Last In, First Out by Matt Bromme

Matt Bromme is a former NYC teacher, assistant principal, principal, district superintendent and high level official at Tweed. He has seen this issue from many angles, and his words are to be heeded:

Much has been stated and argued over the policy used to lay-off teachers by seniority (Last In First Out). Many new teachers to the school systems across America are enthusiastic and willing to bring new methodologies to the classroom. However, many senior teachers are extremely competent and their body of work makes them deserving of our respect, not deserving of being tainted as incompetent and unsatisfactory.

In 1975 I was terminated as a New York City teacher during that fiscal crisis. I had three years of experience as a teacher, and I was extremely upset about my situation. Were there senior teachers who possibly could have been let go if there was an objective criteria? Someone please define what an objective criteria is? Were some of these teachers not terminated deserving of an unsatisfactory rating? The answer is yes. That was management’s responsibility to rid the system of anyone who was incompetent.

However, I supported then and I support now the concept of a due process procedure to ensure that all staff have their rights protected and that good teachers have their seniority rights protected.

Just like senior staff in the police department, fire department and military, have a strong knowledge base, so do senior teachers and school leaders. There is a need for a professional to develop a reputation in the community that they serve. This takes time. Time is not an idea embraced by the new corporate mentality swarming over our schools.

In 1976-1977 I returned to the classroom. In 1984 I became a middle school assistant principal, in 1988 I became an elementary school principal and in 1991 I became a middle school principal. My last position was at the rank of school district superintendent in New York City, with the last six months of my career assigned to the Tweed Courthouse.

The Tweed Court House environment was fascinating from my point of view as a civil servant. It seemed that everyone hired by the Department of Education came from an Ivy League College, had not yet reached their twenty fifth birthday and looked at all of us “old” educators as failures because we stayed in our position for more than five years. What really disturbed me was that these young perky preppy staff members had no clue as to what needed to be done in the communities we served.

Fast forward to today’s argument that newer teachers are automatically better then senior teachers. This corporate mentality (Bloomberg, Black, Gates, etc.), has taken over from the the philosophy that teaching is an art and not a science. In their desire to use data (which too many times is incorrect), they are missing the point that teachers are like ministers preaching to a very difficult group and trying to convert them to accept a better life. Before the system went data crazy, in many of our most challenging schools, we used music, art, and drama to motivate our students to do better. Today, too many schools have had to give up their assembly programs and art programs because there is not enough time, since a child’s educational experience today is dominated by test prep.

The corporate mentality also does not understand that it takes time for school teachers and school leaders to develop and to gain the respect of the community they serve. In my experience, especially at the middle school and high school level, it takes at least three years for a reputation to develop and ergo for the educator to be respected. It is also my experience that for competent teachers and principals each year they improve in their skills, just as police fire and military personnel do. As educators mature they learn numerous different techniques to enhance their classroom performance.

Tenure has become an obscene word among politicians and the new educational corporate mentality. Tenure at the public school level (as opposed to the world of the university) only guarantees a due process procedure for those accused of egregious behavior. I rated teachers and school leaders unsatisfactory. I had numerous grievances on all levels, including arbitration hearings and court cases.

Where I and my staff did our homework, we won our cases. In some cases, staff was terminated, fined or chose to retire. Where supervisors, either at the school or district level, failed to meet their contractual obligations, we did not win. I would not have it any other way.

Due process protects teachers who speak out for their students. Due process protects school leaders who administer their buildings and often are subject to political pressures. It also protects school leaders who are brave enough to challenge their central district corporate leaders who know nothing about schools and the community the schools serve.

While Mayor Bloomberg and his “people” should have been focused on class size issues to enhance school performance, he caused this issue by creating numerous schools within schools. Many of them will be overcrowded when they reach their full maturity.

Mayor Bloomberg created this issue by allowing principals to automatically refuse to hire teachers of the schools being replaced by the new small schools. Mayor Bloomberg also created these problems by readjusting the budget process, so that “average” salary was replaced at the school level with “exact” salary. Therefore this motivated new principals not to hire from the ranks of teachers that were available, but to go out and hire “inexpensive” teachers.

