Class size press conference at the Title One Landmark elementary school in Brooklyn

            Andrea Castellano at Landmark school press conference    (photo credit: Melissa Khan)
 

Updated: Latest Talk out of School podcast ran excerpts from the press conference remarks and also interviewed  Landmark school teachers Andrew Castellano & Daniel Highsmith  & Beruryah Batyehudah,  parent of a 1st grader in which the class sizes are 29 and 31.

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A press conference  was held yesterday at the Landmark Elementary School, a Title One school in Brooklyn that has class sizes of 27-31 in the early grades.   UFT President Michael Mulgrew spoke, along with  AQE's Zakiyah Ansari, Landmark teachers and parents, and many elected officials, explainin how the growing class sizes have undermined the quality of education for NYC students.  Among other issues, the UFT found that hundreds of Title One schools with over 300,000 students have more than half of their classes exceeding the limits in the new law this year.  Check out the Class size Matters website for more about the speakers at the event, and more photos.  Here are some news links: City & State, ABC7, Gothamist, NY1, Fox5 NY.  Below are the comments of Andrea Castellano, the UFT chapter leader of the school.

My name is Andrea Castellano and I am chapter leader and 3rd grade teacher at Brooklyn Landmark Elementary School. I stand here today in support of the Class Size Law and to ask the Department of Education to fully fund our schools.

Brooklyn Landmark is a great school. But we do have some big classes. We take that as a sign that parents across District 23 trust us with their children. We offer excellent instruction and a vibrant, child-friendly learning environment and we try our best to provide our students with the skills and the confidence they need for their journey ahead.

But despite all our efforts, there are still elements beyond our control that affect our work. Simple mathematics tells you that class size significantly affects the amount of time we as teachers spend with each small group, the number of times we can work closely with students 1 on 1, the amount of feedback we give. With smaller classes, teachers can more efficiently pace lessons, cover more material, and create more opportunities for differentiation.

Class size not only affects our students’ academic progress, but their emotional well-being and sense of belonging as well. It impacts the type of attention they receive when there’s an issue or a concern. Classrooms are calmer and everything feels less stressed. Smaller class sizes are just better for building relationships and creating that close-knit community that we all want for our children in their school.

These are the foundational years of their development. They deserve the best we can give them. But so many of our educational challenges are related to class size. In order for our work to be successful, the proper supports must be in place. We can’t afford to wait years for funding to materialize because what’s happening now in our classrooms will shape these young people for years to come.

I’m asking the mayor and city council to give NYC’s public schools the support we need to keep class sizes small— so those of us working in these schools can ensure that each child’s needs are truly being met, every day. Thank you.

Scurrilous fact-free NY Post article about briefings on upcoming CEC elections; please apply to be a CEC candidate yourself!

Yesterday, the NY Post ran a sleazy and fact-free article attacking Shino Tanikawa for a workshop she gave a month ago to inform parents about the upcoming CEC and Citywide Council elections.  Shino is a friend, a long-time parent leader, and currently the well-respected Manhattan representative on the NY State Board of Regents. I refuse to provide a link to the article but it attacked Shino for giving this briefing, because it was co-sponsored by the UFT.

The reporter, Mia Walsh, claimed that the workshop was somehow unfairly biased in favor of pro-UFT positions, even though the two parents quoted in the article who attended the briefing were unable to provide any evidence that would back up this claim:

Two attendees included Deborah Kross, a representative for the Bronx on the Citywide Council on High Schools, and Steve Stowe, president of CEC 20 in Brooklyn....Kross and Stowe found the boot camp to be informative, covering the application process and education law that governs them, but questioned the UFT involvement.

But somehow, they and the NY Post reporter remained suspicious, though they were unable to cite any example of bias: 

"I  think it’s naive to say that the UFT doesn’t have their own interest in all of this,” said Stowe. “That’s something that’s hard to communicate sometimes because the message is that parents have to always support teachers,” he said. 

Parents supporting teachers?  What a radical idea.  

The article also featured a scurrilous personal attack on Shino by Deborah Kross, without bothering to quote any of the hundreds of parents and advocates who admire Shino's principled positions and hard work to improve our schools over many years,  as the former President of CEC2 and as an appointee to many NYC task forces and DOE working groups.

For those who may still harbor suspicions of this briefing, I asked Shino for a copy.  It is posted below.  Please comment if you see any sign of political bias or favoritism to the UFT.  

