworkable within the legal, financial and contractual
restraints of the present system. What may have begun with some critic
presenting some valid data regarding a system practice or policy that should
be immediately stopped concludes with the critics on the defensive suggesting
solutions that the school people show are infeasible. If the critics are
local business leaders the school people even get them to agree that “since
we all support public education in this city we should be working together.”
If the critics are educational experts the school people invite them to serve
on school system committees to explore solutions to the problems they have
raised, or they hire them outright as consultants. These interactions
conclude with the critics being co-opted into contributing human and
financial resources to some initiative which the school people then use to
enhance the dysfunctional bureaucracy rather than solve the particular
problem of miseducation that started the
interaction in the first place. The critics lose in two ways: their valid
criticisms will never lead to any action that will stop the miseducation of the children and they have been finessed
into becoming active collaborators of a pernicious system. The “logic” under girding
this twisted process is interesting. Imagine a doctor sharing data with a
patient which indicates that the patient is dying of cancer. Since the doctor
has neither a cure that he can guarantee nor even any treatment that the
patient finds amenable, the patient has “proven” that the doctor’s diagnosis
cannot possibly be valid. One reason this bizarre non-sequitur is repeated
endlessly in every city is that the critics are amateur change agents and
transformers pursuing real jobs and demanding careers. They can only function
as part-time, temporary change agents. School people and the other
beneficiaries of district failure however all work full time at protecting
their systems, their sinecures and their benefits. In all of these cities
the local media handle criticism of their local dysfunctional school
bureaucracy in precisely the same way using the same “logic.” For example, a
critic may come to my city and make a presentation which shows that in our
local school system the number of children being labeled with some
handicapping condition is 18% compared to 12% nationally and that it is not
reasonable to believe that a city has a special education population of 18%.
Would the suburban population around the city support the labeling of more
than one out of every six of their children as abnormal in some way as a
reasonable educational activity? He indicates further that nationally there
are 3.8 million boys but “only” 1.9 million girls being given some special
education label. There is also a significantly greater number of African
American males in this population. In some cities e.g. The media eagerly report
these data because it is in the nature of news that the more negative it is
the more likely the reporter can get his story and byline on page one. But
media people are also beneficiaries of the failed school system. Once they
have secured their negative headlines they quickly lapse into the very same
follow-up questions and “logic” used by school people as blocking strategies.
They shift the onus and accountability from system functionaries who should
immediately stop the inaccurate labeling and quickly come up with a valid procedure
that doesn’t harm children, to the critic’s solutions for changing the school
district system. The media ask the critic questions such as the following:
“Are you saying the district is violating federal and state laws in
identifying the handicapped? Are you saying that all these children should be
retested by people who are not district employees? Which tests should be
used? Who should pay for this massive retesting of 18,000 students? In your
plan who will bear the liability for making restitution to the children and
their families for the damages related to having been incorrectly labeled?”
The critic may have begun with a valid point: i.e. the procedures for
evaluating children in this district are producing biased results in
determining who is normal and there is a likelihood, greater than can be
attributed to chance, that this district is seriously mislabeling and
therefore miseducating large numbers of children,
particularly African American males. The media have neutralized the critic by
using school people’s “logic”. If the critic has no total and complete
solution for altering the mislabeling practices (assuming the present
district system must be continued and assuming that the functionaries within
the present system must find his solutions amenable), then his criticism has
been “proven” to be invalid. In this way, when critics who are focused on
improving the schooling offered diverse children in poverty come up against
school people and others who benefit from protecting existing school systems,
they are inevitably made to look unprepared and unrealistic. The poor critic
with expertise in the testing of cognitive disabilities is no match for
school people who can readily show that he doesn’t know how to reorganize the
district and he has no idea of all the interlocking bureaucracies outside the
district which would also have to be changed in order to stop the miseducation of children within the district. The goals of the school
people and the other beneficiaries of failing districts is to make their
dysfunctional bureaucracies synonymous with support for public education and
to protect and enhance these systems. In this example what is not discussed
is the powerful, well endowed superstructure which under girds the failing
district’s special education structure. Continuing the same example, the
following are just a few of the trails that lead to the direct and indirect
beneficiaries: the recipients of the 350 million ( 2002 dollars) my district
annually receives given the great and increasing number of its special
students; the number of school psychologists and diagnostic teachers employed
to assess all these students (there are over 1,000 children waiting in the
pipeline to be tested and fully evaluated); the number of other school
personnel paid for by these funds; the amount of contracted services paid for
by the district with these funds; and the amount of additional federal, state
and private grants obtained to work with this inflated student population.
Other beneficiaries are the school people who claim to be raising student
achievement scores in particular schools and in the district as a whole when
in reality they are just increasing the number of children who will be
excused from taking achievement tests. The way achievement scores are “raised”
in many urban schools and districts is not by improving the learning of
children but by excusing an increasing number of students from taking the
tests. These passes are given to special education students, transfer
students not in the building for a sufficient time period and in some
districts, the principal has a ten percent quota for excusing any children
s/he deems inappropriate for testing. The indirect beneficiaries of this
system extend way beyond school boards and system functionaries. They include
the universities who provide the exceptional education training programs for
the district personnel right up through the doctoral level training of the
school psychologists. Other constituencies of beneficiaries include the
thousands of federal employees who write the guidelines and administer the
grant funds and the state employees who oversee these programs. There is
literally an army of lawyers employed by plaintiffs as well as by the
districts themselves who sue, try cases and settle issues related to the
treatment of special education students. An interaction that began with a
simple report on mislabeling special education students has now tapped into
roots that connect widely and deeply with a great number of interlocking
systems all built on the backs of the children being mislabeled. The naïve
critic has become an active accomplice in making him/herself look
ill-prepared for changing all these systems by the sophisticated bureaucrats’
questions and blocking strategies. To avoid this entrapment
those presenting criticisms of the existing district systems need to make
clear that they support public education but not the dysfunctional
bureaucracies which characterize the current school districts. (Assuming of
course the critic is not a potential beneficiary of the school system seeking
to be employed as a consultant, or seeking the district’s sign off on a grant
he is proposing, or seeking the district’s approval to access some data he
needs for some future study.) Critics need to emphasize there are multiple
ways to implement their suggestions with new forms of school organization
which differ markedly from those of existing school districts but that
designing these new districts is not the purpose of the particular report or
study. Critics need to emphasize that school people and other beneficiaries
of maintaining the present district systems must be held accountable for
immediately stopping miseducative practices or
resign. It is noteworthy that the
example used here of the failed special education system administered in the
urban districts is merely one of literally dozens that need immediate
attention if children are to be saved from irreparable miseducation.
This scenario of how districts deflect criticism and continue to grow their
dysfunctional bureaucracies can be repeated for other blatant systemic
failures. How are the curricula offered in the district developed and
evaluated? How are the mandated methods for teaching various subjects
determined? What is the district process for selecting, training and
evaluating teachers? What are the procedures for selecting, training and
evaluating principals? What is the district program for assessing student
learning and achievement in addition to mandated testing? How are central
office staff selected, evaluated and held accountable? How effective are the
mechanisms the system uses to control and manage the district budget? What is
the accountability system in place for those who exceed their budgets? What
is the process for tracking funds to ensure they are used for their intended
purposes? What research and evaluation is performed (and not allowed to be
performed) by the district? How effective is the program which allows parents
to select schools initially and to transfer their children out of failing schools?
How effective is the district’s suspension and expulsion policy? What is the
cost and effectiveness of the guidance personnel in the district? What is the
program in place related to the selection, training and evaluation of safety
personnel? How are paraprofessionals and teacher aides selected, trained,
used and evaluated? What are the costs and effectiveness of the school
transportation program? What is the quality and effectiveness of the after
school, tutoring and extra curricula activities supported by the district?
What is the impact of high stakes testing for middle school students to enter
high school? What happens to graduates of the system? In truth urban school
districts do not have the ability to answer any of these questions in any meaningful
way. And these are just a few of the necessary performance areas which, when
studied, would inevitably lead reasonable people who are not beneficiaries of
these district failures to see the multiple ways in which children are
damaged in irrevocable ways. Toward a Solution The preservation,
protection and enhancement of failing urban school districts is deeply
embedded in American society by the constituencies of beneficiaries who
derive either direct benefits or undeserved privilege as a result of these
failures. These constituencies cannot be attacked or even influenced by
direct change efforts since their benefits flow from established agencies of
federal and state government, effective state lobbies for maintaining present
forms of funding public education; the existing body of school law and court
cases, universities supported by massive funding mechanisms and certification
agencies, networks of professional organizations, and a plethora of vendors
and entrepreneurs who benefit from dealing with major urban districts. The
power of these institutions and power blocs derives from the fundamental
American value that education is a personal not a common good and the fact
that the eighty percent of the people who have no children in school believe
that they and their families derive great benefits and little risk from
maintaining the current system. The primary motive of most Americans is to
keep the present benefit structure intact and to control taxes, particularly
their real estate taxes. Whatever changes might be made to make urban
schooling more equitable for diverse children in poverty therefore will have
to be made within present funding structures and without imposing greater
costs on taxpayers no longer directly involved with schooling. This realistic
view of the possibilities for changing let alone transforming any of the
major dysfunctional school bureaucracies more accurately reflects the
American experience of the last half century than the naïve assumption that
urban school district functionaries want to stop their miseducation
of diverse children in poverty and are merely waiting for the presentation of
better research findings or more appeals to their sense of equity and
justice. The surest and most
reasonable change strategy therefore is not to appeal to the self interest of
those protecting or working in the present systems but to the self interest
of those who have financial and legal power over them. Calls for transforming
urban districts will inevitably elicit powerful and effective resistance
unless the appeals are to the public’s sense of maintaining not changing what
has always been done and this means replicating what seems to them to be
working in small towns and suburbs. This can be done in an honest and
straightforward manner since the taxpayers are currently paying enough to
have many more effective urban schools. There are two change goals which are
quickly realizable, which will have immediate impact on decreasing the miseducation in the urban districts and which will at the
same time support the traditions of American schooling. The first realizable
change that will have a significant impact on diverse children in poverty is
not only possible but is already in the process of impacting many urban
schools now. This involves selecting and preparing new populations of
teachers (Part IV.). The second change is also achievable and is as likely of
attainment as enacting any statute regarding urban schools would be in any
state legislature. This involves decentralizing the major urban districts
into districts comparable in size to middle size townships and suburbs. The
benefits of such a decentralization are discussed in Part V. Appendix A.
contains a draft of the elements that need to be included in such
decentralization legislation. These two changes meet the test of effective
change strategies in that they support the public goals of cost containment
and maintain their traditional views regarding local control of small school
districts. Part IV. The Rationale
for Recruiting and Preparing Adults As Teachers of Diverse
Children in Urban Poverty The crisis in urban
school schools serving diverse children in poverty is worsening. The
persisting shortage of teachers who can be effective and who will remain in
urban poverty schools for more than brief periods is a major cause of this
crisis. The benefits of securing and preparing more effective teachers are
several: fewer children will be damaged, more children will learn more and if
teachers are placed as groups into failing schools these schools will be
turned around. At the same time it must be recognized that getting better
teachers and even turning failed individual schools into successful ones will
not by themselves transform the 120 failed urban school district
bureaucracies currently miseducating seven million
diverse children in poverty. Selecting new populations of teachers prepared
in new ways will provide more islands of success in failing districts. The
belief systems and behaviors of effective urban teachers make it clear that
they are focused on their students’ learning and development. They are driven
to help each youngster be as successful as possible. They do not go into or
stay in teaching because they want to function as educational change agents,
community organizers or system reformers. Their raison d etre
is their students first and last. It is also important to
understand how and why some teachers succeed in spite of the debilitating
working conditions created by failed urban school bureaucracies. These
organizations are not only likely to continue but worsen, creating even more
negative conditions which impinge on teachers’ work and children’s learning.
Indeed, there is a perverse irony here: as more effective teachers are
recruited, selected and prepared, the pressures to break up or have state
takeovers of failed urban districts decreases. A pernicious, debilitating
school bureaucracy is, in effect, made to look workable as it secures and
retains more teachers who literally drain and exhaust themselves in order to
function in spite of the systems in which they work. But while good teachers
can transform failed schools into successful ones, they cannot transform
entire failed urban districts. At the district level, issues dealing with
federal mandates, state laws, funding formulas, school board politics,
superintendent turnover, central office mismanagement and local culture must
be resolved before systemic change can occur. And because schools reflect
rather than change society it is highly unlikely these issues will ever be dealt
with in ways that transform failing urban school bureaucracies into
organizations that function in the interests of children, teachers and
parents. Nevertheless, recruiting, selecting and preparing the teachers
needed by diverse children in poverty should be vigorously pursued because
they can and will rescue individual children and transform individual
schools. (The section which follows outlines a specific state law that would
implement total district change.) Much can be done to get
the teachers needed. Too many decades have already passed and too many
youngsters have been driven out, miseducated or
been underdeveloped awaiting the change agents who would have us believe they
can transform urban schools districts and their debilitating impact on teaching
and learning. This is a critical issue because defenders of traditional
teacher education argue that before their excellent programs of teacher
education can be held accountable for their “fully qualified” graduates to
succeed and remain in poverty schools, the debilitating conditions of work
must be changed. This analysis argues that securing and retaining effective
teachers can and must happen now because the children need them now and
because the conditions in urban school districts are quite likely to get even
worse. Some Pertinent History of
Teacher Training Which Helps Explain the Current Shortage The first normal school
training teachers in During this period
itinerant male school masters moved about the country and were contracted by
communities to keep school for a few months. By the Civil War women were
replacing men as teachers for several reasons. They worked for less money
than men, they were regarded as more capable of morally training the young,
they needed gainful employment if they did not marry, and their role as a purveyor
of some basic skills and moral trainer was seen as the level of work women
were capable of doing. Between the Civil War and
WWI. the growth of normal schools burgeoned and became extended into post
secondary training programs of one and then two years. Between 1890 and 1920
30 million immigrants, mostly low income white Europeans, came to a Except for the western
states, every state opened normal schools and some states had over ten.
During the 20th century these normal schools were extended into four year
teachers colleges offering baccalaureate degrees. After WWII. they became
state colleges offering comprehensive majors not limited to teaching. The old
two year normal schools did not die easily and in The knowledge base in
teacher education developed after WWI. with the growth of educational
psychology and educational philosophy. But neither the psychologist and test experts
professionally descended from E. L. Thorndike or the progressives seeking to
implement the work of John Dewey ever recognized the existence of African
Americans, those in urban poverty, or people in any ethnic or class groups
not seeking to abandon their cultures and melt into the mainstream. The
progressives, philosophers and citizenship educators were clearly defeated by
the educational psychologists who claimed to have universal constructs
regarding the nature of child development, the nature of learning and the
nature of evaluation and research. These studies still comprise the basic
knowledge base for preparing teachers in colleges and universities today. During this same period
the land grant institutions comprising the flag ship institutions of their
respective state’s public higher education systems also took on the
responsibility of preparing teachers. Today, with the exception of states
whose higher education was developed differently in response to later
statehood, we still see the pattern of states with major land grant
institutions now deeply involved in teacher education but even larger numbers
of state colleges that were formerly the single purpose teacher training
institutions still preparing most of the teachers. In recent years private
institutions have begun contributing some teachers to urban school districts
but these tend to be small numbers and not the major source of teachers for
urban districts. A few very vital points
of this history are relevant to the current analysis and need to be kept in
mind in order to more clearly understand why traditional programs of teacher
education do not prepare enough teachers for diverse children in urban
poverty. Teacher training
institutions were purposely and systematically located across rural A great number of such
normal schools were needed to ensure that female teachers would not work
further than fifty miles from home, could easily return home for holidays and
summer work, and that the teachers being trained would likely be of the same
religious and ethnic background as the children they would be training in
morality and the abc’s. The notion that school
teaching is the appropriate work of young, single women has been imbedded in
American culture for more than 150 years. The perception that even married
women are less appropriate than single women has been reinforced during
periods of economic depression when married women in many urban districts
were laid off. There were very few
public normal schools started in urban areas. A few exceptions existed in There can be no question
that teacher training in The need for teachers who
could be effective with African Americans, other children of color, children
in urban poverty and non-European populations was never a consideration in
the development of the knowledge base in American teacher education. The knowledge base
purporting to explain normal child development, how normal children learn and
what constitutes normal behavior that is offered in traditional programs of
teacher education is derived in greatest measure from psychology where the
unit of study and analysis is the individual. Other ways of understanding and
explaining human behavior that reflect cultural constructs are still very
minimal additions to state requirements for approving university based
teacher education programs, e.g a course in
Multicultural Education. What is the import of
these trends? After one understands even a few of the basic facts surrounding
the development of teacher training in America it is extremely naïve to raise
questions such as why teacher education is not relevant to diverse children
in urban poverty, or why teacher education does not provide more teachers who
will be effective in teaching all children, or why teachers who complete
traditional programs of teacher education do not seem to be able to relate to
all children. It was never the intention of teacher education in Current Factors Affecting
the Teacher Shortage Between 2000 and 2010
app. 2,200.000 teachers representing more than half of The staggering percentage
of the newly certified choosing to not waste their own time or the children’s
time is a second reason for the shortage. This is actually a benefit since it
does not inflict potential quitters and failures on children in desperate
need of competent caring teachers. Newly certified graduates not taking jobs
is also a clear indication that the bearers of these licenses are being much
more honest about themselves and their lack of competence than those who
prepared them and who insist on pronouncing them “fully qualified”. In 1999
the SUNY system prepared 17,000 “fully qualified” teachers. The number who
applied for teaching positions in The third reason for the
teacher shortage is the number of beginners who take jobs in urban schools
but fail or leave. Using data from the The fourth major reason
for the teacher shortage in urban schools is the shortage of special
education teachers. This shortage is exacerbated by the fact that many
suburbs, small towns, parochial and private schools contract out the
education of their children with special needs to their nearby urban school
districts. This not only increases the teacher shortage in urban districts
but raises their costs. For example, in my state and in many others the state
makes a deduction in state aid to the urban district for every special
education class not taught by a fully certified teacher. No state imposes
such a fiscal penalty when a district employs an uncertified teacher in math,
science or other areas of continuing shortage. A fifth reason for the
teacher shortage results from greater entrance level career opportunities now
available to women outside of teaching at the time of college graduation.
Many however soon discover that they encounter glass ceilings and can only
advance in limited ways. After age 30 this population includes many who
decide to make more mature decisions than they did at age 20 about becoming
teachers of diverse children in poverty. The sixth reason for the
shortage deals with college graduates of color who have greater access into a
larger number of entry level career positions than in former times. As with
the population of women who perceive greater opportunity for careers of
higher status and greater financial reward than in teaching, this population
also frequently experiences glass ceilings after age thirty. African
Americans comprise fewer than 6% of all undergraduates in all fields and
substantially fewer who decide as youthful undergraduates to pursue
traditional university based programs of teacher education. But as career
changers after aged thirty, college graduates of color (particularly women)
become a primary source of teachers for diverse children in poverty in urban
school districts. The continuing and
worsening teacher shortage must also take note of the special nature of
teaching fields such as math and science. Math and science teachers leave at
a higher rate than others; they tend to be men seeking better opportunities
in other fields. While the causes of the shortage in these areas has some
distinctive dimensions they are not discussed separately but are included in
the analysis of the entire problem. The solutions proposed for the general
shortage will also impact on these high need specializations. Given all these reasons
the question of why there is a desperate shortage of special education
teachers deserves further comment. The knowledge base purporting to explain
child development, how children learn and what constitutes normal behavior
that is offered in traditional programs of teacher education is derived from
the field of psychology where the unit of study and analysis is the individual.
What is regarded as normal behavior is based on what white school
psychologists and teachers believe to be normal behavior and development. For
example; future teachers are taught that it is not normal for children to sit
quietly all day. In my city there is a large population of Hmong children who sit quietly all day and are a source
of great concern to the teachers who place more credence on psychological
definitions of normal and on their own prejudices, than on what they see
acted out in front of them all day everyday by perfectly normal children of a
different culture. It is not accidental that in my own city with over 103,000
children in public schools that there are 18,000 children, mostly African
American and mostly male, identified as emotionally disturbed, cognitively
disabled or handicapped in some way. The fact that parents in poverty are
enticed by state and federal programs of financial aid if they agree to have
their children labeled as handicapped is little known and rarely mentioned.
Neither is the fact that 145 school psychologists assisted by 100 Diagnostic
Teachers receive more than 1,000 referrals from classroom teachers every
year. In effect the school psychologists in my city would have us believe
that more than one out of six of our children are abnormal. And that it will
perfectly acceptable, given the referral rate, if by 2012 25% or one out of
four of our children will be labeled as handicapped in some way. The hegemony
of psychologists over the definition of normal is clear when one notes that
no state gives anthropologists, sociologists or linguists the legal power to
decide who is normal and what constitutes normal behavior. It should be
remembered that four state certified psychologists swore under oath that,
based on his responses to the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory, Jeffrey Dahmer was sane and
capable of making normal moral judgments. The fact that he had actually eaten
22 people was ignored in favor of his test scores. The bizarre reality
imposed by those licensed to determine who and what is normal is that the
results of tests which are supposed to predict behavior are given greater
credence than actual behavior. This explains why school children, once
labeled in primary grades, never get unlabeled in upper grades even when they
subsequently earn good grades or pass the eighth grade tests for high school
admission. In effect, “fully qualified” teachers prepared in traditional
university based programs are systematically trained to view many of their
children as somehow lacking, deviant, or having special needs. It is
certainly understandable that new teachers unable to connect with and manage
their students will see things that are wrong with the children and their
families rather than the inadequacies in themselves. Trapped by biased,
limited definitions of how a normal child should develop, behave and learn
language, it is inevitable that teachers would refer children they cannot
connect with for testing to equally limited school psychologists who then provide
the backup test scores and psychological evaluations to show that these
children are not capable of functioning in normal ways. In studies of quitters
and leavers the most commonly offered reasons they cite refer to either poor
working conditions, the difficulty of managing the children, or both. A
typical list includes the following reasons: overwhelming workload,
discipline problems, low pay, little respect, lack of support and the
clerical workload. Reasonable people have every reason to question the
validity of these responses, the maturity of the leavers making these
responses and the quality of the teacher preparation offered those who give
these reasons for leaving. Are we really to believe that even youngsters
fresh out of teacher education programs have no idea that teachers’ salaries
are low until after they take jobs and actually receive their first paycheck?
Are we really to believe that even new teachers are unaware of the media
attacks and the public criticism of urban poverty schools until after they
are employed in them? Are we seriously to believe that as new teachers they
had no idea before taking a position that working as a teacher would require
an hour or two of planning time every night? Or that there would be records
to keep, papers to grade and parents to see? People who work in offices,
stores, factories, beauty salons and drive taxis and who have not completed
60 credits of education courses and student teaching are well aware of these
factors as the typical working conditions of teachers. Indeed, interviews of
high school students indicate quite clearly that even adolescents are well
aware of these factors as the normal conditions of their teachers’ work.
Quitters and leavers who offer these reasons for terminating their employment
and those who accept and analyze these responses as authentic explanations,
make the findings of studies on why teachers quit or fail highly problematic. While poor working
conditions contribute to teacher losses, in-depth interviews we have had with
quitters and failures from schools serving diverse children in urban poverty
over the past 45 years reveal other explanations for leaving than those
gleaned from superficial questionnaires, surveys and brief exit interviews.
Our final classroom observations of teachers who are failing also support the
existence of more basic reasons for leaving than those gained from typical
exit interviews. Leavers are understandably chary about having anything on
their records that they believe might make it difficult for them to get a
reference for a future job. They are also savvy enough to try and not say
things that might make them appear biased or prejudiced toward children of
color or their families. It takes an hour or longer for a skilled interviewer
to establish rapport, trust and an open dialogue in order to extract more
authentic and less superficial reasons for why teachers leave. For example,
the quitter’s citation of “discipline and classroom management problems” as
the reason for leaving takes on new meaning when one learns what the
respondent is really saying. In typical surveys quitters and failures
frequently mention the challenge of working with “difficult” students and
this comment is simply noted or checked or counted. In in-depth interviews
where rapport has been established this cause is amplified by leavers into
more complete explanations of why discipline and classroom management are
difficult for them. They make statements such as, “I really don’t see myself
spending the rest of my life working with these children.” or “It’s clear
that these children don’t want me as their teacher.” When the reasons for the
disconnect between themselves and the children are probed further, leavers
will frequently make statements such as the following: “These kids will never
learn standard English.” or “My mother didn’t raise me to listen to ‘m.f.’ all day.” or “These children could not possibly be
Christians.” or “These kids are just not willing or able to follow the
simplest directions.” The comments of quitters and leavers which may have at
first appeared to indicate a simple, straightforward lack of skills on the
part of a neophyte still learning to maintain discipline, can now be
recognized as actually representing much deeper issues. Rather than a simple
matter which can be corrected by providing more training to child-centered
beginning teachers who understandably just need some tips on classroom
management and more experience, we have now uncovered an irreconcilable chasm
between the teachers and their students. Teacher attrition increases as the
number of minority students increases. Quitters and leavers cannot connect
with, establish rapport, or reach diverse children in urban poverty because
at bottom they do not respect and care enough about them to want to be their
teachers. These attitudes and perceptions are readily sensed by students who
respond in kind by not wanting these people as their teachers. Contrary to
the popular debates on what teachers need to know to be effective, teachers
in urban schools do not quit because they lack subject matter or pedagogy.
Quitters and leavers know how to divide fractions and they know how to write
lesson plans. They leave because they cannot connect with the students and it
is a continuous, draining hassle for them to keep students on task. In a very
short period leavers are emotionally and physically exhausted from struggling
against resisting students for six hours every day. In our classroom
observations of failing teachers we have never found an exception to this
condition: if there is a disconnect between the teacher and the students no
mentoring, coaching, workshop, or class on discipline and classroom
management can provide the teacher with the magic to control children s/he
does not genuinely respect and care about. In truth, the graduates of
traditional programs of teacher education are “fully qualified” if we limit
the definition of this term to mean they can pass written tests of subject
matter and pedagogy. Unfortunately while knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy
are absolutely necessary they are not sufficient conditions for being
effective in urban schools. Knowing what and how to teach only becomes
relevant after the teacher has connected and established a positive
relationship with the students. Many who give advice on
the teachers needed to solve the shortage frequently assert that these
children need to be taught by the “best and the brightest.” Unfortunately,
the typical criteria used to define “the best and the brightest” identify the
precise individuals who are most likely to quit and fail in urban schools.
The majority of early leavers have higher I.Q.’s,
GPA’s, and standardized test scores than those who stay; more have also had
academic majors. Teachers who earn advanced degrees within the prior two years
leave at the highest rates. Those who see teaching as primarily an
intellectual activity are eight times more likely to leave the classroom. In
1963 my Milwaukee Intern Program became the model for the National Teacher
Corps. In the ten years (1963-1972) of the Corps’ existence app. 100,000
college graduates with high GPA’s were prepared for urban teaching. While
many stayed in education fewer than 5% remained in the classroom for more
than three years. This was the largest, longest study ever done in teacher
education. The fact that the shibboleth “best and brightest” survives is
testimony to the fact that many prefer to maintain their pet beliefs about
teacher education in spite of the facts. In effect, the criteria typically
used to support the “best and brightest” are powerful, valid identifiers of
failures and quitters. While being an effective
teacher of diverse children in poverty has some intellectual and academic
aspects, it is primarily a human relations activity demanding the ability to
make and maintain positive, supportive connections with diverse children,
school staff and caregivers. The term “best and the brightest” might be more
appropriately used to refer to individuals who can actually demonstrate a
propensity to connect with and cause diverse urban children in poverty to
learn rather than as a predictor of which college youth will earn high GPA’s
and do well on written tests of teaching. Those threatened by this view
misconstrue my advocacy to mean that I believe that knowledge of subject
matter and knowledge of teaching are unimportant. Not so. There is
substantial research and no question that teachers who know more English
usage and who have greater knowledge of the subject matters they teach, have
children who learn more. But it is only after their propensity to relate to
diverse children in urban poverty has been demonstrated that the teachers’
knowledge of subject matter and how to teach can become relevant. This raises the more
basic issue of whether future teachers (or anyone) can be taught to connect
with diverse children in poverty or whether this is an attribute learned from
mature reflection about one’s life experiences after one has had some life
experiences. If it is, as I believe, the latter then it is an attribute that
must be selected for and not assumed to be the result of completing
university coursework as a late adolescent or young adult. Indeed, there is
substantial evidence that college courses and direct experiences reinforce
rather than change teacher education students’ prejudices and abilities to
connect with diverse children in poverty. Because of selective perception
students in university training programs merely “see” what they are
predisposed to “see” in their coursework and direct experiences. Open
students become more open and narrow students reinforce their limited views
of the world. The effect of teacher education is to make teacher candidates
more predisposed to believe whatever they believed when they began their
programs. This is also true of the effects of in-service programs on
teachers. Building on this dynamic that trainees see what we want to see
makes selecting the right people a more productive approach to teacher
education than assuming that training programs are treatments powerful enough
to transform deep-seated values and ideologies. Given the need for teachers
with the belief systems and the predispositions to effectively relate to
diverse children in dysfunctional bureaucracies, there should no longer be
any question that selecting those with the appropriate dispositions
determines the usefulness of any training. The Nature of Adolescence
and Adulthood as it Pertains to the Education of Teachers for Diverse
Children in Poverty There is an extensive
literature on the nature of adolescence and adulthood. Much of it is focused
on the life stages of people generally while a lesser amount refers to the
stages of teacher development. Almost all of this literature comes from
psychologists or writers who use psychological constructs and suffers from the
same ethnocentricity that characterizes the knowledge base in teacher
education. But since over 90% of those in traditional university programs of
teacher education are white youth from working class and middle class
families the characteristics attributed to these young adults is most
relevant and worth noting. University magic occurs
when students graduate from high school. They are declared “adults” by their
respective states and by the universities in which they enroll. Bestowing
this status frees the university from having to pay any serious attention to
students’ natures or to the stages of their development. The notion that it
is critical to know the nature of the learners and the nature of their
development in order to teach them is of no concern and completely ignored by
university faculty. In place of stages of development higher education relies
on contrived categories of status representing the university organization,
e.g. freshman, undergraduate, full time and GPA level. The areas in which youth
force universities to respond to their developmental needs are in
extra-curricular activities, food service, health care, and rules related to
housing and safety. It is no accident therefore that out-of-class activities
which do respond to the nature and level of their development frequently
cause more change in students than their formal classes. Late adolescents and
young adults are still struggling with the issue of self-identity fighting
off peer pressure, asserting independence from family and grappling with
their own struggle to achieve meaning and purpose in life. They are haunted
by questions like, “Will I find someone to love me?” “Will I be able to earn
a living?” How do I gain independence from my mother and still show her I
love her?” The period of the 20’s is frequently identified as a time of
impatience and idealism. “Now” becomes an obsession and change must be quick.
Those in their early twenties are infatuated with ideals but have not
experienced or observed enough of life to provide a workable basis for
understanding themselves or the world. This often leads to impetuous behavior
regarded by authority figures as rebellious or lacking in judgment. In
American society these and other insecurities are normal concerns and explain
the almost complete self absorption of youth as they seek to answer the basic
questions of identity. Teaching, on the other hand, is a continuous effort to
inspire confidence in others. Juxtaposing the demands of teaching with the
natural and common needs of young adults in American society highlights the
inappropriateness of the match. The willingness and ability to empathize with
and nurture others is the essence, the very soul of teaching. These
attributes are present in very few college youth. Because the work of the
teacher requires building self-esteem in others not in trying to find
oneself, there is no stage of development less appropriate for training
teachers than late adolescence and young adulthood. Mature adults have a
strong and reasonable sense of who they are and are self-accepting. Such
adults are sufficiently confident to be motivated by intrinsic rather than
extrinsic rewards as they engage in a wide range of learning activities. The
benefit of a university education to mature adults is that they are able to
integrate their personal experiences with theory, research, logic and a
system of morality and apply them to the persistent problems of living in a
free society. Educated adults consciously test common sense and unexamined
assumptions against various ways of knowing. Freed of the adolescent’s need
to realize parental expectations and the pressures of equally immature peers,
adults seek to reconcile their inner direction with the social good. Terms
such as integration, generativity and
self-realization have all been used to define adults who have reached the
level of aligning their proclivities with the demands of society. They seek
self enhancement by contributing. In Kohlberg’s theory of
moral development individuals move through the following stages: II. satisfaction of needs
and wants, III. concern with
conformity, IV. concern with
preserving society, V. concern with what is
right beyond legalities, VI. concern with
universal ethical principles According to Kohlberg,
only 10 per cent of those in their twenties ever attain Stages V. or VI. His
findings indicate that “college students are capable of employing reasoning
at these levels yet rarely do so.” Erikson’s theory of human
development includes eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (first year); autonomy
vs. doubt (ages 2-3); initiative vs. guilt (ages 4-5); industry vs.
inferiority ( ages 6-11); identity vs. role confusion (ages 12-18); intimacy
vs. isolation (18- through young adulthood); generativity
vs. self-absorption (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (old age). For Erikson generativity can only
occur after individuals have resolved the issue of intimacy. Generativity is most common in young parents but can be
found in individuals who are actively concerned with the welfare of young
people and making the world a better place for them to live and work. Those
who fail to develop generativity fall into a state
of self-absorption in which their personal needs and comforts become their
predominant concern. Researchers building on Erikson’s
model have extensively studied college students to determine at what point
they develop a sense of their own identity and found that only 22 per cert
achieve this level. Other researchers have
described college youth as lacking commitment to any philosophy or set of
beliefs, living for the moment and not delaying gratification. Piaget equated
his fourth stage of formal operations with adulthood. At this level
individuals engage in abstract thinking, prepositional thinking,
combinatorial thinking, hypothetical-deductive thinking, thinking ahead, metacognitive thinking and self reflection. Piaget found
that college students rarely reach this level of thinking . Kitchener followed
college youth through their undergraduate years and found them beginning as
moral and intellectual absolutists, moving to a stage of relativism when any
opinion is as good as any other and ending up in a search for identify with
most never getting beyond the middle stage of relativism. Other models of
development focus on stages of development and the nature of knowledge sought
in each. Late adolescents and young adults typically use their direct
experiences in support of absolutism, they then move through the stage of
weighing conflicting perceptions (relativism) and conclude with a more mature
view of reality and multiple ways of knowing. This last stage is seldom or
ever reached in college youth. It is ironic that youthful college students
who believe so much in the value of their own experiences as the best way to
learn undervalue the experiences of the children they teach by limiting them
to texts and vicarious experiences. Teacher educators
bombarded by preservice students’ fears and
apprehensions regarding classroom discipline are well aware of the childlike
stage in which many about to be certified find themselves. There is seldom
little if any concern with higher levels of thinking or with how issues of
social justice and equity can be infused into school curricula. Indeed, there
is strong resistance to these issues. As they move toward graduation and
certification there is a marked narrowing of student interests and concerns
until students finally narrow the complex problems of teaching into the one
grand obsession which precludes their thinking about anything: “Will I be
able to control the class?” This is the overriding concern of the new
graduates awarded universal licenses by all states and heralded by university
based teacher educators as “fully qualified.” There is no value in
simply getting older. But serious reflection upon one’s life experience is
more likely to result in individuals reaching higher levels of development.
Having families, work experiences and sustained careers provide individuals
with rich and varied experiential material to integrate into their cognitive
and emotional development. The potential of teacher growth through reflection
is great. So too are the dangers for those individuals who have difficulty
reflecting accurately upon their strengths and weaknesses. Clearly those with
more life and work experiences have more with which to build up their
perceptual repertoires. Reflection is a process not only more characteristic
of advanced life stages than of youth but a process that needs meaningful
experiences to draw upon. Ultimately it is the high
level of conceptual work that star teachers serving diverse children in urban
poverty perform which drives my commitment to the need for greater teacher
maturity. If we perceive of teaching as essentially a mindless set of jejune
tasks (e.g. the 19th century school- marm teaching
the abc’s and giving directions) then the levels of
cognition or development reached by the practitioners would be of little
importance. Indeed, many urban school districts have given up trying to find
teachers who can think at all and have mandated that instruction be done by
reading from scripts. On the other hand, if we believe teaching requires
higher-order abilities such as the humane application of abstract concepts to
interactions with diverse children and youth in urban poverty, then the
teachers’ cognitive and affective development becomes a crucial determinant
of success. There have been multiple studies (over 200) in many countries
which have found that there are four general developmental abilities which
are highly related to success in any field: 1) Empathy, 2) Autonomy, 3) Symbolization, and 4) Commitment to
democratic values. All four of these
correlate with greater maturity. In the American sample there was an inverse
correlation between SAT scores and level of maturity. Pintrich’s landmark summary of the
research on the learning and development of college students and its
implications for teacher education is a meta-analysis which, to my knowledge,
no college or university program of teacher education has ever referred to
let alone utilized. Reasonable people cannot read Pintrich’s
summary of what is known about human development and learning and still focus
on young adults as the primary source of teachers. Using any respectable
theory of human development leads to the same conclusion. For white, working
and middle class females growing up in American society there is no more
inappropriate stage of life to prepare for teaching than young adulthood… and
for youthful males their personal development and the demands of teaching are
an even greater mismatch. What do these scholarly summaries about teachers’
levels of development mean when translated and applied to the real world? We
are supposed to believe that a system of traditional teacher education which
would take a young, immature white male from a small town in Wisconsin, put
him through a traditional program of teacher education, graduate, certify and
declare him “fully qualified” at age 22 is engaged in a perfectly reasonable
activity. Further, we are to believe that it would be a good idea for this
young man to come to the Milwaukee Public Schools (or to any urban district
in America) and be hired as a teacher because he is now a professional
practitioner who can shape the mind and character of a seventeen year old
African American girl with a child and a part-time job trying to make a place
for herself in the world. Or that he has the knowledge, skills and
predispositions to help a Hispanic five year old make sense of the world. Or
that he has the competencies needed to help a young adolescent survive the
throes of puberty and the peer pressure to drop out. The best that can be said
about such a monumental disconnect between the nature of who is in teacher
preparation and the demands of practice in urban schools is that we should be
grateful to this young man and his cohort for never taking jobs. They know
and are willing to declare their inadequacies more truthfully than the
faculty who trained them. The faculty declaring these youth to be “fully
qualified” are beneficiaries of a university system that views its late
adolescent and young adult students preparing to become teachers as its
clientele. Diverse children in urban poverty being miseducated
by dysfunctional bureaucracies are not conceived of as the clientele of
teacher educators. Where Do Urban Schools
Currently Get Their Beginning Teachers? Although the typical age
of college graduates has risen from age 22 to age 26, it is still generally
true that most of those preparing to teach are college age youth, that is,
late adolescents and young adults. This analysis is not an advocacy for
preventing all such individuals from becoming teachers but to shift the
balance. The current emphasis remains app. 80% still being youngsters below
age 26 who are full-time university students and only app. 20% being older
“non-traditional” post baccalaureate students or adults in alternative
certification or on-the job training programs. Given the needs in urban
poverty districts this balance should be reversed so that the majority of
those in teacher training would be adults over age 30. Denigrating labels
such as “retreads” or “career changers” indicate the power of the
misconceptions and stereotypes regarding the age at which it is generally
believed that individuals should become new teachers. My best estimate is
that of the app. 500.000 traditionally prepared teachers under age 26
produced annually, fewer than 15% seek employment in the 120 major urban
districts serving app. 7 million diverse children in poverty. This represents
app. 75,000 of the colleges and universities annual output. The research
based on my Urban Teacher Selection Interview indicates further that of the
15% who are willing to apply to work in urban school districts that only one
in ten (or 7,500) of those under aged 26 will stay long enough (three years)
to become successful teachers in urban schools. What this means is that app.
one half million youngsters under 26 in over 1,250 traditional program of
teacher education are supplying the 120 largest urban school districts with
about 1.5% of their annual teacher output. If I am under-estimating this by
tenfold, which I do not believe I am, then traditional college based programs
of teacher education would still be preparing about 15% of their graduates
willing to try urban teaching. The effectiveness of this minimal output must
also be considered since 50% of those who deign to try urban teaching will
leave in five years or less. While this is obviously a
very small output from traditional teacher preparing institutions it
represents a small bloc of young people who do have the potential for
teaching diverse children in urban poverty and for whom the doors of the
profession must remain open. But should this population of young teachers
represented by this 1.5% contribution remain as the predominant body of
future teachers or should policy makers be looking for other constituencies
from which to draw and develop the teachers It is quite clear that
the current and future teachers of diverse children in urban poverty are
non-traditional populations of adults trained in on-the-job forms of
university-school partnerships or by the urban school districts themselves.
Those who cannot recognize this reality are those who have a stake in not
wanting to be convinced that the present system of teacher preparation is not
working for the urban districts. In truth, traditional teacher educators
could put all of the alternative certification programs they rail against out
of business right now if they were able to prepare teachers for the real
world rather than for the best of all non-existent ones. It is difficult for
traditional programs of teacher education to maintain they know best how to
prepare teachers when they don’t do it. The excuse is that “we are preparing
excellent teachers in sufficient numbers but cannot be held accountable for
their performance or whether they stay because the conditions of work in
urban schools are driving them out.” Will the Conditions of
Work for Beginning Teachers Improve or Worsen? While I have argued that
teachers leave primarily because they cannot connect with children it is
necessary to recognize that the conditions under which beginning teachers
work in urban schools are horrific and are driving out not only those who
should have never been hired but many who have the potential for becoming
effective teachers and even stars. The problem faced by policy makers is
whether the strategy of recruiting and training more mature people who can
succeed in schools as they presently are is a better strategy than continuing
to focus on traditional populations of teachers and waiting for change agents
to transform the conditions under which they will work in failing urban
school districts. In my own city we train
beginning teachers who are often expected to work under conditions that are
medieval: rooms without windows, over 30 middle school students in a class
including 6 or more students with handicapping conditions, insufficient,
outdated textbooks, no dictionaries, no paper, no access to a copier that
works, no computers connected to the internet, science rooms without running
water or any materials, no parking, and no closet that locks, or even a hook
to hang up one’s coat. Teachers in my city spend an average of $600 dollars a
year of their own money on supplies. We’ve had beginners use their own funds
to buy chalk. When I recently asked a principal to provide a teacher with
some chalk he replied, “The teachers knew how much money we had for supplies
and they chose to use it up by January. What do you want from me?” Observing
the equipment, supplies and materials that urban teachers typically have to
work with frequently leads one to question whether these teachers are working
in the Salaries. In my city a
single mother with two or more children (a typical profile of one pool who
are likely to stay in urban teaching) will earn a starting salary that is low
enough to meet the state’s poverty criterion and will entitle her to food
stamps. In future, teacher salaries will not increase in real dollars and are
likely to fall further behind others of comparable education in other
occupations. Much worse than the annual rate of inflation are the
out-of-control costs of health care which are predicted to triple in the next
decade. Urban school districts are negotiating greater contributions from
teachers to help cover these costs but will still be forced to put whatever
monies they might have used for salary raises into health care. In my own
city the teachers’ benefit package is already 55% so that a beginning teacher
paid $28,000 costs the district $43,400. By 2012 a very conservative estimate
is that the benefits package will be at least 80%. This means that a
beginning teacher paid $35,000 will cost the district $63,000 per year… and
this assumes that the teachers will be paying for a greater share of their
health care thereby decreasing their real income. School Safety. The amount
that urban districts pay for school safety personnel and equipment will
continue to increase. This not only diverts funds from educational purposes
but seriously alters school climate transforming them from educational
institutions into custodial ones. This is already true in most of the major
urban districts. In many urban middle schools there is more invested in hall
cameras and safety equipment and personnel than in computers or computer
assisted instruction. As more time of professional staff is directed to
issues of control it casts a pall over the self concepts of beginning
teachers who have great needs for perceiving of themselves as educators
rather than as monitors or safety personnel. It is not likely that in future
schools will either give up their custodial functions or that they will
become safer places. Class Size. This
condition has a great impact on beginners. It will continue to move in two
directions. In a few states which mandate smaller classes, usually for
primary grades, there will be a sharp increase in the teacher shortage but
smaller classes for those who take jobs in these states. In most urban
districts however class size will increase in response to higher birth rates
among the urban poor. These increases in class size will be worst in urban
middle schools where teachers face the most behavior problems and where most
of the students who will not make it to high school are retained for an extra
year or more. In urban middle schools teachers work with between 100 and 150
students daily. These schools are likely to be places where large classes
make the conditions of work extremely difficult for beginners. Caring
teachers recognize that this is the last chance for many youth to make it or
drop out before getting to high school and as a result they work especially
hard. But the conditions of work in urban middle schools will continue to
make it more likely that the teachers who stay for more than five years are
likely to be the strong insensitives rather than
those who are caring and committed. Prohibitive costs make it un- likely that
the goal of reducing class size beyond primary levels is one that will be
realized in the urban districts. Supportive Principals.
