Last week the Los Angeles Times published a controversial article about teacher effectiveness by using what they call a “value added approach” to evaluate teachers and schools who have made significant improvement in student achievement. I am not too familiar with the approach, but many educational experts and scholars have criticized the approach as being an invalid approach to educational research.
The decision to publish data of thousands of Los Angeles teachers provoked an outcry from numerous educators. And what predictably happens when someone is under attack is that they turn around and try to place blame on other people-students, parents, administrators, and politicians.
In response to the controversy, Diane Ravitch, an educational scholar and historian wrote on twitter:
Staff is not the problem. Poverty and not speaking English are problems. Hundreds of schools in poor and minority dists will close. Why?
My partner immediately tweeted the following to her:
@DianeRavitch Saying “poverty and not speaking English” are problems seems to suggest a deficit ideology and “blame the victim” mentality
@dianeravitch How about “lack of growth model accountability” and “invalid and unreliable testing for ELLs” are problems?
Of course Diane Ravitch didn’t respond because she is too busy trying to incite educators into buying her new book as well as blame Obama for all this mess, although she spent years working on the Bush payroll and had no problem with supporting the same policies that she is speaking out against now.
Today the Los Angeles Times published an additional article about the evaluation of two schools in Los Angeles. Some educators left some really disgusting comments:
I worked at a school with abnormally high test scores given what i thought was its population. It turned out this school was the closest middle school to Chinatown. I don’t like to traffic in stereotypes, but the deference between the hunger for learning was so vast between the working class Latino and the working class Asian students you would have to blind not to notice.
In gathering evidence for a reseach paper I interviewed many of my Asian and Latino students about why the Asian studnets did so startlingly well in school. Almost all the Latino students said the Asian’s did well because they were smart. The Asian’s all said they did well because they did the required work. In Latino culture “not being smart” gives you an out, in Asian culture that’s not a proper excuse, you do the work.
Culture…Culture…Culture
(misspelling in original)
Right, right. It’s their culture that causes low achievement, not the fact that they have racist teachers who reinforce the “lazy Mexican” ideology. Another teacher wrote:
Is it teachers, or is it PARENTS:
*who send their kids to school with no breakfast
*who insist on speaking a language other than English at home (even if the parent KNOWS English)
…
*who let the Spanish-speaking housekeeper (ahem, I teach at “one of those” LAUSD schools) help the kid with their homework
And yet another racist teacher wrote:
And of course my favorite is the parent who shows up for a conference and is amazed when I don’t speak Spanish!! That’s how you know things are really F@#$ed up. Then you find out they have been in the US for 20 years and don’t speak a word of English.
Often there are no books in the home and students are never taken anywhere but within a mile or so of the home. But when you visit the homes, there are two or three TV sets.
Then there are the macho, controlling latino dads who won’t let their daughters go on field trips! I feel like saying,” You’re in the US now and if you wan’t to treat your daughter like dirt, move back to the peasant country you came from.” It’s disgusting what we have allowed to happen.
(misspelling in original)
What is actually disgusting is that teachers like this receive a paycheck by teaching Spanish-speaking Latino students!
I’m not a supporter of the sensationalist “let’s publicly tar and feather teachers and schools just to sell newspapers, although we will use the guise that we’re doing it because parents deserve a right to know”. Parents aren’t stupid, and they know when their child has a good or a bad teacher.
I’m a teacher advocate and I don’t believe that any teacher or school deserves to be publicly humiliated, whether or not they are a good or a bad teacher. But I am also a student and a parent advocate and I refuse to remain quiet when there are teachers and educational scholars out there who are placing blame on students for their language, culture, parents, or socioeconomic status. The issue is much more complex than blaming language and culture, and energy would be best spent elsewhere.
Stop the blame and instead let’s all focus our efforts on demanding valid and reliable assessments and accountability systems for culturally and linguistically diverse students.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I am a 7th grade teacher at a school that’s 95% Mexican. My previous school was about 92% Mexican students, so I definitely was interested in this topic. I think you hit on a real issue. Teachers have been attacked for a few years now as part of a major push to privatize public education. I’m from Chicago where this movement really originated from.
Teachers who elect to teach in an urban school environment face a lot of challenges and that’s because our students do. It’s really easy for teachers and parents to blame each other. Whose fault is it that so many kids don’t have the basic necessities needed to do well in school? It’s not the teacher’s fault and frankly it’s not the parents’ fault either. We need economic and social justice in this country. When you look at other country’s whose education systems outperform ours on international tests the first thing that jumps out on you is the childhood poverty levels in those countries compared to ours.