Parents, please consider running for a position on the Citywide and/or Community Education Councils.  In recent years, a few CECs have been taken over by right-wing zealots, including one CEC which passed a resolution urging the Gov. Hochul to veto the class size bill -- a resolution that was full of factual errors and did not represent the wishes of their constituents, as class size reduction has been the top priority of K12 parents in that same district nearly every year that DOE parent surveys have been given. 

The deadline to nominate yourself to be a candidate is Feb. 15, only ten days away, and the process is simple.  For more information, check out the DOE website here. 

UFT On the Record Podcast: prodding the DOE to enact the small class-size law

 See my comments on this UFT podcast about the Department of Education's evident disinterest in planning for the class size reduction which is required by the new state law.  More on this here.

Another disappointing UFT contract when it comes to helping kids learn

Picture: We Are Teachers

UPDATE:More from the UFT on the new process for addressing violations of the class size cap in the new contract here:   All class-size overages that the chapter leader and principal cannot resolve by the 10th day of school will be sent to the UFT district representative and the superintendent to work to fix and later up to a central class size labor management committee. Does this sound like it will lead to speedier resolution than the process now?

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Today the Mayor, the Chancellor and UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced a new tentative four-year contract. In contrast to their claims that it is innovative and far-reaching, the provisions of the agreement seem familiar in many respects, a retread of past failed efforts. I can't really comment on the salary, health insurance or other financial provisions. Instead, I looked more specifically as to whether the contract is likely to improve learning conditions, and my prediction is no.

Class size limits weren't altered, which haven't been lowered in fifty years and which since the 1960's have range from 32 students per class in grades 1-5 to 34 students in high school. The only apparent policy change to class size in the UFT summary is this brief passage: Class size overcrowding must be remedied within 10 days.


I assumed that meant when contractual class size violations are grieved by the union, they will be remedied by the city within 10 days. However Arthur Goldstein, Francis Lewis HS chapter leader, has more details on his blog:

Class size will not change. Action for oversized classes must be taken within 21 days. Chronically oversized schools will have only ten days. These will go to superintendent and chancellor and will hopefully result in fewer arbitrations.


This description doesn't address when the grievance can be made - right now, teachers and chapter leaders have to wait ten school days before even filing a class size grievance, and only a set number of grievances can be heard by arbitrators each week, which considerably slows down the process of holding class size to the legal limits.

If teachers (and their students) have to wait another 21 days to have the violations addressed this could drag on until November and December, as too often happens currently. Not to mention that there are many loopholes in the contract which continue to allow schools to evade these limits, which are already far too high. There's no mention if any of these contractual loopholes have been eliminated or tightened.


Rather than address the crying need to cap class sizes at lower levels, especially in struggling schools, the contract seems to feature but a variation on the failed Renewal school initiative. Here is an excerpt from Carranza's letter:

At the heart of this groundbreaking contract is The Bronx Plan. The Bronx Plan is a partnership between the DOE and the UFT that allows us to recruit and retain educators through the use of a targeted salary differential in schools that have, in the past, struggled to attract and keep teachers in key subjects. The Plan also creates the Collaborative Schools Model – an idea grounded in the knowledge that our schools perform at their best when teachers, leaders, and staff work together to solve longstanding problems.


Like the Renewal schools, the Collaborative Schools Model or the Bronx Plan [couldn't they settle on a more compelling epithet, or at least choose between them?] will supposedly feature more teacher and community "collaboration" --which usually seems to be nothing more than a public relations fig leaf, especially when it comes to heeding the parent voice.

Also like the Renewal schools, teacher incentive pay will be provided to recruit teachers to these struggling schools. In the case of the "Bronx Plan" or the "Collaborative Schools Model," $8,000 will be offered to teachers who fill hard-to-staff positions.

Many other districts have used incentive pay to try to attract teachers to struggling schools without much success. In 2014, Fulton County schools in Georgia announced a plan to recruit teachers to the lowest-performing schools by offering them $20, 000 stipends:

A year later, in 2015, the AJC checked on the progress of the Fulton pilot and found the district laboring to lure these highly qualified teachers to lower-performing schools....Although 375 were eligible to participate, only 32 applied....So what finally happened to the Fulton experiment? It faded away.

The Renewal schools also featured a $4.9 million teacher-leadership program which "several principals said it has not been much help as they try to recruit teachers from other schools."

This same sort of teacher leadership program will now be expanded citywide, to create "Teacher Development Facilitators" and "Teacher Team Leaders," the latter to train more "Master Teachers, Model Teachers, and Teacher Development Facilitators." All of these positions will likely take more teachers out of the classroom and add them to the bureaucracy, rather than deploy their talents more effectively by deploying them where they can teach kids.