There is a growing of shortage of effective urban school principals. It is
not uncommon for major districts to fire as many as fifty at a time. In
addition, an increasing number of urban districts now hold the principal
accountable, on an annual basis, for raising test scores. Raising these
expectations for principals cuts down on the pool of those who can be
effective in such demanding roles. It is noteworthy that beginning teachers
frequently cite “having a supportive principal’ as a critical factor in their
professional development and whether or not they leave. There is a continuing
and growing shortage of school leaders of color who can function effectively
in African American and Latino communities. Principals are still drawn from
the ranks of former teachers and assistant principals in the same urban
district. Unless there is an increase in the pool of teachers of color
therefore the pool from which future principals of color will be drawn will
not increase. The obstacle to turning this situation around is that every
urban district has a shortage of effective principals now. This means that
most of the teachers and assistant principals who will comprise the pool of
future applicants to become principals may never work for or even see a
principal functioning as an accountable, instructional educator leading an
urban school as if it were an effective community based organization in a
democratic, pluralistic society. As the shortage of effective principals
increases the demands and expectations for what this role can accomplish
increases. The growing expectation that the principal can no longer be a
building manager but must be the instructional leader of a non-profit
community organization will deepen this shortage. Without such models of
success to emulate, the most likely prognosis is that tomorrow’s principals
will function in the same ways and at the same levels as today’s. This makes
the likelihood that beginning teachers will be getting more support from an
increasing pool of more effective principals problematic. Tests. The number of
tests taken by students in urban schools is not likely to diminish. District
and state mandates have now made testing a fact of life for urban teachers.
In some districts the curriculum is so tightly aligned with the mandated tests
that teachers actually follow scripts to cover all topics in the exact ways
the students will be tested for. This is a critical condition of work for
many beginners who are misled into believing that as teachers they will be
professional decision-makers rather than school employees required to spend
most of their time as test tutors. The very strong likelihood is that the
pressures felt by teachers to prepare their children for tests will continue
and increase since so many will be assigned to schools officially designated
as failing. On the positive side
there has been an increase in several conditions which beginners rate as
critical conditions of work. First, there is more teacher teaming than in
past. This means that beginning teachers have greater access to veteran
teachers’ ideas and experiences. Second, there is more mentoring of beginning
teachers by experienced teacher with released time. Both of these factors are
expensive because they involve greater staff costs and while implemented in
some urban districts they are cut back in many others. If these are the five
conditions cited by most urban teachers as the most debilitating and if all
five of these are likely to worsen, is it a wiser strategy to continue to
prepare teachers in traditional ways and wait for their working conditions to
improve, or to prepare new populations of teachers who can succeed in today’s
failing urban school districts? Securing the Teachers Traditional teacher
education cannot provide the great number of teachers who can be effective
and who will remain in urban schools for more than brief periods. Recruiting
and preparing the teachers needed for the real world will require new forms
of teacher education employing the following processes: 1)Recruiting mature
college graduates from all fields; 2) Selecting only
individuals whose belief systems predispose them to see teaching and
schooling as a means of fostering equity and justice for diverse children in
poverty; 3) Preparing candidates
while they function as fully responsible, paid teachers of record in schools
serving diverse children in poverty; 4) Providing a support
system that includes coaching from skilled mentors and a technology system
that connects them instantly to resources and problem solving, 5) Offering professional
studies which are closely aligned with the actual behaviors candidates must
perform as teachers; and 6) Evaluating and
recommending candidates for licensure on the basis of their children’s
learning. Using these procedures we
have trained diverse, mature college graduates from all fields of study for
the Milwaukee Public Schools since 1990. 78% of them are minorities and 94%
of them are still there after a decade. Securing the teachers that diverse
children in urban poverty deserve requires taking some initiatives which are
in opposition to the current practices and culture in traditional teacher
education. 1. The clients of teacher
preparation are not students in programs of teacher education but the diverse
children in poverty in urban schools who need effective teachers. This change
of focus causes many shifts in practice, the most notable being that teacher
candidates are put through selection and training procedures that result in
significantly more of them self selecting out or being failed before they are
licensed. 2. The great shortage of
teachers does not mean that standards should be lowered but that they must be
raised. Teachers who will be effective and who will remain are individuals
who not only have knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy but who can
connect with diverse children in poverty and can function under extremely
adverse working conditions. 3. Candidates should not
be admitted into programs of teacher education because they have passed
selection criteria at a college or university. Urban school districts must
first process candidates through their selection procedures. Only those who
the district is willing to hire and to guarantee a placement should be
admitted to preparation programs. 4. The locus of
preparation must be urban school classrooms in which the candidates function
as teachers of record. The various pools of adults who can be recruited,
selected and prepared to be effective in urban schools envision themselves
changing careers in order to function in the role of teachers. They are not
willing to take on the role of students in teacher education programs and
have demonstrated clearly, over decades, that they will not be recruited if
their primary role is to become college students rather than teachers. This
means alternative certification programs, intern programs and on-the-job
training programs must be used to recruit and prepare mature candidates. 5.The traditional
practice of young college students deciding they would like to be teachers of
a particular age or subject matter and then seeking employment after
graduation must be abandoned. The starting point for creating the pools of
teachers to be trained in the various specializations should be based on the
projections of teacher need in the local urban school districts. Then those
who can fill the specific school needs for the various teacher
specializations should be actively recruited, selected and prepared. 6. For teachers to remain
and be effective their training program cannot focus on universal truths re:
the supposed universal nature of all children, teaching and learning. Neither
can it be preparation focused on the best of all model professional schools
since these are nonexistent worlds. From the outset candidates’ preparation
must focus on serving particular groups of children from specific local
cultures attending schools in a particular urban district. Preparing
candidates for no place in particular and assuming they will be able to teach
all children everywhere will only perpetuate the current system of “fully
qualified” graduates not taking jobs, quitting or failing. There is no
shortage of teacher candidates whose primary motive is to secure licenses
which will enable them to be hired in any state. The need is for teachers for
specific urban schools serving particular constituencies. Mature adults from
a specific urban area who begin with a focused local, urban commitment are
more likely to not only succeed but remain in urban schools. 7. The tradition of
waiting for young undergraduate students to apply to a university to be
prepared as teachers must be replaced with aggressive and targeted marketing
programs directed at pools of local, adult college graduates, particularly
those of color. Nationwide and traditional forms of recruitment by urban school
districts competing with each other for a limited pool of young minority
graduates need to be replaced by strategies which focus on mature residents
of the local metropolitan area. Local churches and faith-based community
organizations are basic to the recruitment of African American and Latino
applicants. While women and mothers with children in the very same school
systems in which they would like to become teachers are the primary target,
ways of reaching local male pools must be utilized. New ways of explaining
the work of a teacher in an urban school district need to be an integral part
of honest, realistic marketing that lets applicants know what they are
getting into from day one. Signing bonuses and similar inducements for
enticing reluctant applicants who lack commitment to the diverse children in
the particular urban area are counterproductive and should be discontinued. 8. Specific attributes of
great (star) urban teachers should guide the selection of new teachers into
preparation programs. Traditional criteria which predict success in college
or on written tests of teaching should be irrelevant to the selection
process. All programs of preparation should utilize both interviews of
applicants which compare them to star teachers and observing candidates
actually relating to children and youth. These are the two most powerful
predictors of success with diverse children in urban poverty. 9. The post baccalaureate
level is the primary source for the new pools of teacher candidates who need
to be recruited. There should be no limitation on the fields of study which
these candidates have completed. Considerations of grade point and other
traditional admission criteria used by graduate schools are irrelevant
criteria. It is counterproductive to focus on or even include masters degree
studies during the first year of any internship, residency or on-the-job
training program. Considering the factors
beginning teachers say they need or would like versus those they regard as
debilitating, the likelihood is far greater that the negative conditions for
beginning teachers in urban schools will not only continue but worsen. What
this means for securing teachers who will stay and become effective is clear.
While all constituencies must do everything possible to try and improve the
conditions under which beginning urban teachers work we cannot be naïve at
the expense of children in poverty schools. The need is for teachers who can
be effective with today’s children and youth in today’s schools. We cannot
take the pious position that it is unfair or even immoral for beginning
teachers to function in today’s schools and therefore we as teacher educators
cannot be held accountable for who we select or how we train them until the
urban schools are transformed. There are real children, spending the only
childhood they will ever have going to these schools everyday. Demanding that
the schools improve before we can be expected to provide effective teachers
for such places will sacrifice the education of 14 million children while we
wait for change agents who have been extremely unsuccessful up to now. The
most prudent policy must assume that whether these schools stay the same or
get even worse we will recruit and prepare caring teachers who will make a
difference immediately, Part V. Decentralization
and Accountable School Leadership There are many critical
elements that would be necessary to include in a state statute decentralizing
its urban school districts. There is no one template that can be used to
cover the peculiarities that will necessarily arise in various states. The
example offered in Appendix A. is merely a starter example of some of the
critical elements that are likely to be useful in several states similar to
my own. My strong feeling is that if decentralization statutes are done
effectively and with relevance to the needs of the particular cities and
states there will be some degree of flexibility and variation in these
statutes. At the same time there are some fundamental issues that must in
some form be achieved by every effort to decentralize if it is to be
successful. Each of these required elements refers to building various forms
of accountability into the statute. Accountability Elements
Which Should Be Achieved in Decentralization Statutes An elected Mayor through
his Fiscal Manager rather than a superintendent should be held directly
responsible for the fiscal oversight of all the schools in the city. As an
elected official this individual can be held accountable. There should be no
district wide central office allowed to become established by the Fiscal
Manager. No dysfunctional bureaucracies absorbing funds that should be used
for the education of children can grow and take resources away from schools
if there are no central offices. There should be no miniature
central offices created in the newly decentralized districts. Each of these
districts should be able to function with the level of administration
currently typical in their surrounding suburban and township districts. There must be an end to
city-wide school boards trying to make policy with a massive budget, (in many
cases over a billion dollars), that is beyond their span of control and
understanding. The Fiscal Manager reports to the Mayor not a board. Each of
the newly created districts will have its own local school board. The newly constituted
districts of up to 5,000 students are small enough to provide the children
personal attention but sufficiently large to provide all the options needed
in a modern, effective school district. As there are shifts in population
these districts may vary in size but should not be allowed to grow beyond
5,000. The newly constituted
local districts will not be administered by superintendents and the
inevitable staffs that build up around superintendents’ offices, but by a
school principal chosen by his/her peers on a limited term basis. Since there
will be only twelve or so schools in each district the local school boards
will be able to hold school principals directly and clearly accountability
for the quality of teaching and learning in every school. The principal who
serves as the local “superintendent” should be viewed as a temporary
assignment rotated among the local district’s principals. The newly constituted
districts should have two clear accountability lines: one fiscal and the
other educational. The fiscal oversight is through the Fiscal Manager who is
the deputy to the mayor. The educational oversight is through local school
boards to the state department of education as is the case with all the surrounding
suburbs and townships. The currently powerless
urban parents and citizens must have the same rights and immediate contacts
with their schools as other citizens in the state. Aside from achieving
these essential goals, the nature of each state’s decentralization statute
should vary and be sufficiently flexible to account for local conditions. A Note on A Critical
Omission in This Advocacy It will be readily noted
by those familiar with failing urban school districts as well as by parents,
business and community constituencies with experience in dealing with urban
districts that effective urban schools in failing districts inevitable are
led by outstanding principals. In future it will be necessary to recognize
that an effective urban principal in a failing school district is not a
building manager and more than an instructional leader. S/he is the leader of
a non-profit community organization. The small number of outstanding
principals that can be readily identified in every failing district are not
products of the training institutions where they took courses to earn their
state licenses, nor are they products of the school systems where they worked
their way up as teachers and assistant principals. They are atypical
mavericks who became effective school leaders in spite of not because of
their training and previous school positions. While school districts all over
In every failing urban
district it is still typical for the school boards and superintendents to
claim their highest priority is getting the very best school leaders they
possibly can. They then limit their candidate pools to the same old
populations of in-house people who have ostensibly been prepared by
functioning as assistant principals and completing a principal’s
certification program. These two criteria ensure that most of their principal
appointments will yield a continuous crop of failure principals. The principals who are
most likely to succeed in failing urban school districts are currently
heading community agencies, small businesses, governmental agencies, in the
military and working successfully at a wide variety of jobs and careers
outside of public education. Because bringing these new populations into
school leadership roles is still a long term rather than a near future trend
it is regretfully omitted from this analysis. The focus here is on the
changes that can be made near term which will stop the miseduation
of diverse children in poverty now. Who Will Benefit from
Decentralization? The three primary
benefits of decentralizing dysfunctional urban school district bureaucracies
will be stopping the massive miseducation and
raising the quality of the urban schools to those typical in the state;
giving urban parents and communities the same level of control enjoyed
throughout the state; and demonstrating that if taxpayer funds are used in
responsible, accountable ways for their intended purposes that there are
sufficient funds currently in the system to educate all the children in urban
schools to high levels. The common arguments
against decentralization are that having all these small districts would
increase the bureaucracy and the costs, that many urban parents are
themselves dropouts and increasing their influence on the schools will not
improve them, and that many of the special services provided by the urban
schools will be lost to the children. These arguments are extremely weak and
readily answered. The suburbs and major towns of our states do not devote
over half of their school budgets to people who are ostensibly helping or
supervising the teachers and children. If the failing urban school district
is replaced by small districts which simply do not have the funds, the space,
or the parental support to hire these central office functionaries then none
will be hired. Neither the suburbs nor the small towns have cabinet officers,
department heads or any of the other numerous functionaries who earn over
$100,000 per year (plus fringe benefits) yet they have children who learn
more. By making the new districts similar in size to existing school
districts there will be neither the positions nor the funds to expend on an
army of central office functionaries. The bureaucracy will not grow because
there will be none. The argument that urban
parents cannot run their local schools is blatantly racist. The The final argument that
the bureaucrats will make against decentralization will be that many valuable
services will be lost. But why should surrounding school districts (all of
which have wealthier people than the city) be able to contract with the urban
public schools to take their special education students rather than integrate
and include these students into their own schools as the law intends they do?
Why should surrounding schools (including private schools) expect the urban
public schools to provide free transportation for many of their students? The
answer to these and many other questions is always the same: “You have is a
big district that has all these services and we are just a small district.”
This statement is actually in code and is really saying: “The taxpayers in
our small district have not provided funds for these services and would
protest or take our jobs if we asked them for funds for these purposes, while
the taxpayers in your city have no notion that they are even providing these
services and couldn’t do anything about stopping them if they found out.”
Suburbs of wealthy families use this small vs. big rationalization to get the
poor families of the city to support services they themselves should be
providing. Simply put, the small towns and suburbs use their neighboring
large districts as fiscal fools. This is similar to the strategy used in my
state when the state representatives of 72 counties decided that four urban
counties in southeastern Finally, the notion that
any service provided by the public schools of a major urban district is
saving money because it is done for a larger group is simply not supported by
the facts. The best example of this fable are the after school reading and
tutoring programs. In my city the YMCA has for decades offered after school
reading tutoring that is more effective and reaches three times as many
students at a small fraction of the cost of the tutoring offered by the
Milwaukee Public Schools. The argument that this failed district which has miseducated over a million children and continues to miseducate over 100,000 annually should be kept intact
because it offers valuable services which would not otherwise be available is
untrue and misleading. It would be like looking at a town in Alabama where
the Monsanto Chemical Co. has poisoned the air, the ground and the water with
carcinogens that are killing the residents and saying, “Yes, but Monsanto
offers day care services.” At what cost are the day care services offered and
how about the local community organizations that offer more and better day
care at one-third of the public school costs? A final caveat is in
order. It is reasonable and practical to conclude that the newly created
decentralized districts will provide higher quality education than the single
failing district within the existing budget and within the current state
statutes for calculating increases to this budget. The usual argument that
children in poverty need more funds, that special education students need
more funds and that bilingual children need more funds are correct but in
this case are unnecessary. These extra funds can all come from the funds
released by discontinuing a dysfunctional bureaucracy skimming more than half
(in some cases two-thirds) of its budget before allocating funds to the
schools. At the same time, the state system for funding all the schools in
the state is in need of rethinking and repair. Currently some districts
invest twice as much as others in the schooling of their children. The
property tax rate in a property poor district can be five times higher than
in a property wealthy low tax district. But while the creation of a more
equitable funding system for the entire state is going on there need be no
delay in moving ahead to save the educational lives of those currently being miseducated. In my city the funds in the current public
school system budget and the funds that would accrue annually under the
existing state funding system, would be sufficient to significantly increase
the quality of schooling offered all children in the newly created school
districts. Appendix A. Sample
Elements to be Included in a State Statute for Decentralizing Its Urban
School Districts The legislature of the
State of __(state name)_ will approve an education bill directed specifically
at stopping the irreparable harm being done to children in the (city name) at
great cost to themselves, their families, to the taxpayers and to the general
society. This legislation will
have three goals: To achieve these purposes
the legislation proposed will include but not be limited to the following
elements: Educational Management The administration of the
schools in each of the newly created districts will be subject to the same
rules and regulations as the other school districts in the State of (state
name) . Each of these districts will be comparable in size to surrounding
suburban and major town school districts. The essential difference will be
the maintenance of the City of (name of city) as the tax base unit for
funding these districts. The legislation will create a City of (name of city)
School Office led by a Fiscal Manager and up to 3 FTE’s. This skeleton office
will replace the current city school system which has over half of its
employees who do not work directly with children in schools. The City of
__(name of city) School Office will be a pass-through of funds from the state
to insure that all funds go directly to schools and are not diverted for the
maintenance and growth of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Following are some of
the elements which will be included in this legislation. Organization and
Governance 1. The __(name of
city)__Public Schools will be discontinued as an entity responsible for the
administration of public schools in the city of __(name of city)__. 2.The
public schools of the _( name of city)__will be decentralized into ___X____
districts not to exceed 5,000 students in each. These districts will be
limited to high schools of no more than 800 students and elementary schools
(K-8) of 300 or fewer students. There will be no middle schools in these
districts. 3. The __(name of city)
will remain as the tax base unit for the all the newly constituted public
school districts educating children in the __(name of city)__. 4. The newly created
school districts will be accountable to a Fiscal Manager appointed by the
Mayor of __(name of city)__ for budget purposes and directly to the State of
__(name of state)__ for all educational purposes. 5. Each of the districts
will have a five person school board elected by the parents and community every
four years. 6. There will be no
superintendents in any of these districts. The school principals in each of
the districts will select a chairperson on an annual basis to serve as the
administrative representative to the school board. Fiscal Management 7. The Mayor (s) of the
__(name of city)__ will appoint the Fiscal Manager for the City of (name of
city)__ Public School District to oversee the use of all revenues generated
from the state and local tax base as well as from federal grants awarded on a
district basis. Essentially, this individual’s duties will be to ensure that
all public funds intended for the education of __(name of city) students go
directly and only to individual schools and not to perform any functions in
support of all the schools or to any individuals not working in a specific
school. 8. The Fiscal Manager of
the __(name of city)__ 9. Appeals regarding the
Fiscal Manager’s allocation of funds to school districts will be made
directly from the local school boards to the Office of the Mayor. 10. The salary of the
Fiscal Manager will be limited to the salary of the highest paid teacher in
any of the districts in the City of __(name of city)__ plus two additional
months for summer. This would make the Fiscal Manager’s salary less than many
current superintendents in suburbs and major towns and substantially less
than the current salary of the urban superintendent. There will be no perks
or additions of any kind which can be made to this salary. 11. The Fiscal Manager’s
term will be limited to a maximum of four years. S/he will be subject to
annual reviews of the Mayor. 12.The Fiscal Manager
will be limited to no more than 3 FTE’s paid for with public funds. The job
descriptions of these individuals will be up to the Fiscal Manager. S/he will
have the discretion of contracting for services using the equivalent of these
salaries. 13. Annual increases to
the budget of the Fiscal Manager will be made according to all existing state
laws for funding the current __(name of city)__ Public School System. 14. Because of the
intense pressure on the Fiscal Manager for additional funds from the newly
created school districts who have been conditioned to depend on a centralized
bureaucracy, it can be anticipated that the Fiscal Manager’s annual budget is
likely to request substantial increases. This legislation will make it clear
that such special budget requests can never exceed 1% of the total budget for
all the school districts in the City of (name of city)_. 15. All requests for
exceptions or additions to the annual budget must be made by the Fiscal
Manager to the Mayor or the __(name of city)__ or to the appropriate state
agency overseeing funds for particular purposes. 16. The City of __(name
of city)__ will audit the Fiscal Manager annually and prepare a report to the
Mayor. This report will include whatever the city auditors and the Mayor deem
to be appropriate but must include the following: The amount of federal,
state and private grants which the Fiscal Manager’s office has received and
their dispersal to the school districts. The annual amount behind
each child in each of the newly constituted districts so that judgments about
equity among the districts can be readily ascertained. The annual amounts behind
high school students vs. elementary students in each of the districts. The funds received from
all sources for exceptional education students in each of the districts. The amounts of any grants
or donations received in each of the districts. The specific districts
which overspent and under-spent their annual budgets. 17. The total budget of
the Fiscal Manager for dispersal to all the districts will increase annually
according to all state laws and funding formulas currently in place. These boards will have
all the powers and duties commonly associated with local school boards. They
will be governed by all the current laws of the State of __(name of state)__.
In addition to current statutes the legislation establishing the new
districts will include the following modifications or emphases. 18. Each school district
will have its own school board to set policy for the district. Each board
will be composed of five parents, caregivers or residents of the community
served by the schools in the district. 19. School board members
will be elected for four year terms by vote of all residents of the community
and parents/caregivers of children who attend the district schools. 20. School board members
will receive $100 for attending meetings not to exceed 25 meetings in any
calendar year. All other meetings or duties will be their voluntary.
contributions. School Board members will not be employees of the district and
will receive no health, retirement or other benefits or perks. This includes borrowing
school equipment, using school facilities for non-school purposes, using
school transportation for personal reasons, or receiving any materials or
equipment which the district is discarding. 21. School board members
will recuse themselves from voting on any issue
that involves the hiring, contracting or providing of paid services by the
district to any family member, employer of a board member or a school board
member’s family, or any company or agency in which the member has an
interest. 22. All costs related to
the school boards will be paid by the local districts. 23.School board
meetings shall be subject to all the laws of the State related to open
meetings, affirmative action and maintaining public access to documents and
reports. 24. School boards will
set their own meeting times and length of meetings. No meeting shall continue
after 11:00 p.m. All meetings shall take place in a school building or other
public building in the community with sufficient notice so that parents and
community may attend. 25. Districts will
provide school board members with a physical space that includes computers,
telephones, immediate access to a copier and fax, and access of up to 20 hrs
per week of clerical assistance. 26. With the exception of
#25 preceding, district school boards will have no employees of their own. District Superintendents 27. None of the newly
constituted districts will have a superintendent. Central Office Structure 28. None of the newly
constituted districts will have a central office School Principals in the
Newly Constituted Districts 29. The role of the
principal will not be defined as a building manager. The role of school
principals in all the districts will be defined as an administrator of a
non-profit community based organization. This is to recognize the role of the
school administrator as an individual who is not only an instructional leader
but a leader of his/her local community. The need to relate to the diverse
constituencies in the community, to raise additional funds than those that
are allocated in the regular budget, to make provision for health and human
services, to make provisions for after school, evening and summer programs
are all critically important parts of this leadership position. 33. The principals’
salaries will not exceed 1.1 times the highest teacher salary in his/her
district plus two additional months and will be set by the school board. 34. The annual evaluation
criteria of principals will be set by their school boards but must include
the following criteria: achievement scores for all mandated tests; the number
of students in their schools not taking the tests; attendance rates for
teachers and students; annual summaries of suspensions, expulsions and
dropouts; evaluations of all newly hired teachers which include achievement
data of their students; an evaluation of the principal by the teachers in
his/her school; and a review of the principal’s effectiveness in involving
the community in the life of the school. 35. Principals’ time
allowed out-of-their school districts will be limited to ten days per year if
approved by the school board. Professional meetings out of the district but
within the city, sick days and vacation will not be counted. 36. Support for
principals attendance at professional meetings will come from the principal’s
school budget and be part of his/her annual report to the school board. 37. Principals will not
use any portion of their school budgets for consultants, speakers,
memberships of any kind, subscriptions, or for purposes not directly related
to the teaching and learning of students in their schools. Private and grant
funds may be solicited for purposes deemed appropriate by the principal. Teachers and Teacher
Representation 38. Teachers in specific
__(name of city)__ Public Schools who wish to continue teaching in them after
decentralization will be able to do so. 39. The current salary
schedule and benefits will remain in effect in the newly constituted
districts. 40. New teachers and
teachers who wish to transfer will be hired in each of the school districts
according to procedures established in those districts and approved by their
local school boards. 41. The tenure rights of
veteran teachers will be continued in the newly constituted districts and
extended to new teachers using the current criteria in place. 42. The salary and
benefits of teachers in all the newly created districts will continue to be
negotiated annually by the __(name of city)__ Teacher Education Association
with the Fiscal Manager of the City of __(name of city)__ Public School
District and approved by the Mayor. 43. There will be no
residency requirement for teachers to live in the districts in which they
teach or in the City of __(name of city)__. 44. One teachers salary
schedule shall pertain to all professional staff in the schools. Guidance
counselors, librarians, reading and all subject matter specialists, assistant
principals, department heads, and any other professional educators employed
in the district, will be covered by the same salary schedule as the classroom
teachers. The concept that one is “promoted” by leaving the classroom or that
those who are not responsible for teaching classes of children are higher
status, or more valuable than the teachers is counterproductive and must be
discontinued. 45. The salaries of school office staff, custodians and other
school employees will be negotiated by representatives of their unions with
the Fiscal Manager of the City of __(name of city)__ Public School District
and approved by the Mayor. Buildings and Other
Physical Assets 46. As part of the
decentralization process all buildings and properties of the __(name of
city)__ Public Schools now housing central office people, administrators,
school board members or any other employees of the district will be rebuilt
as schools or sold. The Fiscal Managers recommendations will be made in the
first calendar year of the decentralization process and approved by the
Mayor. There will be no physical space retained that might be misconstrued as
a central office. 47. Any radio stations,
television channels, farms, camping sites, acreage and all other physical
property including warehouses, storage facilities, and the contents thereof
currently owned by the district will be retained or sold upon recommendation
of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor. 48. All transportation
vehicles, repair facilities and related equipment will be sold or retained
upon recommendation of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor. 49. Upon
decentralization it will be within the purview of the Fiscal Manager to
recommend to the Mayor that any current asset (including copyrights) of the
__(name of city)__ Public Schools be retained or sold. The Redistricting Process 50. The panel that
establishes the new districts will be appointed by the Mayor of the City of__
(name of city)__. 51. The panel will have a
maximum of nine months to specify the new districts including the school
buildings and physical district boundaries. 52. The initial
decentralization plan will be approved by both houses of the state
legislature. If disapproved the legislature will have three months to approve
a substitute plan. 53. Subsequent
redistricting as populations shifts occur in the city will be made upon
recommendation of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor of the City of __name of
city_. 54. Failing schools will
also require redistricting to maintain maximum size of districts and to
provide choices for parents. The Fiscal Manager will make these
recommendations to the Mayor. Accountability for Public
Education in the City of __(name of city)__. 55.The Mayor through his/her
appointed Fiscal Manager will be accountable for all public funds related to
schooling in the city of __(name of city)__. 56.Just as in the rest of
__(name of state)__, the local school boards will be accountable for the
educational programs of the newly constituted district schools. 57.Local principals will
report to their local school boards through their Principal Chairperson. SELECTED REFERENCES Boe, E.E., Corwin, R.G.(1973)
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Do? Forum For the Comments welcomed through
email or post on our Bulletin Board All Rights Reserved ©
2002 EducationNews.org my city the district
charters special schools serving disruptors and other specific populations.
The number of schools which benefit by being chartered by the district is now
nineteen. 13. Federal, state and
local elected officials. Candidates running for office at all levels use
educational reform issues related to urban schools for political purposes. It
is no longer possible to be elected without an educational platform and these
inevitably focus on problems that are worst in the urban districts.
Unfortunately these plans inevitably enhance the bureaucracy not the children
and make things even worse when enacted. 14. School board members.
In many cities as well as in my own, school board members receive salaries,
full health benefits and numerous other perks. Many boards also have their
own research staffs since they don’t trust the reports of their own central
office people and superintendents. 15. Superintendents.
Inflated salaries and perks are common. It is typical for urban boards to buy
out contracts of failed superintendents who then take jobs in other districts
and collect salary checks from their former as well as from their current
employers. 16. Media. If 17. Professional
organizations. The Great Cities Council, its Director and staff are just one
organization with a budget in the millions. There are countless other
professional organizations whose existence depends on its urban school
district constituency. 18. The “helping”
professions and those who train them. There are several professions involving
health and human service workers who “serve” the poor in our cities and
schools. Small town and suburban school districts do not employ or contract
with social workers, nurses and other health professionals, community agencies,
child care professionals and others to the same extent as the major urban
districts if at all. All these constituencies have careers because the urban
bureaucracies exist. The community colleges and universities which train and
certify this wide variety of individuals are also beneficiaries. 19. The test
manufacturers have a billion dollar industry which continues to grow. This
industry supports a range of professionals with advanced university training. 20. Employees of the Victims of the Failed Why Do the Victims
Support These Following are some of the
reasons the victims continue to support systems that are clearly
dysfunctional bureaucracies. Strange as it may seem,
most urban parents and caregivers still trust the system. They see many
school people who are people of color, who may have grown up in their
neighborhood or even attended the very same schools that their children now
attend. Latinos may find a community person in the school who speaks Spanish
and “helps” them. African Americans see people of color in important
positions. Many parents and
caregivers work in the school district or have family members who work in the
district. They have a direct financial stake in the well being of the
district. In my city and in many others the school district is the employer
of more minorities than any business or governmental agency in the city.
These parents and caregivers are cynically exploited by systems that know if
they hire minorities these employees will help protect the entire system from
significant change. Districts in effect trade off jobs to people in poverty
or to college graduates of color who experience discrimination in the private
sector as a strategy for making parents and community think twice about
attacking the district. Many parents and
caregivers were themselves victims of miseducation.
With no model of what a successful education would look like they have an
insufficient basis for understanding how the system is damaging their
children. Low income people of
color cannot find affordable housing in suburbs or the transportation and
jobs needed to live in small towns. Their only choice is to keep trying to
improve urban districts no matter how impossible they find the task. The
parents and caregivers who have grievances have no chance against the
bureaucracy, even if they organize. They cannot win any battles against these
large school district organizations any more than they can improve their
garbage collection, health care, or the services of any other branch of local
government. In my city the school district maintains one high school with an
18% graduation rate and claims it is the parents who will not let the school
be closed. The parents and
caregivers are low income people whose major time and energy must be devoted
to earning a living. It is typical for individuals to work long hours or hold
several part time jobs. They simply don’t have the time or energy to monitor
the district’s policies and procedures. In some cases parents and
caregivers are bribed with government grants. Several categories of special
education make parents eligible for monthly checks once they agree to have
their children labeled. Parents and caregivers
are manipulated, directly lied to, or controlled. The pretense is that they
are being given voice when in reality their ideas are not heard and their
stated choices are simply not delivered. In my city in 2002 there were 64
schools defined as failing according to the Leave No Child Behind
legislation. The law required that 45,000 parents and caregivers be informed
by letter that they were entitled by federal law to select new schools and
move their children out of the failing schools to new ones. When the delays
and procedures engaged in by the local district system were completed, only
163 of the 45,000 parents were able to transfer their children to other
schools. Whether these were actually transfers to “successful” schools has
not been documented. Many parents and
caregivers may have accurate insights regarding how the system is failing
their children but approach it as they would the lottery. There are enough
one-in-a-thousand examples of a youngster who does get to college and becomes
a lawyer or a banker; or an athlete who gets a scholarship; or a teenager who
is adopted by a local business and is trained for a career. These rare
exceptions are enough to keep hope alive no matter how great the odds are
against most children. Many parents and
caregivers are simply used by the school. They are involved as classroom
helpers, school volunteers, parent assistants on field trips and in other
unpaid capacities. This leads many of them to feel involved and useful. It
also provides them with some first-hand experience seeing many teachers who
do care and who do work very hard. Finally and most
pernicious are the influences exerted on parents and caregivers by community
leaders, religious leaders, educational leaders, the media and the general
society to regard the miseducation of the district
as their fault and the fault of their children. In effect, the school
district blames the victims by convincing them that the school district is
doing the best it can to educate children lacking in the appropriate life
experiences, raised by inadequate parents in chaotic communities. While this
would be an amazing and unbelievable explanation if a school district tried
to offer it to non-urban populations, it is not only offered but accepted by
many diverse, low income parents and caregivers who frequently feel
inadequate and helpless in protecting their children from negative
influences. While it is easy to understand the motivation of the urban
districts to blame their failures on the victims of their miseducation
it is more difficult to comprehend why so many of the victims agree with and
support the district’s explanation of failure. It is only when we understand
that parents and caregivers are under a constant barrage from every source of
information telling them that if there were less violence, drugs, unstable
families, gangs and community instability then their children would do better
in school. The dysfunctional bureaucracy is extremely effective at evading
accountability and convincing parents that miseducation
is their own fault. Distributing Scarce
Resources In our society, families
in the top 25% in income send 86% of their children to college while families
in the bottom 20% send 4% of their children to college. But there are other
gaps that must be addressed which also contribute to the achievement gap:
language development, early childhood experience, health care, parent
education, school size, and class size. While the majority of the 14 million
children in poverty are white, there are disproportionately high numbers of
African American and Latino children represented. The diverse children in
urban poverty represent about half of these 14 million. The recognition that
selected constituencies derive more benefits than others is not new or
strange in American society. Our basic assumption is that in a free society
some will inevitably fare better than others. We live with the unequal
distribution of goods and services every day of our lives. Inevitably the
goods that are most desired and the services that are most vital are a scarce
resource. There is never enough of what is most wanted or needed to go
around. We solve this problem of “Who gets what?” by raising costs. If, for
example, the scarce resource to be distributed is a limited number of
downtown parking spaces then the parking fees on lots and in garages increase
until only those who can pay for the limited spaces are able to park. We
satisfy our sense of fairness by providing the public equal access to a
limited number of metered spaces on a first come first serve basis but these
spaces are less conveniently located, metered by the hour and ticketed for
overtime lapses. We have mollified both the god of individual initiative by
providing those with the means to have access to highly desirable limited
parking and the god of equity and access by providing the public with the
opportunity to compete for public parking. We have learned to accept this
dual process as the best way to distribute a scarce resource. Our commonly
held value is that those who are paying a great deal should be able to park. As we mature we become
cognizant of more than how material goods are distributed. The distribution
of many services affecting our day-to-day existence and futures are
recognized as vital. Access to health care, legal services, insurance
coverage, police and fire protection, transportation, housing and educational
services come to the foreground of our consciousness. Various levels of
government take responsibility for providing these services and everyone is
deemed to be entitled to these basic services. Frequently, we go even further
and espouse the goal that everyone is entitled to “high quality” services in
these and other vital areas. As politicians spend their careers reiterating
such lofty promises it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile reality
and rhetoric. Our stated values of equity and access for all don’t match the
actual availability and distribution of services declared to be entitlements
for all at a level of “high quality”. For example, in health care high
quality refers to having the most qualified doctors in the best hospitals
utilizing the latest treatments on a personal and thorough basis. This
definition of high quality makes it clear that health care is a scarce
resource since there is a limited number of the best doctors, treatments and
services available. As in the more simple parking example, the problem of how
to distribute top quality health care is solved by enabling those who can pay
the highest, escalating costs to secure the service. Those who can pay less
receive basic but something less than the highest quality care. The 43
million without health insurance have equal access to compete for the health
services provided by emergency rooms and other public services. As a matter
of life and death, health care is infinitely more important than parking so
there is more political activity and public discourse about its availability.
But when the talk about everyone being entitled to high quality or even basic
health care has subsided, the actual distribution of scarce health care
services is determined on the basis of who can pay for them. In spite of the
fact that some health care professionals contribute pro bono services, the
government provides subsidies and the private sector makes substantial
contributions, the correlation between ability to pay and access to high
quality service is high and not due to chance: the more one can pay the
greater the likelihood that one’s health care will increase in quality. Many
typically pay more than half of their total assets in their last year of life
just to secure even basic health services. The fact that there is
always a finite amount of the highest quality of any service is what makes it
a scarce resource. Access to scarce high quality resources is controlled by
three factors: 1) awareness that the service or opportunity exists, 2)
knowledge of the method (set of steps, procedures, hurdles) for securing the
service and 3) sufficient resources for buying the service. Nowhere is this
three step process for distributing high quality service more assiduously
followed than in deciding who has access to high quality education. In the
case of public education what is purchased is the location of the family’s
housing. Education as a Personal
Good The achievement gap is
not an aberration of American society nor is it an unintended consequence.
Quite the contrary. It reflects the will of the overwhelming majority of
Americans who believe that education is a personal not a common good and that
the highest quality education is a scarce resource. Schooling is the means we
use to produce winners and losers. Who gets into the prestigious colleges is
the critical question at the top achievers’ level. Who goes to the other
colleges or to post secondary institutions reflects the competition at the
next levels down. Who gets training for a decent job or any job at all is the
next level and so on. When we get to the poor and diverse children in urban
schools the lofty mission of advanced knowledge, citizenship and
self-actualization we want for our children has been narrowed down to “get a
job and stay out of jail.” At this lowest level there is no longer any
competition for a future of any substantial value. This level is miseducation and the future “opportunities” it leads to
are far from a scarce resource. School systems state
goals as universals but their actual work is sorting students not equalizing
their opportunities to learn. Failing public schools in urban districts
function in ways that ensure that diverse children in poverty will be kept in
the bottom half on standardized tests of school achievement. They function as
custodial institutions rather than as places where learning is the primary
activity. The “pedagogy” offered in these “schools” is a set of cultural
rituals that bears no resemblance whatever to the knowledge base in teaching
and learning. As in other exploitative situations, most of the parents of the
14 million diverse children in poverty in the 120 largest school districts
and in poor rural areas honestly believe that their schools are treating
their children fairly. In my own city parents and community tolerate a high
school which had an 18 percent graduate last year in a district that has an
overall 36 percent high school graduation rate for African Americans -and
this is a higher rate than in several other urban districts. Maintaining and
supporting failure in our urban school districts over decades cannot be
attributed to chance. Typically, scholars writing in the field of school
change assume that the school functionaries maintaining these urban districts
miseducating the bottom half are well intentioned;
they just don’t have sufficient knowledge and understanding. Even the most
scholarly analysts of why school reform has failed stop short of attributing
motive and assume that school functionaries are benign and caring individuals
who just need to know more and that once they do they will then act more
wisely. But objective analysts observing the realities of life in urban
schools must conclude otherwise. The long-term institutionalization of
failure for diverse children in poverty can only be the result of systematic
design and purposeful, committed resistance to change. For over half a
century failed urban school districts and teacher education efforts directed
at improving urban teaching, have spent billions of dollars from federal and
private sources specifically directed at equalizing the quality of the
schooling offered diverse children in urban poverty. While soliciting and
accepting the funds, urban school districts have systematically pursued
policies and practices which have effectively withstood serious change
efforts. I have reports and analysis of major urban school districts dating
from the 1960’s which describe the very same problems and advocate the very
same solutions as analyses made of these districts after 2000. The fact is
that the change efforts have not been as effective as the urban districts’
blocking strategies and that as urban schools continue to worsen the
achievement gap has become solidified, predictable and worst of all…generally
accepted as if a law of nature. Part III. No One to
Blame: Institutionalizing the Miseducation of
Diverse Children in Urban Poverty Whenever any serious,
objective, data-based analysis of the urban schools is presented there is
common agreement that the systems are indeed failing. School people cannot
mount a credible defense against the mountain of evidence revealing students’
low achievement, the achievement gap with advantaged students, the dropout/pushout rate, the attendance/truancy rate, the
suspension/expulsion rate, teacher turnover, the graduation rate, or the low
number of “successful” graduates who never move into the world of work or
higher education. Given the stated purposes of public education, these
systems are readily shown to be massive failures on the basis of any criteria
using any data sets. How then can these failed systems resist the onslaught
of data supporting their failure and do so effectively in so many different
cities over such an extended period? The answer does not lie in understanding
why the victims support these failing systems since the victims have little
or no power over these organizations and their supporting institutions. The
answer lies in the power of the beneficiaries who derive unearned privileges
from maintaining the present systems. A secondary explanation is in the naïve
behaviors of the would-be change agents and transformers who do research,
publish reports and then present their findings to the very beneficiaries of
the failed systems-as if the school boards and the functionaries
administrating these failing school district systems are open minded, consumers
eagerly waiting to be informed of still another problem they should be
solving. In truth, the problems and criticisms which may be new to the
critics and the researchers are already much better known to the school
people who not only understand these problems from personal experience but
are in possession of substantially more data than they have allowed the
critics to see regarding the extent of their failures. The strategy used by
school people to counter any serious criticism is to begin by admitting to
the validity of the data but then deflecting critics’ calls for stopping
their malpractice into discussions of precisely how the critics would solve
these problems in the context of the existing school district’s system. The
assumption they lead critics into making is that the only option for those
who claim to support public education is to support the existing school
district systems. The content of any criticisms showing that specific system
practices are seriously damaging the children is quickly lost. The focus is
shifted from the criticisms to the critic’s advocacy for changing the
district bureaucracy given the complexities of the system’s administrative
structures, the multiple funding mechanisms, the state and federal mandates,
the system’s contractual obligations, and the body of state laws giving the
district the responsibility for these functions. Using this ploy school
people shift the onus for solving the problems raised in any research report
from themselves to the critics. Whatever critics now propose as remedies must
meet two conditions: they must be solutions that will work given the
continued existence of the present school district; and they must be
practical and feasible. And since the school district employees and their
representatives know these systems best they make themselves the arbiters of
whether the critics’ solutions are realistic and will work. School people’s
“logic” now dominates the interchange. If the critic doesn’t have solutions
that the school people approve of his/her diagnosis of the problem is
“proven” incorrect. In these forums, dialogues and debates, the very
constituencies that cause and benefit from the school district’s failures are
able to preserve and protect their systems from change by shifting the focus
from their miseducation of children to analyses of
the inadequacies in critics’ plans for redesigning their dysfunctional
bureaucracies. Inevitably, critics fall
into the trap and begin presenting ideas for how to solve the problems they
have raised within the current school systems forgetting or not understanding
that it is the present systems that have caused the problems. The
constituencies representing the dysfunctional bureaucracy, with the help of
other beneficiaries of the failing school district, now become the
questioners and judges of the critic’s solutions for changing the system. One
by one the critics’ suggestions are shown by the beneficiaries of
dysfunctional bureaucracy to be unworkable within the legal, financial and
contractual restraints of the present system. What may have begun with some
critic presenting some valid data regarding a system practice or policy that
should be immediately stopped concludes with the critics on the defensive
suggesting solutions that the school people show are infeasible. If the
critics are local business leaders the school people even get them to agree
that “since we all support public education in this city we should be working
together.” If the critics are educational experts the school people invite
them to serve on school system committees to explore solutions to the
problems they have raised, or they hire them outright as consultants. These
interactions conclude with the critics being co-opted into contributing human
and financial resources to some initiative which the school people then use
to enhance the dysfunctional bureaucracy rather than solve the particular
problem of miseducation that started the
interaction in the first place. The critics lose in two ways: their valid
criticisms will never lead to any action that will stop the miseducation of the children and they have been finessed
into becoming active collaborators of a pernicious system. The “logic” under girding
this twisted process is interesting. Imagine a doctor sharing data with a
patient which indicates that the patient is dying of cancer. Since the doctor
has neither a cure that he can guarantee nor even any treatment that the
patient finds amenable, the patient has “proven” that the doctor’s diagnosis
cannot possibly be valid. One reason this bizarre non-sequitur is repeated
endlessly in every city is that the critics are amateur change agents and
transformers pursuing real jobs and demanding careers. They can only function
as part-time, temporary change agents. School people and the other
beneficiaries of district failure however all work full time at protecting
their systems, their sinecures and their benefits. In all of these cities
the local media handle criticism of their local dysfunctional school
bureaucracy in precisely the same way using the same “logic.” For example, a
critic may come to my city and make a presentation which shows that in our
local school system the number of children being labeled with some
handicapping condition is 18% compared to 12% nationally and that it is not
reasonable to believe that a city has a special education population of 18%.
