Public Education Is All About Compliance: Obey Or Else!

From the Daily News:

A teacher at an Upper West Side high school was fired for creating a curriculum with lessons about the Central Park Five that administrators feared would “rile up” black students, according to a new federal lawsuit.

English teacher Jeena Lee-Walker said her bosses at the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry urged her in November 2013 to be more “balanced” in her approach to the racially charged Central Park jogger case that ended with five black and Latino teens being exonerated after spending several years in prison for the attack.

They told her the lessons could create little “riots,” according to court papers.

Although Lee-Walker, 37, agreed to soften her approach, she argued “that students in general, and black students in particular, should be riled up.”

“I kind of wanted to hook them in, engage them, win them over,” she said. “I thought that this material was not only engaging but important.”

...

After several tense exchanges with supervisors, Lee-Walker received a series of bad performance reviews over the next 18 months that ultimately led to her dismissal, the suit said.

Lee-Walker said she was accused of insubordination and given poor evaluations not just because of the material, but because she pushed back.

She was fired in May, roughly two years after joining the High School for the Arts and six years after she began teaching in city public schools.

“I felt abandoned and mistreated,” Lee-Walker said of the ordeal. “I think a lot of teachers in the system feel the same way.”

There's still all this talk in the media and from politicians about the need to fire "bad" teachers and close "failing" schools.

The environment for education is toxic and poisoned these days by all the compliance mandates we have that are supposed to handle the firing of "bad" teachers and the closing of "failing" schools.

Danielson drive-bys, where administrators come into your room with the Danielson rubric and ensure that you're jumping through every hoop on the rubric, are meant to control and contain teachers.

They're also meant to give dismissal tools to administrators who want to get rid of teachers they don't want - regardless of whether they're "bad" or not.

There's nothing "objective" about the Danielson rubric - administrators can ignore all the great stuff a teacher does, focus on one or two supposed "flaws" in a lesson and give enough developings and ineffectives in an evaluation to get the teacher either put on a PIP or sent packing.

You can see how this worked with Lee-Walker - they wanted her to tone down her lessons, she agreed, but the "softening" wasn't enough for administrators at the school and she was targeted for dismissal and successfully canned after a period of so-called "objective documentation."

The message for teachers in the DOE - obey or else! - is also the message for students when they see what happens to their teachers who try and step out of the uniform and give something of themselves in the classroom.

That message is underscored by the EngageNY curriculum and Regents exams, which punish any thoughts that do not come "from the text" and so teach students that they are not to think for themselves, only learn what their betters think and figure out how to parrot that back in the endless "text-based argumentative essays" they have to write across classes.

Lee-Walker's lawyer puts this all into perspective for us:

“Ms. Lee-Walker is the type of teacher we want in a classroom,” her lawyer, Ambrose Wotorson, told The News.

“We’re not looking to turn our students into automatons. We’re looking to turn out independent thinkers — and she got fired for that, and that's just wrong,” Wotorson said.

Actually it's quite the opposite.

What education reformers want are compliant teachers who obey the rules, teach only what is supposed to be taught in the way the system wants it taught and students who learn to be automatons who are just smart enough to be able to figure out what their betters want but not smart enough to know how badly they're getting screwed by the system.

21st Century public education is all about compliance - from the system as a whole right down to the individual classrooms and the teachers and students in each one.

The Fetishization Of "Assessments," Accountability And Compliance

A Perdido Street School blog reader writes the following:

Test prep for standardized tests should be abolished in schools - Our schools are turning into test prep factories. The state tests are just administered in different formats (Common formative assessments) - throughout the year. You cannot reduce testing AND require "accountability" that is based on tests. It doesn't matter what changes a "committee" makes to the test - they will still be used to measure and punish schools, students, and teachers. This in turn creates a culture of fear and school leaders react by mandating MORE practice tests. Therefore, their call for reducing testing is meaningless.