In contrast, our analysis of the Renewal program found that despite DOE promises to the state, most did not cap class sizes at lower levels, and the vast majority continued to feature maximum class sizes of 30 or more. Those that did cap class sizes at lower levels had a significantly greater chance of boosting student achievement. Lowering class size, by the way, has also been shown to reduce teacher attrition, especially at low-performing schools.

The "Collaborative Schools Model" or the "Bronx Plan" will also feature enhanced "data coaching." Shades of Joel Klein and Jim Liebman; remember their misplaced almost messianic faith in "data coaches" and data inquiry teams?

I predict that the "Collaborative Schools Model" will go the same way as the Renewal program, and the Klein era data inquiry teams, and will continue to leave thousands of students behind, that is, unless support, focus, and funding is put on lowering class size in these schools.

There are other aspects of the new contract that appear to be going in the wrong direction. For example, students in the Bronx will be put on computers to receive distance learning from their teachers, instead of offering them the close, in-person support that they need:

Remote teaching pilot: Starting in Spring 2019, Bronx high school students will participate in a 3-year, remote-teacher pilot program. These courses will be led remotely by teachers, who will be able to engage their students and answer questions in real time. The pilot will expand access to AP courses, advanced foreign language courses required for an Advanced Regents Diploma, and elective courses, allowing schools to expand course offerings.

Clearly, the Chancellor and the UFT haven't paid attention to the research showing online learning rarely works, except for the most motivated, self-directed students.

Another disappointing aspect of the agreement is the way Mulgrew seems to have traded pay raises and other goodies for his support of continued mayoral control that is up for renewal this spring. Mulgrew's position on this issue seemed often to be shape-shifting and depend on who was in the room at the time, but along with the announcement of the contract was his unabashed, full-throated assent to submit to the mayor's top priority, and allow him to continue his one-man rule into the indefinite future:

" Given the importance of the issues and the long-term initiatives that are part of this contract, the UFT is calling for the continuation of mayoral control as the governance structure for New York City public schools.”


One wonders if the UFT membership gets to vote on that issue separately; or if the organization itself operates similarly as one-man rule.

It's not as if the members of the UFT are unconcerned with this issue, as its leaders must know.  See the 2014 UFT survey of NYC teachers that showed that 99% of respondents said reducing class size would be an effective reform -- outstripping every other option.  (Though the survey is supposed to be given every year, I couldn't find any posted since that year. If others can, please provide the link in the comment section.)

In contrast to the lack of attention given class size in this new contract, see how Nevada teacher Angela Barton just wrote about the frustration of growing class sizes and how it relates to teacher attrition on the We Are Teachers blog:

"With these large numbers, it has become increasingly more difficult to recognize students that may be struggling...It’s almost like they are invisible.” It’s true. The more students in one room, the louder, smellier, and more distracting it becomes. Individual teacher-student interactions and meeting student needs are impossible....

We know firsthand that teacher and student morale, along with academic and social development, suffer with larger class sizes.

We also know that smaller class sizes would help restore the joy of teaching and retain quality educators. Routinely, state legislators who vote on education funding choose to ignore the voices of teaching professionals.

So what’s next? I think it’s time we take action, raise our voices, and walk hand in hand with parents and community members to our legislatures and other governing bodies. We can not and will not be crowded out of our own classrooms.

In fact, according to an analysis of the Economic Policy Institute, the teacher gap keeps growing nationwide -- with nearly 400,000 jobs lost since the recession just to keep up with student enrollment growth, meaning larger classes as well:

Rather than passively give in to these conditions, other teacher unions have made class size a central focus in their negotiations; most recently in Los Angeles. Let's hope for the sake of NYC kids we don't have to wait another fifty years for the UFT to do so.

Video and highlights from yesterday's UFT mayoral forum

Below is a video of the mayoral forum at the UFT spring conference yesterday.

Some highlights: In response to pointed questions from President Michael Mulgrew and Karen Alford, VP of elementary schools, all the candidates said they would get rid of the school progress reports along with the school grades. They also said they would minimize the influence of high stakes testing, including as a factor in teacher evaluations.