Would the suburban population around the city support the labeling of more
than one out of every six of their children as abnormal in some way as a
reasonable educational activity? He indicates further that nationally there
are 3.8 million boys but “only” 1.9 million girls being given some special
education label. There is also a significantly greater number of African
American males in this population. In some cities e.g. The media eagerly report
these data because it is in the nature of news that the more negative it is
the more likely the reporter can get his story and byline on page one. But
media people are also beneficiaries of the failed school system. Once they
have secured their negative headlines they quickly lapse into the very same
follow-up questions and “logic” used by school people as blocking strategies.
They shift the onus and accountability from system functionaries who should
immediately stop the inaccurate labeling and quickly come up with a valid
procedure that doesn’t harm children, to the critic’s solutions for changing
the school district system. The media ask the critic questions such as the
following: “Are you saying the district is violating federal and state laws
in identifying the handicapped? Are you saying that all these children should
be retested by people who are not district employees? Which tests should be
used? Who should pay for this massive retesting of 18,000 students? In your
plan who will bear the liability for making restitution to the children and
their families for the damages related to having been incorrectly labeled?”
The critic may have begun with a valid point: i.e. the procedures for
evaluating children in this district are producing biased results in
determining who is normal and there is a likelihood, greater than can be
attributed to chance, that this district is seriously mislabeling and
therefore miseducating large numbers of children,
particularly African American males. The media have neutralized the critic by
using school people’s “logic”. If the critic has no total and complete
solution for altering the mislabeling practices (assuming the present
district system must be continued and assuming that the functionaries within
the present system must find his solutions amenable), then his criticism has
been “proven” to be invalid. In this way, when critics who are focused on
improving the schooling offered diverse children in poverty come up against
school people and others who benefit from protecting existing school systems,
they are inevitably made to look unprepared and unrealistic. The poor critic with
expertise in the testing of cognitive disabilities is no match for school
people who can readily show that he doesn’t know how to reorganize the
district and he has no idea of all the interlocking bureaucracies outside the
district which would also have to be changed in order to stop the miseducation of children within the district. The goals of the school
people and the other beneficiaries of failing districts is to make their
dysfunctional bureaucracies synonymous with support for public education and to
protect and enhance these systems. In this example what is not discussed is
the powerful, well endowed superstructure which under girds the failing
district’s special education structure. Continuing the same example, the
following are just a few of the trails that lead to the direct and indirect
beneficiaries: the recipients of the 350 million ( 2002 dollars) my district
annually receives given the great and increasing number of its special
students; the number of school psychologists and diagnostic teachers employed
to assess all these students (there are over 1,000 children waiting in the
pipeline to be tested and fully evaluated); the number of other school
personnel paid for by these funds; the amount of contracted services paid for
by the district with these funds; and the amount of additional federal, state
and private grants obtained to work with this inflated student population.
Other beneficiaries are the school people who claim to be raising student
achievement scores in particular schools and in the district as a whole when
in reality they are just increasing the number of children who will be
excused from taking achievement tests. The way achievement scores are
“raised” in many urban schools and districts is not by improving the learning
of children but by excusing an increasing number of students from taking the
tests. These passes are given to special education students, transfer
students not in the building for a sufficient time period and in some
districts, the principal has a ten percent quota for excusing any children
s/he deems inappropriate for testing. The indirect beneficiaries of this
system extend way beyond school boards and system functionaries. They include
the universities who provide the exceptional education training programs for
the district personnel right up through the doctoral level training of the
school psychologists. Other constituencies of beneficiaries include the
thousands of federal employees who write the guidelines and administer the
grant funds and the state employees who oversee these programs. There is
literally an army of lawyers employed by plaintiffs as well as by the
districts themselves who sue, try cases and settle issues related to the
treatment of special education students. An interaction that began with a
simple report on mislabeling special education students has now tapped into
roots that connect widely and deeply with a great number of interlocking
systems all built on the backs of the children being mislabeled. The naïve
critic has become an active accomplice in making him/herself look
ill-prepared for changing all these systems by the sophisticated bureaucrats’
questions and blocking strategies. To avoid this entrapment
those presenting criticisms of the existing district systems need to make
clear that they support public education but not the dysfunctional
bureaucracies which characterize the current school districts. (Assuming of
course the critic is not a potential beneficiary of the school system seeking
to be employed as a consultant, or seeking the district’s sign off on a grant
he is proposing, or seeking the district’s approval to access some data he
needs for some future study.) Critics need to emphasize there are multiple
ways to implement their suggestions with new forms of school organization
which differ markedly from those of existing school districts but that
designing these new districts is not the purpose of the particular report or
study. Critics need to emphasize that school people and other beneficiaries
of maintaining the present district systems must be held accountable for
immediately stopping miseducative practices or
resign. It is noteworthy that the
example used here of the failed special education system administered in the
urban districts is merely one of literally dozens that need immediate
attention if children are to be saved from irreparable miseducation.
This scenario of how districts deflect criticism and continue to grow their
dysfunctional bureaucracies can be repeated for other blatant systemic
failures. How are the curricula offered in the district developed and
evaluated? How are the mandated methods for teaching various subjects
determined? What is the district process for selecting, training and
evaluating teachers? What are the procedures for selecting, training and
evaluating principals? What is the district program for assessing student
learning and achievement in addition to mandated testing? How are central
office staff selected, evaluated and held accountable? How effective are the
mechanisms the system uses to control and manage the district budget? What is
the accountability system in place for those who exceed their budgets? What
is the process for tracking funds to ensure they are used for their intended
purposes? What research and evaluation is performed (and not allowed to be
performed) by the district? How effective is the program which allows parents
to select schools initially and to transfer their children out of failing
schools? How effective is the district’s suspension and expulsion policy?
What is the cost and effectiveness of the guidance personnel in the district?
What is the program in place related to the selection, training and
evaluation of safety personnel? How are paraprofessionals and teacher aides
selected, trained, used and evaluated? What are the costs and effectiveness
of the school transportation program? What is the quality and effectiveness
of the after school, tutoring and extra curricula activities supported by the
district? What is the impact of high stakes testing for middle school students
to enter high school? What happens to graduates of the system? In truth urban
school districts do not have the ability to answer any of these questions in
any meaningful way. And these are just a few of the necessary performance
areas which, when studied, would inevitably lead reasonable people who are
not beneficiaries of these district failures to see the multiple ways in
which children are damaged in irrevocable ways. Toward a Solution The preservation,
protection and enhancement of failing urban school districts is deeply
embedded in American society by the constituencies of beneficiaries who
derive either direct benefits or undeserved privilege as a result of these
failures. These constituencies cannot be attacked or even influenced by
direct change efforts since their benefits flow from established agencies of
federal and state government, effective state lobbies for maintaining present
forms of funding public education; the existing body of school law and court
cases, universities supported by massive funding mechanisms and certification
agencies, networks of professional organizations, and a plethora of vendors
and entrepreneurs who benefit from dealing with major urban districts. The
power of these institutions and power blocs derives from the fundamental
American value that education is a personal not a common good and the fact
that the eighty percent of the people who have no children in school believe
that they and their families derive great benefits and little risk from
maintaining the current system. The primary motive of most Americans is to
keep the present benefit structure intact and to control taxes, particularly
their real estate taxes. Whatever changes might be made to make urban
schooling more equitable for diverse children in poverty therefore will have
to be made within present funding structures and without imposing greater
costs on taxpayers no longer directly involved with schooling. This realistic
view of the possibilities for changing let alone transforming any of the major
dysfunctional school bureaucracies more accurately reflects the American
experience of the last half century than the naïve assumption that urban
school district functionaries want to stop their miseducation
of diverse children in poverty and are merely waiting for the presentation of
better research findings or more appeals to their sense of equity and
justice. The surest and most
reasonable change strategy therefore is not to appeal to the self interest of
those protecting or working in the present systems but to the self interest
of those who have financial and legal power over them. Calls for transforming
urban districts will inevitably elicit powerful and effective resistance
unless the appeals are to the public’s sense of maintaining not changing what
has always been done and this means replicating what seems to them to be
working in small towns and suburbs. This can be done in an honest and
straightforward manner since the taxpayers are currently paying enough to
have many more effective urban schools. There are two change goals which are
quickly realizable, which will have immediate impact on decreasing the miseducation in the urban districts and which will at the
same time support the traditions of American schooling. The first realizable
change that will have a significant impact on diverse children in poverty is
not only possible but is already in the process of impacting many urban
schools now. This involves selecting and preparing new populations of
teachers (Part IV.). The second change is also achievable and is as likely of
attainment as enacting any statute regarding urban schools would be in any
state legislature. This involves decentralizing the major urban districts
into districts comparable in size to middle size townships and suburbs. The benefits
of such a decentralization are discussed in Part V. Appendix A. contains a
draft of the elements that need to be included in such decentralization
legislation. These two changes meet the test of effective change strategies
in that they support the public goals of cost containment and maintain their
traditional views regarding local control of small school districts. Part IV. The Rationale
for Recruiting and Preparing Adults As Teachers of Diverse
Children in Urban Poverty The crisis in urban
school schools serving diverse children in poverty is worsening. The
persisting shortage of teachers who can be effective and who will remain in
urban poverty schools for more than brief periods is a major cause of this
crisis. The benefits of securing and preparing more effective teachers are
several: fewer children will be damaged, more children will learn more and if
teachers are placed as groups into failing schools these schools will be
turned around. At the same time it must be recognized that getting better teachers
and even turning failed individual schools into successful ones will not by
themselves transform the 120 failed urban school district bureaucracies
currently miseducating seven million diverse
children in poverty. Selecting new populations of teachers prepared in new
ways will provide more islands of success in failing districts. The belief
systems and behaviors of effective urban teachers make it clear that they are
focused on their students’ learning and development. They are driven to help
each youngster be as successful as possible. They do not go into or stay in
teaching because they want to function as educational change agents,
community organizers or system reformers. Their raison d etre
is their students first and last. It is also important to
understand how and why some teachers succeed in spite of the debilitating
working conditions created by failed urban school bureaucracies. These
organizations are not only likely to continue but worsen, creating even more
negative conditions which impinge on teachers’ work and children’s learning.
Indeed, there is a perverse irony here: as more effective teachers are
recruited, selected and prepared, the pressures to break up or have state
takeovers of failed urban districts decreases. A pernicious, debilitating
school bureaucracy is, in effect, made to look workable as it secures and
retains more teachers who literally drain and exhaust themselves in order to
function in spite of the systems in which they work. But while good teachers
can transform failed schools into successful ones, they cannot transform
entire failed urban districts. At the district level, issues dealing with
federal mandates, state laws, funding formulas, school board politics,
superintendent turnover, central office mismanagement and local culture must
be resolved before systemic change can occur. And because schools reflect
rather than change society it is highly unlikely these issues will ever be
dealt with in ways that transform failing urban school bureaucracies into
organizations that function in the interests of children, teachers and
parents. Nevertheless, recruiting, selecting and preparing the teachers
needed by diverse children in poverty should be vigorously pursued because
they can and will rescue individual children and transform individual
schools. (The section which follows outlines a specific state law that would
implement total district change.) Much can be done to get
the teachers needed. Too many decades have already passed and too many
youngsters have been driven out, miseducated or
been underdeveloped awaiting the change agents who would have us believe they
can transform urban schools districts and their debilitating impact on
teaching and learning. This is a critical issue because defenders of
traditional teacher education argue that before their excellent programs of
teacher education can be held accountable for their “fully qualified”
graduates to succeed and remain in poverty schools, the debilitating
conditions of work must be changed. This analysis argues that securing and
retaining effective teachers can and must happen now because the children
need them now and because the conditions in urban school districts are quite
likely to get even worse. Some Pertinent History of
Teacher Training Which Helps Explain the Current Shortage The first normal school
training teachers in During this period
itinerant male school masters moved about the country and were contracted by
communities to keep school for a few months. By the Civil War women were
replacing men as teachers for several reasons. They worked for less money
than men, they were regarded as more capable of morally training the young,
they needed gainful employment if they did not marry, and their role as a
purveyor of some basic skills and moral trainer was seen as the level of work
women were capable of doing. Between the Civil War and
WWI. the growth of normal schools burgeoned and became extended into post
secondary training programs of one and then two years. Between 1890 and 1920
30 million immigrants, mostly low income white Europeans, came to a Except for the western
states, every state opened normal schools and some states had over ten.
During the 20th century these normal schools were extended into four year
teachers colleges offering baccalaureate degrees. After WWII. they became
state colleges offering comprehensive majors not limited to teaching. The old
two year normal schools did not die easily and in The knowledge base in
teacher education developed after WWI. with the growth of educational
psychology and educational philosophy. But neither the psychologist and test
experts professionally descended from E. L. Thorndike or the progressives
seeking to implement the work of John Dewey ever recognized the existence of
African Americans, those in urban poverty, or people in any ethnic or class
groups not seeking to abandon their cultures and melt into the mainstream.
The progressives, philosophers and citizenship educators were clearly
defeated by the educational psychologists who claimed to have universal
constructs regarding the nature of child development, the nature of learning
and the nature of evaluation and research. These studies still comprise the
basic knowledge base for preparing teachers in colleges and universities
today. During this same period
the land grant institutions comprising the flag ship institutions of their
respective state’s public higher education systems also took on the responsibility
of preparing teachers. Today, with the exception of states whose higher
education was developed differently in response to later statehood, we still
see the pattern of states with major land grant institutions now deeply
involved in teacher education but even larger numbers of state colleges that
were formerly the single purpose teacher training institutions still
preparing most of the teachers. In recent years private institutions have
begun contributing some teachers to urban school districts but these tend to
be small numbers and not the major source of teachers for urban districts. A few very vital points
of this history are relevant to the current analysis and need to be kept in
mind in order to more clearly understand why traditional programs of teacher
education do not prepare enough teachers for diverse children in urban
poverty. Teacher training
institutions were purposely and systematically located across rural A great number of such
normal schools were needed to ensure that female teachers would not work
further than fifty miles from home, could easily return home for holidays and
summer work, and that the teachers being trained would likely be of the same
religious and ethnic background as the children they would be training in
morality and the abc’s. The notion that school
teaching is the appropriate work of young, single women has been imbedded in
American culture for more than 150 years. The perception that even married
women are less appropriate than single women has been reinforced during
periods of economic depression when married women in many urban districts
were laid off. There were very few public
normal schools started in urban areas. A few exceptions existed in There can be no question
that teacher training in The need for teachers who
could be effective with African Americans, other children of color, children
in urban poverty and non-European populations was never a consideration in
the development of the knowledge base in American teacher education. The knowledge base
purporting to explain normal child development, how normal children learn and
what constitutes normal behavior that is offered in traditional programs of
teacher education is derived in greatest measure from psychology where the
unit of study and analysis is the individual. Other ways of understanding and
explaining human behavior that reflect cultural constructs are still very
minimal additions to state requirements for approving university based
teacher education programs, e.g a course in
Multicultural Education. What is the import of
these trends? After one understands even a few of the basic facts surrounding
the development of teacher training in America it is extremely naïve to raise
questions such as why teacher education is not relevant to diverse children
in urban poverty, or why teacher education does not provide more teachers who
will be effective in teaching all children, or why teachers who complete
traditional programs of teacher education do not seem to be able to relate to
all children. It was never the intention of teacher education in Current Factors Affecting
the Teacher Shortage Between 2000 and 2010
app. 2,200.000 teachers representing more than half of The staggering percentage
of the newly certified choosing to not waste their own time or the children’s
time is a second reason for the shortage. This is actually a benefit since it
does not inflict potential quitters and failures on children in desperate
need of competent caring teachers. Newly certified graduates not taking jobs
is also a clear indication that the bearers of these licenses are being much
more honest about themselves and their lack of competence than those who
prepared them and who insist on pronouncing them “fully qualified”. In 1999
the SUNY system prepared 17,000 “fully qualified” teachers. The number who
applied for teaching positions in The third reason for the
teacher shortage is the number of beginners who take jobs in urban schools
but fail or leave. Using data from the The fourth major reason
for the teacher shortage in urban schools is the shortage of special
education teachers. This shortage is exacerbated by the fact that many
suburbs, small towns, parochial and private schools contract out the
education of their children with special needs to their nearby urban school
districts. This not only increases the teacher shortage in urban districts
but raises their costs. For example, in my state and in many others the state
makes a deduction in state aid to the urban district for every special
education class not taught by a fully certified teacher. No state imposes
such a fiscal penalty when a district employs an uncertified teacher in math,
science or other areas of continuing shortage. A fifth reason for the
teacher shortage results from greater entrance level career opportunities now
available to women outside of teaching at the time of college graduation.
Many however soon discover that they encounter glass ceilings and can only
advance in limited ways. After age 30 this population includes many who
decide to make more mature decisions than they did at age 20 about becoming
teachers of diverse children in poverty. The sixth reason for the
shortage deals with college graduates of color who have greater access into a
larger number of entry level career positions than in former times. As with
the population of women who perceive greater opportunity for careers of higher
status and greater financial reward than in teaching, this population also
frequently experiences glass ceilings after age thirty. African Americans
comprise fewer than 6% of all undergraduates in all fields and substantially
fewer who decide as youthful undergraduates to pursue traditional university
based programs of teacher education. But as career changers after aged
thirty, college graduates of color (particularly women) become a primary
source of teachers for diverse children in poverty in urban school districts. The continuing and
worsening teacher shortage must also take note of the special nature of
teaching fields such as math and science. Math and science teachers leave at
a higher rate than others; they tend to be men seeking better opportunities
in other fields. While the causes of the shortage in these areas has some
distinctive dimensions they are not discussed separately but are included in
the analysis of the entire problem. The solutions proposed for the general
shortage will also impact on these high need specializations. Given all these reasons
the question of why there is a desperate shortage of special education
teachers deserves further comment. The knowledge base purporting to explain
child development, how children learn and what constitutes normal behavior
that is offered in traditional programs of teacher education is derived from
the field of psychology where the unit of study and analysis is the
individual. What is regarded as normal behavior is based on what white school
psychologists and teachers believe to be normal behavior and development. For
example; future teachers are taught that it is not normal for children to sit
quietly all day. In my city there is a large population of Hmong children who sit quietly all day and are a source
of great concern to the teachers who place more credence on psychological
definitions of normal and on their own prejudices, than on what they see
acted out in front of them all day everyday by perfectly normal children of a
different culture. It is not accidental that in my own city with over 103,000
children in public schools that there are 18,000 children, mostly African
American and mostly male, identified as emotionally disturbed, cognitively
disabled or handicapped in some way. The fact that parents in poverty are
enticed by state and federal programs of financial aid if they agree to have
their children labeled as handicapped is little known and rarely mentioned.
Neither is the fact that 145 school psychologists assisted by 100 Diagnostic
Teachers receive more than 1,000 referrals from classroom teachers every
year. In effect the school psychologists in my city would have us believe
that more than one out of six of our children are abnormal. And that it will
perfectly acceptable, given the referral rate, if by 2012 25% or one out of
four of our children will be labeled as handicapped in some way. The hegemony
of psychologists over the definition of normal is clear when one notes that
no state gives anthropologists, sociologists or linguists the legal power to
decide who is normal and what constitutes normal behavior. It should be
remembered that four state certified psychologists swore under oath that,
based on his responses to the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory, Jeffrey Dahmer was sane and
capable of making normal moral judgments. The fact that he had actually eaten
22 people was ignored in favor of his test scores. The bizarre reality
imposed by those licensed to determine who and what is normal is that the
results of tests which are supposed to predict behavior are given greater
credence than actual behavior. This explains why school children, once
labeled in primary grades, never get unlabeled in upper grades even when they
subsequently earn good grades or pass the eighth grade tests for high school
admission. In effect, “fully qualified” teachers prepared in traditional
university based programs are systematically trained to view many of their
children as somehow lacking, deviant, or having special needs. It is
certainly understandable that new teachers unable to connect with and manage
their students will see things that are wrong with the children and their
families rather than the inadequacies in themselves. Trapped by biased,
limited definitions of how a normal child should develop, behave and learn
language, it is inevitable that teachers would refer children they cannot
connect with for testing to equally limited school psychologists who then
provide the backup test scores and psychological evaluations to show that
these children are not capable of functioning in normal ways. In studies of quitters
and leavers the most commonly offered reasons they cite refer to either poor
working conditions, the difficulty of managing the children, or both. A
typical list includes the following reasons: overwhelming workload,
discipline problems, low pay, little respect, lack of support and the
clerical workload. Reasonable people have every reason to question the
validity of these responses, the maturity of the leavers making these
responses and the quality of the teacher preparation offered those who give
these reasons for leaving. Are we really to believe that even youngsters
fresh out of teacher education programs have no idea that teachers’ salaries
are low until after they take jobs and actually receive their first paycheck?
Are we really to believe that even new teachers are unaware of the media
attacks and the public criticism of urban poverty schools until after they
are employed in them? Are we seriously to believe that as new teachers they
had no idea before taking a position that working as a teacher would require
an hour or two of planning time every night? Or that there would be records
to keep, papers to grade and parents to see? People who work in offices,
stores, factories, beauty salons and drive taxis and who have not completed
60 credits of education courses and student teaching are well aware of these
factors as the typical working conditions of teachers. Indeed, interviews of
high school students indicate quite clearly that even adolescents are well
aware of these factors as the normal conditions of their teachers’ work.
Quitters and leavers who offer these reasons for terminating their employment
and those who accept and analyze these responses as authentic explanations,
make the findings of studies on why teachers quit or fail highly problematic. While poor working
conditions contribute to teacher losses, in-depth interviews we have had with
quitters and failures from schools serving diverse children in urban poverty
over the past 45 years reveal other explanations for leaving than those
gleaned from superficial questionnaires, surveys and brief exit interviews.
Our final classroom observations of teachers who are failing also support the
existence of more basic reasons for leaving than those gained from typical
exit interviews. Leavers are understandably chary about having anything on
their records that they believe might make it difficult for them to get a
reference for a future job. They are also savvy enough to try and not say
things that might make them appear biased or prejudiced toward children of
color or their families. It takes an hour or longer for a skilled interviewer
to establish rapport, trust and an open dialogue in order to extract more
authentic and less superficial reasons for why teachers leave. For example,
the quitter’s citation of “discipline and classroom management problems” as
the reason for leaving takes on new meaning when one learns what the
respondent is really saying. In typical surveys quitters and failures
frequently mention the challenge of working with “difficult” students and
this comment is simply noted or checked or counted. In in-depth interviews
where rapport has been established this cause is amplified by leavers into
more complete explanations of why discipline and classroom management are
difficult for them. They make statements such as, “I really don’t see myself
spending the rest of my life working with these children.” or “It’s clear
that these children don’t want me as their teacher.” When the reasons for the
disconnect between themselves and the children are probed further, leavers
will frequently make statements such as the following: “These kids will never
learn standard English.” or “My mother didn’t raise me to listen to ‘m.f.’ all day.” or “These children could not possibly be
Christians.” or “These kids are just not willing or able to follow the
simplest directions.” The comments of quitters and leavers which may have at
first appeared to indicate a simple, straightforward lack of skills on the
part of a neophyte still learning to maintain discipline, can now be
recognized as actually representing much deeper issues. Rather than a simple
matter which can be corrected by providing more training to child-centered
beginning teachers who understandably just need some tips on classroom
management and more experience, we have now uncovered an irreconcilable chasm
between the teachers and their students. Teacher attrition increases as the
number of minority students increases. Quitters and leavers cannot connect
with, establish rapport, or reach diverse children in urban poverty because
at bottom they do not respect and care enough about them to want to be their
teachers. These attitudes and perceptions are readily sensed by students who
respond in kind by not wanting these people as their teachers. Contrary to
the popular debates on what teachers need to know to be effective, teachers
in urban schools do not quit because they lack subject matter or pedagogy.
Quitters and leavers know how to divide fractions and they know how to write
lesson plans. They leave because they cannot connect with the students and it
is a continuous, draining hassle for them to keep students on task. In a very
short period leavers are emotionally and physically exhausted from struggling
against resisting students for six hours every day. In our classroom
observations of failing teachers we have never found an exception to this
condition: if there is a disconnect between the teacher and the students no
mentoring, coaching, workshop, or class on discipline and classroom
management can provide the teacher with the magic to control children s/he
does not genuinely respect and care about. In truth, the graduates of
traditional programs of teacher education are “fully qualified” if we limit
the definition of this term to mean they can pass written tests of subject
matter and pedagogy. Unfortunately while knowledge of subject matter and
pedagogy are absolutely necessary they are not sufficient conditions for
being effective in urban schools. Knowing what and how to teach only becomes
relevant after the teacher has connected and established a positive
relationship with the students. Many who give advice on
the teachers needed to solve the shortage frequently assert that these children
need to be taught by the “best and the brightest.” Unfortunately, the typical
criteria used to define “the best and the brightest” identify the precise
individuals who are most likely to quit and fail in urban schools. The
majority of early leavers have higher I.Q.’s,
GPA’s, and standardized test scores than those who stay; more have also had
academic majors. Teachers who earn advanced degrees within the prior two
years leave at the highest rates. Those who see teaching as primarily an
intellectual activity are eight times more likely to leave the classroom. In
1963 my Milwaukee Intern Program became the model for the National Teacher
Corps. In the ten years (1963-1972) of the Corps’ existence app. 100,000
college graduates with high GPA’s were prepared for urban teaching. While
many stayed in education fewer than 5% remained in the classroom for more
than three years. This was the largest, longest study ever done in teacher
education. The fact that the shibboleth “best and brightest” survives is testimony
to the fact that many prefer to maintain their pet beliefs about teacher
education in spite of the facts. In effect, the criteria typically used to
support the “best and brightest” are powerful, valid identifiers of failures
and quitters. While being an effective
teacher of diverse children in poverty has some intellectual and academic
aspects, it is primarily a human relations activity demanding the ability to
make and maintain positive, supportive connections with diverse children,
school staff and caregivers. The term “best and the brightest” might be more
appropriately used to refer to individuals who can actually demonstrate a
propensity to connect with and cause diverse urban children in poverty to
learn rather than as a predictor of which college youth will earn high GPA’s
and do well on written tests of teaching. Those threatened by this view
misconstrue my advocacy to mean that I believe that knowledge of subject
matter and knowledge of teaching are unimportant. Not so. There is
substantial research and no question that teachers who know more English
usage and who have greater knowledge of the subject matters they teach, have
children who learn more. But it is only after their propensity to relate to
diverse children in urban poverty has been demonstrated that the teachers’
knowledge of subject matter and how to teach can become relevant. This raises the more
basic issue of whether future teachers (or anyone) can be taught to connect
with diverse children in poverty or whether this is an attribute learned from
mature reflection about one’s life experiences after one has had some life
experiences. If it is, as I believe, the latter then it is an attribute that
must be selected for and not assumed to be the result of completing
university coursework as a late adolescent or young adult. Indeed, there is
substantial evidence that college courses and direct experiences reinforce
rather than change teacher education students’ prejudices and abilities to
connect with diverse children in poverty. Because of selective perception
students in university training programs merely “see” what they are
predisposed to “see” in their coursework and direct experiences. Open
students become more open and narrow students reinforce their limited views
of the world. The effect of teacher education is to make teacher candidates
more predisposed to believe whatever they believed when they began their
programs. This is also true of the effects of in-service programs on
teachers. Building on this dynamic that trainees see what we want to see
makes selecting the right people a more productive approach to teacher
education than assuming that training programs are treatments powerful enough
to transform deep-seated values and ideologies. Given the need for teachers
with the belief systems and the predispositions to effectively relate to
diverse children in dysfunctional bureaucracies, there should no longer be
any question that selecting those with the appropriate dispositions
determines the usefulness of any training. The Nature of Adolescence
and Adulthood as it Pertains to the Education of Teachers for Diverse
Children in Poverty There is an extensive
literature on the nature of adolescence and adulthood. Much of it is focused
on the life stages of people generally while a lesser amount refers to the
stages of teacher development. Almost all of this literature comes from
psychologists or writers who use psychological constructs and suffers from
the same ethnocentricity that characterizes the knowledge base in teacher
education. But since over 90% of those in traditional university programs of
teacher education are white youth from working class and middle class
families the characteristics attributed to these young adults is most
relevant and worth noting. University magic occurs when
students graduate from high school. They are declared “adults” by their
respective states and by the universities in which they enroll. Bestowing
this status frees the university from having to pay any serious attention to
students’ natures or to the stages of their development. The notion that it
is critical to know the nature of the learners and the nature of their
development in order to teach them is of no concern and completely ignored by
university faculty. In place of stages of development higher education relies
on contrived categories of status representing the university organization,
e.g. freshman, undergraduate, full time and GPA level. The areas in which
youth force universities to respond to their developmental needs are in
extra-curricular activities, food service, health care, and rules related to
housing and safety. It is no accident therefore that out-of-class activities
which do respond to the nature and level of their development frequently
cause more change in students than their formal classes. Late adolescents and
young adults are still struggling with the issue of self-identity fighting
off peer pressure, asserting independence from family and grappling with
their own struggle to achieve meaning and purpose in life. They are haunted
by questions like, “Will I find someone to love me?” “Will I be able to earn
a living?” How do I gain independence from my mother and still show her I
love her?” The period of the 20’s is frequently identified as a time of
impatience and idealism. “Now” becomes an obsession and change must be quick.
Those in their early twenties are infatuated with ideals but have not
experienced or observed enough of life to provide a workable basis for
understanding themselves or the world. This often leads to impetuous behavior
regarded by authority figures as rebellious or lacking in judgment. In
American society these and other insecurities are normal concerns and explain
the almost complete self absorption of youth as they seek to answer the basic
questions of identity. Teaching, on the other hand, is a continuous effort to
inspire confidence in others. Juxtaposing the demands of teaching with the
natural and common needs of young adults in American society highlights the
inappropriateness of the match. The willingness and ability to empathize with
and nurture others is the essence, the very soul of teaching. These
attributes are present in very few college youth. Because the work of the
teacher requires building self-esteem in others not in trying to find
oneself, there is no stage of development less appropriate for training
teachers than late adolescence and young adulthood. Mature adults have a
strong and reasonable sense of who they are and are self-accepting. Such
adults are sufficiently confident to be motivated by intrinsic rather than
extrinsic rewards as they engage in a wide range of learning activities. The
benefit of a university education to mature adults is that they are able to
integrate their personal experiences with theory, research, logic and a system
of morality and apply them to the persistent problems of living in a free
society. Educated adults consciously test common sense and unexamined
assumptions against various ways of knowing. Freed of the adolescent’s need
to realize parental expectations and the pressures of equally immature peers,
adults seek to reconcile their inner direction with the social good. Terms
such as integration, generativity and
self-realization have all been used to define adults who have reached the
level of aligning their proclivities with the demands of society. They seek
self enhancement by contributing. In Kohlberg’s theory of
moral development individuals move through the following stages: II. satisfaction of needs
and wants, III. concern with conformity, IV. concern with
preserving society, V. concern with what is
right beyond legalities, VI. concern with
universal ethical principles According to Kohlberg,
only 10 per cent of those in their twenties ever attain Stages V. or VI. His
findings indicate that “college students are capable of employing reasoning
at these levels yet rarely do so.” Erikson’s theory of human
development includes eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (first year); autonomy
vs. doubt (ages 2-3); initiative vs. guilt (ages 4-5); industry vs.
inferiority ( ages 6-11); identity vs. role confusion (ages 12-18); intimacy
vs. isolation (18- through young adulthood); generativity
vs. self-absorption (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (old age). For Erikson generativity can only
occur after individuals have resolved the issue of intimacy. Generativity is most common in young parents but can be
found in individuals who are actively concerned with the welfare of young
people and making the world a better place for them to live and work. Those
who fail to develop generativity fall into a state
of self-absorption in which their personal needs and comforts become their
predominant concern. Researchers building on Erikson’s
model have extensively studied college students to determine at what point
they develop a sense of their own identity and found that only 22 per cert
achieve this level. Other researchers have
described college youth as lacking commitment to any philosophy or set of
beliefs, living for the moment and not delaying gratification. Piaget equated
his fourth stage of formal operations with adulthood. At this level
individuals engage in abstract thinking, prepositional thinking,
combinatorial thinking, hypothetical-deductive thinking, thinking ahead, metacognitive thinking and self reflection. Piaget found
that college students rarely reach this level of thinking . Kitchener followed
college youth through their undergraduate years and found them beginning as
moral and intellectual absolutists, moving to a stage of relativism when any
opinion is as good as any other and ending up in a search for identify with
most never getting beyond the middle stage of relativism. Other models of
development focus on stages of development and the nature of knowledge sought
in each. Late adolescents and young adults typically use their direct
experiences in support of absolutism, they then move through the stage of
weighing conflicting perceptions (relativism) and conclude with a more mature
view of reality and multiple ways of knowing. This last stage is seldom or
ever reached in college youth. It is ironic that youthful college students
who believe so much in the value of their own experiences as the best way to
learn undervalue the experiences of the children they teach by limiting them
to texts and vicarious experiences. Teacher educators
bombarded by preservice students’ fears and
apprehensions regarding classroom discipline are well aware of the childlike
stage in which many about to be certified find themselves. There is seldom
little if any concern with higher levels of thinking or with how issues of
social justice and equity can be infused into school curricula. Indeed, there
is strong resistance to these issues. As they move toward graduation and
certification there is a marked narrowing of student interests and concerns
until students finally narrow the complex problems of teaching into the one
grand obsession which precludes their thinking about anything: “Will I be
able to control the class?” This is the overriding concern of the new graduates
awarded universal licenses by all states and heralded by university based
teacher educators as “fully qualified.” There is no value in
simply getting older. But serious reflection upon one’s life experience is
more likely to result in individuals reaching higher levels of development.
Having families, work experiences and sustained careers provide individuals
with rich and varied experiential material to integrate into their cognitive
and emotional development. The potential of teacher growth through reflection
is great. So too are the dangers for those individuals who have difficulty
reflecting accurately upon their strengths and weaknesses. Clearly those with
more life and work experiences have more with which to build up their
perceptual repertoires. Reflection is a process not only more characteristic
of advanced life stages than of youth but a process that needs meaningful
experiences to draw upon. Ultimately it is the high
level of conceptual work that star teachers serving diverse children in urban
poverty perform which drives my commitment to the need for greater teacher
maturity. If we perceive of teaching as essentially a mindless set of jejune
tasks (e.g. the 19th century school- marm teaching
the abc’s and giving directions) then the levels of
cognition or development reached by the practitioners would be of little
importance. Indeed, many urban school districts have given up trying to find
teachers who can think at all and have mandated that instruction be done by
reading from scripts. On the other hand, if we believe teaching requires
higher-order abilities such as the humane application of abstract concepts to
interactions with diverse children and youth in urban poverty, then the
teachers’ cognitive and affective development becomes a crucial determinant
of success. There have been multiple studies (over 200) in many countries
which have found that there are four general developmental abilities which
are highly related to success in any field: 1) Empathy, 2) Autonomy, 3) Symbolization, and 4) Commitment to
democratic values. All four of these
correlate with greater maturity. In the American sample there was an inverse
correlation between SAT scores and level of maturity. Pintrich’s landmark summary of the
research on the learning and development of college students and its
implications for teacher education is a meta-analysis which, to my knowledge,
no college or university program of teacher education has ever referred to
let alone utilized. Reasonable people cannot read Pintrich’s
summary of what is known about human development and learning and still focus
on young adults as the primary source of teachers. Using any respectable
theory of human development leads to the same conclusion. For white, working
and middle class females growing up in American society there is no more
inappropriate stage of life to prepare for teaching than young adulthood… and
for youthful males their personal development and the demands of teaching are
an even greater mismatch. What do these scholarly summaries about teachers’
levels of development mean when translated and applied to the real world? We
are supposed to believe that a system of traditional teacher education which
would take a young, immature white male from a small town in Wisconsin, put
him through a traditional program of teacher education, graduate, certify and
declare him “fully qualified” at age 22 is engaged in a perfectly reasonable
activity. Further, we are to believe that it would be a good idea for this
young man to come to the Milwaukee Public Schools (or to any urban district
in America) and be hired as a teacher because he is now a professional
practitioner who can shape the mind and character of a seventeen year old
African American girl with a child and a part-time job trying to make a place
for herself in the world. Or that he has the knowledge, skills and
predispositions to help a Hispanic five year old make sense of the world. Or
that he has the competencies needed to help a young adolescent survive the
throes of puberty and the peer pressure to drop out. The best that can be said
about such a monumental disconnect between the nature of who is in teacher
preparation and the demands of practice in urban schools is that we should be
grateful to this young man and his cohort for never taking jobs. They know
and are willing to declare their inadequacies more truthfully than the
faculty who trained them. The faculty declaring these youth to be “fully
qualified” are beneficiaries of a university system that views its late
adolescent and young adult students preparing to become teachers as its
clientele. Diverse children in urban poverty being miseducated
by dysfunctional bureaucracies are not conceived of as the clientele of
teacher educators. Where Do Urban Schools
Currently Get Their Beginning Teachers? Although the typical age
of college graduates has risen from age 22 to age 26, it is still generally
true that most of those preparing to teach are college age youth, that is,
late adolescents and young adults. This analysis is not an advocacy for
preventing all such individuals from becoming teachers but to shift the
balance. The current emphasis remains app. 80% still being youngsters below
age 26 who are full-time university students and only app. 20% being older
“non-traditional” post baccalaureate students or adults in alternative
certification or on-the job training programs. Given the needs in urban
poverty districts this balance should be reversed so that the majority of
those in teacher training would be adults over age 30. Denigrating labels
such as “retreads” or “career changers” indicate the power of the
misconceptions and stereotypes regarding the age at which it is generally
believed that individuals should become new teachers. My best estimate is
that of the app. 500.000 traditionally prepared teachers under age 26
produced annually, fewer than 15% seek employment in the 120 major urban
districts serving app. 7 million diverse children in poverty. This represents
app. 75,000 of the colleges and universities annual output. The research
based on my Urban Teacher Selection Interview indicates further that of the
15% who are willing to apply to work in urban school districts that only one
in ten (or 7,500) of those under aged 26 will stay long enough (three years)
to become successful teachers in urban schools. What this means is that app.
one half million youngsters under 26 in over 1,250 traditional program of
teacher education are supplying the 120 largest urban school districts with
about 1.5% of their annual teacher output. If I am under-estimating this by
tenfold, which I do not believe I am, then traditional college based programs
of teacher education would still be preparing about 15% of their graduates
willing to try urban teaching. The effectiveness of this minimal output must also
be considered since 50% of those who deign to try urban teaching will leave
in five years or less. While this is obviously a
very small output from traditional teacher preparing institutions it
represents a small bloc of young people who do have the potential for
teaching diverse children in urban poverty and for whom the doors of the
profession must remain open. But should this population of young teachers
represented by this 1.5% contribution remain as the predominant body of
future teachers or should policy makers be looking for other constituencies
from which to draw and develop the teachers It is quite clear that
the current and future teachers of diverse children in urban poverty are
non-traditional populations of adults trained in on-the-job forms of
university-school partnerships or by the urban school districts themselves.