There is a crisis today regarding LIFO that was not caused by unions and or senior staff members. If you look deep enough into the corporate mentality,you will find that this is more of a budget issue than an educational issue. If the principals had hired the senior staff that was assigned to ATR status, none of their schools would be looking at draconian cuts. However, under a false sense of security the Mayor rolled the dice and decided to ignore these career ATR teachers, many of them competent and capable. Instead they went for the young and the restless, most of whom will leave the system within five years.

-- Matt

Fact-checking "Waiting for Superman": False data and fraudulent claims

In response to critical comments, I have added clarifications and corrections in bold italics to my original post. I apologize for some sloppy math in not annualizing what was a six year rate in the apparent source article for the film. After further analysis, the movie’s claims remain clearly inaccurate as well as misleading; though the source article was only partially erroneous, at least as far as I can tell. Sorry for the mistake -- and thanks to all my readers, and especially those of you who checked my figures so assiduously.

In the movie Waiting for Superman, nominated for an Oscar as the best Documentary of 2010, the following statement is made:

" ...in Illinois, 1 in 57 doctors loses his or her medical license, and 1 in 97 attorneys loses his or her law license, but only 1 teacher in 2500 has ever lost his or her credentials."

Since the movie was released, these figures have been repeated frequently. They take up five pages in the Google search engine, were cited in the NY Times review of the film, the British newspaper the Independent, as well as Brian Williams of NBC in the television program Education Nation.

But apparently not a single one of these news outlets, or the makers of Waiting for Superman, ever bothered to check them.

While looking for the source of this claim, which is repeated without citation in the movie and its companion book, I came upon a 2007 newspaper article by Scott Reeder of the Small Newspaper Group:

During the past six years, 1 in 2,500 Illinois educators have lost their teaching credentials through suspension, revocation or surrender. By comparison, during the same period 1 in 57 doctors practicing in Illinois lost their medical licenses and 1 in 97 Illinois attorneys lost their law licenses.

"Either Illinois teachers are 43 times better behaved than doctors or they are being held to a considerably lower professional standard than other professions,'' said Jeff Mays, executive director of the Illinois Business Roundtable and an advocate for educator accountability standards. ``Just like doctors and lawyers, teachers are members of an important and demanding profession. It's time that they be held to the same professional standards."

One should note that the data cited in the source article is substantially different from the claim made in the film. In the movie, the period of six years is omitted for the disbarment of physicians and/or attorneys– making indefinite the time span over which the data was collected. The film also says that only 1 in 2500 Illinois teachers have “ever” lost his or her credentials, rather than over six years.

In an effort to verify these claims, I first consulted the annual summary put out by the Federation of State Medical Boards. In reality, 121 doctors lost their licenses in Illinois in 2009, out of 43,670 physicians. That means an average of 0.3% of doctors per year lost their licenses; or 3 out 1,000 per year. Over six years, this would equal 1.8% -- substantially the same as the 1 in 57 figure cited in the source material.

I also checked the claim that 1 in 97 attorneys in Illinois lose their licenses over six years. According to data reported by the American Bar Association, 26 lawyers in Illinois were disbarred in 2009, out of a total of 58,457 - in some cases, by mutual consent.

Since 2001, the average rate of Illinois attorneys disbarred is 32 per year – with more than half of them leaving their professions “voluntarily.” This is an annual rate of about 0.05%, for a six year rate of 0 .3% -- 3 out of 1,000 – not one out of 97, as the source material claimed. As mentioned above, the movie did not specify the time frame over which this disbarment is supposed to have occurred.

The total number of lawyers disbarred in the entire country, either involuntarily or by mutual consent, is 800 per year out of 1,180,386; which is about 0.07% per year, or 7 out of 10,000. The number of those involuntarily disbarred is 441- about 0 .04% or 4 out of 10,000 per year. The six year rate for disbarment nationally would be 0.42% -- about ten times the figure cited in the film of one in 2500 Illinois teachers who “ever” lost their credentials.