On school governance, Bill Thompson said he could live with less than a majority on the Panel for Educational Policy.  He said he would take six appointments out of 13, and that if he couldn't convince one non-mayoral appointee to vote with him, his position was probably wrong. John Liu said the members of the PEP should have fixed terms and the mayor should not be able to fire them at will, as currently occurs.  All but Christine Quinn said that there should be local approval (presumably of the Community Education Councils) before any more school co-locations could take place.

They all wanted to restore the district structure, get rid of networks, and strengthen neighborhood public schools.  They were opposed to raising the charter cap, were supportive of the community school idea with wrap-around services, and pledged to try to get more CFE funding from the state and use it to reduce class size.

In response to a question from the floor about charter school operator Eva Moskowitz, Bill de Blasio blasted her as he has done many times before; and Quinn said that when Eva was  chair of the City Council Education committee, she had unfairly targeted the union and "ripped us apart on the council."

The biggest gaffe?  Quinn was the only one who said that her choice as chancellor wouldn't necessarily be an educator, and cited Arne Duncan as an example of someone who was an "advocate" who had also been a good leader, prompting huge boos from the crowd.

Autopsy of the failed teacher evaluation deal

In all the conflicting accounts between the city and the UFT about the collapse of the teacher evaluation negotiations, there is one clear point of agreement:  the Mayor refused to accept a two year sunset for the plan. In this, he was deeply wrong for disallowing the city to pilot what is essentially an experiment that could go badly, for both teachers and children.  Meanwhile, 90 percent of the districts in the rest of the state, appropriately, have a one year sunset on their teacher evaluation systems.  As I commented on the Schoolbook site, this insistence that the plan should be set in stone, with no sunset, shows Bloomberg as an arrogant wannabe Mayor-for-life. 

• On the UFT site, Edwize, Leo Casey posts what appears to be a DOE document, showing that the two year sunset had been accepted by the DOE before the Mayor blew the deal out of the water.  This evidence further contradicts Bloomberg's claim that it was the UFT who tried to slip the sunset provision in at the last minute. His claim is also inconsistent with what Ernie Logan has revealed, that the DOE had already agreed to an even shorter sunset of one year with the principals union, before Bloomberg blew up their evaluation deal as well.

•  Casey also reveals that towards the end, DOE tried to change “numerous scoring tables and conversion charts” that would incorporate the different components of the evaluation plan, including the growth scores based on student test scores, and that the DOE and the UFT then agreed to form a committee that would work on the scoring tables after the agreement was signed.  This suggests that even before the mayor rejected it, the deal was not really complete but could have faced serious conflicts in the future.

• There’s a good piece in the Village Voice with lots of quotes from Bruce Baker of Rutgers, about the fact that the state still owes NYC billions of dollars in funds through the CFE decision, and  that the Governor should not be allowed to cut $250 million, as he has threatened, because of the city's failure to come to an agreement.  If so, he will merely be hurting the children of NYC who deserve these funds no matter whether there is a new teacher evaluation system or not.  The article also contains links to Baker’s analysis, showing that the growth scores that would be included in the plan, required as part of Race to the Top,  are particularly unreliable, and the problem with “[these] policy prescriptions is they're trying to do it in a particularly dumbass way."

• Yoav Gonen reveals in the NY Post that the man who was primarily responsible for these dumbass prescriptions, Arne Duncan, called the Bloomberg and the UFT to urge them to make a deal.

• Meanwhile there is NY State Education Commissioner  King’s statement that the city and the UFT still have a “legal obligation to continue to negotiate,”  I suppose because the State promised this in return for getting RTTT funds, but whether anyone will take this seriously is doubtful.

My take on the teacher evaluation deal announced today in Albany: disappointing & with uncertain results

From what I can tell, the part of the deal that was struck between the city and the UFT seems to be a good one: an external arbiter for the subjective teacher ratings by principals, which is necessary considering the number of unfair "U" ratings we have seen from abusive principals in recent years.  CORRECTION: I should never comment before reading the reporting and the fine print.  Apparently, only 13% of teachers will have independent review the 1st year of  an "ineffective" rating from a principal, and none the second year, according to GothamSchools.

The rest of the deal statewide is very disappointing.  If I am reading the agreement correctly, it founders on four main points:

 .          Teachers will be rated on a curve, with the commissioner having the ultimate power to decide whether the curve is "rigorous" enough -- meaning automatically some teachers must fail;

.         Any teacher rated 0-64 out of 100 will be rated "ineffective" (which seems to be a biased scale);

.         If a teacher is rated ineffective thru growth rates on assessments alone, he or she must be rated ineffective overall; making the agreement to base 20-40% on test scores a total fiction.  If the 40% turns out to be state test scores alone, no matter how used, the results will be unreliable and erratic, teachers will be unfairly evaluated and  students will suffer as a result.