Those who cannot recognize this reality are those who have a stake in not
wanting to be convinced that the present system of teacher preparation is not
working for the urban districts. In truth, traditional teacher educators
could put all of the alternative certification programs they rail against out
of business right now if they were able to prepare teachers for the real
world rather than for the best of all non-existent ones. It is difficult for
traditional programs of teacher education to maintain they know best how to
prepare teachers when they don’t do it. The excuse is that “we are preparing
excellent teachers in sufficient numbers but cannot be held accountable for
their performance or whether they stay because the conditions of work in
urban schools are driving them out.” Will the Conditions of
Work for Beginning Teachers Improve or Worsen? While I have argued that
teachers leave primarily because they cannot connect with children it is
necessary to recognize that the conditions under which beginning teachers
work in urban schools are horrific and are driving out not only those who
should have never been hired but many who have the potential for becoming
effective teachers and even stars. The problem faced by policy makers is
whether the strategy of recruiting and training more mature people who can
succeed in schools as they presently are is a better strategy than continuing
to focus on traditional populations of teachers and waiting for change agents
to transform the conditions under which they will work in failing urban
school districts. In my own city we train
beginning teachers who are often expected to work under conditions that are
medieval: rooms without windows, over 30 middle school students in a class
including 6 or more students with handicapping conditions, insufficient,
outdated textbooks, no dictionaries, no paper, no access to a copier that
works, no computers connected to the internet, science rooms without running
water or any materials, no parking, and no closet that locks, or even a hook
to hang up one’s coat. Teachers in my city spend an average of $600 dollars a
year of their own money on supplies. We’ve had beginners use their own funds
to buy chalk. When I recently asked a principal to provide a teacher with
some chalk he replied, “The teachers knew how much money we had for supplies
and they chose to use it up by January. What do you want from me?” Observing
the equipment, supplies and materials that urban teachers typically have to
work with frequently leads one to question whether these teachers are working
in the Salaries. In my city a
single mother with two or more children (a typical profile of one pool who
are likely to stay in urban teaching) will earn a starting salary that is low
enough to meet the state’s poverty criterion and will entitle her to food
stamps. In future, teacher salaries will not increase in real dollars and are
likely to fall further behind others of comparable education in other
occupations. Much worse than the annual rate of inflation are the out-of-control
costs of health care which are predicted to triple in the next decade. Urban
school districts are negotiating greater contributions from teachers to help
cover these costs but will still be forced to put whatever monies they might
have used for salary raises into health care. In my own city the teachers’
benefit package is already 55% so that a beginning teacher paid $28,000 costs
the district $43,400. By 2012 a very conservative estimate is that the
benefits package will be at least 80%. This means that a beginning teacher
paid $35,000 will cost the district $63,000 per year… and this assumes that
the teachers will be paying for a greater share of their health care thereby
decreasing their real income. School Safety. The amount
that urban districts pay for school safety personnel and equipment will
continue to increase. This not only diverts funds from educational purposes
but seriously alters school climate transforming them from educational
institutions into custodial ones. This is already true in most of the major
urban districts. In many urban middle schools there is more invested in hall
cameras and safety equipment and personnel than in computers or computer
assisted instruction. As more time of professional staff is directed to
issues of control it casts a pall over the self concepts of beginning
teachers who have great needs for perceiving of themselves as educators
rather than as monitors or safety personnel. It is not likely that in future
schools will either give up their custodial functions or that they will
become safer places. Class Size. This
condition has a great impact on beginners. It will continue to move in two
directions. In a few states which mandate smaller classes, usually for
primary grades, there will be a sharp increase in the teacher shortage but
smaller classes for those who take jobs in these states. In most urban
districts however class size will increase in response to higher birth rates
among the urban poor. These increases in class size will be worst in urban middle
schools where teachers face the most behavior problems and where most of the
students who will not make it to high school are retained for an extra year
or more. In urban middle schools teachers work with between 100 and 150
students daily. These schools are likely to be places where large classes
make the conditions of work extremely difficult for beginners. Caring
teachers recognize that this is the last chance for many youth to make it or
drop out before getting to high school and as a result they work especially
hard. But the conditions of work in urban middle schools will continue to
make it more likely that the teachers who stay for more than five years are
likely to be the strong insensitives rather than
those who are caring and committed. Prohibitive costs make it un- likely that
the goal of reducing class size beyond primary levels is one that will be
realized in the urban districts. Supportive Principals.
There is a growing of shortage of effective urban school principals. It is
not uncommon for major districts to fire as many as fifty at a time. In
addition, an increasing number of urban districts now hold the principal
accountable, on an annual basis, for raising test scores. Raising these
expectations for principals cuts down on the pool of those who can be
effective in such demanding roles. It is noteworthy that beginning teachers
frequently cite “having a supportive principal’ as a critical factor in their
professional development and whether or not they leave. There is a continuing
and growing shortage of school leaders of color who can function effectively
in African American and Latino communities. Principals are still drawn from
the ranks of former teachers and assistant principals in the same urban
district. Unless there is an increase in the pool of teachers of color
therefore the pool from which future principals of color will be drawn will
not increase. The obstacle to turning this situation around is that every
urban district has a shortage of effective principals now. This means that most
of the teachers and assistant principals who will comprise the pool of future
applicants to become principals may never work for or even see a principal
functioning as an accountable, instructional educator leading an urban school
as if it were an effective community based organization in a democratic,
pluralistic society. As the shortage of effective principals increases the
demands and expectations for what this role can accomplish increases. The
growing expectation that the principal can no longer be a building manager
but must be the instructional leader of a non-profit community organization
will deepen this shortage. Without such models of
success to emulate, the most likely prognosis is that tomorrow’s principals
will function in the same ways and at the same levels as today’s. This makes
the likelihood that beginning teachers will be getting more support from an
increasing pool of more effective principals problematic. Tests. The number of
tests taken by students in urban schools is not likely to diminish. District
and state mandates have now made testing a fact of life for urban teachers.
In some districts the curriculum is so tightly aligned with the mandated
tests that teachers actually follow scripts to cover all topics in the exact
ways the students will be tested for. This is a critical condition of work
for many beginners who are misled into believing that as teachers they will
be professional decision-makers rather than school employees required to
spend most of their time as test tutors. The very strong likelihood is that
the pressures felt by teachers to prepare their children for tests will
continue and increase since so many will be assigned to schools officially
designated as failing. On the positive side
there has been an increase in several conditions which beginners rate as
critical conditions of work. First, there is more teacher teaming than in
past. This means that beginning teachers have greater access to veteran
teachers’ ideas and experiences. Second, there is more mentoring of beginning
teachers by experienced teacher with released time. Both of these factors are
expensive because they involve greater staff costs and while implemented in
some urban districts they are cut back in many others. If these are the five
conditions cited by most urban teachers as the most debilitating and if all
five of these are likely to worsen, is it a wiser strategy to continue to
prepare teachers in traditional ways and wait for their working conditions to
improve, or to prepare new populations of teachers who can succeed in today’s
failing urban school districts? Securing the Teachers Traditional teacher
education cannot provide the great number of teachers who can be effective
and who will remain in urban schools for more than brief periods. Recruiting
and preparing the teachers needed for the real world will require new forms
of teacher education employing the following processes: 1)Recruiting mature
college graduates from all fields; 2) Selecting only
individuals whose belief systems predispose them to see teaching and
schooling as a means of fostering equity and justice for diverse children in
poverty; 3) Preparing candidates
while they function as fully responsible, paid teachers of record in schools
serving diverse children in poverty; 4) Providing a support
system that includes coaching from skilled mentors and a technology system
that connects them instantly to resources and problem solving, 5) Offering professional
studies which are closely aligned with the actual behaviors candidates must perform
as teachers; and 6) Evaluating and
recommending candidates for licensure on the basis of their children’s
learning. Using these procedures we
have trained diverse, mature college graduates from all fields of study for
the Milwaukee Public Schools since 1990. 78% of them are minorities and 94%
of them are still there after a decade. Securing the teachers that diverse
children in urban poverty deserve requires taking some initiatives which are
in opposition to the current practices and culture in traditional teacher
education. 1. The clients of teacher
preparation are not students in programs of teacher education but the diverse
children in poverty in urban schools who need effective teachers. This change
of focus causes many shifts in practice, the most notable being that teacher
candidates are put through selection and training procedures that result in
significantly more of them self selecting out or being failed before they are
licensed. 2. The great shortage of
teachers does not mean that standards should be lowered but that they must be
raised. Teachers who will be effective and who will remain are individuals
who not only have knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy but who can
connect with diverse children in poverty and can function under extremely
adverse working conditions. 3. Candidates should not
be admitted into programs of teacher education because they have passed
selection criteria at a college or university. Urban school districts must
first process candidates through their selection procedures. Only those who
the district is willing to hire and to guarantee a placement should be
admitted to preparation programs. 4. The locus of
preparation must be urban school classrooms in which the candidates function
as teachers of record. The various pools of adults who can be recruited,
selected and prepared to be effective in urban schools envision themselves
changing careers in order to function in the role of teachers. They are not
willing to take on the role of students in teacher education programs and
have demonstrated clearly, over decades, that they will not be recruited if
their primary role is to become college students rather than teachers. This
means alternative certification programs, intern programs and on-the-job
training programs must be used to recruit and prepare mature candidates. 5.The traditional
practice of young college students deciding they would like to be teachers of
a particular age or subject matter and then seeking employment after
graduation must be abandoned. The starting point for creating the pools of
teachers to be trained in the various specializations should be based on the
projections of teacher need in the local urban school districts. Then those
who can fill the specific school needs for the various teacher specializations
should be actively recruited, selected and prepared. 6. For teachers to remain
and be effective their training program cannot focus on universal truths re:
the supposed universal nature of all children, teaching and learning. Neither
can it be preparation focused on the best of all model professional schools
since these are nonexistent worlds. From the outset candidates’ preparation
must focus on serving particular groups of children from specific local
cultures attending schools in a particular urban district. Preparing
candidates for no place in particular and assuming they will be able to teach
all children everywhere will only perpetuate the current system of “fully
qualified” graduates not taking jobs, quitting or failing. There is no shortage
of teacher candidates whose primary motive is to secure licenses which will
enable them to be hired in any state. The need is for teachers for specific
urban schools serving particular constituencies. Mature adults from a
specific urban area who begin with a focused local, urban commitment are more
likely to not only succeed but remain in urban schools. 7. The tradition of
waiting for young undergraduate students to apply to a university to be
prepared as teachers must be replaced with aggressive and targeted marketing
programs directed at pools of local, adult college graduates, particularly
those of color. Nationwide and traditional forms of recruitment by urban
school districts competing with each other for a limited pool of young
minority graduates need to be replaced by strategies which focus on mature
residents of the local metropolitan area. Local churches and faith-based
community organizations are basic to the recruitment of African American and
Latino applicants. While women and mothers with children in the very same
school systems in which they would like to become teachers are the primary
target, ways of reaching local male pools must be utilized. New ways of
explaining the work of a teacher in an urban school district need to be an
integral part of honest, realistic marketing that lets applicants know what
they are getting into from day one. Signing bonuses and similar inducements
for enticing reluctant applicants who lack commitment to the diverse children
in the particular urban area are counterproductive and should be
discontinued. 8. Specific attributes of
great (star) urban teachers should guide the selection of new teachers into
preparation programs. Traditional criteria which predict success in college
or on written tests of teaching should be irrelevant to the selection
process. All programs of preparation should utilize both interviews of
applicants which compare them to star teachers and observing candidates
actually relating to children and youth. These are the two most powerful predictors
of success with diverse children in urban poverty. 9. The post baccalaureate
level is the primary source for the new pools of teacher candidates who need
to be recruited. There should be no limitation on the fields of study which
these candidates have completed. Considerations of grade point and other
traditional admission criteria used by graduate schools are irrelevant
criteria. It is counterproductive to focus on or even include masters degree
studies during the first year of any internship, residency or on-the-job
training program. Considering the factors
beginning teachers say they need or would like versus those they regard as
debilitating, the likelihood is far greater that the negative conditions for
beginning teachers in urban schools will not only continue but worsen. What
this means for securing teachers who will stay and become effective is clear.
While all constituencies must do everything possible to try and improve the
conditions under which beginning urban teachers work we cannot be naïve at
the expense of children in poverty schools. The need is for teachers who can
be effective with today’s children and youth in today’s schools. We cannot
take the pious position that it is unfair or even immoral for beginning
teachers to function in today’s schools and therefore we as teacher educators
cannot be held accountable for who we select or how we train them until the
urban schools are transformed. There are real children, spending the only
childhood they will ever have going to these schools everyday. Demanding that
the schools improve before we can be expected to provide effective teachers
for such places will sacrifice the education of 14 million children while we
wait for change agents who have been extremely unsuccessful up to now. The most
prudent policy must assume that whether these schools stay the same or get
even worse we will recruit and prepare caring teachers who will make a
difference immediately, Part V. Decentralization
and Accountable School Leadership There are many critical elements
that would be necessary to include in a state statute decentralizing its
urban school districts. There is no one template that can be used to cover
the peculiarities that will necessarily arise in various states. The example
offered in Appendix A. is merely a starter example of some of the critical
elements that are likely to be useful in several states similar to my own. My
strong feeling is that if decentralization statutes are done effectively and
with relevance to the needs of the particular cities and states there will be
some degree of flexibility and variation in these statutes. At the same time
there are some fundamental issues that must in some form be achieved by every
effort to decentralize if it is to be successful. Each of these required
elements refers to building various forms of accountability into the statute. Accountability Elements
Which Should Be Achieved in Decentralization Statutes An elected Mayor through
his Fiscal Manager rather than a superintendent should be held directly responsible
for the fiscal oversight of all the schools in the city. As an elected
official this individual can be held accountable. There should be no
district wide central office allowed to become established by the Fiscal
Manager. No dysfunctional bureaucracies absorbing funds that should be used
for the education of children can grow and take resources away from schools
if there are no central offices. There should be no
miniature central offices created in the newly decentralized districts. Each
of these districts should be able to function with the level of
administration currently typical in their surrounding suburban and township
districts. There must be an end to
city-wide school boards trying to make policy with a massive budget, (in many
cases over a billion dollars), that is beyond their span of control and
understanding. The Fiscal Manager reports to the Mayor not a board. Each of
the newly created districts will have its own local school board. The newly constituted
districts of up to 5,000 students are small enough to provide the children
personal attention but sufficiently large to provide all the options needed
in a modern, effective school district. As there are shifts in population
these districts may vary in size but should not be allowed to grow beyond
5,000. The newly constituted
local districts will not be administered by superintendents and the
inevitable staffs that build up around superintendents’ offices, but by a
school principal chosen by his/her peers on a limited term basis. Since there
will be only twelve or so schools in each district the local school boards
will be able to hold school principals directly and clearly accountability
for the quality of teaching and learning in every school. The principal who
serves as the local “superintendent” should be viewed as a temporary
assignment rotated among the local district’s principals. The newly constituted
districts should have two clear accountability lines: one fiscal and the
other educational. The fiscal oversight is through the Fiscal Manager who is
the deputy to the mayor. The educational oversight is through local school
boards to the state department of education as is the case with all the
surrounding suburbs and townships. The currently powerless
urban parents and citizens must have the same rights and immediate contacts
with their schools as other citizens in the state. Aside from achieving
these essential goals, the nature of each state’s decentralization statute
should vary and be sufficiently flexible to account for local conditions. A Note on A Critical
Omission in This Advocacy It will be readily noted
by those familiar with failing urban school districts as well as by parents,
business and community constituencies with experience in dealing with urban
districts that effective urban schools in failing districts inevitable are
led by outstanding principals. In future it will be necessary to recognize
that an effective urban principal in a failing school district is not a
building manager and more than an instructional leader. S/he is the leader of
a non-profit community organization. The small number of outstanding
principals that can be readily identified in every failing district are not
products of the training institutions where they took courses to earn their
state licenses, nor are they products of the school systems where they worked
their way up as teachers and assistant principals. They are atypical
mavericks who became effective school leaders in spite of not because of
their training and previous school positions. While school districts all over
In every failing urban
district it is still typical for the school boards and superintendents to
claim their highest priority is getting the very best school leaders they
possibly can. They then limit their candidate pools to the same old
populations of in-house people who have ostensibly been prepared by
functioning as assistant principals and completing a principal’s
certification program. These two criteria ensure that most of their principal
appointments will yield a continuous crop of failure principals. The principals who are
most likely to succeed in failing urban school districts are currently
heading community agencies, small businesses, governmental agencies, in the
military and working successfully at a wide variety of jobs and careers
outside of public education. Because bringing these new populations into
school leadership roles is still a long term rather than a near future trend
it is regretfully omitted from this analysis. The focus here is on the
changes that can be made near term which will stop the miseduation
of diverse children in poverty now. Who Will Benefit from
Decentralization? The three primary
benefits of decentralizing dysfunctional urban school district bureaucracies
will be stopping the massive miseducation and
raising the quality of the urban schools to those typical in the state;
giving urban parents and communities the same level of control enjoyed
throughout the state; and demonstrating that if taxpayer funds are used in
responsible, accountable ways for their intended purposes that there are
sufficient funds currently in the system to educate all the children in urban
schools to high levels. The common arguments
against decentralization are that having all these small districts would
increase the bureaucracy and the costs, that many urban parents are
themselves dropouts and increasing their influence on the schools will not
improve them, and that many of the special services provided by the urban
schools will be lost to the children. These arguments are extremely weak and
readily answered. The suburbs and major towns of our states do not devote
over half of their school budgets to people who are ostensibly helping or
supervising the teachers and children. If the failing urban school district
is replaced by small districts which simply do not have the funds, the space,
or the parental support to hire these central office functionaries then none
will be hired. Neither the suburbs nor the small towns have cabinet officers,
department heads or any of the other numerous functionaries who earn over
$100,000 per year (plus fringe benefits) yet they have children who learn
more. By making the new districts similar in size to existing school
districts there will be neither the positions nor the funds to expend on an army
of central office functionaries. The bureaucracy will not grow because there
will be none. The argument that urban
parents cannot run their local schools is blatantly racist. The The final argument that
the bureaucrats will make against decentralization will be that many valuable
services will be lost. But why should surrounding school districts (all of
which have wealthier people than the city) be able to contract with the urban
public schools to take their special education students rather than integrate
and include these students into their own schools as the law intends they do?
Why should surrounding schools (including private schools) expect the urban
public schools to provide free transportation for many of their students? The
answer to these and many other questions is always the same: “You have is a
big district that has all these services and we are just a small district.”
This statement is actually in code and is really saying: “The taxpayers in
our small district have not provided funds for these services and would
protest or take our jobs if we asked them for funds for these purposes, while
the taxpayers in your city have no notion that they are even providing these
services and couldn’t do anything about stopping them if they found out.” Suburbs
of wealthy families use this small vs. big rationalization to get the poor
families of the city to support services they themselves should be providing.
Simply put, the small towns and suburbs use their neighboring large districts
as fiscal fools. This is similar to the strategy used in my state when the
state representatives of 72 counties decided that four urban counties in
southeastern Finally, the notion that
any service provided by the public schools of a major urban district is
saving money because it is done for a larger group is simply not supported by
the facts. The best example of this fable are the after school reading and
tutoring programs. In my city the YMCA has for decades offered after school
reading tutoring that is more effective and reaches three times as many
students at a small fraction of the cost of the tutoring offered by the
Milwaukee Public Schools. The argument that this failed district which has miseducated over a million children and continues to miseducate over 100,000 annually should be kept intact
because it offers valuable services which would not otherwise be available is
untrue and misleading. It would be like looking at a town in Alabama where
the Monsanto Chemical Co. has poisoned the air, the ground and the water with
carcinogens that are killing the residents and saying, “Yes, but Monsanto
offers day care services.” At what cost are the day care services offered and
how about the local community organizations that offer more and better day
care at one-third of the public school costs? A final caveat is in
order. It is reasonable and practical to conclude that the newly created
decentralized districts will provide higher quality education than the single
failing district within the existing budget and within the current state
statutes for calculating increases to this budget. The usual argument that
children in poverty need more funds, that special education students need
more funds and that bilingual children need more funds are correct but in
this case are unnecessary. These extra funds can all come from the funds
released by discontinuing a dysfunctional bureaucracy skimming more than half
(in some cases two-thirds) of its budget before allocating funds to the
schools. At the same time, the state system for funding all the schools in
the state is in need of rethinking and repair. Currently some districts
invest twice as much as others in the schooling of their children. The
property tax rate in a property poor district can be five times higher than
in a property wealthy low tax district. But while the creation of a more
equitable funding system for the entire state is going on there need be no
delay in moving ahead to save the educational lives of those currently being miseducated. In my city the funds in the current public
school system budget and the funds that would accrue annually under the
existing state funding system, would be sufficient to significantly increase
the quality of schooling offered all children in the newly created school
districts. Appendix A. Sample
Elements to be Included in a State Statute for Decentralizing Its Urban
School Districts The legislature of the
State of __(state name)_ will approve an education bill directed specifically
at stopping the irreparable harm being done to children in the (city name) at
great cost to themselves, their families, to the taxpayers and to the general
society. This legislation will
have three goals: To achieve these purposes
the legislation proposed will include but not be limited to the following
elements: Educational Management The administration of the
schools in each of the newly created districts will be subject to the same
rules and regulations as the other school districts in the State of (state
name) . Each of these districts will be comparable in size to surrounding
suburban and major town school districts. The essential difference will be
the maintenance of the City of (name of city) as the tax base unit for
funding these districts. The legislation will create a City of (name of city)
School Office led by a Fiscal Manager and up to 3 FTE’s. This skeleton office
will replace the current city school system which has over half of its
employees who do not work directly with children in schools. The City of
__(name of city) School Office will be a pass-through of funds from the state
to insure that all funds go directly to schools and are not diverted for the
maintenance and growth of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Following are some of
the elements which will be included in this legislation. Organization and
Governance 1. The __(name of city)__Public
Schools will be discontinued as an entity responsible for the administration
of public schools in the city of __(name of city)__. 2.The public schools of
the _( name of city)__will be decentralized into ___X____ districts not to
exceed 5,000 students in each. These districts will be limited to high
schools of no more than 800 students and elementary schools (K-8) of 300 or
fewer students. There will be no middle schools in these districts. 3. The __(name of city)
will remain as the tax base unit for the all the newly constituted public
school districts educating children in the __(name of city)__. 4. The newly created
school districts will be accountable to a Fiscal Manager appointed by the
Mayor of __(name of city)__ for budget purposes and directly to the State of
__(name of state)__ for all educational purposes. 5. Each of the districts
will have a five person school board elected by the parents and community
every four years. 6. There will be no
superintendents in any of these districts. The school principals in each of
the districts will select a chairperson on an annual basis to serve as the
administrative representative to the school board. Fiscal Management 7. The Mayor (s) of the
__(name of city)__ will appoint the Fiscal Manager for the City of (name of
city)__ Public School District to oversee the use of all revenues generated
from the state and local tax base as well as from federal grants awarded on a
district basis. Essentially, this individual’s duties will be to ensure that
all public funds intended for the education of __(name of city) students go
directly and only to individual schools and not to perform any functions in
support of all the schools or to any individuals not working in a specific
school. 8. The Fiscal Manager of
the __(name of city)__ 9. Appeals regarding the
Fiscal Manager’s allocation of funds to school districts will be made
directly from the local school boards to the Office of the Mayor. 10. The salary of the
Fiscal Manager will be limited to the salary of the highest paid teacher in
any of the districts in the City of __(name of city)__ plus two additional
months for summer. This would make the Fiscal Manager’s salary less than many
current superintendents in suburbs and major towns and substantially less
than the current salary of the urban superintendent. There will be no perks
or additions of any kind which can be made to this salary. 11. The Fiscal Manager’s
term will be limited to a maximum of four years. S/he will be subject to
annual reviews of the Mayor. 12.The Fiscal Manager
will be limited to no more than 3 FTE’s paid for with public funds. The job
descriptions of these individuals will be up to the Fiscal Manager. S/he will
have the discretion of contracting for services using the equivalent of these
salaries. 13. Annual increases to
the budget of the Fiscal Manager will be made according to all existing state
laws for funding the current __(name of city)__ Public School System. 14. Because of the
intense pressure on the Fiscal Manager for additional funds from the newly
created school districts who have been conditioned to depend on a centralized
bureaucracy, it can be anticipated that the Fiscal Manager’s annual budget is
likely to request substantial increases. This legislation will make it clear
that such special budget requests can never exceed 1% of the total budget for
all the school districts in the City of (name of city)_. 15. All requests for
exceptions or additions to the annual budget must be made by the Fiscal
Manager to the Mayor or the __(name of city)__ or to the appropriate state
agency overseeing funds for particular purposes. 16. The City of __(name
of city)__ will audit the Fiscal Manager annually and prepare a report to the
Mayor. This report will include whatever the city auditors and the Mayor deem
to be appropriate but must include the following: The amount of federal,
state and private grants which the Fiscal Manager’s office has received and
their dispersal to the school districts. The annual amount behind
each child in each of the newly constituted districts so that judgments about
equity among the districts can be readily ascertained. The annual amounts behind
high school students vs. elementary students in each of the districts. The funds received from
all sources for exceptional education students in each of the districts. The amounts of any grants
or donations received in each of the districts. The specific districts which
overspent and under-spent their annual budgets. 17. The total budget of
the Fiscal Manager for dispersal to all the districts will increase annually
according to all state laws and funding formulas currently in place. These boards will have
all the powers and duties commonly associated with local school boards. They
will be governed by all the current laws of the State of __(name of state)__.
In addition to current statutes the legislation establishing the new
districts will include the following modifications or emphases. 18. Each school district
will have its own school board to set policy for the district. Each board
will be composed of five parents, caregivers or residents of the community
served by the schools in the district. 19. School board members
will be elected for four year terms by vote of all residents of the community
and parents/caregivers of children who attend the district schools. 20. School board members
will receive $100 for attending meetings not to exceed 25 meetings in any
calendar year. All other meetings or duties will be their voluntary.
contributions. School Board members will not be employees of the district and
will receive no health, retirement or other benefits or perks. This includes borrowing
school equipment, using school facilities for non-school purposes, using
school transportation for personal reasons, or receiving any materials or
equipment which the district is discarding. 21. School board members
will recuse themselves from voting on any issue
that involves the hiring, contracting or providing of paid services by the
district to any family member, employer of a board member or a school board
member’s family, or any company or agency in which the member has an
interest. 22. All costs related to
the school boards will be paid by the local districts. 23.School board
meetings shall be subject to all the laws of the State related to open
meetings, affirmative action and maintaining public access to documents and
reports. 24. School boards will
set their own meeting times and length of meetings. No meeting shall continue
after 11:00 p.m. All meetings shall take place in a school building or other
public building in the community with sufficient notice so that parents and
community may attend. 25. Districts will
provide school board members with a physical space that includes computers,
telephones, immediate access to a copier and fax, and access of up to 20 hrs
per week of clerical assistance. 26. With the exception of
#25 preceding, district school boards will have no employees of their own. District Superintendents 27. None of the newly
constituted districts will have a superintendent. Central Office Structure 28. None of the newly
constituted districts will have a central office School Principals in the
Newly Constituted Districts 29. The role of the
principal will not be defined as a building manager. The role of school
principals in all the districts will be defined as an administrator of a
non-profit community based organization. This is to recognize the role of the
school administrator as an individual who is not only an instructional leader
but a leader of his/her local community. The need to relate to the diverse
constituencies in the community, to raise additional funds than those that
are allocated in the regular budget, to make provision for health and human
services, to make provisions for after school, evening and summer programs
are all critically important parts of this leadership position. 33. The principals’
salaries will not exceed 1.1 times the highest teacher salary in his/her
district plus two additional months and will be set by the school board. 34. The annual evaluation
criteria of principals will be set by their school boards but must include
the following criteria: achievement scores for all mandated tests; the number
of students in their schools not taking the tests; attendance rates for
teachers and students; annual summaries of suspensions, expulsions and
dropouts; evaluations of all newly hired teachers which include achievement
data of their students; an evaluation of the principal by the teachers in
his/her school; and a review of the principal’s effectiveness in involving
the community in the life of the school. 35. Principals’ time
allowed out-of-their school districts will be limited to ten days per year if
approved by the school board. Professional meetings out of the district but
within the city, sick days and vacation will not be counted. 36. Support for
principals attendance at professional meetings will come from the principal’s
school budget and be part of his/her annual report to the school board. 37. Principals will not
use any portion of their school budgets for consultants, speakers,
memberships of any kind, subscriptions, or for purposes not directly related
to the teaching and learning of students in their schools. Private and grant
funds may be solicited for purposes deemed appropriate by the principal. Teachers and Teacher
Representation 38. Teachers in specific
__(name of city)__ Public Schools who wish to continue teaching in them after
decentralization will be able to do so. 39. The current salary
schedule and benefits will remain in effect in the newly constituted
districts. 40. New teachers and
teachers who wish to transfer will be hired in each of the school districts
according to procedures established in those districts and approved by their
local school boards. 41. The tenure rights of
veteran teachers will be continued in the newly constituted districts and
extended to new teachers using the current criteria in place. 42. The salary and
benefits of teachers in all the newly created districts will continue to be
negotiated annually by the __(name of city)__ Teacher Education Association
with the Fiscal Manager of the City of __(name of city)__ Public School
District and approved by the Mayor. 43. There will be no
residency requirement for teachers to live in the districts in which they
teach or in the City of __(name of city)__. 44. One teachers salary
schedule shall pertain to all professional staff in the schools. Guidance
counselors, librarians, reading and all subject matter specialists, assistant
principals, department heads, and any other professional educators employed
in the district, will be covered by the same salary schedule as the classroom
teachers. The concept that one is “promoted” by leaving the classroom or that
those who are not responsible for teaching classes of children are higher
status, or more valuable than the teachers is counterproductive and must be
discontinued. 45. The salaries of school office staff, custodians and other
school employees will be negotiated by representatives of their unions with
the Fiscal Manager of the City of __(name of city)__ Public School District
and approved by the Mayor. Buildings and Other
Physical Assets 46. As part of the
decentralization process all buildings and properties of the __(name of city)__
Public Schools now housing central office people, administrators, school
board members or any other employees of the district will be rebuilt as
schools or sold. The Fiscal Managers recommendations will be made in the
first calendar year of the decentralization process and approved by the
Mayor. There will be no physical space retained that might be misconstrued as
a central office. 47. Any radio stations,
television channels, farms, camping sites, acreage and all other physical
property including warehouses, storage facilities, and the contents thereof
currently owned by the district will be retained or sold upon recommendation
of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor. 48. All transportation
vehicles, repair facilities and related equipment will be sold or retained
upon recommendation of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor. 49. Upon
decentralization it will be within the purview of the Fiscal Manager to
recommend to the Mayor that any current asset (including copyrights) of the
__(name of city)__ Public Schools be retained or sold. The Redistricting Process 50. The panel that
establishes the new districts will be appointed by the Mayor of the City of__
(name of city)__. 51. The panel will have a
maximum of nine months to specify the new districts including the school
buildings and physical district boundaries. 52. The initial
decentralization plan will be approved by both houses of the state
legislature. If disapproved the legislature will have three months to approve
a substitute plan. 53. Subsequent
redistricting as populations shifts occur in the city will be made upon
recommendation of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor of the City of __name of
city_. 54. Failing schools will
also require redistricting to maintain maximum size of districts and to
provide choices for parents. The Fiscal Manager will make these
recommendations to the Mayor. Accountability for Public
Education in the City of __(name of city)__. 55.The Mayor through
his/her appointed Fiscal Manager will be accountable for all public funds
related to schooling in the city of __(name of city)__. 56.Just as in the rest of
__(name of state)__, the local school boards will be accountable for the
educational programs of the newly constituted district schools. 57.Local principals will
report to their local school boards through their Principal Chairperson. SELECTED REFERENCES Boe, E.E., Corwin, R.G.(1973)
Organizational Reform and Organizational Survival: The Teacher Corps as an
Instrument of Educational Change. Darling-Hammond,L. and Sclan,E.M.(1996)
Who teaches and why: Dilemma of building a profession for twenty-first
century schools. In J.Sikula (Ed.) Delgadillo,F.(1992) A qualitative
analysis of an alternative masters program for practicing teachers engaged in
action research. Ph.D. dissertation. Florida State Department
of Education(1985) Teaching as a career: High school students perceptions’ of
teachers and teaching. Haberman,M.(1991) Can cultural
awareness be taught in teacher education programs? Teaching Education.
4:1,Fall,1991 Haberman,M.(1999)Increasing the
number of high quality African Americans in Urban Schools. Journal of
Instructional Psychology. October,1999, pp.1-5 Haberman,M. and Rickards,W.(1990)Urban
teachers who quit: Why they leave and what they do. Urban Education. 25: 3,
297-303 Haselow, D.(2002) Newly Elected Heath,D.(1977) Maturity and
Competence. Handbook of Research on
Teacher Education. Second Edition. Pp.67-101. Imhelder,B. and Piaget,J.(1958)
The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood Through Adolescence. Ingersoll,R.(2001) Teacher Turnover,
Teacher Shortages and the Organization of the Schools. Keating,D.P.(1980)Thinking processes
in adolescence. In J.Adelman(Ed.) Handbook of
Adolescent Psychology pp.214-246. Characteristics, evidence
and measurement. In R.A.Mines and A.S.Kitchener (Eds.)Adult Cognitive Development: Methods
and Models,pp.76-91. Kohlberg,L.(1976) Moral stages and
moralization. In T.E.Lickona (Ed.)Moral development
and behavior: Theory research and social issues. pp.2-15, Marcia,J.(1976) Identity six
years later: A follow-up study. In Journal of Youth and Adolescence 5:145-60 Murnane,R.J. (1996) Staffing the
nation’s schools with skilled teachers. In E.A.Hanushek
and D.W.Jorgenson (eds.)Improving America’s
Schools: The Role of Incentives. Pp.241-258. Pintrich,P.R.(1990) Implications of
psychological research on student learning and college teaching for teacher
education in R. Houston (Ed.) Handbook of Research on Teaching. Ch.47
pp.826-857 Quartz, K.H., Thomas,A., Hasan,L., Kim,P., Barraza-Lawrence,K.(2001
Urban Teacher Retention: (Phase One:1998-2001) Technical Report of the CenterX/TEP Research Group, #1001-UTEC-6-01. UCLA:
Institute For Democracy, Education
and Access Rollefson, M. (1990) Teacher
Turnover: Patterns of Entry to and Exit from Teaching. Sleeter,C.E.(1992) Keepers of the
American Dream: A Study of Staff Development and Multicultural Education. Smith, R.A.(2002)Black
Boys. Education Week. October 30,2002. p.40 Sprinthall,R.C. and Sprinthall,
N.A.(1987) Experienced teachers: Agents for revitalization and renewal as
mentors and teacher educators. Journal of Teacher Education 169(1): 65-67 Unites States Department
of Education.(2000) Teaching Researching and Disseminating. What Works.
http://www.ed.gov/inits/teachers/recruit.html Wingspread
Coalition(2001) Where Will We Find the Leaders and What Will We Ask Them To
Do? Forum For the Comments welcomed through
email or post on our Bulletin Board All Rights Reserved ©
2002 EducationNews.org city the
district charters special schools serving disruptors and other specific
populations. The number of schools which benefit by being chartered by the
district is now nineteen. 13. Federal, state and
local elected officials. Candidates running
for office at all levels use educational reform issues related to urban
schools for political purposes. It is no longer possible to be elected
without an educational platform and these inevitably focus on problems that
are worst in the urban districts. Unfortunately these plans inevitably
enhance the bureaucracy not the children and make things even worse when
enacted. 14. School board
members. In many cities as well as in my own, school
board members receive salaries, full health benefits and numerous other
perks. Many boards also have their own research staffs since they don’t trust
the reports of their own central office people and superintendents. 15. Superintendents.
Inflated salaries and perks are common. It is typical
for urban boards to buy out contracts of failed superintendents who then take
jobs in other districts and collect salary checks from their former as well
as from their current employers. 16. Media.
If 17. Professional
organizations. The Great Cities Council, its Director and staff
are just one organization with a budget in the millions. There are countless
other professional organizations whose existence depends on its urban school
district constituency. 18. The “helping”
professions and those who train them. There are
several professions involving health and human service workers who “serve”
the poor in our cities and schools. Small town and suburban school districts
do not employ or contract with social workers, nurses and other health
professionals, community agencies, child care professionals and others to the
same extent as the major urban districts if at all. All these constituencies
have careers because the urban bureaucracies exist. The community colleges
and universities which train and certify this wide variety of individuals are
also beneficiaries. 19. The test
manufacturers have a billion dollar industry which continues to grow.
This industry supports a range of professionals with advanced university
training. 20. Employees of the Victims of the Failed Why Do the Victims Support These Following are some of the reasons the victims
continue to support systems that are clearly dysfunctional bureaucracies. Strange as it may seem, most urban parents and
caregivers still trust the system. They see many school people who are people
of color, who may have grown up in their neighborhood or even attended the
very same schools that their children now attend. Latinos may find a
community person in the school who speaks Spanish and “helps” them. African
Americans see people of color in important positions. Many parents and caregivers work in the school
district or have family members who work in the district. They have a direct
financial stake in the well being of the district. In my city and in many
others the school district is the employer of more minorities than any
business or governmental agency in the city. These parents and caregivers are
cynically exploited by systems that know if they hire minorities these
employees will help protect the entire system from significant change.
Districts in effect trade off jobs to people in poverty or to college
graduates of color who experience discrimination in the private sector as a
strategy for making parents and community think twice about attacking the
district. Many parents and caregivers were themselves
victims of miseducation. With no model of what a
successful education would look like they have an insufficient basis for
understanding how the system is damaging their children. Low income people of color cannot find affordable
housing in suburbs or the transportation and jobs needed to live in small
towns. Their only choice is to keep trying to improve urban districts no
matter how impossible they find the task. The parents and caregivers who have
grievances have no chance against the bureaucracy, even if they organize.
They cannot win any battles against these large school district organizations
any more than they can improve their garbage collection, health care, or the
services of any other branch of local government. In my city the school
district maintains one high school with an 18% graduation rate and claims it
is the parents who will not let the school be closed. The parents and caregivers are low income people
whose major time and energy must be devoted to earning a living. It is
typical for individuals to work long hours or hold several part time jobs.
They simply don’t have the time or energy to monitor the district’s policies
and procedures. In some cases parents and caregivers are bribed
with government grants. Several categories of special education make parents
eligible for monthly checks once they agree to have their children labeled. Parents and caregivers are manipulated, directly
lied to, or controlled. The pretense is that they are being given voice when
in reality their ideas are not heard and their stated choices are simply not
delivered. In my city in 2002 there were 64 schools defined as failing
according to the Leave No Child Behind legislation. The law required that
45,000 parents and caregivers be informed by letter that they were entitled
by federal law to select new schools and move their children out of the
failing schools to new ones. When the delays and procedures engaged in by the
local district system were completed, only 163 of the 45,000 parents were
able to transfer their children to other schools. Whether these were actually
transfers to “successful” schools has not been documented. Many parents and caregivers may have accurate
insights regarding how the system is failing their children but approach it
as they would the lottery. There are enough one-in-a-thousand examples of a
youngster who does get to college and becomes a lawyer or a banker; or an
athlete who gets a scholarship; or a teenager who is adopted by a local
business and is trained for a career. These rare exceptions are enough to
keep hope alive no matter how great the odds are against most children. Many parents and caregivers are simply used by
the school. They are involved as classroom helpers, school volunteers, parent
assistants on field trips and in other unpaid capacities. This leads many of
them to feel involved and useful. It also provides them with some first-hand
experience seeing many teachers who do care and who do work very hard. Finally and most pernicious are the influences
exerted on parents and caregivers by community leaders, religious leaders,
educational leaders, the media and the general society to regard the miseducation of the district as their fault and the fault
of their children. In effect, the school district blames the victims by
convincing them that the school district is doing the best it can to educate
children lacking in the appropriate life experiences, raised by inadequate
parents in chaotic communities. While this would be an amazing and
unbelievable explanation if a school district tried to offer it to non-urban
populations, it is not only offered but accepted by many diverse, low income
parents and caregivers who frequently feel inadequate and helpless in
protecting their children from negative influences. While it is easy to
understand the motivation of the urban districts to blame their failures on
the victims of their miseducation it is more
difficult to comprehend why so many of the victims agree with and support the
district’s explanation of failure. It is only when we understand that parents
and caregivers are under a constant barrage from every source of information
telling them that if there were less violence, drugs, unstable families,
gangs and community instability then their children would do better in
school. The dysfunctional bureaucracy is extremely effective at evading
accountability and convincing parents that miseducation
is their own fault. Distributing Scarce Resources In our society, families in the top 25% in income
send 86% of their children to college while families in the bottom 20% send
4% of their children to college. But there are other gaps that must be
addressed which also contribute to the achievement gap: language development,
early childhood experience, health care, parent education, school size, and
class size. While the majority of the 14 million children in poverty are
white, there are disproportionately high numbers of African American and
Latino children represented. The diverse children in urban poverty represent
about half of these 14 million. The recognition that selected constituencies
derive more benefits than others is not new or strange in American society.
Our basic assumption is that in a free society some will inevitably fare
better than others. We live with the unequal distribution of goods and
services every day of our lives. Inevitably the goods that are most desired
and the services that are most vital are a scarce resource. There is never
enough of what is most wanted or needed to go around. We solve this problem
of “Who gets what?” by raising costs. If, for example, the scarce resource to
be distributed is a limited number of downtown parking spaces then the
parking fees on lots and in garages increase until only those who can pay for
the limited spaces are able to park. We satisfy our sense of fairness by
providing the public equal access to a limited number of metered spaces on a
first come first serve basis but these spaces are less conveniently located,
metered by the hour and ticketed for overtime lapses. We have mollified both
the god of individual initiative by providing those with the means to have
access to highly desirable limited parking and the god of equity and access
by providing the public with the opportunity to compete for public parking.
