- DCSAA announces Pigskin Kickoff Classic, featuring public, private and charter teams [Friendship PCS mentioned]
- Campbell Brown takes on teacher tenure in New York
- Teaching Teaching
DCSAA announces Pigskin Kickoff Classic, featuring public, private and charter teams [Friendship PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Brandon Parker
July 28, 2014
Eight public, private and charter school football teams from the District will face off in September in the inaugural D.C. State Athletic Association Pigskin Kickoff Classic, the organization announced Monday.
The event will begin Sept. 6 at Eastern with Anacostia taking on St. Albans at noon, Eastern playing Maret at 2:30 p.m. and Gravy Bowl champion McKinley Tech facing DCSAA Class A winner Carroll at 5 p.m. The kickoff will culminate on Sept. 12 when charter school power Friendship Collegiate faces Wilson at Catholic University.
“We were going to play Friendship anyway and the state office called and asked if we wouldn’t mind playing them as a part of the classic,” Wilson Coach Mark Martin said. “You can’t pass up a chance to play Friendship in an event like this, and it’s an honor for us to be a part of it. It’s all about competition and playing the best teams out there.”
The Pigskin Kickoff Classic marks another effort by the DCSAA to unify D.C.’s public, private and charter school sports teams under one umbrella. The event will be bookended by the annual DCSAA football playoffs, which were launched in 2012 and expanded last season into AA and A Classes.
“We are eager to see these matchups between opponents that rarely have opportunities to meet and allow our student-athletes from across the city to face one another,” DCSAA Executive Director Clark Ray said in the press release. “Just as the state football playoffs have become an annual tradition, our fans can look forward to this becoming a yearly event.”
Campbell Brown takes on teacher tenure in New York
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
July 28, 2014
An advocacy group headed by former television journalist Campbell Brown filed a lawsuit in New York on Monday that seeks to overturn the state’s tenure laws and other job protections for teachers.
The legal challenge in New York comes a month after a Los Angeles judge struck down teacher tenure and other related California laws that offer job security to educators, a decision that is triggering similar actions around the country.
Brown, a former CNN anchor who founded the Partnership for Educational Justice, contends that job protections for teachers are archaic and make it difficult for school systems to get rid of incompetent teachers.
The lawsuit argues that poor, minority students are more likely than more affluent peers to be taught by weak teachers, a claim similar to the California case.
Brown’s group has connections to StudentsFirst, the education advocacy group formed by Michelle Rhee, a former D.C. school chancellor, and Democrats for Education Reform. Brown said her group might file similar legal challenges in other states.
Brown’s legal team is headed by Jay Lefkowitz, a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis, which is representing the plaintiffs pro bono.
Brown maintains that tenure and “last in, first out” policies where teachers with the least amount of seniority are laid off during budget cutbacks, regardless of their job performance, are damaging to students.
There are some clear differences between teacher job protections in California and New York. For instance, under the laws that were recently struck down in California, tenure was awarded after 18 months. In New York, that probationary period is three years, and teachers unions say administrators have more time to make informed decisions and weed out poor performers.
Brown appeared Monday at a press conference on the steps of City Hall in Manhattan with several of the seven plaintiffs in the case, Wright vs. The State of New York. A similar lawsuit filed by a separate group, Parent Union, was filed in New York earlier this month.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that tenure laws and other job protections are “a bulwark against cronyism, patronage and hiring based on who you know, not what you know. Teachers in New York and across the country, relying on the fairness due process provides, have advocated for the needs of special education students, demanded adequate funding for art and music, and used edgy, innovative material to teach students in new and exciting ways.”
Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and a chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, called the lawsuit “courageous.”
“There will be no equality in education until we transition to a system that prioritizes academic achievement for children over job security for adults,” Bush said in a statement. “Teachers have a tremendous impact on the lives of students, particularly the most disadvantaged. When ineffective teachers are allowed to remain in the classroom because of union protections and antiquated laws, it is not only a disservice to students but also to the many wonderful teachers dedicated to excellence in education.”
Teaching Teaching
The New York Times
By Joe Nocera
July 28, 2014
I’m starting to wonder if we’ve entered some kind of golden age of books about education. First came Paul Tough’s book, “How Children Succeed,” about the importance of developing noncognitive skills in students. It was published in September 2012. Then came “The Smartest Kids in the World,” by Amanda Ripley, which tackled the question of what other countries were getting right in the classroom that America was getting wrong. Her book came out just about a year ago.
And now comes Elizabeth Green’s “Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone),” which will be published next week, and which was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine over the weekend. The first two books made the New York Times best-seller list. My guess is that Green’s book will, too. It certainly ought to.
Over the past few decades — with the rise of charter school movement and No Child Left Behind — reformers and teachers’ unions have been fighting over how to improve student performance in the classroom. The reformers’ solution, notes Green, is accountability. The unions’ solution is autonomy. “Where accountability proponents call for extensive student testing and frequent on-the-job evaluations, autonomy supporters say that teachers are professionals and should be treated accordingly,” Green writes. In both schemes, the teachers are basically left alone in the classroom to figure it out on their own.
In America, that’s how it’s always been done. An inexperienced teacher stands in front of a class on the first day on the job and stumbles his or her way to eventual success. Even in the best-case scenario, students are being shortchanged by rookie teachers who are learning on the job. In the worst-case scenario, a mediocre (or worse) teacher never figures out what’s required to bring learning alive.
Green’s book is about a more recent effort, spearheaded by a small handful of teaching revolutionaries, to improve the teaching of teaching. The common belief, held even by many people in the profession, that the best teachers are “natural-born” is wrong, she writes. The common characteristic of her main characters is that they have broken down teaching into certain key skills, which can be taught.
“You don’t need to be a genius,” Green told me recently. “You have to know how to manage a discussion. You have to know which problems are the ones most likely to get the lessons across. You have to understand how students make mistakes — how they think — so you can respond to that.” Are these skills easier for some people than others? Of course they are. But they can be taught, even to people who don’t instinctively know how to do these things.
One of Green’s central characters is a woman named Deborah Loewenberg Ball, who began her career as an elementary school teacher and is now the dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Education. “Watching Deborah teach is like listening to chamber music,” Green quotes an admirer. But she didn’t start out that way. She struggled as a young teacher, and, as she became a better teacher, she began to codify, in her own mind at first, the practices that made her successful. And she asked herself, “Why hadn’t she learned any of this before?”
Green has a chapter about why schools of education value things other than the actual teaching of teachers. But the University of Michigan under Ball is one place that is trying to reverse that trend, not just at Michigan but across the country. Ball is pushing the idea that teachers should be prepared to teach — that they should have the tools and the skills — when they walk into that classroom on the first day on the job. That is rarely the case right now.
“We need to shift teaching to be like other fields where you have to demonstrate proficiency before you get a license,” Ball told me not long ago. “People who cut hair and fly airplanes get training that teachers don’t get.”
One thing that Ball and Green both stress is the importance of scale. I’ve also come to see the ability to scale successful programs as the single biggest issue facing public education. It is great that there are charter schools that give a small percentage of public schoolchildren a chance for a good education — and a good life. And it’s all well and good that Michigan graduates maybe 100 or so teachers a year who genuinely know how to teach by the time they get out of school.
But these small-scale successes won’t ultimately matter much unless they are embraced by the country at large. You can’t teach every kid in a charter school. And schools of education need to change their priorities. Learning on the job just shouldn’t cut it anymore.