.    The agreement also gives the SED Commissioner too much power -- the authority to approve or disapprove any local evaluation plan he deems "insufficient."

Since the state agreement will govern NYC as well, what it means for our schools will depend on what our local assessments turn out to be. 

If they turn out to be yet more standardized tests, like the 408 standardized exams the city bid out this summer, this will mean our schools become even more test prep factories, with teachers unfairly rated and less learning in the classroom.   

Thus it is critical that some form of portfolio work, based on actual classroom work, be used for the 20 percent local assessments. But will the DOE agree to this? Will the Commissioner agree to a portfolio system, especially as he seems to believe test scores should trump all? Who knows.

As made clear at the press conference, the city has also not yet agreed to refrain from closing the 33 SIG schools -- despite this deal.  There are still many unresolved issues on the table.
In the end, this new statewide evaluation system represents a vast experiment on our kids,  with uncertain and potentially damaging results.  And all this, to get Race to the Top and SIG funds -- most of which will spent on consultants, more testing and data systems -- not to benefit the children.

On teacher evaluation: the responsibility of the media to dig a little deeper

The mainstream media has contributed heavily to the rampant public confusion over the teacher evaluation debate in recent weeks.  Most recently, on Sunday the NY Times featured two superficial accounts of this issue.   

The first, by Nick Kristof, told a familiar if touching story about an Arkansas school librarian named Mildred Grady, who bought  some books by a favored author and slipped them onto the shelves to appeal to one particular at-risk student who later became a judge--to prove the  notion that good teachers can change lives.  This story was apparently first told in a Story Corps 2009 piece on NPR radio.

Kristof concludes that this example reveals how “we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers.”   

Not so fast.  The so-called “rigorous” system currently being promoted by the state and the mayor would base  teacher evaluation largely on unreliable test scores, combined with the opinion of a principal only, without any assurances that the sort of librarian described in this story would ever be recognized as “effective” and indeed could be “weeded-out” herself – as many librarians have already, due to recent budget cuts.

In fact, Kristof's column could more easily be used to buttress the other side of the debate: showing the many imponderable ways that teachers – and librarians – transforms lives that are unquantifiable; and that cannot be captured in the sort of reductionist systems now being imposed on states throughout the country because of “Race to the Top” and the support of corporate executives like Bill Gates, who claim that the major cause of school dysfunction is incompetent teaching. 

The other NYT column that ran Sunday was written by Ginia Bellafante and entitled “Petty Differences Mask Consensus on Teachers”.  It was just as misleading as Kristof’s, implying that the differences in the positions taken by the state and the city versus the teacher unions on the teacher evaluation system were trivial.  

Nothing could be further from the case.  NYSUT, the state teacher’s union, sued the state in court and won, because Education Commissioner King had subverted their agreement to include multiple measures for teacher evaluation.  Instead, he wrote regulations that would allow districts to use state test scores as 40 percent of the evaluation system, rather than the 20 percent that the union had agreed upon.  More importantly – and missing in most press accounts – is the way in which King devised a rubric that would make it impossible for any teacher who did not succeed on the test score metric alone to be rated “effective” – no matter how highly he or she was found to be through observations or any other means. (See the judge’s ruling here.) 

The differences between the city and the UFT are just as fundamental.  The NYC Department of Education obdurately refuses to allow any independent appeal of a negative subjective evaluation by a principal – no matter how obviously wrong it might be.  Many  principals have shown themselves to be unfairly give poor evaluations to teachers in recent years, under the system of "principal empowerment," with little or no oversight from DOE. 

Nothing in this system would protect great teachers from vindictive principals or inherently volatile value-added test scores – and in fact, DOE has built in to its school funding system a poison pill that incentivizes principals to fire experienced teachers, since they have to pay for their higher salaries out of their school budgets.

Both authors fail to recognize that the current evaluation system being proposed could hurt teacher quality and undermine the quality of education our children receive, by causing teachers to focus even more on damaging and inane test prep over reallearning – something that is already severely damaging our schools. 

Neither author bothers to mention the fact that over one-third of the principals in New York state strongly oppose the evaluation system the state is pushing…which one principal calls "nutty" and which will calls for even more ridiculous  and expensive assessments in all subjects, including music and art.