Teachers, parents, and community leaders need to come together to advocate for the needs of our children. As a teacher we see horrible parenting. As a parent you see horrible teaching. However, most all of us all want these children to succeed. Nothing fills me with more joy than when a student comes back to visit me from high school or college and tells me that they’re doing great and I played some small part in it.
I’m sorry to say that President Obama’s misguided educational policies are actually worse than George Bush’s. I say this as an Obama supporter who donated and volunteered and who cringes when he opens his mouth about education. They’re trying to take a system that has failed for 15 years in Chicago and export it nationally.
The value added tests are pretty useless as a way of evaluating teachers because they are not reliable. Teachers will show up as terrible one year, outstanding the next, and average the third. Flipping a coin would be no less random. I quibble with a few things, but overall I think you’re right. I appreciated that you didn’t demonize all teachers because of the ignorance of one. I wish that teacher learned the same lesson.
Thanks for your comment Jack. It was actually more than one teacher, but that is neither here nor there. And, as a school administrator I am very sad to say that the comments that they make are comments that I frequently hear made by far too many teachers who work in high minority schools. But not all, as you mentioned. However, far too many as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes I wonder if some of them work in high minority schools because they think that they can get away with many things that they might not get away with if they had upper middle class white kids.
I don’t disagree with you that Obama’s education policies are seriously misguided. I personally voted for him myself, but I am becoming increasingly disappointed that his neoliberal policies are actually accomplishing what Bush only wished to do. I saw the writing on the wall when I saw that Duncan was chosen as secretary of education. I suppose he has to try to prove that he can make a name for himself in the field of education, but I am afraid that it will back fire by turning a huge voting population against him.
What he should be doing is reforming NCLB, turning it into a growth model so that schools are awarded for making progress as opposed to being punished. I’m sick of all the punitive attacks, and I’m just getting so sick of everyone pointing fingers at everyone else.
In California the immigrant governor vetoed twice the bill that test scores for newcomer students as well as students in bilingual programs will count for a couple of years in the English accountability system. Many districts have a law suit against the state, demanding that if primary language assessments are taken into consideration that linguistically modified assessments with easier syntax, pictures, etc are instituted. But of course no one wants to do that, because then it disrupts their whole plan to make it look as if schools are failing so that they can bring in their buddies in the form of program improvement teams and prescriptive curriculum.
Yes, just tossing blame back and forth is unproductive. However, it’s amazing to me the lengths people will go to to protect the precious teachers at the cost of the kids. Of course the Times should publish the teachers’ scores, and if the teachers are embarrassed, GOOD. They should be! I wouldn’t be surprised if those who oppose the publication are the same people who advocate that self-esteem is more important than learning the correct answers–i.e. “creative spelling.” That camp produces kids whose spelling and grammar is atrocious, and they end up feeling crappy anyway because eventually they find out they’re wrong and then they get to feel stupid.
The other thing that would help not just our schools, but our society in general, is if everyone could knock off the ridiculous oversensitivity and mislabeling and overuse of “racism.” Comments like those above by the teachers are not racist–parents coming in to meet with a teacher are shocked when the teacher doesn’t speak English? Can you imagine moving to France or Germany or Portugal, not having learned a decent amount of French, German, or Portuguese, then being shocked when the teacher doesn’t speak your own personal language?! No, that’s preposterous. I actually argue that You wouldn’t call a French teacher who’s offended by the nerve of an American to move to France and not learn French “racist,” so perhaps those who call these teachers racist only do so because of the color of skin of the Latinos. Now, that’s racist!
Point being, if we could get people off of the rampant overuse and misuse of the racism blame-game, maybe people would actually LISTEN to what they’re saying and take some action! Like if these teachers notice that Asian-American kids are more successful learners than Latinos on a consistent basis, instead of shouting “RACISM!” based on a TRUE observation, wouldn’t the best possible thing be to take that information and DO something with it? Rather than denying and denying and trying to minimize what teachers have noticed, talk to the kids and figure out if Latino parents or kids can be doing something more like Asian families (or any other ethnicity) who seems to be getting it right.
When you call people racist because of comments that some people find a way to interpret as insulting, you totally toss out what are quite possibly very valid, HELPFUL observations that could help Latinos or other students. If there’s any blame game that should stop, it’s the “racism”-labeling one!