The Battle for Room 314

by Ed Boland

  Find Dedicated Mentors; Milk Them for All They’re Worth

  The mentoring program for new teachers at Union Street was sporadic and ever-changing, so I sought out my own mentor in Monica. If a school has a more formalized mentoring program it can be tremendously beneficial, but it’s no guarantee if the match isn’t right. As a seasoned dean of students once told me, “Latch on to the teacher whose classroom makes you feel right at home, the person who looks most like your aspirational teacher-self. Stalk them. Flatter them. Observe them frequently. Have them observe you constantly.” In retrospect, I wish I had asked twice as many questions of the informal mentors I found and asked for help three times more often. Also, if possible, find another veteran outside of the school community to whom you can occasionally vent, cry, and rant without fear of repercussions in your workplace. My sister Nora played that role for me, and it was tremendously helpful.

  Pamper Alert: Take Care of Yourself

  Find hobbies, sports, indulgences, favored substances, and some kind of therapy that will get your head out of the game when you need a break. Build them into your schedule; otherwise, you will never do them. Eat well, get enough sleep, and take power naps after school. As you plan your weekly lessons, build in specific downtime for yourself. Martyrs burn out early and hard, and that doesn’t help anyone. My Wednesday-night volleyball games were a lifesaver.

  Yesbut

  I have given you the “yes” in my “yesbut,” but now brace yourself for the “but,” because it is daunting. Without a doubt, by teaching you can help close the educational achievement gap in a real and palpable way. You will touch lives and make an enormous difference. However, as hard as you will work and as much as you will devote yourself to your new profession, you need to recognize from the outset just how much of the entire enterprise is determined outside of your classroom and ultimately outside of your control. No sustained and widespread change will come about until and unless we address the broader problems in our educational system and the even larger, looming societal challenges. It’s a long list of structural woes: poverty, institutional racism, and deep flaws in the way we design, run, and pay for our school systems. I warn you about these external forces not to discourage you, but so that you will see your frequent setbacks as emanating from causes beyond your power and count your victories, as small as they might be, as causes for celebration.

  I’ll end my rant here, Charles, and simply say: Go forth and give it your all.

  With great respect,

  Ed

  Through Teach For America, Charles went on to teach third grade at a charter school in Brownsville, one of the lowest academically performing neighborhoods in New York. Because he lacked experience, he was initially made an assistant teacher to a ten-plus-year veteran who had just been recruited from a high-performing public school in suburban Ohio, but she had little experience in teaching underserved kids. They chewed her up and spit her out in three weeks’ time and Charles was promoted to head teacher. Against the odds and despite my pessimism, he took control of the classroom and did an admirable job: The test scores of his students in English increased by 50 percent and even more in math.

  His is a story that gives us hope as much as mine discourages us. But here’s the rub: Tales of individual teacher and school success and failure serve as a dangerous distraction for those who care deeply about changing the trajectory of American education. To enact real change, we must step outside the system and stop expecting schools and teachers alone to create lasting solutions.

  This is a call to radical action for elected officials at all levels, academics, union heads, private sector leaders, and, most important, ordinary citizens to take up this cause. Here are the most pressing priorities that we as a society must embrace to reform our broken and unfair educational system:

  Integrate Schools

  After decades of progress, we have returned to an educational system of severe racial segregation. Today’s students of color attend schools with fewer white students than they did in the 1960s.

  Integrated schools are not simply a comforting democratic affirmation that children can learn and play together; decades of research have shown that the practice actually results in higher achievement for lower-income students. Recent studies have shown that a school’s racial composition may have an even greater effect on student achievement than family background. It may be even more effective (and cost-efficient) than in-school reforms such as a longer school day, the ability to fire teachers, and curricular innovations. With careful policy choices and greater political finesse, we can avoid past unsuccessful attempts at integration. Practices that work to expand the number of desirable schools rather than simply promote competition for seats in good schools will avoid white flight to suburban districts and to parochial/private alternatives.

  Rethink School Funding

  Despite the fact that the United States spends more money by far on public education than any other country on earth, it doesn’t spend those funds equitably. We spend it worse than equitably, we disadvantage the poor by design: Unlike almost every other developed country, we actually favor the students who have more resources over students with less. It is exactly the opposite of what common sense and fair-mindedness dictate. Much of the underlying problem is that the majority of school expenses in the United States are funded by local property taxes. The practice encourages self-interested enclaves of privilege and promotes neighborhood segregation. For example, even in a progressive state like New York, the affluent town of Southampton spends over $39,000 per pupil, and the Rust Belt city of Utica spends $14,600. Other states like Illinois have even greater per-pupil spreads, ranging from $5,000 to $28,000. Since the 1960s, scores of lawsuits brought by advocacy groups and unions have begun to slowly chip away at the gap, but the pace of change has been glacial and the implementation uneven. Federal and especially state governments must be held accountable to level the playing field.

