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Charter schools show what we can accomplish
By Jessie Gerson-Nieder
I am a seventh-grade English and social studies teacher at Prospect Hill Academy, an urban charter school in Somerville. Prospect Hill is a highly successful school. The majority of our students are the children of first-generation immigrants, and many speak a language other than English at home and live at or below poverty level. Yet 98 percent of our seniors were accepted by four-year colleges last year, many with scholarships, and our 10th-grade math MCAS scores were among the highest in the state. Prospect Hill offers an instructive point of entry into some of the issues facing urban educators.
The work and commitment of the Prospect Hill teaching staff is at the root of our students’ success. That said, the school also holds up a mirror to the struggles of attracting and retaining quality teachers who represent a range of backgrounds and experience levels. Although many of our students are children of color, and research indicates that students benefit from being taught by adults who share their cultural and racial experiences, our school’s staff is predominantly white. While, in general, teachers do not reach their full potential until their fifth year in the classroom, most of our teachers are in their mid-20s to early 30s and average two to four years of teaching experience. Furthermore, as a result of the workload and pay, staff turnover is high.
These problems are common within the charter school movement. The issue, then, is how to attract a diverse and talented teaching force into urban education and then retain them over an extended period of time.
Discussions of urban education usually use the language of a deficit model: “How will we convince teachers to go to these schools?” The conversation needs to be reframed as: “How can we support talented teachers who want to teach in urban schools and ensure their success?” Contrary to public perception, there is no shortage of such teachers. We need, however, to acknowledge and accommodate the unique demands of urban education.
Our schools all too often represent the racial and economic divisions that are present in our country. Urban schools largely serve the children of color and families living below the poverty line — the children who are most affected by the achievement gap. Unless schools deliberately set out to close this gap, they risk doing little more than reinforcing existing race and class inequities.
Therefore, successful urban teaching differs from teaching in more socioeconomically privileged settings. Urban teachers are not being asked to simply teach a year’s worth of skills and content; they are being asked to attempt to elevate each student to the educational achievement level of their more privileged peers.
The work required to accomplish this can be monumental. I collaborate with colleagues to analyze data from student work and state assessments to identify what skills my students have and have not mastered, and we design targeted unit and lesson plans that are vertically and horizontally aligned with other educators in my building. I grade student work not just for completion and quality, but also for longitudinal tracking of skill mastery, and I create individual action plans for students who are struggling. All this while developing relationships with students and their families and cultivating a warm and disciplined classroom environment.
I have been responsible for more than 130 students in the past; I am now down to 100. I work more than 65 hours a week, but I cannot imagine being able to buy a house given my salary, or figure out how I would raise a family while working these hours.
Urban teachers need smaller classes, more planning time, and compensation that reflect the tasks that are being asked of them. Currently, we seem to have low expectations of teachers, compensate them accordingly, and then are disappointed in the results they produce. Instead, we need to increase teachers’ pay to a level commensurate with other respected professionals while simultaneously increasing rigor in teacher selection and training and in the expectation of best practice in the classroom.
Unless class size, planning time, and pay are addressed, we will continue to see the least experienced teachers funneled into the highest-needs schools and then, after a few years, depart for better paid and easier work — even those teachers who under different circumstances would have happily stayed in an urban setting.
At Prospect Hill, the MCAS is taken seriously and used as a data point in our analysis of what we are and are not teaching well. The focus is not on teaching to the test but on teaching core academic skills in such a way that students will be successful on the test by default. That said, MCAS testing is a stressful time for faculty and students alike. We know that our success on this test will be used as a barometer of our success as a school.
Although controversial, I believe that standards, assessments, and accountability are necessary. The MCAS provides valuable data and allows me to track student progress. However, accountability needs to take a value-added approach, measuring how far each student progresses over the course of the year. To do otherwise penalizes schools with large numbers of special education or “at risk” students.
A wonderful former principal of mine used to say, “A pig doesn’t get any fatter by weighing it.” Testing is a valuable diagnostic tool, but we need to make sure that we are not confusing the diagnosis with the solution. We want to know how much the pig weighs but need to devote most of our time and effort to figuring out how to fatten it up.
The most distressing element of high-stakes testing is the hard truth that it reveals. These tests reflect the pervasive reality of the achievement gap. At the same time, schools and teachers need to be rewarded for making meaningful, measurable progress rather than be punished for not erasing societal inequities in one fell swoop.
The charter school debate is often one of dichotomies — for example, whether charter schools are a panacea or are weakening public schools by taking away funds and spiriting away academically committed families. The issue is far more nuanced than that.
Prospect Hill is a model of what urban schools can accomplish. Our teachers are passionately committed to the work of education and to our students. We are free to design our curriculum with creativity, albeit with a close eye to state standards, and our students benefit from the results. But with lack of funding and institutional support, sustainability remains a major concern. I know that I cannot continue working at such a fevered pitch forever, and high teacher turnover is emotionally difficult for students and logistically difficult for departments.