Indeed, it's been my experience that the common monthly "assessments" - coming ten times a year in every subject - are standardized tests by another name only.

These "assessments" (a euphemism for test that educrats and education reformers adopted which I refuse to use) are used for "accountability" and "compliance" - are teachers teaching what the administration wants taught, are students learning these lessons and demonstrating them via the monthly common "assessments"?

For English and math, they're EngageNY-based or CCSS Regents exam assignments while in other grades, they're Regents exam-based assignments.

They function, quite frankly, as standardized testing and compliance measures, not authentic learning.

Obama and Cuomo can talk about capping testing time in schools all they want.

The culture of schools has been infected by constant "assessment," compliance and accountability via the EngageNY curriculum, the Common Core standards, and the Danielson rubric - all of these are used as bludgeons against teachers and schools and ensure that, no matter an arbitrary cap on testing time, the Endless Testing regime will live on.

What's The UFT Doing About The DOE's Fetishization Of Lesson Plans?

From James Eterno's round-up of yesterday's UFT Delegate's Assembly:

Question: Principals asking for lesson plans and doctor's notes unlike in the past.  What can we do?



Mulgrew Answer: The administration could always ask to see a lesson plan but they cannot dictate format or collect them ritualistically. We are not publicizing what we are doing behind the scenes but we are working on reigning in onerous administration.  We are also waiting for a decision on the lesson plan arbitration.

Many teachers are still being told that lesson plans, while only "suggested," must contain specific criteria as "suggested" by administration (including AIM, learning objectives, standards met, timed activities, and assessments), must have all activities with exact times, must have assessments for all activities and all activity assessments must have expected outcomes/student responses in detail.

Some administrators are taking lesson plans on mini-Danielson drive-by's and handing out "ineffectives" and "developings" if the lesson plans do not meet the administration's "suggested" format.

Now I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me what I have just described in the two paragraphs above is dictating lesson plan format, collecting them ritualistically and using them in an onerous way against teachers.

I hope the UFT leadership works this problem out, either in negotiations with the de Blasio administration (which is the most preferable) or through the arbitration process.

One of the new delights brought to us by Sheriff Andy Cuomo's APPR teacher evaluation system as imposed upon us by NYSED Commissioner King per Cuomo's dictum has been the absolute fetishization of the lesson plan to the point of absurdity.

Teachers are being told lesson plans are as important as the lessons themselves and even if an observed lesson is declared excellent during a Danielson drive-by, teachers can still be dinged "ineffective" or "developing" on the lesson plan component if the administrator decides the teacher's lesson plan does not live up to the "suggested" format.

Now I have always written lesson plans throughout my entire career but I do not get bogged down in the minutiae that some of the "suggested" formats I have seen handed around get bogged down in - in particular including every expected student response for every question asked and exact times for every activity.

In short, I use lesson plans for big picture stuff - AIM, objectives, standards, activities - but not absolute scripts to be obsessively written and followed throughout lessons.

The EngageNY lesson plans promoted by NYSED are exactly that - obsessive scripts devised to be followed to the letter - and what I hear from teachers and students unfortunate enough to be using those scripts is that the lessons are stilted and boring and students feel disengaged from the material.

Part of the problem there is not just the planning format but the lessons themselves - the material there is close reading of the same text day after day after day with nothing but text-based questions for students to respond to with text-based evidence.

But the obsessive detail in those lesson plans (a one-day lesson plan can be 10 pages long) is a problem as well and points to a bigger problem overall with Danielson, APPR and the teacher evaluations.

This is all about compliance, plain and simple, and using these mechanisms to keep teachers in constant fear for their jobs.

A ten page lesson plan does not make for better teachers nor for better lessons.

It does ensure compliance in every classroom with exactly what John King wants taught, however, if every teacher is afraid to deviate from the lesson plan format in case of a Danielson drive-by.

I am happy to hear the UFT knows the lesson plan fetishization issue is a problem, but I am not so sure they understand just how big a problem it is.