We have learned to accept this dual process as the best way to distribute a
scarce resource. Our commonly held value is that those who are paying a great
deal should be able to park. As we mature we become cognizant of more than how
material goods are distributed. The distribution of many services affecting
our day-to-day existence and futures are recognized as vital. Access to
health care, legal services, insurance coverage, police and fire protection,
transportation, housing and educational services come to the foreground of
our consciousness. Various levels of government take responsibility for
providing these services and everyone is deemed to be entitled to these basic
services. Frequently, we go even further and espouse the goal that everyone
is entitled to “high quality” services in these and other vital areas. As
politicians spend their careers reiterating such lofty promises it becomes
increasingly difficult to reconcile reality and rhetoric. Our stated values
of equity and access for all don’t match the actual availability and
distribution of services declared to be entitlements for all at a level of
“high quality”. For example, in health care high quality refers to having the
most qualified doctors in the best hospitals utilizing the latest treatments
on a personal and thorough basis. This definition of high quality makes it
clear that health care is a scarce resource since there is a limited number
of the best doctors, treatments and services available. As in the more simple
parking example, the problem of how to distribute top quality health care is
solved by enabling those who can pay the highest, escalating costs to secure
the service. Those who can pay less receive basic but something less than the
highest quality care. The 43 million without health insurance have equal
access to compete for the health services provided by emergency rooms and
other public services. As a matter of life and death, health care is
infinitely more important than parking so there is more political activity
and public discourse about its availability. But when the talk about everyone
being entitled to high quality or even basic health care has subsided, the
actual distribution of scarce health care services is determined on the basis
of who can pay for them. In spite of the fact that some health care
professionals contribute pro bono services, the government provides subsidies
and the private sector makes substantial contributions, the correlation
between ability to pay and access to high quality service is high and not due
to chance: the more one can pay the greater the likelihood that one’s health
care will increase in quality. Many typically pay more than half of their
total assets in their last year of life just to secure even basic health
services. The fact that there is always a finite amount of
the highest quality of any service is what makes it a scarce resource. Access
to scarce high quality resources is controlled by three factors: 1) awareness
that the service or opportunity exists, 2) knowledge of the method (set of
steps, procedures, hurdles) for securing the service and 3) sufficient
resources for buying the service. Nowhere is this three step process for
distributing high quality service more assiduously followed than in deciding
who has access to high quality education. In the case of public education
what is purchased is the location of the family’s housing. Education as a Personal Good The achievement gap is not an aberration of
American society nor is it an unintended consequence. Quite the contrary. It
reflects the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe that
education is a personal not a common good and that the highest quality
education is a scarce resource. Schooling is the means we use to produce
winners and losers. Who gets into the prestigious colleges is the critical
question at the top achievers’ level. Who goes to the other colleges or to
post secondary institutions reflects the competition at the next levels down.
Who gets training for a decent job or any job at all is the next level and so
on. When we get to the poor and diverse children in urban schools the lofty
mission of advanced knowledge, citizenship and self-actualization we want for
our children has been narrowed down to “get a job and stay out of jail.” At
this lowest level there is no longer any competition for a future of any
substantial value. This level is miseducation and
the future “opportunities” it leads to are far from a scarce resource. School systems state goals as universals but
their actual work is sorting students not equalizing their opportunities to
learn. Failing public schools in urban districts function in ways that ensure
that diverse children in poverty will be kept in the bottom half on
standardized tests of school achievement. They function as custodial
institutions rather than as places where learning is the primary activity.
The “pedagogy” offered in these “schools” is a set of cultural rituals that
bears no resemblance whatever to the knowledge base in teaching and learning.
As in other exploitative situations, most of the parents of the 14 million
diverse children in poverty in the 120 largest school districts and in poor
rural areas honestly believe that their schools are treating their children
fairly. In my own city parents and community tolerate a high school which had
an 18 percent graduate last year in a district that has an overall 36 percent
high school graduation rate for African Americans -and this is a higher rate
than in several other urban districts. Maintaining and supporting failure in our urban
school districts over decades cannot be attributed to chance. Typically,
scholars writing in the field of school change assume that the school
functionaries maintaining these urban districts miseducating
the bottom half are well intentioned; they just don’t have sufficient
knowledge and understanding. Even the most scholarly analysts of why school
reform has failed stop short of attributing motive and assume that school
functionaries are benign and caring individuals who just need to know more
and that once they do they will then act more wisely. But objective analysts
observing the realities of life in urban schools must conclude otherwise. The
long-term institutionalization of failure for diverse children in poverty can
only be the result of systematic design and purposeful, committed resistance
to change. For over half a century failed urban school districts and teacher
education efforts directed at improving urban teaching, have spent billions
of dollars from federal and private sources specifically directed at
equalizing the quality of the schooling offered diverse children in urban
poverty. While soliciting and accepting the funds, urban school districts
have systematically pursued policies and practices which have effectively
withstood serious change efforts. I have reports and analysis of major urban
school districts dating from the 1960’s which describe the very same problems
and advocate the very same solutions as analyses made of these districts
after 2000. The fact is that the change efforts have not been as effective as
the urban districts’ blocking strategies and that as urban schools continue
to worsen the achievement gap has become solidified, predictable and worst of
all…generally accepted as if a law of nature. Part III. No One to Blame: Institutionalizing the
Miseducation of Diverse Children in Urban Poverty Whenever any serious, objective, data-based analysis
of the urban schools is presented there is common agreement that the systems
are indeed failing. School people cannot mount a credible defense against the
mountain of evidence revealing students’ low achievement, the achievement gap
with advantaged students, the dropout/pushout rate,
the attendance/truancy rate, the suspension/expulsion rate, teacher turnover,
the graduation rate, or the low number of “successful” graduates who never
move into the world of work or higher education. Given the stated purposes of
public education, these systems are readily shown to be massive failures on
the basis of any criteria using any data sets. How then can these failed
systems resist the onslaught of data supporting their failure and do so
effectively in so many different cities over such an extended period? The
answer does not lie in understanding why the victims support these failing
systems since the victims have little or no power over these organizations
and their supporting institutions. The answer lies in the power of the
beneficiaries who derive unearned privileges from maintaining the present
systems. A secondary explanation is in the naïve behaviors of the would-be
change agents and transformers who do research, publish reports and then
present their findings to the very beneficiaries of the failed systems-as if
the school boards and the functionaries administrating these failing school
district systems are open minded, consumers eagerly waiting to be informed of
still another problem they should be solving. In truth, the problems and
criticisms which may be new to the critics and the researchers are already
much better known to the school people who not only understand these problems
from personal experience but are in possession of substantially more data than
they have allowed the critics to see regarding the extent of their failures. The strategy used by school people to counter any
serious criticism is to begin by admitting to the validity of the data but
then deflecting critics’ calls for stopping their malpractice into
discussions of precisely how the critics would solve these problems in the
context of the existing school district’s system. The assumption they lead
critics into making is that the only option for those who claim to support
public education is to support the existing school district systems. The
content of any criticisms showing that specific system practices are
seriously damaging the children is quickly lost. The focus is shifted from
the criticisms to the critic’s advocacy for changing the district bureaucracy
given the complexities of the system’s administrative structures, the
multiple funding mechanisms, the state and federal mandates, the system’s
contractual obligations, and the body of state laws giving the district the
responsibility for these functions. Using this ploy school people shift the
onus for solving the problems raised in any research report from themselves
to the critics. Whatever critics now propose as remedies must meet two
conditions: they must be solutions that will work given the continued
existence of the present school district; and they must be practical and
feasible. And since the school district employees and their representatives
know these systems best they make themselves the arbiters of whether the
critics’ solutions are realistic and will work. School people’s “logic” now
dominates the interchange. If the critic doesn’t have solutions that the
school people approve of his/her diagnosis of the problem is “proven”
incorrect. In these forums, dialogues and debates, the very constituencies
that cause and benefit from the school district’s failures are able to
preserve and protect their systems from change by shifting the focus from
their miseducation of children to analyses of the
inadequacies in critics’ plans for redesigning their dysfunctional
bureaucracies. Inevitably, critics fall into the trap and begin
presenting ideas for how to solve the problems they have raised within the
current school systems forgetting or not understanding that it is the present
systems that have caused the problems. The constituencies representing the
dysfunctional bureaucracy, with the help of other beneficiaries of the
failing school district, now become the questioners and judges of the
critic’s solutions for changing the system. One by one the critics’
suggestions are shown by the beneficiaries of dysfunctional bureaucracy to be
unworkable within the legal, financial and contractual restraints of the
present system. What may have begun with some critic presenting some valid data
regarding a system practice or policy that should be immediately stopped
concludes with the critics on the defensive suggesting solutions that the
school people show are infeasible. If the critics are local business leaders
the school people even get them to agree that “since we all support public
education in this city we should be working together.” If the critics are
educational experts the school people invite them to serve on school system
committees to explore solutions to the problems they have raised, or they
hire them outright as consultants. These interactions conclude with the
critics being co-opted into contributing human and financial resources to
some initiative which the school people then use to enhance the dysfunctional
bureaucracy rather than solve the particular problem of miseducation
that started the interaction in the first place. The critics lose in two
ways: their valid criticisms will never lead to any action that will stop the
miseducation of the children and they have been
finessed into becoming active collaborators of a pernicious system. The “logic” under girding this twisted process is
interesting. Imagine a doctor sharing data with a patient which indicates
that the patient is dying of cancer. Since the doctor has neither a cure that
he can guarantee nor even any treatment that the patient finds amenable, the
patient has “proven” that the doctor’s diagnosis cannot possibly be valid.
One reason this bizarre non-sequitur is repeated endlessly in every city is
that the critics are amateur change agents and transformers pursuing real
jobs and demanding careers. They can only function as part-time, temporary
change agents. School people and the other beneficiaries of district failure
however all work full time at protecting their systems, their sinecures and
their benefits. In all of these cities the local media handle
criticism of their local dysfunctional school bureaucracy in precisely the
same way using the same “logic.” For example, a critic may come to my city
and make a presentation which shows that in our local school system the
number of children being labeled with some handicapping condition is 18%
compared to 12% nationally and that it is not reasonable to believe that a
city has a special education population of 18%. Would the suburban population
around the city support the labeling of more than one out of every six of
their children as abnormal in some way as a reasonable educational activity?
He indicates further that nationally there are 3.8 million boys but “only”
1.9 million girls being given some special education label. There is also a
significantly greater number of African American males in this population. In
some cities e.g. The media eagerly report these data because it is
in the nature of news that the more negative it is the more likely the
reporter can get his story and byline on page one. But media people are also
beneficiaries of the failed school system. Once they have secured their
negative headlines they quickly lapse into the very same follow-up questions
and “logic” used by school people as blocking strategies. They shift the onus
and accountability from system functionaries who should immediately stop the
inaccurate labeling and quickly come up with a valid procedure that doesn’t
harm children, to the critic’s solutions for changing the school district
system. The media ask the critic questions such as the following: “Are you saying
the district is violating federal and state laws in identifying the
handicapped? Are you saying that all these children should be retested by
people who are not district employees? Which tests should be used? Who should
pay for this massive retesting of 18,000 students? In your plan who will bear
the liability for making restitution to the children and their families for
the damages related to having been incorrectly labeled?” The critic may have
begun with a valid point: i.e. the procedures for evaluating children in this
district are producing biased results in determining who is normal and there
is a likelihood, greater than can be attributed to chance, that this district
is seriously mislabeling and therefore miseducating
large numbers of children, particularly African American males. The media
have neutralized the critic by using school people’s “logic”. If the critic
has no total and complete solution for altering the mislabeling practices
(assuming the present district system must be continued and assuming that the
functionaries within the present system must find his solutions amenable),
then his criticism has been “proven” to be invalid. In this way, when critics
who are focused on improving the schooling offered diverse children in
poverty come up against school people and others who benefit from protecting
existing school systems, they are inevitably made to look unprepared and
unrealistic. The poor critic with expertise in the testing of cognitive
disabilities is no match for school people who can readily show that he
doesn’t know how to reorganize the district and he has no idea of all the
interlocking bureaucracies outside the district which would also have to be
changed in order to stop the miseducation of
children within the district. The goals of the school people and the other
beneficiaries of failing districts is to make their dysfunctional
bureaucracies synonymous with support for public education and to protect and
enhance these systems. In this example what is not discussed is the powerful,
well endowed superstructure which under girds the failing district’s special
education structure. Continuing the same example, the following are just a
few of the trails that lead to the direct and indirect beneficiaries: the
recipients of the 350 million ( 2002 dollars) my district annually receives
given the great and increasing number of its special students; the number of
school psychologists and diagnostic teachers employed to assess all these
students (there are over 1,000 children waiting in the pipeline to be tested
and fully evaluated); the number of other school personnel paid for by these
funds; the amount of contracted services paid for by the district with these
funds; and the amount of additional federal, state and private grants obtained
to work with this inflated student population. Other beneficiaries are the
school people who claim to be raising student achievement scores in
particular schools and in the district as a whole when in reality they are
just increasing the number of children who will be excused from taking
achievement tests. The way achievement scores are “raised” in many urban
schools and districts is not by improving the learning of children but by
excusing an increasing number of students from taking the tests. These passes
are given to special education students, transfer students not in the
building for a sufficient time period and in some districts, the principal
has a ten percent quota for excusing any children s/he deems inappropriate
for testing. The indirect beneficiaries of this system extend way beyond
school boards and system functionaries. They include the universities who
provide the exceptional education training programs for the district
personnel right up through the doctoral level training of the school psychologists.
Other constituencies of beneficiaries include the thousands of federal
employees who write the guidelines and administer the grant funds and the
state employees who oversee these programs. There is literally an army of
lawyers employed by plaintiffs as well as by the districts themselves who
sue, try cases and settle issues related to the treatment of special
education students. An interaction that began with a simple report on
mislabeling special education students has now tapped into roots that connect
widely and deeply with a great number of interlocking systems all built on
the backs of the children being mislabeled. The naïve critic has become an
active accomplice in making him/herself look ill-prepared for changing all
these systems by the sophisticated bureaucrats’ questions and blocking
strategies. To avoid this entrapment those presenting
criticisms of the existing district systems need to make clear that they
support public education but not the dysfunctional bureaucracies which
characterize the current school districts. (Assuming of course the critic is
not a potential beneficiary of the school system seeking to be employed as a
consultant, or seeking the district’s sign off on a grant he is proposing, or
seeking the district’s approval to access some data he needs for some future
study.) Critics need to emphasize there are multiple ways to implement their
suggestions with new forms of school organization which differ markedly from
those of existing school districts but that designing these new districts is
not the purpose of the particular report or study. Critics need to emphasize
that school people and other beneficiaries of maintaining the present
district systems must be held accountable for immediately stopping miseducative practices or resign. It is noteworthy that the example used here of
the failed special education system administered in the urban districts is
merely one of literally dozens that need immediate attention if children are
to be saved from irreparable miseducation. This
scenario of how districts deflect criticism and continue to grow their
dysfunctional bureaucracies can be repeated for other blatant systemic
failures. How are the curricula offered in the district developed and
evaluated? How are the mandated methods for teaching various subjects
determined? What is the district process for selecting, training and
evaluating teachers? What are the procedures for selecting, training and
evaluating principals? What is the district program for assessing student
learning and achievement in addition to mandated testing? How are central
office staff selected, evaluated and held accountable? How effective are the
mechanisms the system uses to control and manage the district budget? What is
the accountability system in place for those who exceed their budgets? What
is the process for tracking funds to ensure they are used for their intended
purposes? What research and evaluation is performed (and not allowed to be
performed) by the district? How effective is the program which allows parents
to select schools initially and to transfer their children out of failing
schools? How effective is the district’s suspension and expulsion policy?
What is the cost and effectiveness of the guidance personnel in the district?
What is the program in place related to the selection, training and
evaluation of safety personnel? How are paraprofessionals and teacher aides
selected, trained, used and evaluated? What are the costs and effectiveness
of the school transportation program? What is the quality and effectiveness
of the after school, tutoring and extra curricula activities supported by the
district? What is the impact of high stakes testing for middle school
students to enter high school? What happens to graduates of the system? In
truth urban school districts do not have the ability to answer any of these
questions in any meaningful way. And these are just a few of the necessary
performance areas which, when studied, would inevitably lead reasonable
people who are not beneficiaries of these district failures to see the
multiple ways in which children are damaged in irrevocable ways. Toward a Solution The preservation, protection and enhancement of
failing urban school districts is deeply embedded in American society by the
constituencies of beneficiaries who derive either direct benefits or
undeserved privilege as a result of these failures. These constituencies
cannot be attacked or even influenced by direct change efforts since their
benefits flow from established agencies of federal and state government,
effective state lobbies for maintaining present forms of funding public
education; the existing body of school law and court cases, universities
supported by massive funding mechanisms and certification agencies, networks
of professional organizations, and a plethora of vendors and entrepreneurs
who benefit from dealing with major urban districts. The power of these
institutions and power blocs derives from the fundamental American value that
education is a personal not a common good and the fact that the eighty
percent of the people who have no children in school believe that they and
their families derive great benefits and little risk from maintaining the
current system. The primary motive of most Americans is to keep the present
benefit structure intact and to control taxes, particularly their real estate
taxes. Whatever changes might be made to make urban schooling more equitable
for diverse children in poverty therefore will have to be made within present
funding structures and without imposing greater costs on taxpayers no longer
directly involved with schooling. This realistic view of the possibilities
for changing let alone transforming any of the major dysfunctional school
bureaucracies more accurately reflects the American experience of the last
half century than the naïve assumption that urban school district
functionaries want to stop their miseducation of
diverse children in poverty and are merely waiting for the presentation of
better research findings or more appeals to their sense of equity and
justice. The surest and most reasonable change strategy
therefore is not to appeal to the self interest of those protecting or
working in the present systems but to the self interest of those who have
financial and legal power over them. Calls for transforming urban districts
will inevitably elicit powerful and effective resistance unless the appeals
are to the public’s sense of maintaining not changing what has always been
done and this means replicating what seems to them to be working in small
towns and suburbs. This can be done in an honest and straightforward manner
since the taxpayers are currently paying enough to have many more effective
urban schools. There are two change goals which are quickly realizable, which
will have immediate impact on decreasing the miseducation
in the urban districts and which will at the same time support the traditions
of American schooling. The first realizable change that will have a
significant impact on diverse children in poverty is not only possible but is
already in the process of impacting many urban schools now. This involves
selecting and preparing new populations of teachers (Part IV.). The second
change is also achievable and is as likely of attainment as enacting any
statute regarding urban schools would be in any state legislature. This
involves decentralizing the major urban districts into districts comparable
in size to middle size townships and suburbs. The benefits of such a
decentralization are discussed in Part V. Appendix A. contains a draft of the
elements that need to be included in such decentralization legislation. These
two changes meet the test of effective change strategies in that they support
the public goals of cost containment and maintain their traditional views
regarding local control of small school districts. Part IV. The Rationale
for Recruiting and Preparing Adults As Teachers of Diverse
Children in Urban Poverty The crisis in urban school schools serving
diverse children in poverty is worsening. The persisting shortage of teachers
who can be effective and who will remain in urban poverty schools for more
than brief periods is a major cause of this crisis. The benefits of securing
and preparing more effective teachers are several: fewer children will be
damaged, more children will learn more and if teachers are placed as groups
into failing schools these schools will be turned around. At the same time it
must be recognized that getting better teachers and even turning failed
individual schools into successful ones will not by themselves transform the
120 failed urban school district bureaucracies currently miseducating
seven million diverse children in poverty. Selecting new populations of
teachers prepared in new ways will provide more islands of success in failing
districts. The belief systems and behaviors of effective urban teachers make
it clear that they are focused on their students’ learning and development.
They are driven to help each youngster be as successful as possible. They do
not go into or stay in teaching because they want to function as educational
change agents, community organizers or system reformers. Their raison d etre is their students first and last. It is also important to understand how and why
some teachers succeed in spite of the debilitating working conditions created
by failed urban school bureaucracies. These organizations are not only likely
to continue but worsen, creating even more negative conditions which impinge
on teachers’ work and children’s learning. Indeed, there is a perverse irony
here: as more effective teachers are recruited, selected and prepared, the
pressures to break up or have state takeovers of failed urban districts
decreases. A pernicious, debilitating school bureaucracy is, in effect, made
to look workable as it secures and retains more teachers who literally drain
and exhaust themselves in order to function in spite of the systems in which
they work. But while good teachers can transform failed schools into
successful ones, they cannot transform entire failed urban districts. At the
district level, issues dealing with federal mandates, state laws, funding
formulas, school board politics, superintendent turnover, central office
mismanagement and local culture must be resolved before systemic change can
occur. And because schools reflect rather than change society it is highly
unlikely these issues will ever be dealt with in ways that transform failing
urban school bureaucracies into organizations that function in the interests
of children, teachers and parents. Nevertheless, recruiting, selecting and
preparing the teachers needed by diverse children in poverty should be
vigorously pursued because they can and will rescue individual children and
transform individual schools. (The section which follows outlines a specific
state law that would implement total district change.) Much can be done to get the teachers needed. Too
many decades have already passed and too many youngsters have been driven
out, miseducated or been underdeveloped awaiting
the change agents who would have us believe they can transform urban schools
districts and their debilitating impact on teaching and learning. This is a
critical issue because defenders of traditional teacher education argue that
before their excellent programs of teacher education can be held accountable
for their “fully qualified” graduates to succeed and remain in poverty
schools, the debilitating conditions of work must be changed. This analysis
argues that securing and retaining effective teachers can and must happen now
because the children need them now and because the conditions in urban school
districts are quite likely to get even worse. Some Pertinent History of Teacher Training Which
Helps Explain the Current Shortage The first normal school training teachers in During this period itinerant male school masters
moved about the country and were contracted by communities to keep school for
a few months. By the Civil War women were replacing men as teachers for
several reasons. They worked for less money than men, they were regarded as
more capable of morally training the young, they needed gainful employment if
they did not marry, and their role as a purveyor of some basic skills and
moral trainer was seen as the level of work women were capable of doing. Between the Civil War and WWI. the growth of
normal schools burgeoned and became extended into post secondary training
programs of one and then two years. Between 1890 and 1920 30 million
immigrants, mostly low income white Europeans, came to a Except for the western states, every state opened
normal schools and some states had over ten. During the 20th century these
normal schools were extended into four year teachers colleges offering
baccalaureate degrees. After WWII. they became state colleges offering comprehensive
majors not limited to teaching. The old two year normal schools did not die
easily and in The knowledge base in teacher education developed
after WWI. with the growth of educational psychology and educational
philosophy. But neither the psychologist and test experts professionally
descended from E. L. Thorndike or the progressives seeking to implement the
work of John Dewey ever recognized the existence of African Americans, those
in urban poverty, or people in any ethnic or class groups not seeking to
abandon their cultures and melt into the mainstream. The progressives,
philosophers and citizenship educators were clearly defeated by the
educational psychologists who claimed to have universal constructs regarding
the nature of child development, the nature of learning and the nature of
evaluation and research. These studies still comprise the basic knowledge
base for preparing teachers in colleges and universities today. During this same period the land grant
institutions comprising the flag ship institutions of their respective
state’s public higher education systems also took on the responsibility of
preparing teachers. Today, with the exception of states whose higher education
was developed differently in response to later statehood, we still see the
pattern of states with major land grant institutions now deeply involved in
teacher education but even larger numbers of state colleges that were
formerly the single purpose teacher training institutions still preparing
most of the teachers. In recent years private institutions have begun
contributing some teachers to urban school districts but these tend to be
small numbers and not the major source of teachers for urban districts. A few very vital points of this history are
relevant to the current analysis and need to be kept in mind in order to more
clearly understand why traditional programs of teacher education do not
prepare enough teachers for diverse children in urban poverty. Teacher training institutions were purposely and
systematically located across rural A great number of such normal schools were needed
to ensure that female teachers would not work further than fifty miles from
home, could easily return home for holidays and summer work, and that the
teachers being trained would likely be of the same religious and ethnic
background as the children they would be training in morality and the abc’s. The notion that school teaching is the
appropriate work of young, single women has been imbedded in American culture
for more than 150 years. The perception that even married women are less appropriate
than single women has been reinforced during periods of economic depression
when married women in many urban districts were laid off. There were very few public normal schools started
in urban areas. A few exceptions existed in There can be no question that teacher training in
The need for teachers who could be effective with
African Americans, other children of color, children in urban poverty and
non-European populations was never a consideration in the development of the
knowledge base in American teacher education. The knowledge base purporting to explain normal
child development, how normal children learn and what constitutes normal
behavior that is offered in traditional programs of teacher education is
derived in greatest measure from psychology where the unit of study and
analysis is the individual. Other ways of understanding and explaining human
behavior that reflect cultural constructs are still very minimal additions to
state requirements for approving university based teacher education programs,
e.g a course in Multicultural Education. What is the import of these trends? After one
understands even a few of the basic facts surrounding the development of
teacher training in America it is extremely naïve to raise questions such as
why teacher education is not relevant to diverse children in urban poverty,
or why teacher education does not provide more teachers who will be effective
in teaching all children, or why teachers who complete traditional programs
of teacher education do not seem to be able to relate to all children. It was
never the intention of teacher education in Current Factors Affecting the Teacher Shortage Between 2000 and 2010 app. 2,200.000 teachers
representing more than half of The staggering percentage of the newly certified
choosing to not waste their own time or the children’s time is a second
reason for the shortage. This is actually a benefit since it does not inflict
potential quitters and failures on children in desperate need of competent
caring teachers. Newly certified graduates not taking jobs is also a clear
indication that the bearers of these licenses are being much more honest
about themselves and their lack of competence than those who prepared them
and who insist on pronouncing them “fully qualified”. In 1999 the SUNY system
prepared 17,000 “fully qualified” teachers. The number who applied for
teaching positions in The third reason for the teacher shortage is the
number of beginners who take jobs in urban schools but fail or leave. Using
data from the The fourth major reason for the teacher shortage
in urban schools is the shortage of special education teachers. This shortage
is exacerbated by the fact that many suburbs, small towns, parochial and
private schools contract out the education of their children with special
needs to their nearby urban school districts. This not only increases the
teacher shortage in urban districts but raises their costs. For example, in
my state and in many others the state makes a deduction in state aid to the
urban district for every special education class not taught by a fully
certified teacher. No state imposes such a fiscal penalty when a district
employs an uncertified teacher in math, science or other areas of continuing
shortage. A fifth reason for the teacher shortage results
from greater entrance level career opportunities now available to women
outside of teaching at the time of college graduation. Many however soon
discover that they encounter glass ceilings and can only advance in limited ways.
After age 30 this population includes many who decide to make more mature
decisions than they did at age 20 about becoming teachers of diverse children
in poverty. The sixth reason for the shortage deals with
college graduates of color who have greater access into a larger number of
entry level career positions than in former times. As with the population of
women who perceive greater opportunity for careers of higher status and
greater financial reward than in teaching, this population also frequently
experiences glass ceilings after age thirty. African Americans comprise fewer
than 6% of all undergraduates in all fields and substantially fewer who
decide as youthful undergraduates to pursue traditional university based
programs of teacher education. But as career changers after aged thirty,
college graduates of color (particularly women) become a primary source of
teachers for diverse children in poverty in urban school districts. The continuing and worsening teacher shortage
must also take note of the special nature of teaching fields such as math and
science. Math and science teachers leave at a higher rate than others; they
tend to be men seeking better opportunities in other fields. While the causes
of the shortage in these areas has some distinctive dimensions they are not
discussed separately but are included in the analysis of the entire problem.
The solutions proposed for the general shortage will also impact on these
high need specializations. Given all these reasons the question of why there
is a desperate shortage of special education teachers deserves further
comment. The knowledge base purporting to explain child development, how
children learn and what constitutes normal behavior that is offered in
traditional programs of teacher education is derived from the field of
psychology where the unit of study and analysis is the individual. What is
regarded as normal behavior is based on what white school psychologists and
teachers believe to be normal behavior and development. For example; future teachers
are taught that it is not normal for children to sit quietly all day. In my
city there is a large population of Hmong children
who sit quietly all day and are a source of great concern to the teachers who
place more credence on psychological definitions of normal and on their own
prejudices, than on what they see acted out in front of them all day everyday
by perfectly normal children of a different culture. It is not accidental
that in my own city with over 103,000 children in public schools that there
are 18,000 children, mostly African American and mostly male, identified as
emotionally disturbed, cognitively disabled or handicapped in some way. The
fact that parents in poverty are enticed by state and federal programs of
financial aid if they agree to have their children labeled as handicapped is
little known and rarely mentioned. Neither is the fact that 145 school
psychologists assisted by 100 Diagnostic Teachers receive more than 1,000
referrals from classroom teachers every year. In effect the school
psychologists in my city would have us believe that more than one out of six
of our children are abnormal. And that it will perfectly acceptable, given
the referral rate, if by 2012 25% or one out of four of our children will be
labeled as handicapped in some way. The hegemony of psychologists over the
definition of normal is clear when one notes that no state gives
anthropologists, sociologists or linguists the legal power to decide who is
normal and what constitutes normal behavior. It should be remembered that
four state certified psychologists swore under oath that, based on his
responses to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory, Jeffrey Dahmer was sane and capable of
making normal moral judgments. The fact that he had actually eaten 22 people
was ignored in favor of his test scores. The bizarre reality imposed by those
licensed to determine who and what is normal is that the results of tests
which are supposed to predict behavior are given greater credence than actual
behavior. This explains why school children, once labeled in primary grades,
never get unlabeled in upper grades even when they subsequently earn good
grades or pass the eighth grade tests for high school admission. In effect,
“fully qualified” teachers prepared in traditional university based programs
are systematically trained to view many of their children as somehow lacking,
deviant, or having special needs. It is certainly understandable that new
teachers unable to connect with and manage their students will see things
that are wrong with the children and their families rather than the
inadequacies in themselves. Trapped by biased, limited definitions of how a
normal child should develop, behave and learn language, it is inevitable that
teachers would refer children they cannot connect with for testing to equally
limited school psychologists who then provide the backup test scores and
psychological evaluations to show that these children are not capable of
functioning in normal ways. In studies of quitters and leavers the most
commonly offered reasons they cite refer to either poor working conditions,
the difficulty of managing the children, or both. A typical list includes the
following reasons: overwhelming workload, discipline problems, low pay,
little respect, lack of support and the clerical workload. Reasonable people
have every reason to question the validity of these responses, the maturity
of the leavers making these responses and the quality of the teacher
preparation offered those who give these reasons for leaving. Are we really
to believe that even youngsters fresh out of teacher education programs have
no idea that teachers’ salaries are low until after they take jobs and
actually receive their first paycheck? Are we really to believe that even new
teachers are unaware of the media attacks and the public criticism of urban
poverty schools until after they are employed in them? Are we seriously to
believe that as new teachers they had no idea before taking a position that
working as a teacher would require an hour or two of planning time every
night? Or that there would be records to keep, papers to grade and parents to
see? People who work in offices, stores, factories, beauty salons and drive
taxis and who have not completed 60 credits of education courses and student
teaching are well aware of these factors as the typical working conditions of
teachers. Indeed, interviews of high school students indicate quite clearly
that even adolescents are well aware of these factors as the normal
conditions of their teachers’ work. Quitters and leavers who offer these
reasons for terminating their employment and those who accept and analyze
these responses as authentic explanations, make the findings of studies on
why teachers quit or fail highly problematic. While poor working conditions contribute to
teacher losses, in-depth interviews we have had with quitters and failures
from schools serving diverse children in urban poverty over the past 45 years
reveal other explanations for leaving than those gleaned from superficial
questionnaires, surveys and brief exit interviews. Our final classroom
observations of teachers who are failing also support the existence of more
basic reasons for leaving than those gained from typical exit interviews.
Leavers are understandably chary about having anything on their records that
they believe might make it difficult for them to get a reference for a future
job. They are also savvy enough to try and not say things that might make
them appear biased or prejudiced toward children of color or their families.
It takes an hour or longer for a skilled interviewer to establish rapport,
trust and an open dialogue in order to extract more authentic and less
superficial reasons for why teachers leave. For example, the quitter’s
citation of “discipline and classroom management problems” as the reason for
leaving takes on new meaning when one learns what the respondent is really
saying. In typical surveys quitters and failures frequently mention the
challenge of working with “difficult” students and this comment is simply
noted or checked or counted. In in-depth interviews where rapport has been
established this cause is amplified by leavers into more complete
explanations of why discipline and classroom management are difficult for
them. They make statements such as, “I really don’t see myself spending the
rest of my life working with these children.” or “It’s clear that these
children don’t want me as their teacher.” When the reasons for the disconnect
between themselves and the children are probed further, leavers will
frequently make statements such as the following: “These kids will never
learn standard English.” or “My mother didn’t raise me to listen to ‘m.f.’ all day.” or “These children could not possibly be
Christians.” or “These kids are just not willing or able to follow the
simplest directions.” The comments of quitters and leavers which may have at
first appeared to indicate a simple, straightforward lack of skills on the
part of a neophyte still learning to maintain discipline, can now be recognized
as actually representing much deeper issues. Rather than a simple matter
which can be corrected by providing more training to child-centered beginning
teachers who understandably just need some tips on classroom management and
more experience, we have now uncovered an irreconcilable chasm between the
teachers and their students. Teacher attrition increases as the number of
minority students increases. Quitters and leavers cannot connect with,
establish rapport, or reach diverse children in urban poverty because at
bottom they do not respect and care enough about them to want to be their
teachers. These attitudes and perceptions are readily sensed by students who
respond in kind by not wanting these people as their teachers. Contrary to
the popular debates on what teachers need to know to be effective, teachers
in urban schools do not quit because they lack subject matter or pedagogy.
Quitters and leavers know how to divide fractions and they know how to write
lesson plans. They leave because they cannot connect with the students and it
is a continuous, draining hassle for them to keep students on task. In a very
short period leavers are emotionally and physically exhausted from struggling
against resisting students for six hours every day. In our classroom
observations of failing teachers we have never found an exception to this
condition: if there is a disconnect between the teacher and the students no
mentoring, coaching, workshop, or class on discipline and classroom
management can provide the teacher with the magic to control children s/he
does not genuinely respect and care about. In truth, the graduates of
traditional programs of teacher education are “fully qualified” if we limit
the definition of this term to mean they can pass written tests of subject
matter and pedagogy. Unfortunately while knowledge of subject matter and
pedagogy are absolutely necessary they are not sufficient conditions for
being effective in urban schools. Knowing what and how to teach only becomes
relevant after the teacher has connected and established a positive
relationship with the students. Many who give advice on the teachers needed to
solve the shortage frequently assert that these children need to be taught by
the “best and the brightest.” Unfortunately, the typical criteria used to
define “the best and the brightest” identify the precise individuals who are
most likely to quit and fail in urban schools. The majority of early leavers
have higher I.Q.’s, GPA’s, and standardized test
scores than those who stay; more have also had academic majors. Teachers who
earn advanced degrees within the prior two years leave at the highest rates.
Those who see teaching as primarily an intellectual activity are eight times
more likely to leave the classroom. In 1963 my Milwaukee Intern Program
became the model for the National Teacher Corps. In the ten years (1963-1972)
of the Corps’ existence app. 100,000 college graduates with high GPA’s were
prepared for urban teaching. While many stayed in education fewer than 5%
remained in the classroom for more than three years. This was the largest,
longest study ever done in teacher education. The fact that the shibboleth
“best and brightest” survives is testimony to the fact that many prefer to
maintain their pet beliefs about teacher education in spite of the facts. In
effect, the criteria typically used to support the “best and brightest” are
powerful, valid identifiers of failures and quitters. While being an effective teacher of diverse
children in poverty has some intellectual and academic aspects, it is
primarily a human relations activity demanding the ability to make and
maintain positive, supportive connections with diverse children, school staff
and caregivers. The term “best and the brightest” might be more appropriately
used to refer to individuals who can actually demonstrate a propensity to
connect with and cause diverse urban children in poverty to learn rather than
as a predictor of which college youth will earn high GPA’s and do well on
written tests of teaching. Those threatened by this view misconstrue my
advocacy to mean that I believe that knowledge of subject matter and
knowledge of teaching are unimportant. Not so. There is substantial research
and no question that teachers who know more English usage and who have
greater knowledge of the subject matters they teach, have children who learn
more. But it is only after their propensity to relate to diverse children in
urban poverty has been demonstrated that the teachers’ knowledge of subject
matter and how to teach can become relevant. This raises the more basic issue of whether
future teachers (or anyone) can be taught to connect with diverse children in
poverty or whether this is an attribute learned from mature reflection about
one’s life experiences after one has had some life experiences. If it is, as
I believe, the latter then it is an attribute that must be selected for and
not assumed to be the result of completing university coursework as a late
adolescent or young adult. Indeed, there is substantial evidence that college
courses and direct experiences reinforce rather than change teacher education
students’ prejudices and abilities to connect with diverse children in
poverty. Because of selective perception students in university training
programs merely “see” what they are predisposed to “see” in their coursework
and direct experiences. Open students become more open and narrow students
reinforce their limited views of the world. The effect of teacher education
is to make teacher candidates more predisposed to believe whatever they
believed when they began their programs. This is also true of the effects of
in-service programs on teachers. Building on this dynamic that trainees see
what we want to see makes selecting the right people a more productive
approach to teacher education than assuming that training programs are
treatments powerful enough to transform deep-seated values and ideologies.
Given the need for teachers with the belief systems and the predispositions
to effectively relate to diverse children in dysfunctional bureaucracies,
there should no longer be any question that selecting those with the
appropriate dispositions determines the usefulness of any training. The Nature of Adolescence and Adulthood as it
Pertains to the Education of Teachers for Diverse Children in Poverty There is an extensive literature on the nature of
adolescence and adulthood. Much of it is focused on the life stages of people
generally while a lesser amount refers to the stages of teacher development.
Almost all of this literature comes from psychologists or writers who use
psychological constructs and suffers from the same ethnocentricity that
characterizes the knowledge base in teacher education. But since over 90% of
those in traditional university programs of teacher education are white youth
from working class and middle class families the characteristics attributed
to these young adults is most relevant and worth noting. University magic occurs when students graduate
from high school. They are declared “adults” by their respective states and
by the universities in which they enroll. Bestowing this status frees the
university from having to pay any serious attention to students’ natures or
to the stages of their development. The notion that it is critical to know
the nature of the learners and the nature of their development in order to
teach them is of no concern and completely ignored by university faculty. In
place of stages of development higher education relies on contrived
categories of status representing the university organization, e.g. freshman,
undergraduate, full time and GPA level. The areas in which youth force
universities to respond to their developmental needs are in extra-curricular
activities, food service, health care, and rules related to housing and
safety. It is no accident therefore that out-of-class activities which do
respond to the nature and level of their development frequently cause more
change in students than their formal classes. Late adolescents and young adults are still
struggling with the issue of self-identity fighting off peer pressure,
asserting independence from family and grappling with their own struggle to
achieve meaning and purpose in life. They are haunted by questions like,
“Will I find someone to love me?” “Will I be able to earn a living?” How do I
gain independence from my mother and still show her I love her?” The period
of the 20’s is frequently identified as a time of impatience and idealism.
“Now” becomes an obsession and change must be quick. Those in their early
twenties are infatuated with ideals but have not experienced or observed
enough of life to provide a workable basis for understanding themselves or
the world. This often leads to impetuous behavior regarded by authority
figures as rebellious or lacking in judgment. In American society these and
other insecurities are normal concerns and explain the almost complete self
absorption of youth as they seek to answer the basic questions of identity.
Teaching, on the other hand, is a continuous effort to inspire confidence in
others. Juxtaposing the demands of teaching with the natural and common needs
of young adults in American society highlights the inappropriateness of the
match. The willingness and ability to empathize with and nurture others is
the essence, the very soul of teaching. These attributes are present in very
few college youth. Because the work of the teacher requires building
self-esteem in others not in trying to find oneself, there is no stage of
development less appropriate for training teachers than late adolescence and
young adulthood. Mature adults have a strong and reasonable sense
of who they are and are self-accepting. Such adults are sufficiently
confident to be motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards as they
engage in a wide range of learning activities. The benefit of a university
education to mature adults is that they are able to integrate their personal
experiences with theory, research, logic and a system of morality and apply
them to the persistent problems of living in a free society. Educated adults
consciously test common sense and unexamined assumptions against various ways
of knowing. Freed of the adolescent’s need to realize parental expectations
and the pressures of equally immature peers, adults seek to reconcile their
inner direction with the social good. Terms such as integration, generativity and self-realization have all been used to
define adults who have reached the level of aligning their proclivities with
the demands of society. They seek self enhancement by contributing. In Kohlberg’s theory of moral development
individuals move through the following stages: II.
satisfaction of needs and wants, III. concern
with conformity, IV.
concern with preserving society, V.
concern with what is right beyond legalities, VI.
concern with universal ethical principles According to Kohlberg, only 10 per cent of those
in their twenties ever attain Stages V. or VI. His findings indicate that
“college students are capable of employing reasoning at these levels yet rarely
do so.” Erikson’s
theory of human development includes eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (first
year); autonomy vs. doubt (ages 2-3); initiative vs. guilt (ages 4-5);
industry vs. inferiority ( ages 6-11); identity vs. role confusion (ages
12-18); intimacy vs. isolation (18- through young adulthood); generativity vs. self-absorption (middle age); and
integrity vs. despair (old age). For Erikson generativity can only occur after individuals have
resolved the issue of intimacy. Generativity is
most common in young parents but can be found in individuals who are actively
concerned with the welfare of young people and making the world a better
place for them to live and work. Those who fail to develop generativity fall into a state of self-absorption in
which their personal needs and comforts become their predominant concern.
Researchers building on Erikson’s model have
extensively studied college students to determine at what point they develop
a sense of their own identity and found that only 22 per cert achieve this
level. Other researchers have described college youth as
lacking commitment to any philosophy or set of beliefs, living for the moment
and not delaying gratification. Piaget equated his fourth stage of formal
operations with adulthood. At this level individuals engage in abstract
thinking, prepositional thinking, combinatorial thinking,
hypothetical-deductive thinking, thinking ahead, metacognitive
thinking and self reflection. Piaget found that college students rarely reach
this level of thinking . Kitchener followed college youth through their
undergraduate years and found them beginning as moral and intellectual
absolutists, moving to a stage of relativism when any opinion is as good as
any other and ending up in a search for identify with most never getting
beyond the middle stage of relativism. Other models of development focus on
stages of development and the nature of knowledge sought in each. Late
adolescents and young adults typically use their direct experiences in
support of absolutism, they then move through the stage of weighing
conflicting perceptions (relativism) and conclude with a more mature view of
reality and multiple ways of knowing. This last stage is seldom or ever
reached in college youth. It is ironic that youthful college students who
believe so much in the value of their own experiences as the best way to
learn undervalue the experiences of the children they teach by limiting them
to texts and vicarious experiences. Teacher educators bombarded by preservice students’ fears and apprehensions regarding
classroom discipline are well aware of the childlike stage in which many
about to be certified find themselves. There is seldom little if any concern
with higher levels of thinking or with how issues of social justice and equity
can be infused into school curricula. Indeed, there is strong resistance to
these issues. As they move toward graduation and certification there is a
marked narrowing of student interests and concerns until students finally
narrow the complex problems of teaching into the one grand obsession which
precludes their thinking about anything: “Will I be able to control the
class?” This is the overriding concern of the new graduates awarded universal
licenses by all states and heralded by university based teacher educators as
“fully qualified.” There is no value in simply getting older. But
serious reflection upon one’s life experience is more likely to result in
individuals reaching higher levels of development. Having families, work
experiences and sustained careers provide individuals with rich and varied
experiential material to integrate into their cognitive and emotional
development. The potential of teacher growth through reflection is great. So
too are the dangers for those individuals who have difficulty reflecting
accurately upon their strengths and weaknesses. Clearly those with more life
and work experiences have more with which to build up their perceptual
repertoires. Reflection is a process not only more characteristic of advanced
life stages than of youth but a process that needs meaningful experiences to
draw upon. Ultimately it is the high level of conceptual
work that star teachers serving diverse children in urban poverty perform
which drives my commitment to the need for greater teacher maturity. If we
perceive of teaching as essentially a mindless set of jejune tasks (e.g. the
19th century school- marm teaching the abc’s and giving directions) then the levels of cognition
or development reached by the practitioners would be of little importance. Indeed,
many urban school districts have given up trying to find teachers who can
think at all and have mandated that instruction be done by reading from
scripts. On the other hand, if we believe teaching requires higher-order
abilities such as the humane application of abstract concepts to interactions
with diverse children and youth in urban poverty, then the teachers’
cognitive and affective development becomes a crucial determinant of success.