I could not find any independent data verifying the number of Illinois of teachers who lose their credentials each year. According to the NY Daily News, over the past three years, 88 out of about 80,000 New York City schoolteachers have lost their jobs for "poor performance." This represents an annual rate of about 30 out of 80,000, or 0.03%, which is about the same rate as attorneys who are involuntarily disbarred each year nationally.

According to the Houston Chronicle, over the last five years, 364 Houston teachers have been fired, out of about 12,000: "Of those, 140 were ousted for performance reasons, a broad category that generally covers teachers not fulfilling their job duties."

So the rate of Houston teachers who lose their jobs due to poor performance is about 0.2% per year - higher than the rate of either doctors or attorneys in the state of Texas removed from their profession annually. For example, only 32 Texan attorneys were disbarred in 2009 out of 75,087; for an annual rate of 0.04% -- at one fifth the rate. 64 doctors per year on average lost their licenses in Texas between 2005 and 2009; out of about 60,000 physicians, at an annual rate of about 0.1 % -- about half the percentage.

Moreover, many more teachers who are untenured and/or uncertified are removed from their jobs for poor performance. Roughly 3.7% of New York City teachers were denied tenure this year, according to the NY Times.

The overall attrition rate of teachers is much higher - many of whom would probably otherwise be cited for poor performance, but who leave the profession either willingly, or "counseled" out. In New York City, the four year attrition rate is more than 40% -- a mind-boggling figure.

In reality, one of the most serious problems plaguing our urban schools, along with excessive class sizes, overcrowding, and poor support for teachers and students, is the fact that we have far too many inexperienced educators revolving through our high-needs schools each year.

Can you imagine if 40% of physicians or attorneys left their jobs after four years? A national emergency would be declared, with a commission appointed to find out how their working conditions could be improved.

Yet instead of examining this critical issue objectively, the movie Waiting for Superman cites false statistics in their effort to scapegoat teachers, unfairly blaming them for all the failures of our urban schools. The film features the views of Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institute, a well-known conservative critic of equitable educational funding, claiming that the best way to improve our schools would be to fire 5-10% of teachers each year.

To the contrary, eliminating teacher tenure and seniority protections would likely produce an even less experienced and less effective teaching force - especially in our urban public schools, which already suffer from excessively high rates of turnover.

As a parent, I support a higher standard for teacher tenure and more rigorous teacher evaluation systems. I have seen my own children benefit from excellent teachers over the years, but also occasionally suffer as a result of poor teaching, though the latter has occurred as often in schools without union protections as those that were unionized. An improved evaluation system would take into account not only test score data, but also feedback from other teachers, administrators, students and parents.

But at this point, we simply cannot trust the corporate oligarchy currently making policies for our schools to create a fair evaluation system, including those who backed Waiting for Superman, given their proclivity to misuse and distort data, as shown by the egregiously inaccurate figures cited in the film.

Rather than a documentary, perhaps the movie should be re-categorized, with an appropriate disclaimer, as an urban myth.

Tying tenure to test scores: not ready for prime time

Lots of interesting letters to the Times today, deploring the Mayor's proposal to base tenure decisions on test scores. [see “Mayor to Link Teacher Tenure to Test Scores” ]

In the same vein, Aaron Pallas has a column in Gotham schools, Teacher Education in New York State: A skoolboy’s-Eye View, in which he lucidly explains how the evaluation of teachers based on value-added student test scores is not ready for prime time. Pallas recently appeared on a panel at Teachers College with David Steiner, new NY Commissioner of State Education, (photo to the right), and Merryl Tisch, head of the Board of Regents. (You can see a webcast of this event here.)

In his column, Pallas urges Steiner and Tisch to start working on improving the state exams, which have gotten radically easier over time, before beginning to consider a system that would base decision-making on their results. He also points out how the long-standing practice of having high schools score their own Regents exams is a system ripe for abuse.