  Invest More in the Research, Development, and Evaluation of Education

  In the great American debate over how we should spend more than $550 billion a year on education, there is one priority that is all too often given short shrift: funding for creating and testing what truly works in education reform. (We spend less than 1 percent of educational dollars on R & D; most applied fields spend somewhere between 10 and 15 percent.) Before billions of dollars and millions of students and teachers are subjected to new curricula and pedagogy, reforms and technology, government in concert with universities must ensure that they are effective by conducting larger, longer-term, and more rigorous studies. And once they are proven effective, they must implement them!

  Improve Training and Support for Teachers

  My fellow teachers and I attended a wide range of teacher training programs, from the Ivy League to lesser-known state colleges. Some, like me, had earned master’s degrees before teaching; others were taking courses while teaching; still others went through summer boot camps like Teach For America. Yet we all had one thing in common: Almost no one thought the education courses we took were helpful or relevant. We weren’t the only ones dissatisfied: An exhaustive 2013 study by the National Council on Teacher Quality labeled teacher training programs “an industry of mediocrity,” finding that less than 10 percent of rated programs earned three stars or more out of four.

  Our courses were often painfully theoretical and usually taught by people who had been in the classroom only for a short time or very long ago. As one coworker opined, “If I could have had even a fraction of those grad school hours back in sleep, I would have been a better teacher by far.” A much greater percentage of coursework must be tied to real-world scenarios about how to actually teach and manage kids and must be taught by experts who have actually been in those settings.

  Speaking of experts, all programs require their students to log a significant number of hours observing teachers in action, but this time is valuable only if those teachers are models worth emulating. Also, simply obs
erving is not enough; teachers in training also need to watch videos of master teachers in action and hear why and how their approaches work.

  Get Teachers Unions on Board

  The great majority of our nation’s teachers are hardworking and competent, and they deserve strong unions to represent their interests. I appreciated many of the hard-won workplace protections and benefits the union afforded me, but I also saw the union protect incompetence and stifle change.

  In the simplest terms, unions must be more willing to work with the administration so they can fire the least effective teachers; change lockstep compensation; reconsider evaluation, seniority, and tenure; and create incentives to put the best teachers in the neediest schools. We must reward and support the politicians on the left and the right who hold the feet of uncooperative unions to the fire.

  Smart school districts and unions are working together on reform and avoiding the animosity that serves neither students, teachers, nor administrators. In Boston, for example, teachers in district- and union-supported “pilot schools” can vote to amend the union contract and expand the school day or year, establish higher achievement targets, and change their compensation structure. In New Haven, Connecticut, the union consented to a new evaluation system in 2010 where teachers set their own goals for student performance, which accounts for about half of their evaluation. The remainder of the evaluation is based on a review of the teacher’s instructional methods. Underperforming teachers are given ample opportunity to improve. By 2013, the new system resulted in the removal of sixty-two teachers, while helping many others improve their performance.

  For their cooperation, union members must be rewarded with better compensation. Not only is it logical that better wages will attract more qualified people to the field, but research bears it out. One study out of Stanford and UC Davis showed that increasing teachers’ wages by 10 percent reduced the dropout rate by 3 to 4 percent.

  Increase Resources for the Most Disruptive and the Most Gifted Students

  I remember how hopeful and excited I was when some of my most troubled and disruptive students were suspended from my classroom. At last, I can teach and the kids will learn, I thought. But in retrospect it always seemed like others would fill their shoes. What’s more, the suspended students usually returned more resentful from being relegated to little more than a holding cell. These students need more resources, not warehousing. They should be given individual, group, and family therapy, offered behavioral change programs, and provided with out-of-school mentors. These students would also benefit from being assigned to the most veteran teachers and offered additional support in their classrooms.

  Moreover, a new crop of “second-chance” high schools is showing promise in helping chronically unsuccessful kids. Instruction is personalized, classes are small, internships and work experience are offered, and, most important, every student is paired with an advocate/social worker who helps them deal with the life circumstances that usually landed them there in the first place. In most schools, counselors often have more than three hundred students in their caseloads; in these settings, it is usually limited to two dozen. I was encouraged to learn recently that one of my least focused and most nonacademic Union Street students had earned a prestigious Regents diploma and gained valuable work experience at a second-chance school in the Bronx.