There have been multiple studies (over 200) in many countries which have
found that there are four general developmental abilities which are highly
related to success in any field: 1) Empathy, 2) Autonomy, 3) Symbolization, and 4) Commitment to democratic values. All four of these correlate with greater maturity.
In the American sample there was an inverse correlation between SAT scores
and level of maturity. Pintrich’s
landmark summary of the research on the learning and development of college
students and its implications for teacher education is a meta-analysis which,
to my knowledge, no college or university program of teacher education has
ever referred to let alone utilized. Reasonable people cannot read Pintrich’s summary of what is known about human
development and learning and still focus on young adults as the primary
source of teachers. Using any respectable theory of human development leads
to the same conclusion. For white, working and middle class females growing
up in American society there is no more inappropriate stage of life to
prepare for teaching than young adulthood… and for youthful males their
personal development and the demands of teaching are an even greater
mismatch. What do these scholarly summaries about teachers’ levels of
development mean when translated and applied to the real world? We are
supposed to believe that a system of traditional teacher education which
would take a young, immature white male from a small town in Wisconsin, put
him through a traditional program of teacher education, graduate, certify and
declare him “fully qualified” at age 22 is engaged in a perfectly reasonable
activity. Further, we are to believe that it would be a good idea for this
young man to come to the Milwaukee Public Schools (or to any urban district
in America) and be hired as a teacher because he is now a professional
practitioner who can shape the mind and character of a seventeen year old
African American girl with a child and a part-time job trying to make a place
for herself in the world. Or that he has the knowledge, skills and
predispositions to help a Hispanic five year old make sense of the world. Or
that he has the competencies needed to help a young adolescent survive the
throes of puberty and the peer pressure to drop out. The best that can be said about such a monumental
disconnect between the nature of who is in teacher preparation and the
demands of practice in urban schools is that we should be grateful to this
young man and his cohort for never taking jobs. They know and are willing to
declare their inadequacies more truthfully than the faculty who trained them.
The faculty declaring these youth to be “fully qualified” are beneficiaries
of a university system that views its late adolescent and young adult
students preparing to become teachers as its clientele. Diverse children in
urban poverty being miseducated by dysfunctional
bureaucracies are not conceived of as the clientele of teacher educators. Where Do Urban Schools Currently Get Their
Beginning Teachers? Although the typical age of college graduates has
risen from age 22 to age 26, it is still generally true that most of those
preparing to teach are college age youth, that is, late adolescents and young
adults. This analysis is not an advocacy for preventing all such individuals
from becoming teachers but to shift the balance. The current emphasis remains
app. 80% still being youngsters below age 26 who are full-time university
students and only app. 20% being older “non-traditional” post baccalaureate
students or adults in alternative certification or on-the job training programs.
Given the needs in urban poverty districts this balance should be reversed so
that the majority of those in teacher training would be adults over age 30.
Denigrating labels such as “retreads” or “career changers” indicate the power
of the misconceptions and stereotypes regarding the age at which it is
generally believed that individuals should become new teachers. My best
estimate is that of the app. 500.000 traditionally prepared teachers under
age 26 produced annually, fewer than 15% seek employment in the 120 major
urban districts serving app. 7 million diverse children in poverty. This
represents app. 75,000 of the colleges and universities annual output. The
research based on my Urban Teacher Selection Interview indicates further that
of the 15% who are willing to apply to work in urban school districts that
only one in ten (or 7,500) of those under aged 26 will stay long enough
(three years) to become successful teachers in urban schools. What this means
is that app. one half million youngsters under 26 in over 1,250 traditional
program of teacher education are supplying the 120 largest urban school
districts with about 1.5% of their annual teacher output. If I am
under-estimating this by tenfold, which I do not believe I am, then
traditional college based programs of teacher education would still be
preparing about 15% of their graduates willing to try urban teaching. The
effectiveness of this minimal output must also be considered since 50% of
those who deign to try urban teaching will leave in five years or less. While this is obviously a very small output from
traditional teacher preparing institutions it represents a small bloc of
young people who do have the potential for teaching diverse children in urban
poverty and for whom the doors of the profession must remain open. But should
this population of young teachers represented by this 1.5% contribution
remain as the predominant body of future teachers or should policy makers be
looking for other constituencies from which to draw and develop the teachers It is quite clear that the current and future
teachers of diverse children in urban poverty are non-traditional populations
of adults trained in on-the-job forms of university-school partnerships or by
the urban school districts themselves. Those who cannot recognize this
reality are those who have a stake in not wanting to be convinced that the
present system of teacher preparation is not working for the urban districts.
In truth, traditional teacher educators could put all of the alternative
certification programs they rail against out of business right now if they
were able to prepare teachers for the real world rather than for the best of
all non-existent ones. It is difficult for traditional programs of teacher
education to maintain they know best how to prepare teachers when they don’t
do it. The excuse is that “we are preparing excellent teachers in sufficient
numbers but cannot be held accountable for their performance or whether they
stay because the conditions of work in urban schools are driving them out.” Will the Conditions of Work for Beginning
Teachers Improve or Worsen? While I have argued that teachers leave primarily
because they cannot connect with children it is necessary to recognize that
the conditions under which beginning teachers work in urban schools are
horrific and are driving out not only those who should have never been hired
but many who have the potential for becoming effective teachers and even
stars. The problem faced by policy makers is whether the strategy of
recruiting and training more mature people who can succeed in schools as they
presently are is a better strategy than continuing to focus on traditional
populations of teachers and waiting for change agents to transform the
conditions under which they will work in failing urban school districts. In my own city we train beginning teachers who
are often expected to work under conditions that are medieval: rooms without
windows, over 30 middle school students in a class including 6 or more
students with handicapping conditions, insufficient, outdated textbooks, no
dictionaries, no paper, no access to a copier that works, no computers
connected to the internet, science rooms without running water or any
materials, no parking, and no closet that locks, or even a hook to hang up
one’s coat. Teachers in my city spend an average of $600 dollars a year of
their own money on supplies. We’ve had beginners use their own funds to buy
chalk. When I recently asked a principal to provide a teacher with some chalk
he replied, “The teachers knew how much money we had for supplies and they
chose to use it up by January. What do you want from me?” Observing the
equipment, supplies and materials that urban teachers typically have to work
with frequently leads one to question whether these teachers are working in
the Salaries. In my city a single mother with two or
more children (a typical profile of one pool who are likely to stay in urban
teaching) will earn a starting salary that is low enough to meet the state’s
poverty criterion and will entitle her to food stamps. In future, teacher
salaries will not increase in real dollars and are likely to fall further
behind others of comparable education in other occupations. Much worse than
the annual rate of inflation are the out-of-control costs of health care
which are predicted to triple in the next decade. Urban school districts are
negotiating greater contributions from teachers to help cover these costs but
will still be forced to put whatever monies they might have used for salary
raises into health care. In my own city the teachers’ benefit package is already
55% so that a beginning teacher paid $28,000 costs the district $43,400. By
2012 a very conservative estimate is that the benefits package will be at
least 80%. This means that a beginning teacher paid $35,000 will cost the
district $63,000 per year… and this assumes that the teachers will be paying
for a greater share of their health care thereby decreasing their real
income. School Safety. The amount that urban districts
pay for school safety personnel and equipment will continue to increase. This
not only diverts funds from educational purposes but seriously alters school
climate transforming them from educational institutions into custodial ones.
This is already true in most of the major urban districts. In many urban
middle schools there is more invested in hall cameras and safety equipment
and personnel than in computers or computer assisted instruction. As more
time of professional staff is directed to issues of control it casts a pall
over the self concepts of beginning teachers who have great needs for
perceiving of themselves as educators rather than as monitors or safety
personnel. It is not likely that in future schools will either give up their
custodial functions or that they will become safer places. Class Size. This condition has a great impact on
beginners. It will continue to move in two directions. In a few states which
mandate smaller classes, usually for primary grades, there will be a sharp
increase in the teacher shortage but smaller classes for those who take jobs
in these states. In most urban districts however class size will increase in
response to higher birth rates among the urban poor. These increases in class
size will be worst in urban middle schools where teachers face the most
behavior problems and where most of the students who will not make it to high
school are retained for an extra year or more. In urban middle schools
teachers work with between 100 and 150 students daily. These schools are
likely to be places where large classes make the conditions of work extremely
difficult for beginners. Caring teachers recognize that this is the last
chance for many youth to make it or drop out before getting to high school
and as a result they work especially hard. But the conditions of work in
urban middle schools will continue to make it more likely that the teachers
who stay for more than five years are likely to be the strong insensitives rather than those who are caring and
committed. Prohibitive costs make it un- likely that the goal of reducing
class size beyond primary levels is one that will be realized in the urban
districts. Supportive Principals. There is a growing of
shortage of effective urban school principals. It is not uncommon for major
districts to fire as many as fifty at a time. In addition, an increasing
number of urban districts now hold the principal accountable, on an annual
basis, for raising test scores. Raising these expectations for principals
cuts down on the pool of those who can be effective in such demanding roles.
It is noteworthy that beginning teachers frequently cite “having a supportive
principal’ as a critical factor in their professional development and whether
or not they leave. There is a continuing and growing shortage of school
leaders of color who can function effectively in African American and Latino
communities. Principals are still drawn from the ranks of former teachers and
assistant principals in the same urban district. Unless there is an increase
in the pool of teachers of color therefore the pool from which future
principals of color will be drawn will not increase. The obstacle to turning
this situation around is that every urban district has a shortage of
effective principals now. This means that most of the teachers and assistant
principals who will comprise the pool of future applicants to become
principals may never work for or even see a principal functioning as an
accountable, instructional educator leading an urban school as if it were an
effective community based organization in a democratic, pluralistic society.
As the shortage of effective principals increases the demands and
expectations for what this role can accomplish increases. The growing
expectation that the principal can no longer be a building manager but must
be the instructional leader of a non-profit community organization will
deepen this shortage. Without such models of success to emulate, the
most likely prognosis is that tomorrow’s principals will function in the same
ways and at the same levels as today’s. This makes the likelihood that
beginning teachers will be getting more support from an increasing pool of
more effective principals problematic. Tests. The number of tests taken by students in
urban schools is not likely to diminish. District and state mandates have now
made testing a fact of life for urban teachers. In some districts the
curriculum is so tightly aligned with the mandated tests that teachers
actually follow scripts to cover all topics in the exact ways the students
will be tested for. This is a critical condition of work for many beginners
who are misled into believing that as teachers they will be professional
decision-makers rather than school employees required to spend most of their
time as test tutors. The very strong likelihood is that the pressures felt by
teachers to prepare their children for tests will continue and increase since
so many will be assigned to schools officially designated as failing. On the positive side there has been an increase
in several conditions which beginners rate as critical conditions of work.
First, there is more teacher teaming than in past. This means that beginning
teachers have greater access to veteran teachers’ ideas and experiences.
Second, there is more mentoring of beginning teachers by experienced teacher
with released time. Both of these factors are expensive because they involve
greater staff costs and while implemented in some urban districts they are
cut back in many others. If these are the five conditions cited by most
urban teachers as the most debilitating and if all five of these are likely
to worsen, is it a wiser strategy to continue to prepare teachers in
traditional ways and wait for their working conditions to improve, or to
prepare new populations of teachers who can succeed in today’s failing urban
school districts? Securing the Teachers Traditional teacher education cannot provide the
great number of teachers who can be effective and who will remain in urban
schools for more than brief periods. Recruiting and preparing the teachers
needed for the real world will require new forms of teacher education
employing the following processes: 1)Recruiting mature college graduates from all
fields; 2) Selecting only individuals whose belief
systems predispose them to see teaching and schooling as a means of fostering
equity and justice for diverse children in poverty; 3) Preparing candidates while they function as
fully responsible, paid teachers of record in schools serving diverse
children in poverty; 4) Providing a support system that includes
coaching from skilled mentors and a technology system that connects them
instantly to resources and problem solving, 5) Offering professional studies which are
closely aligned with the actual behaviors candidates must perform as
teachers; and 6) Evaluating and recommending candidates for
licensure on the basis of their children’s learning. Using these procedures we have trained diverse,
mature college graduates from all fields of study for the Milwaukee Public
Schools since 1990. 78% of them are minorities and 94% of them are still
there after a decade. Securing the teachers that diverse children in urban
poverty deserve requires taking some initiatives which are in opposition to
the current practices and culture in traditional teacher education. 1. The clients of teacher preparation are not
students in programs of teacher education but the diverse children in poverty
in urban schools who need effective teachers. This change of focus causes
many shifts in practice, the most notable being that teacher candidates are
put through selection and training procedures that result in significantly
more of them self selecting out or being failed before they are licensed. 2. The great shortage of teachers does not mean
that standards should be lowered but that they must be raised. Teachers who
will be effective and who will remain are individuals who not only have
knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy but who can connect with diverse
children in poverty and can function under extremely adverse working
conditions. 3. Candidates should not be admitted into
programs of teacher education because they have passed selection criteria at
a college or university. Urban school districts must first process candidates
through their selection procedures. Only those who the district is willing to
hire and to guarantee a placement should be admitted to preparation programs. 4. The locus of preparation must be urban school
classrooms in which the candidates function as teachers of record. The
various pools of adults who can be recruited, selected and prepared to be
effective in urban schools envision themselves changing careers in order to
function in the role of teachers. They are not willing to take on the role of
students in teacher education programs and have demonstrated clearly, over
decades, that they will not be recruited if their primary role is to become
college students rather than teachers. This means alternative certification
programs, intern programs and on-the-job training programs must be used to
recruit and prepare mature candidates. 5.The traditional practice of young college
students deciding they would like to be teachers of a particular age or
subject matter and then seeking employment after graduation must be
abandoned. The starting point for creating the pools of teachers to be
trained in the various specializations should be based on the projections of
teacher need in the local urban school districts. Then those who can fill the
specific school needs for the various teacher specializations should be
actively recruited, selected and prepared. 6. For teachers to remain and be effective their
training program cannot focus on universal truths re: the supposed universal
nature of all children, teaching and learning. Neither can it be preparation
focused on the best of all model professional schools since these are nonexistent
worlds. From the outset candidates’ preparation must focus on serving
particular groups of children from specific local cultures attending schools
in a particular urban district. Preparing candidates for no place in
particular and assuming they will be able to teach all children everywhere
will only perpetuate the current system of “fully qualified” graduates not
taking jobs, quitting or failing. There is no shortage of teacher candidates
whose primary motive is to secure licenses which will enable them to be hired
in any state. The need is for teachers for specific urban schools serving
particular constituencies. Mature adults from a specific urban area who begin
with a focused local, urban commitment are more likely to not only succeed
but remain in urban schools. 7. The tradition of waiting for young
undergraduate students to apply to a university to be prepared as teachers
must be replaced with aggressive and targeted marketing programs directed at
pools of local, adult college graduates, particularly those of color.
Nationwide and traditional forms of recruitment by urban school districts
competing with each other for a limited pool of young minority graduates need
to be replaced by strategies which focus on mature residents of the local
metropolitan area. Local churches and faith-based community organizations are
basic to the recruitment of African American and Latino applicants. While
women and mothers with children in the very same school systems in which they
would like to become teachers are the primary target, ways of reaching local
male pools must be utilized. New ways of explaining the work of a teacher in
an urban school district need to be an integral part of honest, realistic
marketing that lets applicants know what they are getting into from day one.
Signing bonuses and similar inducements for enticing reluctant applicants who
lack commitment to the diverse children in the particular urban area are
counterproductive and should be discontinued. 8. Specific attributes of great (star) urban
teachers should guide the selection of new teachers into preparation
programs. Traditional criteria which predict success in college or on written
tests of teaching should be irrelevant to the selection process. All programs
of preparation should utilize both interviews of applicants which compare
them to star teachers and observing candidates actually relating to children
and youth. These are the two most powerful predictors of success with diverse
children in urban poverty. 9. The post baccalaureate level is the primary
source for the new pools of teacher candidates who need to be recruited.
There should be no limitation on the fields of study which these candidates
have completed. Considerations of grade point and other traditional admission
criteria used by graduate schools are irrelevant criteria. It is
counterproductive to focus on or even include masters degree studies during
the first year of any internship, residency or on-the-job training program. Considering the factors beginning teachers say they
need or would like versus those they regard as debilitating, the likelihood
is far greater that the negative conditions for beginning teachers in urban
schools will not only continue but worsen. What this means for securing
teachers who will stay and become effective is clear. While all
constituencies must do everything possible to try and improve the conditions
under which beginning urban teachers work we cannot be naïve at the expense
of children in poverty schools. The need is for teachers who can be effective
with today’s children and youth in today’s schools. We cannot take the pious
position that it is unfair or even immoral for beginning teachers to function
in today’s schools and therefore we as teacher educators cannot be held
accountable for who we select or how we train them until the urban schools
are transformed. There are real children, spending the only childhood they
will ever have going to these schools everyday. Demanding that the schools
improve before we can be expected to provide effective teachers for such
places will sacrifice the education of 14 million children while we wait for
change agents who have been extremely unsuccessful up to now. The most
prudent policy must assume that whether these schools stay the same or get
even worse we will recruit and prepare caring teachers who will make a
difference immediately, Part V. Decentralization and Accountable School
Leadership There are many critical elements that would be
necessary to include in a state statute decentralizing its urban school
districts. There is no one template that can be used to cover the
peculiarities that will necessarily arise in various states. The example
offered in Appendix A. is merely a starter example of some of the critical
elements that are likely to be useful in several states similar to my own. My
strong feeling is that if decentralization statutes are done effectively and
with relevance to the needs of the particular cities and states there will be
some degree of flexibility and variation in these statutes. At the same time
there are some fundamental issues that must in some form be achieved by every
effort to decentralize if it is to be successful. Each of these required
elements refers to building various forms of accountability into the statute. Accountability Elements Which Should Be Achieved
in Decentralization Statutes An elected Mayor through his Fiscal Manager
rather than a superintendent should be held directly responsible for the
fiscal oversight of all the schools in the city. As an elected official this
individual can be held accountable. There should be no district wide central office
allowed to become established by the Fiscal Manager. No dysfunctional
bureaucracies absorbing funds that should be used for the education of
children can grow and take resources away from schools if there are no
central offices. There should be no miniature central offices
created in the newly decentralized districts. Each of these districts should
be able to function with the level of administration currently typical in
their surrounding suburban and township districts. There must be an end to city-wide school boards
trying to make policy with a massive budget, (in many cases over a billion
dollars), that is beyond their span of control and understanding. The Fiscal Manager
reports to the Mayor not a board. Each of the newly created districts will
have its own local school board. The newly constituted districts of up to 5,000
students are small enough to provide the children personal attention but
sufficiently large to provide all the options needed in a modern, effective
school district. As there are shifts in population these districts may vary
in size but should not be allowed to grow beyond 5,000. The newly constituted local districts will not be
administered by superintendents and the inevitable staffs that build up
around superintendents’ offices, but by a school principal chosen by his/her
peers on a limited term basis. Since there will be only twelve or so schools
in each district the local school boards will be able to hold school
principals directly and clearly accountability for the quality of teaching
and learning in every school. The principal who serves as the local
“superintendent” should be viewed as a temporary assignment rotated among the
local district’s principals. The newly constituted districts should have two
clear accountability lines: one fiscal and the other educational. The fiscal
oversight is through the Fiscal Manager who is the deputy to the mayor. The
educational oversight is through local school boards to the state department
of education as is the case with all the surrounding suburbs and townships. The currently powerless urban parents and
citizens must have the same rights and immediate contacts with their schools
as other citizens in the state. Aside from achieving these essential goals, the
nature of each state’s decentralization statute should vary and be
sufficiently flexible to account for local conditions. A Note on A Critical Omission in This Advocacy It will be readily noted by those familiar with
failing urban school districts as well as by parents, business and community
constituencies with experience in dealing with urban districts that effective
urban schools in failing districts inevitable are led by outstanding
principals. In future it will be necessary to recognize that an effective
urban principal in a failing school district is not a building manager and
more than an instructional leader. S/he is the leader of a non-profit
community organization. The small number of outstanding principals that can
be readily identified in every failing district are not products of the
training institutions where they took courses to earn their state licenses,
nor are they products of the school systems where they worked their way up as
teachers and assistant principals. They are atypical mavericks who became
effective school leaders in spite of not because of their training and
previous school positions. While school districts all over In every failing urban district it is still
typical for the school boards and superintendents to claim their highest
priority is getting the very best school leaders they possibly can. They then
limit their candidate pools to the same old populations of in-house people
who have ostensibly been prepared by functioning as assistant principals and
completing a principal’s certification program. These two criteria ensure
that most of their principal appointments will yield a continuous crop of
failure principals. The principals who are most likely to succeed in
failing urban school districts are currently heading community agencies,
small businesses, governmental agencies, in the military and working
successfully at a wide variety of jobs and careers outside of public
education. Because bringing these new populations into school leadership
roles is still a long term rather than a near future trend it is regretfully
omitted from this analysis. The focus here is on the changes that can be made
near term which will stop the miseduation of
diverse children in poverty now. Who Will Benefit from
Decentralization? The three primary benefits of decentralizing
dysfunctional urban school district bureaucracies will be stopping the
massive miseducation and raising the quality of the
urban schools to those typical in the state; giving urban parents and
communities the same level of control enjoyed throughout the state; and
demonstrating that if taxpayer funds are used in responsible, accountable
ways for their intended purposes that there are sufficient funds currently in
the system to educate all the children in urban schools to high levels. The common arguments against decentralization are
that having all these small districts would increase the bureaucracy and the
costs, that many urban parents are themselves dropouts and increasing their influence
on the schools will not improve them, and that many of the special services
provided by the urban schools will be lost to the children. These arguments
are extremely weak and readily answered. The suburbs and major towns of our
states do not devote over half of their school budgets to people who are
ostensibly helping or supervising the teachers and children. If the failing
urban school district is replaced by small districts which simply do not have
the funds, the space, or the parental support to hire these central office
functionaries then none will be hired. Neither the suburbs nor the small
towns have cabinet officers, department heads or any of the other numerous
functionaries who earn over $100,000 per year (plus fringe benefits) yet they
have children who learn more. By making the new districts similar in size to
existing school districts there will be neither the positions nor the funds
to expend on an army of central office functionaries. The bureaucracy will
not grow because there will be none. The argument that urban parents cannot run their
local schools is blatantly racist. The The final argument that the bureaucrats will make
against decentralization will be that many valuable services will be lost.
But why should surrounding school districts (all of which have wealthier
people than the city) be able to contract with the urban public schools to
take their special education students rather than integrate and include these
students into their own schools as the law intends they do? Why should
surrounding schools (including private schools) expect the urban public
schools to provide free transportation for many of their students? The answer
to these and many other questions is always the same: “You have is a big
district that has all these services and we are just a small district.” This
statement is actually in code and is really saying: “The taxpayers in our
small district have not provided funds for these services and would protest
or take our jobs if we asked them for funds for these purposes, while the
taxpayers in your city have no notion that they are even providing these
services and couldn’t do anything about stopping them if they found out.”
Suburbs of wealthy families use this small vs. big rationalization to get the
poor families of the city to support services they themselves should be
providing. Simply put, the small towns and suburbs use their neighboring
large districts as fiscal fools. This is similar to the strategy used in my
state when the state representatives of 72 counties decided that four urban
counties in southeastern Finally, the notion that any service provided by
the public schools of a major urban district is saving money because it is
done for a larger group is simply not supported by the facts. The best
example of this fable are the after school reading and tutoring programs. In
my city the YMCA has for decades offered after school reading tutoring that
is more effective and reaches three times as many students at a small
fraction of the cost of the tutoring offered by the Milwaukee Public Schools.
The argument that this failed district which has miseducated
over a million children and continues to miseducate
over 100,000 annually should be kept intact because it offers valuable
services which would not otherwise be available is untrue and misleading. It
would be like looking at a town in Alabama where the Monsanto Chemical Co.
has poisoned the air, the ground and the water with carcinogens that are
killing the residents and saying, “Yes, but Monsanto offers day care
services.” At what cost are the day care services offered and how about the
local community organizations that offer more and better day care at
one-third of the public school costs? A final caveat is in order. It is reasonable and
practical to conclude that the newly created decentralized districts will
provide higher quality education than the single failing district within the
existing budget and within the current state statutes for calculating
increases to this budget. The usual argument that children in poverty need
more funds, that special education students need more funds and that bilingual
children need more funds are correct but in this case are unnecessary. These
extra funds can all come from the funds released by discontinuing a
dysfunctional bureaucracy skimming more than half (in some cases two-thirds)
of its budget before allocating funds to the schools. At the same time, the
state system for funding all the schools in the state is in need of
rethinking and repair. Currently some districts invest twice as much as
others in the schooling of their children. The property tax rate in a property
poor district can be five times higher than in a property wealthy low tax
district. But while the creation of a more equitable funding system for the
entire state is going on there need be no delay in moving ahead to save the
educational lives of those currently being miseducated.
In my city the funds in the current public school system budget and the funds
that would accrue annually under the existing state funding system, would be
sufficient to significantly increase the quality of schooling offered all
children in the newly created school districts. Appendix A. Sample Elements to be Included in a
State Statute for Decentralizing Its Urban School Districts The legislature of the State of __(state name)_
will approve an education bill directed specifically at stopping the
irreparable harm being done to children in the (city name) at great cost to
themselves, their families, to the taxpayers and to the general society. This legislation will
have three goals: To achieve these purposes the legislation
proposed will include but not be limited to the following elements: Educational Management The administration of the schools in each of the
newly created districts will be subject to the same rules and regulations as
the other school districts in the State of (state name) . Each of these
districts will be comparable in size to surrounding suburban and major town
school districts. The essential difference will be the maintenance of the City
of (name of city) as the tax base unit for funding these districts. The
legislation will create a City of (name of city) School Office led by a
Fiscal Manager and up to 3 FTE’s. This skeleton office will replace the
current city school system which has over half of its employees who do not
work directly with children in schools. The City of __(name of city) School
Office will be a pass-through of funds from the state to insure that all
funds go directly to schools and are not diverted for the maintenance and
growth of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Following are some of the elements
which will be included in this legislation. Organization and Governance 1. The __(name of city)__Public Schools will be
discontinued as an entity responsible for the administration of public
schools in the city of __(name of city)__. 2.The public schools of the _(
name of city)__will be decentralized into ___X____ districts not to exceed
5,000 students in each. These districts will be limited to high schools of no
more than 800 students and elementary schools (K-8) of 300 or fewer students.
There will be no middle schools in these districts. 3. The __(name of city) will remain as the tax
base unit for the all the newly constituted public school districts educating
children in the __(name of city)__. 4. The newly created school districts will be
accountable to a Fiscal Manager appointed by the Mayor of __(name of city)__
for budget purposes and directly to the State of __(name of state)__ for all
educational purposes. 5. Each of the districts will have a five person
school board elected by the parents and community every four years. 6. There will be no superintendents in any of
these districts. The school principals in each of the districts will select a
chairperson on an annual basis to serve as the administrative representative
to the school board. Fiscal Management 7. The Mayor (s) of the __(name of city)__ will
appoint the Fiscal Manager for the City of (name of city)__ Public School
District to oversee the use of all revenues generated from the state and
local tax base as well as from federal grants awarded on a district basis.
Essentially, this individual’s duties will be to ensure that all public funds
intended for the education of __(name of city) students go directly and only to
individual schools and not to perform any functions in support of all the
schools or to any individuals not working in a specific school. 8. The Fiscal Manager of the __(name of city)__ 9. Appeals regarding the Fiscal Manager’s
allocation of funds to school districts will be made directly from the local
school boards to the Office of the Mayor. 10. The salary of the Fiscal Manager will be
limited to the salary of the highest paid teacher in any of the districts in
the City of __(name of city)__ plus two additional months for summer. This
would make the Fiscal Manager’s salary less than many current superintendents
in suburbs and major towns and substantially less than the current salary of
the urban superintendent. There will be no perks or additions of any kind
which can be made to this salary. 11. The Fiscal Manager’s term will be limited to
a maximum of four years. S/he will be subject to annual reviews of the Mayor. 12.The Fiscal Manager will be limited to no more
than 3 FTE’s paid for with public funds. The job descriptions of these
individuals will be up to the Fiscal Manager. S/he will have the discretion
of contracting for services using the equivalent of these salaries. 13. Annual increases to the budget of the Fiscal
Manager will be made according to all existing state laws for funding the
current __(name of city)__ Public School System. 14. Because of the intense pressure on the Fiscal
Manager for additional funds from the newly created school districts who have
been conditioned to depend on a centralized bureaucracy, it can be
anticipated that the Fiscal Manager’s annual budget is likely to request
substantial increases. This legislation will make it clear that such special
budget requests can never exceed 1% of the total budget for all the school
districts in the City of (name of city)_. 15. All requests for exceptions or additions to
the annual budget must be made by the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor or the
__(name of city)__ or to the appropriate state agency overseeing funds for
particular purposes. 16. The City of __(name of city)__ will audit the
Fiscal Manager annually and prepare a report to the Mayor. This report will
include whatever the city auditors and the Mayor deem to be appropriate but
must include the following: The amount of federal, state and private grants
which the Fiscal Manager’s office has received and their dispersal to the
school districts. The annual amount behind each child in each of
the newly constituted districts so that judgments about equity among the
districts can be readily ascertained. The annual amounts behind high school students
vs. elementary students in each of the districts. The funds received from all sources for
exceptional education students in each of the districts. The amounts of any grants or donations received
in each of the districts. The specific districts which overspent and
under-spent their annual budgets. 17. The total budget of the Fiscal Manager for
dispersal to all the districts will increase annually according to all state
laws and funding formulas currently in place. These boards will have all the powers and duties
commonly associated with local school boards. They will be governed by all
the current laws of the State of __(name of state)__. In addition to current
statutes the legislation establishing the new districts will include the
following modifications or emphases. 18. Each school district will have its own school
board to set policy for the district. Each board will be composed of five
parents, caregivers or residents of the community served by the schools in
the district. 19. School board members will be elected for four
year terms by vote of all residents of the community and parents/caregivers
of children who attend the district schools. 20. School board members will receive $100 for
attending meetings not to exceed 25 meetings in any calendar year. All other
meetings or duties will be their voluntary. contributions. School Board
members will not be employees of the district and will receive no health,
retirement or other benefits or perks. This includes borrowing school equipment, using
school facilities for non-school purposes, using school transportation for
personal reasons, or receiving any materials or equipment which the district
is discarding. 21. School board members will recuse
themselves from voting on any issue that involves the hiring, contracting or
providing of paid services by the district to any family member, employer of
a board member or a school board member’s family, or any company or agency in
which the member has an interest. 22. All costs related to the school boards will
be paid by the local districts. 23.School board meetings shall be subject to
all the laws of the State related to open meetings, affirmative action and
maintaining public access to documents and reports. 24. School boards will set their own meeting
times and length of meetings. No meeting shall continue after 11:00 p.m. All
meetings shall take place in a school building or other public building in
the community with sufficient notice so that parents and community may
attend. 25. Districts will provide school board members
with a physical space that includes computers, telephones, immediate access
to a copier and fax, and access of up to 20 hrs per week of clerical
assistance. 26. With the exception of #25 preceding, district
school boards will have no employees of their own. District Superintendents 27. None of the newly constituted districts will
have a superintendent. Central Office Structure 28. None of the newly constituted districts will
have a central office School Principals in the Newly Constituted
Districts 29. The role of the principal will not be defined
as a building manager. The role of school principals in all the districts
will be defined as an administrator of a non-profit community based
organization. This is to recognize the role of the school administrator as an
individual who is not only an instructional leader but a leader of his/her
local community. The need to relate to the diverse constituencies in the
community, to raise additional funds than those that are allocated in the
regular budget, to make provision for health and human services, to make
provisions for after school, evening and summer programs are all critically
important parts of this leadership position. 33. The principals’ salaries will not exceed 1.1
times the highest teacher salary in his/her district plus two additional
months and will be set by the school board. 34. The annual evaluation criteria of principals
will be set by their school boards but must include the following criteria:
achievement scores for all mandated tests; the number of students in their
schools not taking the tests; attendance rates for teachers and students;
annual summaries of suspensions, expulsions and dropouts; evaluations of all
newly hired teachers which include achievement data of their students; an
evaluation of the principal by the teachers in his/her school; and a review
of the principal’s effectiveness in involving the community in the life of the
school. 35. Principals’ time allowed out-of-their school
districts will be limited to ten days per year if approved by the school
board. Professional meetings out of the district but within the city, sick
days and vacation will not be counted. 36. Support for principals attendance at
professional meetings will come from the principal’s school budget and be
part of his/her annual report to the school board. 37. Principals will not use any portion of their
school budgets for consultants, speakers, memberships of any kind,
subscriptions, or for purposes not directly related to the teaching and
learning of students in their schools. Private and grant funds may be
solicited for purposes deemed appropriate by the principal. Teachers and Teacher Representation 38. Teachers in specific __(name of city)__
Public Schools who wish to continue teaching in them after decentralization
will be able to do so. 39. The current salary schedule and benefits will
remain in effect in the newly constituted districts. 40. New teachers and teachers who wish to
transfer will be hired in each of the school districts according to
procedures established in those districts and approved by their local school
boards. 41. The tenure rights of veteran teachers will be
continued in the newly constituted districts and extended to new teachers
using the current criteria in place. 42. The salary and benefits of teachers in all
the newly created districts will continue to be negotiated annually by the
__(name of city)__ Teacher Education Association with the Fiscal Manager of
the City of __(name of city)__ Public School District and approved by the
Mayor. 43. There will be no residency requirement for
teachers to live in the districts in which they teach or in the City of
__(name of city)__. 44. One teachers salary schedule shall pertain to
all professional staff in the schools. Guidance counselors, librarians,
reading and all subject matter specialists, assistant principals, department
heads, and any other professional educators employed in the district, will be
covered by the same salary schedule as the classroom teachers. The concept
that one is “promoted” by leaving the classroom or that those who are not
responsible for teaching classes of children are higher status, or more
valuable than the teachers is counterproductive and must be discontinued. 45.
The salaries of school office staff, custodians and other school employees
will be negotiated by representatives of their unions with the Fiscal Manager
of the City of __(name of city)__ Public School District and approved by the
Mayor. Buildings and Other Physical Assets 46. As part of the decentralization process all
buildings and properties of the __(name of city)__ Public Schools now housing
central office people, administrators, school board members or any other
employees of the district will be rebuilt as schools or sold. The Fiscal
Managers recommendations will be made in the first calendar year of the
decentralization process and approved by the Mayor. There will be no physical
space retained that might be misconstrued as a central office. 47. Any radio stations, television channels,
farms, camping sites, acreage and all other physical property including
warehouses, storage facilities, and the contents thereof currently owned by
the district will be retained or sold upon recommendation of the Fiscal
Manager to the Mayor. 48. All transportation vehicles, repair
facilities and related equipment will be sold or retained upon recommendation
of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor. 49. Upon decentralization it will be
within the purview of the Fiscal Manager to recommend to the Mayor that any
current asset (including copyrights) of the __(name of city)__ Public Schools
be retained or sold. The Redistricting Process 50. The panel that establishes the new districts
will be appointed by the Mayor of the City of__ (name of city)__. 51. The panel will have a maximum of nine months
to specify the new districts including the school buildings and physical
district boundaries. 52. The initial decentralization plan will be
approved by both houses of the state legislature. If disapproved the
legislature will have three months to approve a substitute plan. 53. Subsequent redistricting as populations
shifts occur in the city will be made upon recommendation of the Fiscal
Manager to the Mayor of the City of __name of city_. 54. Failing schools will also require
redistricting to maintain maximum size of districts and to provide choices
for parents. The Fiscal Manager will make these recommendations to the Mayor. Accountability for Public Education in the City
of __(name of city)__. 55.The Mayor through his/her appointed Fiscal
Manager will be accountable for all public funds related to schooling in the
city of __(name of city)__. 56.Just as in the rest of __(name of state)__,
the local school boards will be accountable for the educational programs of
the newly constituted district schools. 57.Local principals will report to their local
school boards through their Principal Chairperson. SELECTED REFERENCES Boe,
E.E., Corwin, R.G.(1973) Organizational Reform and
Organizational Survival: The Teacher Corps as an Instrument of Educational
Change. Darling-Hammond,L. and Sclan,E.M.(1996) Who teaches and why: Dilemma of building
a profession for twenty-first century schools. In J.Sikula
(Ed.) Delgadillo,F.(1992)
A qualitative analysis of an alternative masters program for practicing
teachers engaged in action research. Ph.D. dissertation. Florida State Department of Education(1985)
Teaching as a career: High school students perceptions’ of teachers and
teaching. Haberman,M.(1991)
Can cultural awareness be taught in teacher education programs? Teaching
Education. 4:1,Fall,1991 Haberman,M.(1999)Increasing
the number of high quality African Americans in Urban Schools. Journal of
Instructional Psychology. October,1999, pp.1-5 Haberman,M.
and Rickards,W.(1990)Urban teachers who quit: Why
they leave and what they do. Urban Education. 25: 3, 297-303 Haselow,
D.(2002) Newly Elected Heath,D.(1977)
Maturity and Competence. Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. Second
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and Piaget,J.(1958) The Growth of Logical Thinking
from Childhood Through Adolescence. Ingersoll,R.(2001)
Teacher Turnover, Teacher Shortages and the Organization of the Schools. Keating,D.P.(1980)Thinking
processes in adolescence. In J.Adelman(Ed.)
Handbook of Adolescent Psychology pp.214-246. Characteristics, evidence and measurement. In R.A.Mines and A.S.Kitchener
(Eds.)Adult Cognitive Development: Methods and Models,pp.76-91. Kohlberg,L.(1976)
Moral stages and moralization. In T.E.Lickona (Ed.)Moral
development and behavior: Theory research and social issues. pp.2-15, Marcia,J.(1976)
Identity six years later: A follow-up study. In Journal of Youth and
Adolescence 5:145-60 Murnane,R.J.
(1996) Staffing the nation’s schools with skilled teachers. In E.A.Hanushek and D.W.Jorgenson
(eds.)Improving America’s Schools: The Role of Incentives. Pp.241-258. Pintrich,P.R.(1990)
Implications of psychological research on student learning and college
teaching for teacher education in R. Houston (Ed.) Handbook of Research on
Teaching. Ch.47 pp.826-857 Quartz, K.H., Thomas,A.,
Hasan,L., Kim,P., Barraza-Lawrence,K.(2001 Urban Teacher Retention: (Phase
One:1998-2001) Technical Report of the CenterX/TEP
Research Group, #1001-UTEC-6-01. UCLA: Institute For Democracy, Education and Access Rollefson,
M. (1990) Teacher Turnover: Patterns of Entry to and Exit from Teaching. Sleeter,C.E.(1992)
Keepers of the American Dream: A Study of Staff Development and Multicultural
Education. Smith, R.A.(2002)Black Boys. Education Week.
October 30,2002. p.40 Sprinthall,R.C.
and Sprinthall, N.A.(1987) Experienced teachers:
Agents for revitalization and renewal as mentors and teacher educators.
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Researching and Disseminating. What Works.
http://www.ed.gov/inits/teachers/recruit.html Wingspread Coalition(2001) Where Will We Find the
Leaders and What Will We Ask Them To Do? Forum For the Comments welcomed through email or post on our
Bulletin Board All Rights Reserved © 2002 EducationNews.org |
city the district charters
special schools serving disruptors and other specific populations. The number of
schools which benefit by being chartered by the district is now nineteen.
13. Federal, state and local elected officials. Candidates running for
office at all levels use educational reform issues related to urban schools for
political purposes. It is no longer possible to be elected without an
educational platform and these inevitably focus on problems that are worst in
the urban districts. Unfortunately these plans inevitably enhance the
bureaucracy not the children and make things even worse when enacted.
14. School board members. In many cities as well as in my own, school board
members receive salaries, full health benefits and numerous other perks. Many
boards also have their own research staffs since they don’t trust the reports
of their own central office people and superintendents.
15. Superintendents. Inflated salaries and perks are common. It is
typical for urban boards to buy out contracts of failed superintendents who
then take jobs in other districts and collect salary checks from their former
as well as from their current employers.
16. Media. If
17. Professional organizations. The Great Cities Council,
its Director and staff are just one organization with a budget in the millions.
There are countless other professional organizations whose existence depends on
its urban school district constituency.
18. The “helping” professions and those who train them. There are several
professions involving health and human service workers who “serve” the poor in
our cities and schools. Small town and suburban school districts do not employ or
contract with social workers, nurses and other health professionals, community
agencies, child care professionals and others to the same extent as the major
urban districts if at all. All these constituencies have careers because the
urban bureaucracies exist. The community colleges and universities which train
and certify this wide variety of individuals are also beneficiaries.
19. The test manufacturers have a billion dollar industry which
continues to grow.
This industry supports a range of professionals with advanced university
training.
20. Employees of the
Victims of the Failed
Diverse children and youth in poverty who are being miseducated
Taxpayers whose funds are being misappropriated
Society at large absorbing the lifelong costs of caring for the miseduated
Why Do the Victims Support These
Following are some of the
reasons the victims continue to support systems that are clearly dysfunctional
bureaucracies.
Strange as it may seem, most urban parents and caregivers still
trust the system.
They see many school people who are people of color, who may have grown up in
their neighborhood or even attended the very same schools that their children
now attend. Latinos may find a community person in the school who speaks Spanish
and “helps” them. African Americans see people of color in important positions.
Many parents and caregivers
work in the school district or have family members who work in the district.
They have a direct financial stake in the well being of the district. In my
city and in many others the school district is the employer of more minorities
than any business or governmental agency in the city. These parents and
caregivers are cynically exploited by systems that know if they hire minorities
these employees will help protect the entire system from significant change.
Districts in effect trade off jobs to people in poverty or to college graduates
of color who experience discrimination in the private sector as a strategy for
making parents and community think twice about attacking the district.
Many parents and caregivers
were themselves victims of miseducation. With no
model of what a successful education would look like they have an insufficient
basis for understanding how the system is damaging their children.