As part of the state's "Race to the Top" proposal, Commissioner Steiner recently also proposed that they expand the awarding of teaching degrees -- allowing providers other than institutions of higher learning to offer teacher preparation programs, with the Board of Regents granting Master’s degrees to candidates who "graduate" from these programs.

There is so much lacking in terms of the state's current oversight -- of district spending practices, of cheating, of "credit recovery", of the proper reporting of graduation rates, of whether schools are even providing the minimal services to kids that they are entitled to by law.

Given the awful mess at State Ed which Steiner has not yet begun to clean up, I would hate to see him allow further abuses to occur by deregulating the awarding of teaching degrees -- which could easily make a teaching certificate as meaningless as passing the Regents exam is now.

Why are inside-the-beltway so clueless at diagnosing the real problems of our public schools?

See the typical screed in Slate, by Ray Fisman, a professor at the Columbia Business School, subtitled “Why are public schools so bad at hiring good instructors?” It decries the inability of principals to get rid of incompetent teachers, and attributes poverty, the achievement gap and God knows what else to teacher tenure.

Strangely enough, it reports that the principal featured in the story, Anthony Lombardi at PS 49 in Queens, managed to get rid of one third of entire his teaching staff since he arrived, despite the existence of tenure, and, you got it, test scores rose.

The article doesn’t question that looking at test scores alone may not be the best or the only way to evaluate teachers or the quality of education. This is peculiar, especially since Lombardi seems to have rated his teachers not by looking at their test scores, but by examining their lesson plans and observing them in action, which is exactly how tenure decisions are made now.

(By the way, the school got a “B” in its recent DOE school progress report, for whatever that’s worth. And the teachers who remain at the school, though they may have been spared Lombardi’s wrath, don’t seem to respect him much – in the teacher survey, 50% disagreed with the statement that “School leaders invite teachers to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making important decisions for this school for this school,” And 57% disagree that “School leaders encourage open communication on important school issues.”

Most notably, the article omits the fact that teachers no longer have the right of automatic transfer – and in fact implies otherwise: “Since his arrival, a third of PS 49's teachers have been squeezed out through Lombardi's efforts. Of course, this just meant they were moved to another classroom in another school, lowering the test scores of someone else's children.”

Perhaps this inaccuracy results from the fact that much of the description of Lombardi and his schools seem to be lifted directly from a now-outdated NY Magazine article from 2003 (click here).

But the most interesting aspect of the piece, to me anyway, is that it cites the findings in a study by Kane, Staiger and Gordon (yes, the infamous Robert Gordon) that the quality of teaching in LA did not diminish one iota after they had to triple their hiring of teachers to reduce class size, despite the repeated claims of the Bloomberg/Klein administration that lowering class size in NYC would inevitably do just this. In fact, there is no evidence in the research literature that this has ever occurred.

To the contrary, providing them with smaller classes is the most certain way to improve the effectiveness of the teachers we already have in NYC, as well as reducing our sky-high attrition levels, in the process making it more likely that students have experienced teachers – the most reliable predictor of effectiveness, as parents know and which is also backed up by research. It is widely known that no private school in NYC will hire a first year teacher, but makes them spend a couple of years of “seasoning” in the public schools first.

Use test scores for tenure? Not a good idea, with these bumblers

So the NY State budget finally was decided, with all the proposed cuts to NYC schools restored, and the promise of CFE maintained, yet all the newspaper editorial boards and bloggers can do is to blather about a provision in the budget that prohibits the use of student test score data in making teacher tenure decisions.

Eduwonkette provides some of the links to the bloggers who are so outraged as to contend that this is the end of the civilized world.

Actually, the final language in the budget bill was a reasonable compromise, in which it was agreed that there will be a two year moratorium while a commission considers how best this information can be utilized to inform tenure decisions.

Evaluating a teacher’s competence on standardized test scores alone is not sufficient, since the gains or losses that any class achieves in scores is often highly erratic from year to year, is partly based on factors such as class size which is quite variable across NYC schools, and the background of students in each class.