  Similarly, for the most able students, we must create more gifted and talented programs where they can move at an accelerated pace and compete with equally talented peers. (Sadly, there is no federal requirement that schools offer gifted services for students and few dollars allocated to states to provide them. As of 2013, fourteen states provided not one penny of funding for gifted education.)

  The sooner and more intensively such programs are available for students at both ends of the achievement spectrum, the better. In a phenomenon known as the Matthew effect, new research shows that third graders who lack proficiency in reading are four times more likely to become high school dropouts than their peers. The movement toward quality, universal pre-K programs is key; New York City will be an important laboratory as it implements the policy in the coming years.

  Innovate and Test!

  It’s time for more radical experiments and sensible innovations. There is little to lose. Fear of failure shouldn’t hold us back, because we are already failing millions of students and teachers. For example, what if we tried paying good teachers what they’re really worth? The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School in the academically underperforming Washington Heights neighborhood in New York City is doing just that. Teachers are paid a minimum of $125,000 a year, plus a potential $25,000 performance bonus, in exchange for their taking on roles that administrators play in other schools.

  Why not tackle students’ out-of-school challenges as forcefully as we try to remove in-school obstacles? Harlem Children’s Zone is an ambitious attempt to do so for a hundred-block section of Harlem with a comprehensive array of services. There are many other smaller programs that partner with existing districts to provide outside services. Say Yes to Education, for example, offers tutoring, extended day programs, health and legal services, counseling, college guidance, and ultimately the promise of a college scholarship. Providence, Rhode Island, is piloting a program that encourages low-income parents to speak more words to their preschoolers to try to erase the yawning literacy gap that is already apparent by kindergarten.

  What about bringing charter schools and traditional district schools into greater conversation with one another about their practices, successes, and failures? The 141-school network of KIPP charter schools serves mostly low-income students of color, who have a nationwide college graduation rate of around 8–9 percent. By contrast, 44 percent of students who completed eighth grade at KIPP ten or more years ago have now graduated from a four-year college. How can KIPP’s success be scaled up to include more students and more schools? On the flip side, magnet schools in Hartford have been successful in bringing together a diverse array of students—from poor, inner-city neighborhoods and wealthy suburbs alike—and helping them all succeed. Other districts, as well as urban charter school networks that tend to segregate students by race and class, can learn from Hartford’s approach.

  However, all these systematic issues pale in front of the wellspring of all social problems:

  End Poverty, the Root of Educational Failure

  When I saw firsthand the life circumstances of many of my students, my reaction was not “Why are so few showing up for school and failing so badly?” but rather, “How do so many have the wherewithal to show up at all?” As long as our society and our leadership expect the educational system to singlehandedly reverse the crippling legacy of long-term poverty, the system itself and attempts to reform it are doomed to failure. There are many proven steps we can take to improve education for the poor—there are even more untested ideas that we must try—but the real root of the problem is not the schools, it’s poverty. If, like so many of my students, you faced serious poverty and its collateral damage on your family—unemployment, eviction, poor housing, incarceration, untreated physical and mental illness, deportation, and addiction—would you really feel it’s important to fill out a work sheet on Egyptian hieroglyphics, to factor polynomials, or to delve into photosynthesis?

  Poverty and its drag on education are not new, but it is about to become an even more serious problem because of a string of simple facts:

  The number of poor people in the United States is growing. The number of Americans living in poverty has risen to an astounding 43.6 million people, the highest number since poverty rates were published in 1959. Twenty-two percent of our children are now living in poverty.

  The gap between rich and poor is growing. American income inequality is currently at its highest point since the Great Depression.

  When there is an economic gap, there is an academic achievement gap. The educational achievement gap between rich and poor children is nearly 40 percent larger for those born in 2
001 than for those born in 1975. Countries with the greatest income disparity tend to have the greatest educational achievement gaps, and the United States leads the way in this dubious distinction.

  These developments are serious economic, moral, and security threats to the nation. Even the most partisan elements of our two parties can agree on this, and yet the debate too often stays narrowly focused on schools as the sole solution.

  But we can’t tackle poverty if our leadership won’t even discuss it. The Obama administration has said little and done less for the chronically poor, offering largely indirect measures like tax cuts for the working poor and focusing on the temporarily poor affected by the economic crisis. Our president, whose family was at one point on public assistance, has never made a major speech about poverty since taking the White House.

  Eliminating poverty is a fantastic and expensive idea that lacks political will and widespread support, you say?