Low income people of color
cannot find affordable housing in suburbs or the transportation and jobs needed
to live in small towns. Their only
choice is to keep trying to improve urban districts no matter how impossible
they find the task. The parents and caregivers who have grievances have no
chance against the bureaucracy, even if they organize. They cannot win any
battles against these large school district organizations any more than they
can improve their garbage collection, health care, or the services of any other
branch of local government. In my city the school district maintains one high
school with an 18% graduation rate and claims it is the parents who will not
let the school be closed.
The parents and caregivers
are low income people whose major time and energy must be devoted to earning a
living. It is typical for individuals to work long hours or hold several part
time jobs. They simply don’t have the time or energy to monitor the district’s
policies and procedures.
In some cases parents and
caregivers are bribed with government grants. Several categories of special
education make parents eligible for monthly checks once they agree to have
their children labeled.
Parents and caregivers are
manipulated, directly lied to, or controlled. The pretense is that they are
being given voice when in reality their ideas are not heard and their stated
choices are simply not delivered. In my city in 2002 there were 64 schools defined
as failing according to the Leave No Child Behind legislation. The law required
that 45,000 parents and caregivers be informed by letter that they were
entitled by federal law to select new schools and move their children out of
the failing schools to new ones. When the delays and procedures engaged in by
the local district system were completed, only 163 of the 45,000 parents were
able to transfer their children to other schools. Whether these were actually
transfers to “successful” schools has not been documented.
Many parents and caregivers
may have accurate insights regarding how the system is failing their children
but approach it as they would the lottery. There are enough one-in-a-thousand
examples of a youngster who does get to college and becomes a lawyer or a
banker; or an athlete who gets a scholarship; or a teenager who is adopted by a
local business and is trained for a career. These rare exceptions are enough to
keep hope alive no matter how great the odds are against most children.
Many parents and caregivers
are simply used by the school. They are involved as classroom helpers, school
volunteers, parent assistants on field trips and in other unpaid capacities.
This leads many of them to feel involved and useful. It also provides them with
some first-hand experience seeing many teachers who do care and who do work very
hard.
Finally and
most pernicious are the influences exerted on parents and caregivers by
community leaders, religious leaders, educational leaders, the media and the
general society to regard the miseducation of the
district as their fault and the fault of their children. In effect, the school
district blames the victims by convincing them that the school district is
doing the best it can to educate children lacking in the appropriate life
experiences, raised by inadequate parents in chaotic communities. While this
would be an amazing and unbelievable explanation if a school district tried to
offer it to non-urban populations, it is not only offered but accepted by many
diverse, low income parents and caregivers who frequently feel inadequate and
helpless in protecting their children from negative influences. While it is
easy to understand the motivation of the urban districts to blame their
failures on the victims of their miseducation it is
more difficult to comprehend why so many of the victims agree with and support
the district’s explanation of failure. It is only when we understand that
parents and caregivers are under a constant barrage from every source of
information telling them that if there were less violence, drugs, unstable
families, gangs and community instability then their children would do better
in school. The dysfunctional bureaucracy is extremely effective at evading
accountability and convincing parents that miseducation
is their own fault
Distributing Scarce
Resources
In our society, families in
the top 25% in income send 86% of their children to college while families in
the bottom 20% send 4% of their children to college. But there are other gaps
that must be addressed which also contribute to the achievement gap: language
development, early childhood experience, health care, parent education, school
size, and class size. While the majority of the 14 million children in poverty
are white, there are disproportionately high numbers of African American and
Latino children represented. The diverse children in urban poverty represent
about half of these 14 million.
The recognition that
selected constituencies derive more benefits than others is not new or strange
in American society. Our basic assumption is that in a free society some will
inevitably fare better than others. We live with the unequal distribution of
goods and services every day of our lives. Inevitably the goods that are most
desired and the services that are most vital are a scarce resource. There is
never enough of what is most wanted or needed to go around. We solve this
problem of “Who gets what?” by raising costs. If, for example, the scarce
resource to be distributed is a limited number of downtown parking spaces then
the parking fees on lots and in garages increase until only those who can pay
for the limited spaces are able to park. We satisfy our sense of fairness by
providing the public equal access to a limited number of metered spaces on a
first come first serve basis but these spaces are less conveniently located, metered
by the hour and ticketed for overtime lapses. We have mollified both the god of
individual initiative by providing those with the means to have access to
highly desirable limited parking and the god of equity and access by providing
the public with the opportunity to compete for public parking. We have learned
to accept this dual process as the best way to distribute a scarce resource.
Our commonly held value is that those who are paying a great deal should be
able to park.
As we mature we become cognizant
of more than how material goods are distributed. The distribution of many
services affecting our day-to-day existence and futures are recognized as
vital. Access to health care, legal services, insurance coverage, police and
fire protection, transportation, housing and educational services come to the
foreground of our consciousness. Various levels of government take
responsibility for providing these services and everyone is deemed to be
entitled to these basic services. Frequently, we go even further and espouse
the goal that everyone is entitled to “high quality” services in these and
other vital areas. As politicians spend their careers reiterating such lofty
promises it becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile reality and rhetoric.
Our stated values of equity and access for all don’t match the actual
availability and distribution of services declared to be entitlements for all
at a level of “high quality”. For example, in health care high quality refers
to having the most qualified doctors in the best hospitals utilizing the latest
treatments on a personal and thorough basis. This definition of high quality
makes it clear that health care is a scarce resource since there is a limited
number of the best doctors, treatments and services available. As in the more
simple parking example, the problem of how to distribute top quality health
care is solved by enabling those who can pay the highest, escalating costs to
secure the service. Those who can pay less receive basic but something less
than the highest quality care. The 43 million without health insurance have
equal access to compete for the health services provided by emergency rooms and
other public services. As a matter of life and death, health care is infinitely
more important than parking so there is more political activity and public
discourse about its availability. But when the talk about everyone being
entitled to high quality or even basic health care has subsided, the actual
distribution of scarce health care services is determined on the basis of who
can pay for them. In spite of the fact that some health care professionals
contribute pro bono services, the government provides subsidies and the private
sector makes substantial contributions, the correlation between ability to pay
and access to high quality service is high and not due to chance: the more one
can pay the greater the likelihood that one’s health care will increase in
quality. Many typically pay more than half of their total assets in their last
year of life just to secure even basic health services.
The fact that there is
always a finite amount of the highest quality of any service is what makes it a
scarce resource. Access to scarce high quality resources is controlled by three
factors: 1) awareness that the service or opportunity exists, 2) knowledge of
the method (set of steps, procedures, hurdles) for securing the service and 3)
sufficient resources for buying the service. Nowhere is this three step process
for distributing high quality service more assiduously followed than in
deciding who has access to high quality education. In the case of public
education what is purchased is the location of the family’s housing.
Education as a Personal Good
The achievement gap is not
an aberration of American society nor is it an unintended consequence. Quite
the contrary. It reflects the will of the overwhelming majority of Americans
who believe that education is a personal not a common good and that the highest
quality education is a scarce resource. Schooling is the means we use to produce
winners and losers. Who gets into the prestigious colleges is the critical
question at the top achievers’ level. Who goes to the other colleges or to post
secondary institutions reflects the competition at the next levels down. Who
gets training for a decent job or any job at all is the next level and so on.
When we get to the poor and diverse children in urban schools the lofty mission
of advanced knowledge, citizenship and self-actualization we want for our
children has been narrowed down to “get a job and stay out of jail.” At this
lowest level there is no longer any competition for a future of any substantial
value. This level is miseducation and the future
“opportunities” it leads to are far from a scarce resource.
School systems state goals
as universals but their actual work is sorting students not equalizing their
opportunities to learn. Failing public schools in urban districts function in
ways that ensure that diverse children in poverty will be kept in the bottom
half on standardized tests of school achievement. They function as custodial
institutions rather than as places where learning is the primary activity. The
“pedagogy” offered in these “schools” is a set of cultural rituals that bears
no resemblance whatever to the knowledge base in teaching and learning. As in
other exploitative situations, most of the parents of the 14 million diverse
children in poverty in the 120 largest school districts and in poor rural areas
honestly believe that their schools are treating their children fairly. In my
own city parents and community tolerate a high school which had an 18 percent
graduate last year in a district that has an overall 36 percent high school
graduation rate for African Americans -and this is a higher rate than in
several other urban districts.
Maintaining and supporting
failure in our urban school districts over decades cannot be attributed to
chance. Typically, scholars writing in the field of school change assume that
the school functionaries maintaining these urban districts miseducating
the bottom half are well intentioned; they just don’t have sufficient knowledge
and understanding. Even the most scholarly analysts of why school reform has
failed stop short of attributing motive and assume that school functionaries
are benign and caring individuals who just need to know more and that once they
do they will then act more wisely. But objective analysts observing the
realities of life in urban schools must conclude otherwise. The
long-term institutionalization of failure for diverse children in poverty can
only be the result of systematic design and purposeful, committed resistance to
change. For over half a century failed urban school districts and teacher
education efforts directed at improving urban teaching, have spent billions of dollars
from federal and private sources specifically directed at equalizing the
quality of the schooling offered diverse children in urban poverty. While
soliciting and accepting the funds, urban school districts have systematically
pursued policies and practices which have effectively withstood serious change
efforts. I have reports and analysis of major urban school districts
dating from the 1960’s which describe the very same problems and advocate the
very same solutions as analyses made of these districts after 2000. The fact is
that the change efforts have not been as effective as the urban districts’
blocking strategies and that as urban schools continue to worsen the
achievement gap has become solidified, predictable and worst of all…generally
accepted as if a law of nature.
Part III. No One to Blame: Institutionalizing the Miseducation of Diverse Children in Urban Poverty
Whenever any serious,
objective, data-based analysis of the urban schools is presented there is
common agreement that the systems are indeed failing. School people cannot
mount a credible defense against the mountain of evidence revealing students’
low achievement, the achievement gap with advantaged students, the dropout/pushout rate, the attendance/truancy rate, the
suspension/expulsion rate, teacher turnover, the graduation rate, or the low
number of “successful” graduates who never move into the world of work or
higher education. Given the stated purposes of public education, these systems
are readily shown to be massive failures on the basis of any criteria using any
data sets. How then can these failed systems resist the onslaught of data
supporting their failure and do so effectively in so many different cities over
such an extended period? The answer does not lie in understanding why the
victims support these failing systems since the victims have little or no power
over these organizations and their supporting institutions. The
answer lies in the power of the beneficiaries who derive unearned privileges
from maintaining the present systems. A secondary explanation is in the naïve
behaviors of the would-be change agents and transformers who do research,
publish reports and then present their findings to the very beneficiaries of
the failed systems-as if the school boards and the functionaries administrating
these failing school district systems are open minded, consumers eagerly
waiting to be informed of still another problem they should be solving. In
truth, the problems and criticisms which may be new to the critics and the
researchers are already much better known to the school people who not only
understand these problems from personal experience but are in possession of
substantially more data than they have allowed the critics to see regarding the
extent of their failures.
The strategy used by school people to counter any serious
criticism is to begin by admitting to the validity of the data but then
deflecting critics’ calls for stopping their malpractice into discussions of
precisely how the critics would solve these problems in the context of the
existing school district’s system. The assumption they lead critics into making
is that the only option for those who claim to support public education is to
support the existing school district systems. The content of any criticisms showing
that specific system practices are seriously damaging the children is quickly
lost. The focus is shifted from the criticisms to the critic’s advocacy for
changing the district bureaucracy given the complexities of the system’s
administrative structures, the multiple funding mechanisms, the state and
federal mandates, the system’s contractual obligations, and the body of state
laws giving the district the responsibility for these functions. Using this ploy school people shift the
onus for solving the problems raised in any research report from themselves to
the critics. Whatever critics now propose as remedies must meet two conditions:
they must be solutions that will work given the continued existence of the
present school district; and they must be practical and feasible. And since the
school district employees and their representatives know these systems best
they make themselves the arbiters of whether the critics’ solutions are
realistic and will work. School people’s “logic” now dominates the interchange.
If the critic doesn’t have solutions that the school people approve of his/her
diagnosis of the problem is “proven” incorrect. In these forums, dialogues and
debates, the very constituencies that cause and benefit from the school
district’s failures are able to preserve and protect their systems from change
by shifting the focus from their miseducation of
children to analyses of the inadequacies in critics’ plans for redesigning
their dysfunctional bureaucracies.
Inevitably, critics fall into the trap and begin presenting
ideas for how to solve the problems they have raised within the current school
systems forgetting or not understanding that it is the present systems that
have caused the problems. The constituencies representing the dysfunctional
bureaucracy, with the help of other beneficiaries of the failing school
district, now become the questioners and judges of the critic’s solutions for
changing the system. One by one the critics’ suggestions are shown by the
beneficiaries of dysfunctional bureaucracy to be unworkable within the legal,
financial and contractual restraints of the present system. What may have begun
with some critic presenting some valid data regarding a system practice or
policy that should be immediately stopped concludes with the critics on the
defensive suggesting solutions that the school people show are infeasible. If
the critics are local business leaders the school people even get them to agree
that “since we all support public education in this city we should be working
together.” If the critics are educational experts the school people invite them
to serve on school system committees to explore solutions to the problems they
have raised, or they hire them outright as consultants. These interactions
conclude with the critics being co-opted into contributing human and financial
resources to some initiative which the school people then use to enhance the
dysfunctional bureaucracy rather than solve the particular problem of miseducation that started the interaction in the first
place. The critics lose in two ways: their valid criticisms will never lead to
any action that will stop the miseducation of the
children and they have been finessed into becoming active collaborators of a
pernicious system.
The “logic” undergirding this twisted process is interesting. Imagine a
doctor sharing data with a patient which indicates that the patient is dying of
cancer. Since the doctor has neither a cure that he can guarantee nor even any
treatment that the patient finds amenable, the patient has “proven” that the
doctor’s diagnosis cannot possibly be valid. One reason this bizarre non-sequitur is repeated endlessly in every
city is that the critics are amateur change agents and transformers pursuing
real jobs and demanding careers. They can only function as part-time, temporary
change agents. School people and the other beneficiaries of district failure
however all work full time at protecting their systems, their sinecures and
their benefits.
In all of these cities the
local media handle criticism of their local dysfunctional school bureaucracy in
precisely the same way using the same “logic.” For example, a critic may come
to my city and make a presentation which shows that in our local school system
the number of children being labeled with some handicapping condition is 18%
compared to 12% nationally and that it is not reasonable to believe that a city
has a special education population of 18%. Would the suburban population around
the city support the labeling of more than one out of every six of their
children as abnormal in some way as a reasonable educational activity? He
indicates further that nationally there are 3.8 million boys but “only” 1.9
million girls being given some special education label. There is also a
significantly greater number of African American males in this population. In
some cities e.g.
The media eagerly report
these data because it is in the nature of news that the more negative it is the
more likely the reporter can get his story and byline on page one. But media
people are also beneficiaries of the failed school system. Once they have
secured their negative headlines they quickly lapse into the very same
follow-up questions and “logic” used by school people as blocking strategies.
They shift the onus and accountability from system functionaries who should
immediately stop the inaccurate labeling and quickly come up with a valid procedure
that doesn’t harm children, to the critic’s solutions for changing the school
district system. The media ask the critic questions such as the following: “Are
you saying the district is violating federal and state laws in identifying the
handicapped? Are you saying that all these children should be retested by
people who are not district employees? Which tests should be used? Who should
pay for this massive retesting of 18,000 students? In your plan who will bear
the liability for making restitution to the children and their families for the
damages related to having been incorrectly labeled?” The critic may have begun
with a valid point: i.e. the procedures for evaluating children in this
district are producing biased results in determining who is normal and there is
a likelihood, greater than can be attributed to chance, that this district is
seriously mislabeling and therefore miseducating
large numbers of children, particularly African American males. The media have
neutralized the critic by using school people’s “logic”. If the critic has no
total and complete solution for altering the mislabeling practices (assuming
the present district system must be continued and assuming that the
functionaries within the present system must find his solutions amenable), then
his criticism has been “proven” to be invalid. In this way, when critics who
are focused on improving the schooling offered diverse children in poverty come
up against school people and others who benefit from protecting existing school
systems, they are inevitably made to look unprepared and unrealistic. The poor
critic with expertise in the testing of cognitive disabilities is no match for
school people who can readily show that he doesn’t know how to reorganize the
district and he has no idea of all the interlocking bureaucracies outside the
district which would also have to be changed in order to stop the miseducation of children within the district.
The goals of the school people and the other beneficiaries of
failing districts is to make their dysfunctional bureaucracies synonymous with
support for public education and to protect and enhance these systems. In this example what is not discussed is the powerful, well endowed
superstructure which under girds the failing district’s special education
structure. Continuing the same example, the following are just a few of the
trails that lead to the direct and indirect beneficiaries: the recipients of
the 350 million ( 2002 dollars) my district annually receives given the great
and increasing number of its special students; the number of school
psychologists and diagnostic teachers employed to assess all these students
(there are over 1,000 children waiting in the pipeline to be tested and fully
evaluated); the number of other school personnel paid for by these funds; the
amount of contracted services paid for by the district with these funds; and
the amount of additional federal, state and private grants obtained to work
with this inflated student population. Other beneficiaries are the school people
who claim to be raising student achievement scores in particular schools and in
the district as a whole when in reality they are just increasing the number of
children who will be excused from taking achievement tests. The way achievement scores are
“raised” in many urban schools and districts is not by improving the learning
of children but by excusing an increasing number of students from taking the
tests. These passes are given to special education students, transfer
students not in the building for a sufficient time period and in some
districts, the principal has a ten percent quota for excusing any children s/he
deems inappropriate for testing. The indirect beneficiaries of this system
extend way beyond school boards and system functionaries. They include the
universities who provide the exceptional education training programs for the
district personnel right up through the doctoral level training of the school
psychologists. Other constituencies of beneficiaries include the thousands of
federal employees who write the guidelines and administer the grant funds and
the state employees who oversee these programs. There is literally an army of
lawyers employed by plaintiffs as well as by the districts themselves who sue,
try cases and settle issues related to the treatment of special education
students. An interaction that began with a simple report on mislabeling special
education students has now tapped into roots that connect widely and deeply
with a great number of interlocking systems all built on the backs of the
children being mislabeled. The naïve critic has become an active accomplice in
making him/herself look ill-prepared for changing all these systems by the
sophisticated bureaucrats’ questions and blocking strategies.
To avoid this entrapment those
presenting criticisms of the existing district systems need to make clear that
they support public education but not the dysfunctional bureaucracies which
characterize the current school districts. (Assuming of course the
critic is not a potential beneficiary of the school system seeking to be
employed as a consultant, or seeking the district’s sign off on a grant he is
proposing, or seeking the district’s approval to access some data he needs for
some future study.) Critics need to emphasize there are multiple ways to implement their
suggestions with new forms of school organization which differ markedly from
those of existing school districts but that designing these new districts is
not the purpose of the particular report or study. Critics need to emphasize
that school people and other beneficiaries of maintaining the present district
systems must be held accountable for immediately stopping miseducative
practices or resign.
It is noteworthy that the
example used here of the failed special education system administered in the
urban districts is merely one of literally dozens that need immediate attention
if children are to be saved from irreparable miseducation.
This scenario of how districts deflect criticism and continue to grow their
dysfunctional bureaucracies can be repeated for other blatant systemic
failures. How are the curricula offered in the district developed and
evaluated? How are the mandated methods for teaching various subjects
determined? What is the district process for selecting, training and evaluating
teachers? What are the procedures for selecting, training and evaluating
principals? What is the district program for assessing student learning and
achievement in addition to mandated testing? How are central office staff
selected, evaluated and held accountable? How effective are the mechanisms the
system uses to control and manage the district budget? What is the
accountability system in place for those who exceed their budgets? What is the
process for tracking funds to ensure they are used for their intended purposes?
What research and evaluation is performed (and not allowed to be performed) by
the district? How effective is the program which allows parents to select
schools initially and to transfer their children out of failing schools? How
effective is the district’s suspension and expulsion policy? What is the cost
and effectiveness of the guidance personnel in the district? What is the
program in place related to the selection, training and evaluation of safety
personnel? How are paraprofessionals and teacher aides selected, trained, used
and evaluated? What are the costs and effectiveness of the school
transportation program? What is the quality and effectiveness of the after
school, tutoring and extra curricula activities supported by the district? What
is the impact of high stakes testing for middle school students to enter high
school? What happens to graduates of the system? In truth urban school
districts do not have the ability to answer any of these questions in any meaningful
way. And these are just a few of the necessary performance areas which, when
studied, would inevitably lead reasonable people who are not beneficiaries of
these district failures to see the multiple ways in which children are damaged
in irrevocable ways.
Toward a Solution
The preservation,
protection and enhancement of failing urban school districts is deeply embedded
in American society by the constituencies of beneficiaries who derive either
direct benefits or undeserved privilege as a result of these failures. These
constituencies cannot be attacked or even influenced by direct change efforts
since their benefits flow from established agencies of federal and state
government, effective state lobbies for maintaining present forms of funding
public education; the existing body of school law and court cases, universities
supported by massive funding mechanisms and certification agencies, networks of
professional organizations, and a plethora of vendors and entrepreneurs who
benefit from dealing with major urban districts. The power of these
institutions and power blocs derives from the fundamental American value that
education is a personal not a common good and the fact that the eighty percent
of the people who have no children in school believe that they and their
families derive great benefits and little risk from maintaining the current
system. The primary motive of most Americans is to keep the present benefit
structure intact and to control taxes, particularly their real estate taxes.
Whatever changes might be made to make urban schooling more equitable for
diverse children in poverty therefore will have to be made within present
funding structures and without imposing greater costs on taxpayers no longer
directly involved with schooling. This realistic view of the possibilities for
changing let alone transforming any of the major dysfunctional school
bureaucracies more accurately reflects the American experience of the last half
century than the naïve assumption that urban school district functionaries want
to stop their miseducation of diverse children in
poverty and are merely waiting for the presentation of better research findings
or more appeals to their sense of equity and justice.
The surest and most
reasonable change strategy therefore is not to appeal to the self interest of
those protecting or working in the present systems but to the self interest of
those who have financial and legal power over them. Calls for transforming
urban districts will inevitably elicit powerful and effective resistance unless
the appeals are to the public’s sense of maintaining not changing what has
always been done and this means replicating what seems to them to be working in
small towns and suburbs. This can be done in an honest and
straightforward manner since the taxpayers are currently paying enough to have
many more effective urban schools. There are two change goals which are quickly
realizable, which will have immediate impact on decreasing the miseducation in the urban districts and which will at the
same time support the traditions of American schooling. The first realizable
change that will have a significant impact on diverse children in poverty is
not only possible but is already in the process of impacting many urban schools
now. This involves selecting and preparing new populations of teachers (Part
IV.). The second change is also achievable and is as likely of attainment as
enacting any statute regarding urban schools would be in any state legislature.
This involves decentralizing the major urban districts into districts
comparable in size to middle size townships and suburbs. The benefits
of such a decentralization are discussed in Part V. Appendix A. contains a
draft of the elements that need to be included in such decentralization
legislation. These two changes meet the test of effective change strategies in
that they support the public goals of cost containment and maintain their
traditional views regarding local control of small school districts.
Part IV. The Rationale for Recruiting and Preparing Adults
As Teachers of Diverse Children in Urban Poverty
The crisis in urban school
schools serving diverse children in poverty is worsening. The persisting
shortage of teachers who can be effective and who will remain in urban poverty
schools for more than brief periods is a major cause of this crisis. The
benefits of securing and preparing more effective teachers are several: fewer
children will be damaged, more children will learn more and if teachers are
placed as groups into failing schools these schools will be turned around. At
the same time it must be recognized that getting better teachers and even
turning failed individual schools into successful ones will not by themselves
transform the 120 failed urban school district bureaucracies currently miseducating seven million diverse children in poverty.
Selecting new populations of teachers prepared in new ways will provide more
islands of success in failing districts. The belief systems and behaviors of
effective urban teachers make it clear that they are focused on their students’
learning and development. They are driven to help each youngster be as
successful as possible. They do not go into or stay in teaching because they
want to function as educational change agents, community organizers or system reformers.
Their raison d etre is their students first and last.
It is also important to
understand how and why some teachers succeed in spite of the debilitating
working conditions created by failed urban school bureaucracies. These organizations are
not only likely to continue but worsen, creating even more negative conditions
which impinge on teachers’ work and children’s learning. Indeed, there is a
perverse irony here: as more effective teachers are recruited, selected and
prepared, the pressures to break up or have state takeovers of failed urban
districts decreases. A pernicious, debilitating school bureaucracy is, in
effect, made to look workable as it secures and retains more teachers who
literally drain and exhaust themselves in order to function in spite of the
systems in which they work. But while good teachers can transform failed
schools into successful ones, they cannot transform entire failed urban
districts. At the district level, issues dealing with federal mandates, state
laws, funding formulas, school board politics, superintendent turnover, central
office mismanagement and local culture must be resolved before systemic change
can occur. And because schools reflect rather than change society it is highly
unlikely these issues will ever be dealt with in ways that transform failing
urban school bureaucracies into organizations that function in the interests of
children, teachers and parents. Nevertheless, recruiting, selecting and
preparing the teachers needed by diverse children in poverty should be
vigorously pursued because they can and will rescue individual children and
transform individual schools. (The section which follows outlines a specific
state law that would implement total district change.)
Much can be done to get the
teachers needed. Too many decades have already passed and too many youngsters
have been driven out, miseducated or been
underdeveloped awaiting the change agents who would have us believe they can
transform urban schools districts and their debilitating impact on teaching and
learning. This is a critical issue because defenders of traditional teacher
education argue that before their excellent programs of teacher education can
be held accountable for their “fully qualified” graduates to succeed and remain
in poverty schools, the debilitating conditions of work must be changed. This
analysis argues that securing and retaining effective teachers can and must
happen now because the children need them now and because the conditions in
urban school districts are quite likely to get even worse.
Some Pertinent History of Teacher Training Which Helps Explain
the Current Shortage
The first normal school
training teachers in
During this period
itinerant male school masters moved about the country and were contracted by
communities to keep school for a few months. By the Civil War women were
replacing men as teachers for several reasons. They worked for less money than
men, they were regarded as more capable of morally training the young, they
needed gainful employment if they did not marry, and their role as a purveyor
of some basic skills and moral trainer was seen as the level of work women were
capable of doing.
Between the Civil War and WWI. the growth of normal
schools burgeoned and became extended into post secondary training programs of
one and then two years. Between 1890 and 1920 30 million immigrants, mostly low
income white Europeans, came to a
Except for the western states, every state opened normal
schools and some states had over ten. During the 20th century these normal schools were
extended into four year teachers colleges offering baccalaureate degrees. After
WWII. they became state colleges offering comprehensive majors not limited to
teaching. The old two year normal schools did not die easily and in
The knowledge base in
teacher education developed after WWI. with the growth of educational
psychology and educational philosophy. But neither the psychologist and test experts
professionally descended from E. L. Thorndike or the progressives seeking to
implement the work of John Dewey ever recognized the existence of African
Americans, those in urban poverty, or people in any ethnic or class groups not
seeking to abandon their cultures and melt into the mainstream. The
progressives, philosophers and citizenship educators were clearly defeated by
the educational psychologists who claimed to have universal constructs
regarding the nature of child development, the nature of learning and the
nature of evaluation and research. These studies still comprise the basic
knowledge base for preparing teachers in colleges and universities today.
During this same period the
land grant institutions comprising the flag ship institutions of their
respective state’s public higher education systems also took on the
responsibility of preparing teachers. Today, with the exception of states whose
higher education was developed differently in response to later statehood, we
still see the pattern of states with major land grant institutions now deeply
involved in teacher education but even larger numbers of state colleges that
were formerly the single purpose teacher training institutions still preparing
most of the teachers. In recent years private institutions have begun
contributing some teachers to urban school districts but these tend to be small
numbers and not the major source of teachers for urban districts.
A few very vital points of
this history are relevant to the current analysis and need to be kept in mind
in order to more clearly understand why traditional programs of teacher
education do not prepare enough teachers for diverse children in urban poverty.
Teacher training
institutions were purposely and systematically located across rural
A great number of such
normal schools were needed to ensure that female teachers would not work
further than fifty miles from home, could easily return home for holidays and
summer work, and that the teachers being trained would likely be of the same
religious and ethnic background as the children they would be training in
morality and the abc’s.
The notion that school
teaching is the appropriate work of young, single women has been imbedded in
American culture for more than 150 years. The perception that even married
women are less appropriate than single women has been reinforced during periods
of economic depression when married women in many urban districts were laid
off.
There were very few public
normal schools started in urban areas. A few exceptions existed in
There can be no question
that teacher training in
The need for teachers who
could be effective with African Americans, other children of color, children in
urban poverty and non-European populations was never a consideration in the
development of the knowledge base in American teacher education.
The knowledge base
purporting to explain normal child development, how normal children learn and
what constitutes normal behavior that is offered in traditional programs of
teacher education is derived in greatest measure from psychology where the unit
of study and analysis is the individual. Other ways of understanding and
explaining human behavior that reflect cultural constructs are still very
minimal additions to state requirements for approving university based teacher
education programs, e.g a course in Multicultural
Education.
What is the import of these
trends? After one understands even a few of the basic facts surrounding the
development of teacher training in America it is extremely naïve to raise
questions such as why teacher education is not relevant to diverse children in
urban poverty, or why teacher education does not provide more teachers who will
be effective in teaching all children, or why teachers who complete traditional
programs of teacher education do not seem to be able to relate to all children.
It was never the intention of teacher education in
Current Factors Affecting the Teacher Shortage
Between 2000 and 2010 app. 2,200.000 teachers representing more
than half of
The staggering percentage
of the newly certified choosing to not waste their own time or the children’s
time is a second reason for the shortage. This is actually a benefit since it
does not inflict potential quitters and failures on children in desperate need
of competent caring teachers. Newly certified graduates not taking jobs is also
a clear indication that the bearers of these licenses are being much more
honest about themselves and their lack of competence than those who prepared
them and who insist on pronouncing them “fully qualified”. In 1999 the SUNY system prepared
17,000 “fully qualified” teachers. The number who applied for teaching
positions in
The third reason for the
teacher shortage is the number of beginners who take jobs in urban schools but
fail or leave. Using data from the
The fourth major reason for
the teacher shortage in urban schools is the shortage of special education
teachers. This shortage is exacerbated by the fact that many suburbs, small
towns, parochial and private schools contract out the education of their
children with special needs to their nearby urban school districts. This not
only increases the teacher shortage in urban districts but raises their costs.
For example, in my state and in many others the state makes a deduction in
state aid to the urban district for every special education class not taught by
a fully certified teacher. No state imposes such a fiscal penalty when a
district employs an uncertified teacher in math, science or other areas of
continuing shortage.
A fifth reason for the
teacher shortage results from greater entrance level career opportunities now
available to women outside of teaching at the time of college graduation. Many
however soon discover that they encounter glass ceilings and can only advance
in limited ways. After age 30 this population includes many who decide to make
more mature decisions than they did at age 20 about becoming teachers of
diverse children in poverty.
The sixth reason for the
shortage deals with college graduates of color who have greater access into a
larger number of entry level career positions than in former times. As with the
population of women who perceive greater opportunity for careers of higher
status and greater financial reward than in teaching, this population also
frequently experiences glass ceilings after age thirty. African Americans
comprise fewer than 6% of all undergraduates in all fields and substantially
fewer who decide as youthful undergraduates to pursue traditional university
based programs of teacher education. But as career changers after aged thirty,
college graduates of color (particularly women) become a primary source of
teachers for diverse children in poverty in urban school districts.
The continuing and
worsening teacher shortage must also take note of the special nature of
teaching fields such as math and science. Math and science teachers leave at a
higher rate than others; they tend to be men seeking better opportunities in
other fields. While the causes of the shortage in these areas has some
distinctive dimensions they are not discussed separately but are included in
the analysis of the entire problem. The solutions proposed for the general
shortage will also impact on these high need specializations.
Given all these reasons the
question of why there is a desperate shortage of special education teachers
deserves further comment. The knowledge base purporting to explain child
development, how children learn and what constitutes normal behavior that is
offered in traditional programs of teacher education is derived from the field
of psychology where the unit of study and analysis is the individual. What is
regarded as normal behavior is based on what white school psychologists and
teachers believe to be normal behavior and development. For example; future
teachers are taught that it is not normal for children to sit quietly all day.
In my city there is a large population of Hmong
children who sit quietly all day and are a source of great concern to the
teachers who place more credence on psychological definitions of normal and on
their own prejudices, than on what they see acted out in front of them all day
everyday by perfectly normal children of a different culture. It is not
accidental that in my own city with over 103,000 children in public schools
that there are 18,000 children, mostly African American and mostly male,
identified as emotionally disturbed, cognitively disabled or handicapped in
some way. The fact that parents in poverty are enticed by state and federal
programs of financial aid if they agree to have their children labeled as
handicapped is little known and rarely mentioned. Neither is the fact that 145
school psychologists assisted by 100 Diagnostic Teachers receive more than
1,000 referrals from classroom teachers every year. In effect the school
psychologists in my city would have us believe that more than one out of six of
our children are abnormal. And that it will perfectly acceptable, given the
referral rate, if by 2012 25% or one out of four of our children will be
labeled as handicapped in some way. The hegemony of psychologists over the
definition of normal is clear when one notes that no state gives
anthropologists, sociologists or linguists the legal power to decide who is
normal and what constitutes normal behavior. It should be remembered that four
state certified psychologists swore under oath that, based on his responses to
the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory,
Jeffrey Dahmer was sane and capable of making normal
moral judgments. The fact that he had actually eaten 22 people was ignored in
favor of his test scores. The bizarre reality imposed by those licensed to
determine who and what is normal is that the results of tests which are
supposed to predict behavior are given greater credence than actual behavior.
This explains why school children, once labeled in primary grades, never get
unlabeled in upper grades even when they subsequently earn good grades or pass
the eighth grade tests for high school admission. In effect, “fully qualified”
teachers prepared in traditional university based programs are systematically
trained to view many of their children as somehow lacking, deviant, or having
special needs. It is certainly understandable that new teachers unable to
connect with and manage their students will see things that are wrong with the
children and their families rather than the inadequacies in themselves. Trapped
by biased, limited definitions of how a normal child should develop, behave and
learn language, it is inevitable that teachers would refer children they cannot
connect with for testing to equally limited school psychologists who then provide
the backup test scores and psychological evaluations to show that these
children are not capable of functioning in normal ways.
In studies of quitters and
leavers the most commonly offered reasons they cite refer to either poor
working conditions, the difficulty of managing the children, or both. A typical
list includes the following reasons: overwhelming workload, discipline
problems, low pay, little respect, lack of support and the clerical workload.
Reasonable people have every reason to question the validity of these
responses, the maturity of the leavers making these responses and the quality
of the teacher preparation offered those who give these reasons for leaving.
Are we really to believe that even youngsters fresh out of teacher education
programs have no idea that teachers’ salaries are low until after they take
jobs and actually receive their first paycheck? Are we really to believe that
even new teachers are unaware of the media attacks and the public criticism of
urban poverty schools until after they are employed in them? Are we seriously
to believe that as new teachers they had no idea before taking a position that
working as a teacher would require an hour or two of planning time every night?
Or that there would be records to keep, papers to grade and parents to see?
People who work in offices, stores, factories, beauty salons and drive taxis
and who have not completed 60 credits of education courses and student teaching
are well aware of these factors as the typical working conditions of teachers.
Indeed, interviews of high school students indicate quite clearly that even
adolescents are well aware of these factors as the normal conditions of their
teachers’ work. Quitters and leavers who offer these reasons for terminating
their employment and those who accept and analyze these responses as authentic
explanations, make the findings of studies on why teachers quit or fail highly
problematic.
While poor working
conditions contribute to teacher losses, in-depth interviews we have had with
quitters and failures from schools serving diverse children in urban poverty
over the past 45 years reveal other explanations for leaving than those gleaned
from superficial questionnaires, surveys and brief exit interviews. Our final
classroom observations of teachers who are failing also support the existence
of more basic reasons for leaving than those gained from typical exit
interviews. Leavers are understandably chary about having anything on their
records that they believe might make it difficult for them to get a reference
for a future job. They are also savvy enough to try and not say things that
might make them appear biased or prejudiced toward children of color or their
families. It takes an hour or longer for a skilled interviewer to establish rapport,
trust and an open dialogue in order to extract more authentic and less
superficial reasons for why teachers leave. For example, the quitter’s citation
of “discipline and classroom management problems” as the reason for leaving
takes on new meaning when one learns what the respondent is really saying. In
typical surveys quitters and failures frequently mention the challenge of
working with “difficult” students and this comment is simply noted or checked
or counted. In in-depth interviews where rapport has been established this
cause is amplified by leavers into more complete explanations of why discipline
and classroom management are difficult for them. They make statements such as,
“I really don’t see myself spending the rest of my life working with these
children.” or “It’s clear that these children don’t want me as their teacher.”
When the reasons for the disconnect between themselves and the children are
probed further, leavers will frequently make statements such as the following:
“These kids will never learn standard English.” or “My mother didn’t raise me
to listen to ‘m.f.’ all day.” or “These children
could not possibly be Christians.” or “These kids are just not willing or able
to follow the simplest directions.” The comments of quitters and leavers which
may have at first appeared to indicate a simple, straightforward lack of skills
on the part of a neophyte still learning to maintain discipline, can now be
recognized as actually representing much deeper issues. Rather than a simple
matter which can be corrected by providing more training to child-centered
beginning teachers who understandably just need some tips on classroom
management and more experience, we have now uncovered an irreconcilable chasm
between the teachers and their students. Teacher attrition increases as the
number of minority students increases. Quitters and leavers cannot connect
with, establish rapport, or reach diverse children in urban poverty because at
bottom they do not respect and care enough about them to want to be their
teachers. These attitudes and perceptions are readily sensed by students who
respond in kind by not wanting these people as their teachers. Contrary to the
popular debates on what teachers need to know to be effective, teachers in
urban schools do not quit because they lack subject matter or pedagogy.
Quitters and leavers know how to divide fractions and they know how to write
lesson plans. They leave because they cannot connect with the students and it
is a continuous, draining hassle for them to keep students on task. In a very
short period leavers are emotionally and physically exhausted from struggling
against resisting students for six hours every day. In our classroom
observations of failing teachers we have never found an exception to this
condition: if there is a disconnect between the teacher and the students no
mentoring, coaching, workshop, or class on discipline and classroom management
can provide the teacher with the magic to control children s/he does not
genuinely respect and care about. In truth, the graduates of traditional
programs of teacher education are “fully qualified” if we limit the definition
of this term to mean they can pass written tests of subject matter and
pedagogy. Unfortunately while knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy are
absolutely necessary they are not sufficient conditions for being effective in
urban schools. Knowing what and how to teach only becomes relevant after the
teacher has connected and established a positive relationship with the
students.
Many who give advice on the
teachers needed to solve the shortage frequently assert that these children
need to be taught by the “best and the brightest.” Unfortunately, the typical
criteria used to define “the best and the brightest” identify the precise
individuals who are most likely to quit and fail in urban schools. The majority
of early leavers have higher I.Q.’s, GPA’s, and
standardized test scores than those who stay; more have also had academic
majors. Teachers who earn advanced degrees within the prior two years leave at
the highest rates. Those who see teaching as primarily an intellectual activity
are eight times more likely to leave the classroom. In 1963 my Milwaukee Intern
Program became the model for the National Teacher Corps. In the ten years
(1963-1972) of the Corps’ existence app. 100,000 college graduates with high
GPA’s were prepared for urban teaching. While many stayed in education fewer
than 5% remained in the classroom for more than three years. This was the
largest, longest study ever done in teacher education. The fact that the
shibboleth “best and brightest” survives is testimony to the fact that many
prefer to maintain their pet beliefs about teacher education in spite of the
facts. In effect, the criteria typically used to support the “best and
brightest” are powerful, valid identifiers of failures and quitters.
While being an effective
teacher of diverse children in poverty has some intellectual and academic
aspects, it is primarily a human relations activity demanding the ability to
make and maintain positive, supportive connections with diverse children,
school staff and caregivers. The term “best and the brightest” might be more
appropriately used to refer to individuals who can actually demonstrate a
propensity to connect with and cause diverse urban children in poverty to learn
rather than as a predictor of which college youth will earn high GPA’s and do
well on written tests of teaching. Those threatened by this view misconstrue my
advocacy to mean that I believe that knowledge of subject matter and knowledge
of teaching are unimportant. Not so. There is substantial research and no
question that teachers who know more English usage and who have greater
knowledge of the subject matters they teach, have children who learn more. But
it is only after their propensity to relate to diverse children in urban
poverty has been demonstrated that the teachers’ knowledge of subject matter
and how to teach can become relevant.
This raises the more basic
issue of whether future teachers (or anyone) can be taught to connect with
diverse children in poverty or whether this is an attribute learned from mature
reflection about one’s life experiences after one has had some life
experiences. If it is, as I believe, the latter then it is an attribute that
must be selected for and not assumed to be the result of completing university
coursework as a late adolescent or young adult. Indeed, there is substantial
evidence that college courses and direct experiences reinforce rather than
change teacher education students’ prejudices and abilities to connect with
diverse children in poverty. Because of selective perception students in
university training programs merely “see” what they are predisposed to “see” in
their coursework and direct experiences. Open students become more open and
narrow students reinforce their limited views of the world. The effect of
teacher education is to make teacher candidates more predisposed to believe
whatever they believed when they began their programs. This is also true of the
effects of in-service programs on teachers. Building on this dynamic that
trainees see what we want to see makes selecting the right people a more
productive approach to teacher education than assuming that training programs
are treatments powerful enough to transform deep-seated values and ideologies.
Given the need for teachers with the belief systems and the predispositions to
effectively relate to diverse children in dysfunctional bureaucracies, there
should no longer be any question that selecting those with the appropriate
dispositions determines the usefulness of any training.
The Nature of Adolescence and Adulthood as it Pertains to the
Education of Teachers for Diverse Children in Poverty
There is an extensive
literature on the nature of adolescence and adulthood. Much of it is focused on
the life stages of people generally while a lesser amount refers to the stages
of teacher development. Almost all of this literature comes from psychologists
or writers who use psychological constructs and suffers from the same
ethnocentricity that characterizes the knowledge base in teacher education. But
since over 90% of those in traditional university programs of teacher education
are white youth from working class and middle class families the
characteristics attributed to these young adults is most relevant and worth
noting.
University magic occurs
when students graduate from high school. They are declared “adults” by their
respective states and by the universities in which they enroll. Bestowing this
status frees the university from having to pay any serious attention to
students’ natures or to the stages of their development. The notion that it is
critical to know the nature of the learners and the nature of their development
in order to teach them is of no concern and completely ignored by university
faculty. In place of stages of development higher education relies on contrived
categories of status representing the university organization, e.g. freshman,
undergraduate, full time and GPA level. The areas in which youth force
universities to respond to their developmental needs are in extra-curricular
activities, food service, health care, and rules related to housing and safety.