Actually, research shows that its not just the current class size that helps determine the rate of learning, but a student's past class sizes, which can change the entire trajectory of his or her academic career.

And what are they going to do about the fact that many of the tests are given in the middle of the year? The DOE's proposed solution is to give last year's teacher half the credit, but that assumes equal effectiveness of all teachers -- which is contrary to the whole point of this exercise - that some teachers are more effective than others.

Moreover, test scores do not tell the whole story. Other evidence of a teacher's skills and value are equally if not more important, including her ability to motivate students, keep them engaged, and guide them in their writing, their projects and all other types of creative learning that cannot be assessed by test scores alone.

Most importantly, it is by now abundantly clear that this statistically illiterate administration cannot be trusted to use this data carefully and intelligently, with a grain of salt and in relation to other critical factors, given their record on merit pay and school grades.

In both cases, they chose to base the results primarily (85%) on test scores, with more than half based upon the essentially unreliable gains or losses in scores over one year alone.

Tying tenure to test scores could have very destructive effects, discouraging teachers from taking on classes of struggling or special ed students, and lead to a further loss of morale, with even more test prep replacing real learning.

A hiatus of two years is a terrific idea since whatever is decided will be implemented by a new administration that will hopefully be more trustworthy with the use of such data. We know that the bunch of bumbling amateurs in charge of our schools now would never be able to figure out how to balance all these factors in an intelligent, humane and constructive fashion.

For more on this issue, including comments from Chancellor Klein, Randi Weingarten and me, see the Channel 2 report here.

Bloomberg compares himself to Martin Luther King

See the article in today’s NY Sun in which Bloomberg and Klein complain about the lack of hearings and public process as regards the proposed change in the state law on teacher tenure.

Their outrage is a bit hard to stomach, when not a single one of their flawed educational policies has had any real public input, whether it be the constant reorganizations, the continual forcing of charter schools into regular public schools, the evisceration of districts, the disempowering of parents and school leadership teams, the overemphasis on standardized tests including paying students for high scores, the unfair “fair student funding” scheme, or the highly unreliable school grading system.

Even more astonishing is that at the same time as he is proposing indefensible budget cuts to our schools, the Mayor would dare to compare himself to Martin Luther King on the anniversary of his assassination.

On Sunday, while visiting a church in Crown Heights, Bloomberg said: "We are doing the things, I think, that if Dr. Martin Luther King was running the NYC school system, he would have done. And I think that if you were running the New York City school system, you would have done."

Really?

Bloomberg and Klein continually portray themselves as great civil rights heroes at the same time that they refuse to make the sort of fundamental changes that would dramatically improve opportunities for NYC children – for example, by reducing class size, which is one of very few reforms that has been shown to narrow the achievement gap.

See these responses from State Sen. Bill Perkins from Harlem and Council member Leticia James from Brooklyn:

Mr. Perkins, who said he received phone calls yesterday from constituents concerned by the remarks, called the comparison to King "arrogant" and "an insult." He said the claim was insulting "especially when you realize that, within the community, there's a great deal of anger and disappointment at how the schools have been functioning under this administration."

Mr. Perkins added: "Parents have felt left out of the process, and they've felt that the schools are not measuring up. ..."

As Letitia James concluded, "To invoke Dr. Martin Luther King's name, given that a significant number of the schools in Crown Heights do not have computers, do not have science labs and math labs, is really an affront to the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King."

New blog: Billionaires for education reform

A civic-minded, selfless billionaire, Smellington B. Worthington III, has started a new blog, pointing out how the NYC school system needs to be improved.

According to his bio, Smellington “pulled himself up with just the sweat of his brow, the grit in his character, a portfolio of stocks and properties, a substantial inheritance, and ivy-league education, and a hefty trust fund. In his younger years, Mr. Worthington attended private schools, as do his three children. He is now selflessly turning his valuable time and attention toward the public schools, in order to produce a better, more reliable class of worker.”

Accordingly, he has lots of worthy things to say about the need to get rid of teacher tenure, extend the school day, etc. Check it out at Billionaires for Educational Reform.