When I imagine what Prospect Hill would do with more adequate funding and institutional support, it is breathtaking. Charter schools were intended to serve as laboratories for ideas that could be adopted by the broader public school system if they worked and abandoned if they did not. But today there is little connection, and sometimes overt hostility, between charter and traditional public schools. If we are committed to providing the best possible education to every child, we need to think hard about how to work with unions and districts to allow the most successful elements of charter schools to be replicated in all public schools.
Jessie Gerson-Nieder is a seventh-grade teacher at the Prospect Hill Academy, in Somerville.
Striking the balance: autonomy vs. accountability
By Jalene Tamerat
I spent some time recently thinking about the ubiquitous word “change”—not as a political catch phrase or slogan, but as a word that, from my experience, seems to characterize the very nature of public education. As it happened, my thinking coincided with the first round of MCAS examinations for the year, which always places students, parents, teachers, and administrators in the uncomfortable throes of test-induced anxiety.
It isn’t hard to remember a time when we didn’t have the looming presence of accountability measures to influence our practice, when teachers were given free rein over what and how to teach, and we were all exempt from the dreaded MCAS. I graduated from Boston Public Schools in 1995, three years before the first MCAS examination was administered, so I have ample experience with the old system and a personal lens through which I can assess the changes that have taken place over the past decade and a half, for better or worse.
Standards and assessments have an important place in schools. The 1993 Education Reform Act has rightly addressed our long-ignored need for accountability. However, I know that we are not yet at a point where we can use these measures of accountability as a viable means of gauging student performance in an equitable way. We are still working to strike a balance between autonomy and accountability, and we have yet to reach equilibrium.
Ninety-three percent of the students in my science classes are from racial minority groups, and are for the most part economically disadvantaged (two-thirds receive free or reduced lunch). When I consider the fact that the experiences of many of my students, whether at school, home, or elsewhere, contrast sharply with the experiences of students from different backgrounds in other parts of the state, I realize the problematic nature of universally applied forms of assessment.
Over the past few years, I’ve had to rethink everything I had come to understand about public education, the way I teach my students, and how schools are run. I teach at a Boston public school that many would argue is progressive both in terms of pedagogy and school leadership. Being a pilot school, we are free to creatively manipulate our curriculum as we see fit, so long as the outcome is that our students demonstrate proficiency in a given area. For our students, the process of learning does not have to be uniform, competitive, or uninspiring; we are able to create and deliver lessons that are student-centered and experiential. This happens in many of our classrooms, but it is a long and arduous process that often results in variations in student learning.
I taught sixth-grade mathematics during my first three years in the district and can remember spending hours upon hours planning my lessons for each week. I was daunted by the fact that in any given classroom of 25 students, at least a third lacked the basic skills to be able to understand and manipulate fractions, a major component of the sixth-grade MCAS. I was left to figure out a way to cover what perhaps should have been taught in the lower grades for those students who were behind, come up with work that would be challenging and relevant for the students who were ahead, and make sure that they were all up to speed by the time MCAS season rolled around in May. Despite my hard work, I never felt a real sense of accomplishment, because often my students’ scores failed to reflect the personal gains that they had made as a result of what they learned.
I have listened to the gripes of other teachers who have felt overwhelmed by the increased demands placed on them as a result of the many different ability levels of their students and the lack of support they receive for their special education and English Language Learner students. I have experienced aggravation with having to, in some instances, create a curriculum where none before had existed, without the proper time to plan. It makes me wonder how my students will ever be able to compete with schools in other parts of the state that are clearly better funded, sufficiently staffed, and well-organized.
Though I was just a student in the days prior to education reform, my perception is that my teachers back then did not have to face many of the same pressures that teachers face today. While they created their own curricula in the absence of guidelines and standards, they were also the sole judges of how well or how poorly their students had performed. Many schools that were failing went unnoticed in the absence of state-wide assessments.
The push toward accountability was warranted, though it seems as though we have gone too far. Under the pressure to perform, students, teachers, and administrators today have come to regard the MCAS period as one marked by angst and nervousness, and for good reason. Many educators are daunted by the idea that a year or more of learning could be summarized and measured by a single examination. We are cognizant of the fact that student learning experiences across the Commonwealth are still far from uniform, despite knowing that, in many classrooms, lessons have become driven by the inevitability of standardized exams. For us, there is a strong tension between uniformity and individualism. On the one hand, we race toward reaching MCAS proficiency through the rigorous drilling of facts and specific skill sets, and on the other, we take steps to employ creative strategies that will both attract and maintain student populations, and counteract student attrition to charter schools.
It is only fair that if we are compelled to individualize our instruction based on students’ needs, we are given the autonomy to individualize our assessments as well. I have seen a few schools that use competency-based portfolios to demonstrate student learning over a period of time. This seems like a more equitable means of assessing students, given the fact that each child learns differently, comes to us with a unique history, and from year to year and school to school, has teachers with varying teaching styles. Schools should be granted the freedom to develop a new type of assessment that measures individual student competency and value-added gains. I, for one, would enjoy seeing a realistic and clear assessment of the amount of progress that I have been able to make with my students, and I know that my students would enjoy the process of creating a demonstration of their proficiencies.
