I am deeply honored to accept this year’s John Dewey Award, and I am proud to be in the company of past award-winners such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall, and Senator Hillary Clinton.
Two years ago, the UFT, like so many of us, was optimistic about the new mayor and chancellor’s commitment to reform. Teachers and parents were open to new ideas and excited about improving New York City schools.
The task of reforming the school system is difficult and complex. Change takes time, patience, and sensitivity. And for change to be effective, everyone involved must buy into it. So it’s no surprise that many of the Department of Education’s new policies aren’t working.
What is surprising is that Chancellor Klein has been so dismissive of the dedicated men and women who are responsible for carrying out his experiments in the classroom.
I want to take a step back and talk for a moment about John Dewey. Dewey’s philosophy was pragmatism. He believed that ideas and concepts are only good if they work in real life. So if you have what you think is a good idea, try it out and see if it holds up. If it doesn’t, you better be willing to change.
What do you think John Dewey would have to say about the way the Chancellor has handled the education reforms in our schools?
Well, he has the first part down. There are plenty of ideas coming out of Tweed these days. They come in 80 e-mails a day: little ideas, big ideas, expensive ideas.
The DOE has an idea that students learn better when they sit in circles on rugs and teachers teach better when they sit in rocking chairs.
They have an idea that the best way to help low-performing nine-year-olds is to spend the entire year drilling them for two intimidating tests and then hold them back in the third grade if they fail.
They have an idea that for thirty to forty minutes a day teachers should separate out the six students in their class who have the most trouble reading and tutor those six in a small group.
That idea is called Voyager. It had never been tested when the DOE paid thirty-one million dollars for it.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s a positive sign that Chancellor Klein has a lot of ideas. The problem is that he’s forgotten the second part of Dewey’s philosophy: test your ideas, and when they fail, be willing to change.
He has also forgotten that the teachers are the ones who actually have to carry out his experiments in the classroom. They are the ones testing these theories and when they say they don’t work in practice, the DOE should listen.
When teachers say that sitting in rocking chairs doesn’t help them teach, that it makes them feel foolish and gets in the way of their communication with students, the DOE should say, “Maybe this rocking chair thing isn’t such a good idea after all.”
But instead they give the teachers a bad performance review if they don’t use those rocking chairs. In other words, the DOE tries to force teachers to accept an impractical idea.
When Mayor Bloomberg’s education panel—including experts with decades of experience—told him it’s a bad idea to hold students back in the third grade, that it didn’t work in the ’80s, the Mayor should have said, “Maybe I should take a second look at the evidence.”
We all know what he did instead. He fired his own panel and steamrolled ahead with his preconceived ideas.
And when I’ve criticized the DOE—on a variety of important issues, including school safety, the so-called reforms to special education, and the Voyager program—Chancellor Klein has been anything but open-minded. He has stonewalled my requests for information, dismissed my data, and attacked me in the press.
There are some signs that this attitude may change. I recently met with the new Deputy Chancellor Carmen Farina to discuss the massive backlog of students waiting for special education evaluations and services. But whether discussion will translate into a willingness to listen to advice and abandon failed policies remains to be seen.
John Dewey said you should judge your ideas on how they work in practice. That’s good advice and reason enough for Chancellor Klein to listen to the teachers. But that’s not the only reason.
I’m going to say something really obvious right now, but sometimes the obvious is important.
Teachers are the ones who teach our children. You are the ones who spend all day with them. You are the ones who know if they aren’t doing well, and you are the ones who help them do better.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to see what goes on in the trenches from the offices of Tweed . You are the ones who know what’s really going on in our schools.
If a policy makes teachers feel restricted, disrespected, and overburdened it cannot be a good policy for our children.
Let me repeat that because it’s important.
If a policy makes teachers feel restricted, disrespected, and overburdened it cannot be a good policy for our children, no matter how good it sounds to the seventy-four-million-dollar brain trust at Tweed .
A teacher who feels respected, a teacher who is listened to, a teacher who is allowed to use experience and creativity in the classroom—that is a teacher who will teach well and whose students will succeed.
It’s time to remind the Chancellor that teachers are professionals, not service workers, not cogs in a corporate machine.
If they want New York City school children to thrive they must take teachers seriously. And the key to taking teachers seriously is listening to what they have to say and responding thoughtfully and appropriately.
I’ve spent my share of time listening to teachers—as well as principals, parents, and others with a stake in the future of our schools. Let me leave you with some specific ideas that have come from those conversations.
In the past two years, the City has spent millions upon millions on various ideas: thirty-one million on Voyager. Ten million on new central managers. Thirty-three thousand a month on a PR firm.
What if we pooled all that money and used it to hire more teachers at higher salaries?
In 2003, The Leadership Academy paid its staff and consultants nearly 4 million dollars. Is this an academy for principals or a training camp for General Electric CEOs?
What if we took the money the DOE is pouring into ill-conceived ideas and spent it on a wage increase for the people who actually work in the classroom? What if we used it to increase the number of teachers in our schools?
Class sizes would be smaller so teachers would get one of the main reforms experience tells them is necessary. Teachers want smaller classes because they know it’s the key to a better education for their students. I bet the DOE would retain far more teachers if they reduced class sizes.
Instead, Chancellor Klein has spent more than $165,000 on Australian coaches. Never mind that the Aussies’ methods are controversial even in their own country and never mind that often teachers don’t understand what they’re saying. The Chancellor might get better results for his money—our money—if he focused on giving New York City schools the one-to-fifteen teacher-to-student ratio that Australian schools have.
Smaller class sizes and higher salaries would obviously help with the recruitment and retention of teachers. The New York City public school system would be better able to compete not only with other school systems but with other professions that look to attract energetic, highly educated, highly skilled young people.
Smaller class sizes and a corps of enthusiastic professionals in the classroom would ensure something no high-priced curriculum, no coaches, no slick bureaucracy ever will: a better quality of education.
We all have to remind ourselves that this is the ultimate goal—not change for change’s sake, not proving a point, not reelection. The goal is to make the schools our children deserve a reality.
No one is in a better position to know how to do that than you. No one is in a better position to help the Chancellor understand how all his ideas play out in the classroom than you.
The question is, is the Chancellor ready to listen to you. He needs all the help he can get. But is he willing to take it?
Thank you again for this honor.
|