It is no accident therefore that out-of-class activities which do respond to
the nature and level of their development frequently cause more change in
students than their formal classes.
Late adolescents and young
adults are still struggling with the issue of self-identity fighting off peer
pressure, asserting independence from family and grappling with their own
struggle to achieve meaning and purpose in life. They are haunted by questions
like, “Will I find someone to love me?” “Will I be able to earn a living?” How
do I gain independence from my mother and still show her I love her?” The period
of the 20’s is frequently identified as a time of impatience and idealism.
“Now” becomes an obsession and change must be quick. Those in their early
twenties are infatuated with ideals but have not experienced or observed enough
of life to provide a workable basis for understanding themselves or the world.
This often leads to impetuous behavior regarded by authority figures as
rebellious or lacking in judgment. In American society these and other
insecurities are normal concerns and explain the almost complete self
absorption of youth as they seek to answer the basic questions of identity.
Teaching, on the other hand, is a continuous effort to inspire confidence in
others. Juxtaposing the demands of teaching with the natural and common needs
of young adults in American society highlights the inappropriateness of the
match. The willingness and ability to empathize with and nurture others is the
essence, the very soul of teaching. These attributes are present in very few
college youth. Because the work of the teacher requires building self-esteem in
others not in trying to find oneself, there is no stage of development less
appropriate for training teachers than late adolescence and young adulthood.
Mature adults have a strong
and reasonable sense of who they are and are self-accepting. Such adults are
sufficiently confident to be motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic
rewards as they engage in a wide range of learning activities. The benefit of a
university education to mature adults is that they are able to integrate their
personal experiences with theory, research, logic and a system of morality and
apply them to the persistent problems of living in a free society. Educated
adults consciously test common sense and unexamined assumptions against various
ways of knowing. Freed of the adolescent’s need to realize parental
expectations and the pressures of equally immature peers, adults seek to
reconcile their inner direction with the social good. Terms such as
integration, generativity and self-realization have
all been used to define adults who have reached the level of aligning their
proclivities with the demands of society. They seek self enhancement by
contributing.
In Kohlberg’s theory of
moral development individuals move through the following stages:
II. satisfaction of needs
and wants,
III. concern with
conformity,
IV. concern with preserving
society,
V. concern with what is
right beyond legalities,
VI. concern with universal
ethical principles
According to Kohlberg, only
10 per cent of those in their twenties ever attain Stages V. or VI. His
findings indicate that “college students are capable of employing reasoning at
these levels yet rarely do so.”
Erikson’s theory of human
development includes eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (first year); autonomy
vs. doubt (ages 2-3); initiative vs. guilt (ages 4-5); industry vs. inferiority
( ages 6-11); identity vs. role confusion (ages 12-18); intimacy vs. isolation
(18- through young adulthood); generativity vs.
self-absorption (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (old age). For Erikson generativity can only
occur after individuals have resolved the issue of intimacy. Generativity is most common in young parents but can be
found in individuals who are actively concerned with the welfare of young
people and making the world a better place for them to live and work. Those who
fail to develop generativity fall into a state of
self-absorption in which their personal needs and comforts become their
predominant concern. Researchers building on Erikson’s
model have extensively studied college students to determine at what point they
develop a sense of their own identity and found that only 22 per cert achieve
this level.
Other researchers have
described college youth as lacking commitment to any philosophy or set of
beliefs, living for the moment and not delaying gratification. Piaget equated
his fourth stage of formal operations with adulthood. At this level individuals
engage in abstract thinking, prepositional thinking, combinatorial thinking,
hypothetical-deductive thinking, thinking ahead, metacognitive
thinking and self reflection. Piaget found that college students rarely reach
this level of thinking .
Kitchener followed college
youth through their undergraduate years and found them beginning as moral and
intellectual absolutists, moving to a stage of relativism when any opinion is
as good as any other and ending up in a search for identify with most never
getting beyond the middle stage of relativism. Other models of development focus
on stages of development and the nature of knowledge sought in each. Late
adolescents and young adults typically use their direct experiences in support
of absolutism, they then move through the stage of weighing conflicting
perceptions (relativism) and conclude with a more mature view of reality and
multiple ways of knowing. This last stage is seldom or ever reached in college
youth. It is ironic that youthful college students who believe so much in the
value of their own experiences as the best way to learn undervalue the
experiences of the children they teach by limiting them to texts and vicarious
experiences.
Teacher educators bombarded
by preservice students’ fears and apprehensions
regarding classroom discipline are well aware of the childlike stage in which
many about to be certified find themselves. There is seldom little if any
concern with higher levels of thinking or with how issues of social justice and
equity can be infused into school curricula. Indeed, there is strong resistance
to these issues. As they move toward graduation and certification there is a
marked narrowing of student interests and concerns until students finally
narrow the complex problems of teaching into the one grand obsession which
precludes their thinking about anything: “Will I be able to control the class?”
This is the overriding concern of the new graduates awarded universal licenses
by all states and heralded by university based teacher educators as “fully
qualified.”
There is no value in simply
getting older. But serious reflection upon one’s life experience is more likely
to result in individuals reaching higher levels of development. Having
families, work experiences and sustained careers provide individuals with rich
and varied experiential material to integrate into their cognitive and
emotional development. The potential of teacher growth through reflection is
great. So too are the dangers for those individuals who have difficulty
reflecting accurately upon their strengths and weaknesses. Clearly those with
more life and work experiences have more with which to build up their
perceptual repertoires. Reflection is a process not only more characteristic of
advanced life stages than of youth but a process that needs meaningful
experiences to draw upon.
Ultimately it is the high
level of conceptual work that star teachers serving diverse children in urban
poverty perform which drives my commitment to the need for greater teacher
maturity.
If we perceive of teaching as essentially a mindless set of jejune tasks (e.g.
the 19th century school- marm teaching the abc’s and giving directions) then the levels of cognition
or development reached by the practitioners would be of little importance.
Indeed, many urban school districts have given up trying to find teachers who
can think at all and have mandated that instruction be done by reading from
scripts. On the other hand, if we believe teaching requires higher-order
abilities such as the humane application of abstract concepts to interactions
with diverse children and youth in urban poverty, then the teachers’ cognitive
and affective development becomes a crucial determinant of success. There have
been multiple studies (over 200) in many countries which have found that there
are four general developmental abilities which are highly related to success in
any field:
1) Empathy,
2) Autonomy,
3) Symbolization, and
4) Commitment to democratic
values.
All four of these correlate
with greater maturity. In the American sample there was an inverse correlation
between SAT scores and level of maturity.
Pintrich’s landmark summary of the
research on the learning and development of college students and its
implications for teacher education is a meta-analysis which, to my knowledge,
no college or university program of teacher education has ever referred to let
alone utilized. Reasonable people cannot read Pintrich’s
summary of what is known about human development and learning and still focus
on young adults as the primary source of teachers. Using any respectable theory
of human development leads to the same conclusion. For white, working and middle
class females growing up in American society there is no more inappropriate
stage of life to prepare for teaching than young adulthood… and for youthful
males their personal development and the demands of teaching are an even
greater mismatch. What do these scholarly summaries about teachers’
levels of development mean when translated and applied to the real world? We
are supposed to believe that a system of traditional teacher education which
would take a young, immature white male from a small town in Wisconsin, put him
through a traditional program of teacher education, graduate, certify and
declare him “fully qualified” at age 22 is engaged in a perfectly reasonable
activity. Further, we are to believe that it would be a good idea for this
young man to come to the Milwaukee Public Schools (or to any urban district in
America) and be hired as a teacher because he is now a professional
practitioner who can shape the mind and character of a seventeen year old
African American girl with a child and a part-time job trying to make a place
for herself in the world. Or that he has the knowledge, skills and
predispositions to help a Hispanic five year old make sense of the world. Or
that he has the competencies needed to help a young adolescent survive the
throes of puberty and the peer pressure to drop out.
The best that can be said
about such a monumental disconnect between the nature of who is in teacher
preparation and the demands of practice in urban schools is that we should be
grateful to this young man and his cohort for never taking jobs. They know and
are willing to declare their inadequacies more truthfully than the faculty who
trained them. The faculty declaring these youth to be “fully qualified” are
beneficiaries of a university system that views its late adolescent and young
adult students preparing to become teachers as its clientele. Diverse children
in urban poverty being miseducated by dysfunctional
bureaucracies are not conceived of as the clientele of teacher educators.
Where Do Urban Schools Currently Get Their Beginning Teachers?
Although the typical age of
college graduates has risen from age 22 to age 26, it is still generally true
that most of those preparing to teach are college age youth, that is, late
adolescents and young adults. This analysis is not an advocacy for preventing
all such individuals from becoming teachers but to shift the balance. The
current emphasis remains app. 80% still being youngsters below age 26 who are
full-time university students and only app. 20% being older “non-traditional”
post baccalaureate students or adults in alternative certification or on-the
job training programs. Given the needs in urban poverty districts this balance
should be reversed so that the majority of those in teacher training would be
adults over age 30. Denigrating labels such as “retreads” or “career changers”
indicate the power of the misconceptions and stereotypes regarding the age at
which it is generally believed that individuals should become new teachers. My
best estimate is that of the app. 500.000 traditionally prepared teachers under
age 26 produced annually, fewer than 15% seek employment in the 120 major urban
districts serving app. 7 million diverse children in poverty. This represents
app. 75,000 of the colleges and universities annual output. The research based
on my Urban Teacher Selection Interview indicates further that of the 15% who
are willing to apply to work in urban school districts that only one in ten (or
7,500) of those under aged 26 will stay long enough (three years) to become
successful teachers in urban schools. What this means is that app. one half
million youngsters under 26 in over 1,250 traditional program of teacher
education are supplying the 120 largest urban school districts with about 1.5%
of their annual teacher output. If I am under-estimating this by tenfold, which
I do not believe I am, then traditional college based programs of teacher
education would still be preparing about 15% of their graduates willing to try
urban teaching. The effectiveness of this minimal output must also be
considered since 50% of those who deign to try urban teaching will leave in
five years or less.
While this is obviously a
very small output from traditional teacher preparing institutions it represents
a small bloc of young people who do have the potential for teaching diverse
children in urban poverty and for whom the doors of the profession must remain
open. But should this population of young teachers represented by this 1.5%
contribution remain as the predominant body of future teachers or should policy
makers be looking for other constituencies from which to draw and develop the
teachers
It is quite clear that the
current and future teachers of diverse children in urban poverty are
non-traditional populations of adults trained in on-the-job forms of
university-school partnerships or by the urban school districts themselves.
Those who cannot recognize this reality are those who have a stake in not
wanting to be convinced that the present system of teacher preparation is not
working for the urban districts. In truth, traditional teacher educators could
put all of the alternative certification programs they rail against out of
business right now if they were able to prepare teachers for the real world
rather than for the best of all non-existent ones. It is difficult for
traditional programs of teacher education to maintain they know best how to
prepare teachers when they don’t do it. The excuse is that “we are preparing
excellent teachers in sufficient numbers but cannot be held accountable for
their performance or whether they stay because the conditions of work in urban
schools are driving them out.”
Will the Conditions of Work for Beginning Teachers Improve or
Worsen?
While I have argued that
teachers leave primarily because they cannot connect with children it is
necessary to recognize that the conditions under which beginning teachers work
in urban schools are horrific and are driving out not only those who should
have never been hired but many who have the potential for becoming effective
teachers and even stars. The problem faced by policy makers is whether the
strategy of recruiting and training more mature people who can succeed in
schools as they presently are is a better strategy than continuing to focus on
traditional populations of teachers and waiting for change agents to transform
the conditions under which they will work in failing urban school districts.
In my own city we train
beginning teachers who are often expected to work under conditions that are
medieval: rooms without windows, over 30 middle school students in a class
including 6 or more students with handicapping conditions, insufficient,
outdated textbooks, no dictionaries, no paper, no access to a copier that
works, no computers connected to the internet, science rooms without running
water or any materials, no parking, and no closet that locks, or even a hook to
hang up one’s coat. Teachers in my city spend an average of $600 dollars a year
of their own money on supplies. We’ve had beginners use their own funds to buy
chalk. When I recently asked a principal to provide a teacher with some chalk
he replied, “The teachers knew how much money we had for supplies and they
chose to use it up by January. What do you want from me?” Observing the
equipment, supplies and materials that urban teachers typically have to work
with frequently leads one to question whether these teachers are working in the
Salaries. In my city a
single mother with two or more children (a typical profile of one pool who are
likely to stay in urban teaching) will earn a starting salary that is low
enough to meet the state’s poverty criterion and will entitle her to food
stamps. In future, teacher salaries will not increase in real dollars and are
likely to fall further behind others of comparable education in other
occupations. Much worse than the annual rate of inflation are the
out-of-control costs of health care which are predicted to triple in the next
decade. Urban school districts are negotiating greater contributions from
teachers to help cover these costs but will still be forced to put whatever
monies they might have used for salary raises into health care. In my own city
the teachers’ benefit package is already 55% so that a beginning teacher paid
$28,000 costs the district $43,400. By 2012 a very conservative estimate is
that the benefits package will be at least 80%. This means that a beginning
teacher paid $35,000 will cost the district $63,000 per year… and this assumes
that the teachers will be paying for a greater share of their health care
thereby decreasing their real income.
School Safety. The amount
that urban districts pay for school safety personnel and equipment will
continue to increase. This not only diverts funds from educational purposes but
seriously alters school climate transforming them from educational institutions
into custodial ones. This is already true in most of the major urban districts.
In many urban middle schools there is more invested in hall cameras and safety
equipment and personnel than in computers or computer assisted instruction. As
more time of professional staff is directed to issues of control it casts a
pall over the self concepts of beginning teachers who have great needs for
perceiving of themselves as educators rather than as monitors or safety personnel.
It is not likely that in future schools will either give up their custodial
functions or that they will become safer places.
Class Size. This condition
has a great impact on beginners. It will continue to move in two directions. In
a few states which mandate smaller classes, usually for primary grades, there
will be a sharp increase in the teacher shortage but smaller classes for those
who take jobs in these states. In most urban districts however class size will
increase in response to higher birth rates among the urban poor. These
increases in class size will be worst in urban middle schools where teachers
face the most behavior problems and where most of the students who will not
make it to high school are retained for an extra year or more. In urban middle
schools teachers work with between 100 and 150 students daily. These schools
are likely to be places where large classes make the conditions of work
extremely difficult for beginners. Caring teachers recognize that this is the
last chance for many youth to make it or drop out before getting to high school
and as a result they work especially hard. But the conditions of work in urban
middle schools will continue to make it more likely that the teachers who stay
for more than five years are likely to be the strong insensitives
rather than those who are caring and committed. Prohibitive costs make it un-
likely that the goal of reducing class size beyond primary levels is one that
will be realized in the urban districts.
Supportive Principals. There is a growing of shortage of
effective urban school principals. It is not uncommon for major districts to
fire as many as fifty at a time. In addition, an increasing number of urban
districts now hold the principal accountable, on an annual basis, for raising
test scores. Raising these expectations for principals cuts down on the pool of
those who can be effective in such demanding roles. It is noteworthy that
beginning teachers frequently cite “having a supportive principal’ as a
critical factor in their professional development and whether or not they
leave. There is a continuing and growing shortage of school leaders of color
who can function effectively in African American and Latino communities.
Principals are still drawn from the ranks of former teachers and assistant
principals in the same urban district. Unless there is an increase in the pool
of teachers of color therefore the pool from which future principals of color
will be drawn will not increase. The obstacle to turning this situation around
is that every urban district has a shortage of effective principals now. This
means that most of the teachers and assistant principals who will comprise the
pool of future applicants to become principals may never work for or even see a
principal functioning as an accountable, instructional educator leading an
urban school as if it were an effective community based organization in a
democratic, pluralistic society. As the shortage of effective principals
increases the demands and expectations for what this role can accomplish
increases. The growing expectation that the principal can no longer be a
building manager but must be the instructional leader of a non-profit community
organization will deepen this shortage.
Without such models of
success to emulate, the most likely prognosis is that tomorrow’s principals
will function in the same ways and at the same levels as today’s. This makes
the likelihood that beginning teachers will be getting more support from an
increasing pool of more effective principals problematic.
Tests. The number of tests
taken by students in urban schools is not likely to diminish. District and
state mandates have now made testing a fact of life for urban teachers. In some
districts the curriculum is so tightly aligned with the mandated tests that
teachers actually follow scripts to cover all topics in the exact ways the
students will be tested for. This is a critical condition of work for many
beginners who are misled into believing that as teachers they will be
professional decision-makers rather than school employees required to spend
most of their time as test tutors. The very strong likelihood is that the
pressures felt by teachers to prepare their children for tests will continue
and increase since so many will be assigned to schools officially designated as
failing.
On the positive side there
has been an increase in several conditions which beginners rate as critical
conditions of work. First, there is more teacher teaming than in past. This
means that beginning teachers have greater access to veteran teachers’ ideas
and experiences. Second, there is more mentoring of beginning teachers by
experienced teacher with released time. Both of these factors are expensive
because they involve greater staff costs and while implemented in some urban
districts they are cut back in many others.
If these are the five
conditions cited by most urban teachers as the most debilitating and if all
five of these are likely to worsen, is it a wiser strategy to continue to
prepare teachers in traditional ways and wait for their working conditions to
improve, or to prepare new populations of teachers who can succeed in today’s
failing urban school districts?
Securing the Teachers
Traditional teacher
education cannot provide the great number of teachers who can be effective and
who will remain in urban schools for more than brief periods. Recruiting and
preparing the teachers needed for the real world will require new forms of
teacher education employing the following processes:
1)Recruiting mature college graduates from all fields;
2) Selecting only individuals whose belief systems predispose
them to see teaching and schooling as a means of fostering equity and justice
for diverse children in poverty;
3) Preparing candidates while they function as fully responsible,
paid teachers of record in schools serving diverse children in poverty;
4) Providing a support system that includes coaching from
skilled mentors and a technology system that connects them instantly to
resources and problem solving,
5) Offering professional studies which are closely aligned with
the actual behaviors candidates must perform as teachers; and
6) Evaluating and recommending candidates for licensure on the
basis of their children’s learning.
Using these procedures we
have trained diverse, mature college graduates from all fields of study for the
Milwaukee Public Schools since 1990. 78% of them are minorities and 94% of them
are still there after a decade. Securing the teachers that diverse children in
urban poverty deserve requires taking some initiatives which are in opposition
to the current practices and culture in traditional teacher education.
1. The clients of teacher
preparation are not students in programs of teacher education but the diverse
children in poverty in urban schools who need effective teachers. This change
of focus causes many shifts in practice, the most notable being that teacher
candidates are put through selection and training procedures that result in
significantly more of them self selecting out or being failed before they are
licensed.
2. The great shortage of
teachers does not mean that standards should be lowered but that they must be
raised. Teachers who will be effective and who will remain are individuals who
not only have knowledge of subject matter and pedagogy but who can connect with
diverse children in poverty and can function under extremely adverse working
conditions.
3. Candidates should not be
admitted into programs of teacher education because they have passed selection
criteria at a college or university. Urban school districts must first process
candidates through their selection procedures. Only those who the district is
willing to hire and to guarantee a placement should be admitted to preparation
programs.
4. The locus of preparation
must be urban school classrooms in which the candidates function as teachers of
record. The various pools of adults who can be recruited, selected and prepared
to be effective in urban schools envision themselves changing careers in order
to function in the role of teachers. They are not willing to take on the role
of students in teacher education programs and have demonstrated clearly, over
decades, that they will not be recruited if their primary role is to become
college students rather than teachers. This means alternative certification
programs, intern programs and on-the-job training programs must be used to
recruit and prepare mature candidates.
5.The traditional practice
of young college students deciding they would like to be teachers of a
particular age or subject matter and then seeking employment after graduation
must be abandoned. The starting point for creating the pools of teachers to be
trained in the various specializations should be based on the projections of
teacher need in the local urban school districts. Then those who can fill the
specific school needs for the various teacher specializations should be
actively recruited, selected and prepared.
6. For teachers to remain
and be effective their training program cannot focus on universal truths re: the
supposed universal nature of all children, teaching and learning. Neither can
it be preparation focused on the best of all model professional schools since
these are nonexistent worlds. From the outset candidates’ preparation must
focus on serving particular groups of children from specific local cultures
attending schools in a particular urban district. Preparing candidates for no
place in particular and assuming they will be able to teach all children
everywhere will only perpetuate the current system of “fully qualified”
graduates not taking jobs, quitting or failing. There is no shortage of teacher
candidates whose primary motive is to secure licenses which will enable them to
be hired in any state. The need is for teachers for specific urban schools serving
particular constituencies. Mature adults from a specific urban area who begin
with a focused local, urban commitment are more likely to not only succeed but
remain in urban schools.
7. The tradition of waiting
for young undergraduate students to apply to a university to be prepared as
teachers must be replaced with aggressive and targeted marketing programs
directed at pools of local, adult college graduates, particularly those of
color. Nationwide and traditional forms of recruitment by urban school
districts competing with each other for a limited pool of young minority
graduates need to be replaced by strategies which focus on mature residents of
the local metropolitan area. Local churches and faith-based community
organizations are basic to the recruitment of African American and Latino
applicants. While women and mothers with children in the very same school
systems in which they would like to become teachers are the primary target,
ways of reaching local male pools must be utilized. New ways of explaining the
work of a teacher in an urban school district need to be an integral part of
honest, realistic marketing that lets applicants know what they are getting
into from day one. Signing bonuses and similar inducements for enticing
reluctant applicants who lack commitment to the diverse children in the
particular urban area are counterproductive and should be discontinued.
8. Specific attributes of
great (star) urban teachers should guide the selection of new teachers into
preparation programs. Traditional criteria which predict success in college or
on written tests of teaching should be irrelevant to the selection process. All
programs of preparation should utilize both interviews of applicants which
compare them to star teachers and observing candidates actually relating to
children and youth. These are the two most powerful predictors of success with
diverse children in urban poverty.
9. The post baccalaureate
level is the primary source for the new pools of teacher candidates who need to
be recruited. There should be no limitation on the fields of study which these
candidates have completed. Considerations of grade point and other traditional
admission criteria used by graduate schools are irrelevant criteria. It is
counterproductive to focus on or even include masters degree studies during the
first year of any internship, residency or on-the-job training program.
Considering the factors
beginning teachers say they need or would like versus those they regard as
debilitating, the likelihood is far greater that the negative conditions for
beginning teachers in urban schools will not only continue but worsen. What
this means for securing teachers who will stay and become effective is clear.
While all constituencies must do everything possible to try and improve the
conditions under which beginning urban teachers work we cannot be naïve at the
expense of children in poverty schools. The need is for teachers who can be
effective with today’s children and youth in today’s schools. We cannot take
the pious position that it is unfair or even immoral for beginning teachers to
function in today’s schools and therefore we as teacher educators cannot be
held accountable for who we select or how we train them until the urban schools
are transformed. There are real children, spending the only childhood they will
ever have going to these schools everyday. Demanding that the schools improve
before we can be expected to provide effective teachers for such places will
sacrifice the education of 14 million children while we wait for change agents
who have been extremely unsuccessful up to now. The most prudent policy must
assume that whether these schools stay the same or get even worse we will
recruit and prepare caring teachers who will make a difference immediately,
Part V. Decentralization
and Accountable School Leadership
There are many critical
elements that would be necessary to include in a state statute decentralizing
its urban school districts. There is no one template that can be used to cover
the peculiarities that will necessarily arise in various states. The example
offered in Appendix A. is merely a starter example of some of the critical
elements that are likely to be useful in several states similar to my own. My
strong feeling is that if decentralization statutes are done effectively and
with relevance to the needs of the particular cities and states there will be
some degree of flexibility and variation in these statutes. At the same time
there are some fundamental issues that must in some form be achieved by every
effort to decentralize if it is to be successful. Each of these required
elements refers to building various forms of accountability into the statute.
Accountability Elements
Which Should Be Achieved in Decentralization Statutes
An elected Mayor through
his Fiscal Manager rather than a superintendent should be held directly
responsible for the fiscal oversight of all the schools in the city. As an
elected official this individual can be held accountable.
There should be no district
wide central office allowed to become established by the Fiscal Manager. No
dysfunctional bureaucracies absorbing funds that should be used for the
education of children can grow and take resources away from schools if there
are no central offices.
There should be no miniature
central offices created in the newly decentralized districts. Each of these
districts should be able to function with the level of administration currently
typical in their surrounding suburban and township districts.
There must be an end to
city-wide school boards trying to make policy with a massive budget, (in many
cases over a billion dollars), that is beyond their span of control and
understanding. The Fiscal Manager reports to the Mayor not a board. Each of the
newly created districts will have its own local school board.
The newly constituted
districts of up to 5,000 students are small enough to provide the children
personal attention but sufficiently large to provide all the options needed in
a modern, effective school district. As there are shifts in population these
districts may vary in size but should not be allowed to grow beyond 5,000.
The newly constituted local
districts will not be administered by superintendents and the inevitable staffs
that build up around superintendents’ offices, but by a school principal chosen
by his/her peers on a limited term basis. Since there will be only twelve or so
schools in each district the local school boards will be able to hold school
principals directly and clearly accountability for the quality of teaching and
learning in every school. The principal who serves as the local
“superintendent” should be viewed as a temporary assignment rotated among the
local district’s principals.
The newly constituted
districts should have two clear accountability lines: one fiscal and the other
educational. The fiscal oversight is through the Fiscal Manager who is the
deputy to the mayor. The educational oversight is through local school boards
to the state department of education as is the case with all the surrounding
suburbs and townships.
The currently powerless
urban parents and citizens must have the same rights and immediate contacts
with their schools as other citizens in the state.
Aside from achieving these
essential goals, the nature of each state’s decentralization statute should
vary and be sufficiently flexible to account for local conditions.
A Note on A Critical
Omission in This Advocacy
It will be readily noted by
those familiar with failing urban school districts as well as by parents,
business and community constituencies with experience in dealing with urban
districts that effective urban schools in failing districts inevitable are led
by outstanding principals. In future it will be necessary to recognize that an
effective urban principal in a failing school district is not a building
manager and more than an instructional leader. S/he is the leader of a
non-profit community organization. The small number of outstanding principals
that can be readily identified in every failing district are not products of
the training institutions where they took courses to earn their state licenses,
nor are they products of the school systems where they worked their way up as
teachers and assistant principals. They are atypical mavericks who became
effective school leaders in spite of not because of their training and previous
school positions. While school districts all over
In every failing urban
district it is still typical for the school boards and superintendents to claim
their highest priority is getting the very best school leaders they possibly
can. They then limit their candidate pools to the same old populations of
in-house people who have ostensibly been prepared by functioning as assistant
principals and completing a principal’s certification program. These two criteria
ensure that most of their principal appointments will yield a continuous crop
of failure principals.
The principals who are most
likely to succeed in failing urban school districts are currently heading
community agencies, small businesses, governmental agencies, in the military
and working successfully at a wide variety of jobs and careers outside of
public education. Because bringing these new populations into school leadership
roles is still a long term rather than a near future trend it is regretfully
omitted from this analysis. The focus here is on the changes that can be made
near term which will stop the miseduation of diverse
children in poverty now.
Who Will Benefit from
Decentralization?
The three primary benefits
of decentralizing dysfunctional urban school district bureaucracies will be
stopping the massive miseducation and raising the
quality of the urban schools to those typical in the state; giving urban
parents and communities the same level of control enjoyed throughout the state;
and demonstrating that if taxpayer funds are used in responsible, accountable
ways for their intended purposes that there are sufficient funds currently in
the system to educate all the children in urban schools to high levels.
The common arguments
against decentralization are that having all these small districts would
increase the bureaucracy and the costs, that many urban parents are themselves
dropouts and increasing their influence on the schools will not improve them,
and that many of the special services provided by the urban schools will be
lost to the children. These arguments are extremely weak and readily answered.
The suburbs and major towns of our states do not devote over half of their
school budgets to people who are ostensibly helping or supervising the teachers
and children. If the failing urban school district is replaced by small
districts which simply do not have the funds, the space, or the parental
support to hire these central office functionaries then none will be hired.
Neither the suburbs nor the small towns have cabinet officers, department heads
or any of the other numerous functionaries who earn over $100,000 per year
(plus fringe benefits) yet they have children who learn more. By making the new
districts similar in size to existing school districts there will be neither
the positions nor the funds to expend on an army of central office
functionaries. The bureaucracy will not grow because there will be none.
The argument that urban
parents cannot run their local schools is blatantly racist. The
The final argument that the
bureaucrats will make against decentralization will be that many valuable
services will be lost. But why should surrounding school districts (all of
which have wealthier people than the city) be able to contract with the urban
public schools to take their special education students rather than integrate
and include these students into their own schools as the law intends they do?
Why should surrounding schools (including private schools) expect the urban
public schools to provide free transportation for many of their students? The
answer to these and many other questions is always the same: “You have is a big
district that has all these services and we are just a small district.” This
statement is actually in code and is really saying: “The taxpayers in our small
district have not provided funds for these services and would protest or take
our jobs if we asked them for funds for these purposes, while the taxpayers in
your city have no notion that they are even providing these services and
couldn’t do anything about stopping them if they found out.” Suburbs of wealthy
families use this small vs. big rationalization to get the poor families of the
city to support services they themselves should be providing. Simply put, the
small towns and suburbs use their neighboring large districts as fiscal fools.
This is similar to the strategy used in my state when the state representatives
of 72 counties decided that four urban counties in southeastern
Finally, the notion that
any service provided by the public schools of a major urban district is saving
money because it is done for a larger group is simply not supported by the
facts. The best example of this fable are the after school reading and tutoring
programs. In my city the YMCA has for decades offered after school reading
tutoring that is more effective and reaches three times as many students at a
small fraction of the cost of the tutoring offered by the Milwaukee Public
Schools. The argument that this failed district which has miseducated
over a million children and continues to miseducate
over 100,000 annually should be kept intact because it offers valuable services
which would not otherwise be available is untrue and misleading. It would be
like looking at a town in Alabama where the Monsanto Chemical Co. has poisoned
the air, the ground and the water with carcinogens that are killing the
residents and saying, “Yes, but Monsanto offers day care services.” At what
cost are the day care services offered and how about the local community
organizations that offer more and better day care at one-third of the public
school costs?
A final caveat is in order.
It is reasonable and practical to conclude that the newly created decentralized
districts will provide higher quality education than the single failing
district within the existing budget and within the current state statutes for
calculating increases to this budget. The usual argument that children in
poverty need more funds, that special education students need more funds and
that bilingual children need more funds are correct but in this case are
unnecessary. These extra funds can all come from the funds released by
discontinuing a dysfunctional bureaucracy skimming more than half (in some
cases two-thirds) of its budget before allocating funds to the schools. At the
same time, the state system for funding all the schools in the state is in need
of rethinking and repair. Currently some districts invest twice as much as
others in the schooling of their children. The property tax rate in a property
poor district can be five times higher than in a property wealthy low tax district.
But while the creation of a more equitable funding system for the entire state
is going on there need be no delay in moving ahead to save the educational
lives of those currently being miseducated. In my
city the funds in the current public school system budget and the funds that
would accrue annually under the existing state funding system, would be
sufficient to significantly increase the quality of schooling offered all
children in the newly created school districts.
Appendix A. Sample Elements
to be Included in a State Statute for Decentralizing Its Urban School Districts
The legislature of the
State of __(state name)_ will approve an education bill directed specifically
at stopping the irreparable harm being done to children in the (city name) at
great cost to themselves, their families, to the taxpayers and to the general
society.
This legislation will have
three goals:
1. To provide the children and youth of _(city name)_ with an education equal
in quality to the schooling provided others in the State of _(state name)_.
2. To provide the parents and caregivers of _(city name)_ children a voice in
controlling their schools that is comparable to the voice enjoyed by parents
and community members throughout the State of _(state name)_.
3. To contain costs and ensure that the taxpayers of _(state name)_ and the
city of _(city name)_ have public funds spent directly on the education of
children and youth in an accountable, responsible manner.
To achieve these purposes
the legislation proposed will include but not be limited to the following
elements:
Educational Management
The administration of the
schools in each of the newly created districts will be subject to the same
rules and regulations as the other school districts in the State of (state name)
. Each of these districts will be comparable in size to surrounding suburban
and major town school districts. The essential difference will be the
maintenance of the City of (name of city) as the tax base unit for funding
these districts. The legislation will create a City of (name of city) School
Office led by a Fiscal Manager and up to 3 FTE’s. This skeleton office will
replace the current city school system which has over half of its employees who
do not work directly with children in schools. The City of __(name of city)
School Office will be a pass-through of funds from the state to insure that all
funds go directly to schools and are not diverted for the maintenance and
growth of a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Following are some of the elements which
will be included in this legislation.
Organization and Governance
1. The __(name of
city)__Public Schools will be discontinued as an entity responsible for the
administration of public schools in the city of __(name of city)__. 2.The
public schools of the _( name of city)__will be decentralized into ___X____
districts not to exceed 5,000 students in each. These districts will be limited
to high schools of no more than 800 students and elementary schools (K-8) of
300 or fewer students. There will be no middle schools in these districts.
3. The __(name of city)
will remain as the tax base unit for the all the newly constituted public
school districts educating children in the __(name of city)__.
4. The newly created school
districts will be accountable to a Fiscal Manager appointed by the Mayor of
__(name of city)__ for budget purposes and directly to the State of __(name of
state)__ for all educational purposes.
5. Each of the districts
will have a five person school board elected by the parents and community every
four years.
6. There will be no
superintendents in any of these districts. The school principals in each of the
districts will select a chairperson on an annual basis to serve as the
administrative representative to the school board.
Fiscal Management
7. The Mayor (s) of the
__(name of city)__ will appoint the Fiscal Manager for the City of (name of
city)__ Public School District to oversee the use of all revenues generated
from the state and local tax base as well as from federal grants awarded on a district
basis. Essentially, this individual’s duties will be to ensure that all public
funds intended for the education of __(name of city) students go directly and
only to individual schools and not to perform any functions in support of all
the schools or to any individuals not working in a specific school.
8. The Fiscal Manager of
the __(name of city)__
9. Appeals regarding the
Fiscal Manager’s allocation of funds to school districts will be made directly
from the local school boards to the Office of the Mayor.
10. The salary of the
Fiscal Manager will be limited to the salary of the highest paid teacher in any
of the districts in the City of __(name of city)__ plus two additional months
for summer. This would make the Fiscal Manager’s salary less than many current
superintendents in suburbs and major towns and substantially less than the
current salary of the urban superintendent. There will be no perks or additions
of any kind which can be made to this salary.
11. The Fiscal Manager’s
term will be limited to a maximum of four years. S/he will be subject to annual
reviews of the Mayor.
12.The Fiscal Manager will
be limited to no more than 3 FTE’s paid for with public funds. The job
descriptions of these individuals will be up to the Fiscal Manager. S/he will
have the discretion of contracting for services using the equivalent of these
salaries.
13. Annual increases to the
budget of the Fiscal Manager will be made according to all existing state laws
for funding the current __(name of city)__ Public School System.
14. Because of the intense
pressure on the Fiscal Manager for additional funds from the newly created
school districts who have been conditioned to depend on a centralized
bureaucracy, it can be anticipated that the Fiscal Manager’s annual budget is
likely to request substantial increases. This legislation will make it clear
that such special budget requests can never exceed 1% of the total budget for
all the school districts in the City of (name of city)_.
15. All requests for
exceptions or additions to the annual budget must be made by the Fiscal Manager
to the Mayor or the __(name of city)__ or to the appropriate state agency
overseeing funds for particular purposes.
16. The City of __(name of
city)__ will audit the Fiscal Manager annually and prepare a report to the
Mayor. This report will include whatever the city auditors and the Mayor deem
to be appropriate but must include the following:
The amount of federal,
state and private grants which the Fiscal Manager’s office has received and
their dispersal to the school districts.
The annual amount behind
each child in each of the newly constituted districts so that judgments about
equity among the districts can be readily ascertained.
The annual amounts behind
high school students vs. elementary students in each of the districts.
The funds received from all
sources for exceptional education students in each of the districts.
The amounts of any grants
or donations received in each of the districts.
The specific districts
which overspent and under-spent their annual budgets.
17. The total budget of the
Fiscal Manager for dispersal to all the districts will increase annually
according to all state laws and funding formulas currently in place.
These boards will have all
the powers and duties commonly associated with local school boards. They will
be governed by all the current laws of the State of __(name of state)__. In
addition to current statutes the legislation establishing the new districts
will include the following modifications or emphases.
18. Each school district
will have its own school board to set policy for the district. Each board will
be composed of five parents, caregivers or residents of the community served by
the schools in the district.
19. School board members
will be elected for four year terms by vote of all residents of the community
and parents/caregivers of children who attend the district schools.
20. School board members
will receive $100 for attending meetings not to exceed 25 meetings in any
calendar year. All other meetings or duties will be their voluntary.
contributions. School Board members will not be employees of the district and
will receive no health, retirement or other benefits or perks.
This includes borrowing
school equipment, using school facilities for non-school purposes, using school
transportation for personal reasons, or receiving any materials or equipment
which the district is discarding.
21. School board members
will recuse themselves from voting on any issue that
involves the hiring, contracting or providing of paid services by the district
to any family member, employer of a board member or a school board member’s
family, or any company or agency in which the member has an interest.
22. All costs related to
the school boards will be paid by the local districts. 23.School board meetings
shall be subject to all the laws of the State related to open meetings,
affirmative action and maintaining public access to documents and reports.
24. School boards will set
their own meeting times and length of meetings. No meeting shall continue after
11:00 p.m. All meetings shall take place in a school building or other public
building in the community with sufficient notice so that parents and community
may attend.
25. Districts will provide
school board members with a physical space that includes computers, telephones,
immediate access to a copier and fax, and access of up to 20 hrs per week of
clerical assistance.
26. With the exception of
#25 preceding, district school boards will have no employees of their own.
District Superintendents
27. None of the newly
constituted districts will have a superintendent.
Central Office Structure
28. None of the newly
constituted districts will have a central office
School Principals in the
Newly Constituted Districts
29. The role of the
principal will not be defined as a building manager. The role of school
principals in all the districts will be defined as an administrator of a
non-profit community based organization. This is to recognize the role of the
school administrator as an individual who is not only an instructional leader
but a leader of his/her local community. The need to relate to the diverse
constituencies in the community, to raise additional funds than those that are
allocated in the regular budget, to make provision for health and human
services, to make provisions for after school, evening and summer programs are
all critically important parts of this leadership position.
33. The principals’
salaries will not exceed 1.1 times the highest teacher salary in his/her
district plus two additional months and will be set by the school board.
34. The annual evaluation
criteria of principals will be set by their school boards but must include the
following criteria: achievement scores for all mandated tests; the number of
students in their schools not taking the tests; attendance rates for teachers
and students; annual summaries of suspensions, expulsions and dropouts;
evaluations of all newly hired teachers which include achievement data of their
students; an evaluation of the principal by the teachers in his/her school; and
a review of the principal’s effectiveness in involving the community in the
life of the school.
35. Principals’ time
allowed out-of-their school districts will be limited to ten days per year if
approved by the school board. Professional meetings out of the district but
within the city, sick days and vacation will not be counted.
36. Support for principals
attendance at professional meetings will come from the principal’s school
budget and be part of his/her annual report to the school board.
37. Principals will not use
any portion of their school budgets for consultants, speakers, memberships of
any kind, subscriptions, or for purposes not directly related to the teaching
and learning of students in their schools. Private and grant funds may be
solicited for purposes deemed appropriate by the principal.
Teachers and Teacher
Representation
38. Teachers in specific
__(name of city)__ Public Schools who wish to continue teaching in them after
decentralization will be able to do so.
39. The current salary
schedule and benefits will remain in effect in the newly constituted districts.
40. New teachers and
teachers who wish to transfer will be hired in each of the school districts
according to procedures established in those districts and approved by their
local school boards.
41. The tenure rights of
veteran teachers will be continued in the newly constituted districts and
extended to new teachers using the current criteria in place.
42. The salary and benefits
of teachers in all the newly created districts will continue to be negotiated
annually by the __(name of city)__ Teacher Education Association with the
Fiscal Manager of the City of __(name of city)__ Public School District and
approved by the Mayor.
43. There will be no
residency requirement for teachers to live in the districts in which they teach
or in the City of __(name of city)__.
44. One teachers salary
schedule shall pertain to all professional staff in the schools. Guidance
counselors, librarians, reading and all subject matter specialists, assistant
principals, department heads, and any other professional educators employed in
the district, will be covered by the same salary schedule as the classroom
teachers. The concept that one is “promoted” by leaving the classroom or that
those who are not responsible for teaching classes of children are higher
status, or more valuable than the teachers is counterproductive and must be
discontinued. 45. The salaries of school office staff, custodians and other
school employees will be negotiated by representatives of their unions with the
Fiscal Manager of the City of __(name of city)__ Public School District and
approved by the Mayor.
Buildings and Other
Physical Assets
46. As part of the
decentralization process all buildings and properties of the __(name of city)__
Public Schools now housing central office people, administrators, school board
members or any other employees of the district will be rebuilt as schools or
sold. The Fiscal Managers recommendations will be made in the first calendar
year of the decentralization process and approved by the Mayor. There will be
no physical space retained that might be misconstrued as a central office.
47. Any radio stations,
television channels, farms, camping sites, acreage and all other physical
property including warehouses, storage facilities, and the contents thereof
currently owned by the district will be retained or sold upon recommendation of
the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor.
48. All transportation
vehicles, repair facilities and related equipment will be sold or retained upon
recommendation of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor. 49. Upon decentralization it
will be within the purview of the Fiscal Manager to recommend to the Mayor that
any current asset (including copyrights) of the __(name of city)__ Public
Schools be retained or sold.
The Redistricting Process
50. The panel that
establishes the new districts will be appointed by the Mayor of the City of__
(name of city)__.
51. The panel will have a
maximum of nine months to specify the new districts including the school
buildings and physical district boundaries.
52. The initial
decentralization plan will be approved by both houses of the state legislature.
If disapproved the legislature will have three months to approve a substitute
plan.
53. Subsequent
redistricting as populations shifts occur in the city will be made upon
recommendation of the Fiscal Manager to the Mayor of the City of __name of
city_.
54. Failing schools will
also require redistricting to maintain maximum size of districts and to provide
choices for parents. The Fiscal Manager will make these recommendations to the
Mayor.
Accountability for Public
Education in the City of __(name of city)__.
55.The Mayor through his/her
appointed Fiscal Manager will be accountable for all public funds related to
schooling in the city of __(name of city)__.
56.Just as in the rest of
__(name of state)__, the local school boards will be accountable for the
educational programs of the newly constituted district schools.
57.Local principals will
report to their local school boards through their Principal Chairperson.
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Where Will We Find the Leaders and What Will We Ask Them To Do? Forum For the
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