Both also apparently support the same prescription of merit pay for teachers, as though this is a given: “Paying good teachers more is important — and the mayor, admirably, has committed to doing that” writes Bellafante. Both ignore the fact that merit pay has never worked to improve outcomes for kids, and that in 2011, NYC just axed its program that cost $75 million, because of null results.  

So why in his State of the City address did the mayor now propose an even more expensive merit pay proposal , that will cost $250 million to implement; at the same time that schools have suffered huge budget cuts and our kids are crammed into the largest class sizes in eleven years? 

When challenged on Twitter to provide evidence for such heedlessness, both Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson and Andy Jacob of The New Teacher Project pointed to a New Year’s Day front-page story in the New York Times by Sam Dillon, which featured an interview with a DC teacher named Tiffany Johnson, who had received a big bonus from DC’s new Impact evaluation system.  Ms. Johnson said that her bonus might persuade her to teach longer.  When it was pointed out to Wolfson that this article consisted of anecdote not evidence, Wolfson responded on twitter that this was “good enough for him.”

At the time the DC Impact article was published I criticized it for the way it completely glossed over the fact that the vast majority evaluations of teacher merit pay have had negative results; though I could not have guessed that a single flawed article would lead the mayor to make such a wasteful proposal.

Now praise for this bonus system from the very same DC teacher, Tiffany Johnson, has been recycled repeatedly several times. On Jan. 9, she was interviewed on local DC TV;

And two weeks after the NYT article, she was quoted again in a story in the Daily News, making the very same points.

 Of course, one teacher’s comments do not prove anything, and unfortunately, there will apparently be no actual evaluation of the Impact system because the DC Schools Superintendent could not agree on a methodology with Roland Fryer, the researcher who had been selected for the task.  Fryer had found no positive effects of the previous NYC merit pay program.  This lack of a study doesn’t look to me that the people in charge have much faith that the Impact system could prove itself through actual results.

 After Gov. Cuomo joined in the charge in his budget address, and threatened to cut state aid from any  district which did not impose a new test-based evaluation system within a month, the howls from the editorial boards at the major dailies have grown even louder, inveighing against the unions for resisting whatever bogus evaluation system the state or the city have the yen to impose.  

 On Sunday, the Daily News spread spread more misinformation by publishing an oped by a teacher who wrote that her group, the Gates-funded Educators for Excellence, looked at all the failed merit pay programs, and found “that the efforts that have failed either didn’t offer a compelling enough incentive or linked bonuses to school-wide results and not individual performance.”

Again, this is complete misinformation.  The best study of a  merit pay program in the nation was of the Nashville program that provided bonuses of up to $15,000 to individual math teachers whose students saw the greatest gains in their test scores – very similar to what Bloomberg is now proposing.  This study showed no results in terms of improved student achievement or teacher retention.

At least the News oped was accompanied by a far wiser column by Arthur Goldstein, veteran teacher at Francis Lewis HS, who pointed pointing out how merit pay would likely incentivize teachers to focus on test prep even more or even tempt them to cheat: 

“These days, we work in a pressure cooker environment, in which test scores are almost everything. Ridiculous credit recovery programs render credit meaningless. Media outlets feign shock when they discover predictable “erase to the top” style scandals where scores are fabricated.  What do they think will happen when teachers are asked to raise grades to the exclusion of everything else we do?

….We are role models. We inspire kids. We teach them to speak out, stand up, to express themselves. That will be particularly tough if we’re all placing knives in one another’s backs chasing bonuses.”

We have also posted the account of Stephanie Black, a teacher who quit DC schools because the Impact system threatened to make her become less of a teacher than she yearned to be.

In a recent Scholastic survey funded by the pro-merit pay Gates Foundation, teachers overwhelmingly rejected performance pay, with this coming in last of nine proposals to help retain good teachers.  In another national survey by Public Agenda, merit pay again came in last – with only 12% of teachers saying that ‘tying rewards or sanctions to teacher performance” would be a “very effective way” to improve the quality of instruction in our schools.

 In contrast, 86 percent of teachers told Public Agenda that reducing class size would be “very effective” way to improve teacher quality – a proven reform that is rejected by the same corporate reformers, like Mayor Bloomberg and Bill Gates, who relentlessly promote merit pay.

If columnists like Kristof, Bellafante and others really respect teachers and want to dip their toes in the education debate, they should take a serious hard look at the research. They have a responsibility to dig a little deeper before drawing broad conclusions  –lest our children’s education be furthered damaged and millions more wasted on policies that have repeatedly failed in the past.