Change takes time and careful orchestration. We need to change the way we think about assessment and remember the possible pitfalls of autonomy. We also need to embrace the idea that schools can and should be creative enterprises that can inspire students despite diverse backgrounds and learning styles. If we are indeed advocating for school autonomy and individualized learning, our assessments should reflect those values as well. We will never be able accomplish a balanced model as long as we believe that we can measure student learning through high-stakes testing. If we are to create an improved and equitable learning experience for all students in the Commonwealth, our creativity must go further than the classroom; it must extend to the realm of accountability as well.
Jalene Tamerat is a seventh-grade teacher at the Josiah Quincy Upper School, in Boston.
Reform stirs a debate even in affluent suburb
By Anna Gelinas
Longmeadow, where I teach seventh- and eighth-grade Spanish, is an affluent suburb of Springfield. The median household income is $92,000, and the graduation rate is 97 percent, well above the statewide average of 81 percent. Most parents in this residential community of 16,000 are highly educated and take a strong interest in their children’s progress in school. The children themselves are highly motivated.
Yet, even here, the state’s education reform efforts spark spirited discussions. Education reform has helped establish strong curriculum frameworks and standards and has provided much-needed resources for teacher training. But these positive developments are outweighed by increased demands on teachers’ time and on the school budget. It remains a challenge to implement reforms mandated by state politicians, many of whom do not have classroom experience.
The increased accountability within our school district also comes at a time of declining state and national resources and a shift in focus by many grant programs to target disadvantaged areas. Longmeadow has not been immune from this pressure. Over the years, our district has lost staffing positions and resources associated with curriculum coordination, remedial services, gifted programs, and some content areas such as science, health, physical education, foreign languages, and reading. As state and federal mandates increase, we find ourselves continually needing to do more with less.
Tests, a big part of education reform, are another area of concern. The state competency test in subject matter ensures that teachers are teaching within their certification areas, but the changes in certification requirements for new teachers have become hurdles placed in the way of our real goal, which is educating children.
The Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure, required of all persons seeking new licensure in any field, is not a true measure of a person’s ability to teach. It is an exercise in reading and writing and a measure of content knowledge, not pedagogical knowledge. It has become a stumbling block for some people who would be wonderful teachers because of their ability to connect with kids, but who have trouble passing the test. As veteran teachers continue to retire, all districts, including Longmeadow, will have trouble recruiting new teachers because there will be fewer people applying for the jobs.
The annual administration of the MCAS tests has not really changed the way many of us in Longmeadow teach. We have always followed a very rigorous curriculum, and our district has performed well on the tests since their inception. Most of our results are at or above 85 percent of the composite performance indicator.
The only issue we sometimes face is the timing of the tests. That is, the science tests are administered in May, but the teachers do not finish covering the curriculum until June. The tests also create a false sense of closure at the end of the year. Many students assume that once the MCAS is over, school is over, and it is hard to engage them in the remaining curriculum.
The amount of testing that occurs also has an impact on education in general. The tests are administered over three or four days in April and then again over a two-week period in May. It is difficult to give other assessments during this time, and it is difficult to teach a lot of new material because the kids are tired after testing all morning. This hurts some of the untested areas such as foreign language, art, music, and physical education.
De-tracking, which groups students together regardless of intelligence or ability in a content area, has placed added burdens on teachers by creating the need for differentiated instruction within the groupings. The result is mixed-ability classes in which some students are struggling with the content and pacing while others are bored. In classes of 25 students each, individualizing instruction is nearly impossible.
In my Spanish classes, when I begin to explain subject-verb agreement, many students can identify a subject and a verb in a sentence. They can quickly transfer this information to the Spanish language and begin to create sentences. But some students struggle with parts of speech in English, so they often need to remain after school for help in identifying subjects and verbs in English before they can use them in Spanish.
This discrepancy in ability makes teaching more difficult. I have some students who are ready for the next lesson at the same time that I have others who need the lesson presented again. Previously, the students that struggled with reading and English grammar would have been placed in a reading class, while those students with higher language ability would have been placed in the foreign language class.
Then there is the increase in our special education population. Currently, 17 percent of the students in Longmeadow qualify for special education services. Students with severe needs require outside placements, and the district is required by law to locate and fund these placements. These mandated programs have limited state funding and reimbursement, which has caused financial strife in Longmeadow.
Depending on how it is reported, the special education budget in Longmeadow is between 22 percent and 30 percent of the total school budget, which inevitably creates a lack of funding for other areas. It has also created a tense relationship between parents and school officials at times. It is not uncommon for parents in Longmeadow to hire an advocate, or even a lawyer, to assist them at special education meetings and to ensure that the district is in compliance with their child’s Individualized Education Plan.
Our mission in Longmeadow is “eyes on the child learning.” Despite all the negative implications of education reform, we are striving to provide the young people of our town with the best public education possible, even with limited resources and increased demands on our time.
Anna Gelinas, Ph.D., teaches at the Williams Middle School, in Longmeadow. The opinions expressed in this article are hers and those of her eighth-grade colleagues.