NYC Teacher Sam Coleman Responds to NY Post Michael Goodwin Attack

Sam Coleman with GEM's Julie Cavanagh
and Chicago Teachers Union Karen Lewis,
all social justice teachers

Working with Sam Coleman, a founding members in GEM, is one of the reasons I keep doing this stuff. One of the key new gen activists, also a core member of NYCORE, Sam is also as good a teacher as you can find. (I have been to his class). Teaching in a heavy Latino neighborhood, Sam's fluent Spanish in a dual language school is an invaluable skill. Sam and other activists at his school have organized evening workshops for parents at the school and developed tremendous links within the community. Sam and his colleagues originated the Fight Back Friday campaigns in June 2010 and have spread then around the city. 


Sam's voice in the GEM film response to Waiting for Superman is one of the strongest in the movie and at some screenings there is a round of applause (more than once) after Sam speaks.


Thus when Sam was viciously attacked by NY Post columnist Michael Goodwin in ways that called into his question his ability as a teacher, the entire community of ed activists were outraged. The attack was based on an email Sam had responded to on a few list serves. Yes, Sam is a social justice type teacher  -- which he will define in his response below --- and proud of it. As are many of our other younger teachers we are meeting like our film's narrators Julie Cavanagh and Brian Jones. Social justice teachers also raise questions about their union and many of them are behind the Feb. 4 State of the Union conference.

Sam took time out from enjoying his new born son Reuben to respond to Goodwin, who revealed himself as another NY Post slug/thug squarely in the Rupert Murdoch mold. Hey Goodwin, got any cell phone hacks of Sam?

I want to share an "article" published in the New York Post by Michael Goodwin. It is a very clear attack on me both personally and professionally. The link to the editorial is below, followed by my response. In addition, please find the email exchange with a fellow teacher on the GEM list serve, which Mr. Goodwin was quoting from. His words are in red and quotes. 
  
http://m.nypost.com/p/news/local/teacher_blind_to_reality_KGf9pTZSQgWq78UqfdM0CP .   

Mr. Goodwin, Last week I was forwarded your commentary about me after you read an email exchange between myself and another teacher.  Please find my response to your commentary below. 

 "But there's another hurdle that's not so well known [to fixing education].It's harder to root out because it hides in plain sight."There are no substantive arguments or points in your piece. The only way your words have power is through the use of fear.    

"But with his views of what teaching is about, Sam has gone 'round the bend. His plan to help students learn has precious little to do with the classroom." 
 

I don't actually share my views of what teaching is about in the email I am quoted from. What I do write about is my belief that it is our responsibility to fight injustice. If we want all of our nation's students to have access to quality education we must insist on equity in all spheres of society. My view is that teaching takes incredibly hard work and dedication. I am in my school building from 7-5 most days, if not later, yet my work hours are 8-3.  As a dual language teacher I strive to engage my students in ways that tap into their rich lives, cultures and experiences of the world. And, as I mentioned in my email, I find culturally competent and anti-racist pedagogy is more effective in engaging students than the monotony of test-prep. Do our students need to learn to read, write, have strong mathematical literacy, and critical thinking skills? Definitely. Do we need to teach these skills and competencies in the most engaging ways possible? Absolutely. In the long term, the goal of education should be for students to love learning, to think and engage intellectually with aspects of their world that matter. Those are some of my views on teaching, in case you were wondering.



"We get it that you don't have a clue about the role of your profession. You're a "social justice" type, too much a community organizer to be stuck in front of bored kids who can't read. Street protests definitely are more exciting."   

Part of what makes me "well-educated and qualified" for my job is that I understand the relationships between structural inequalities in this society and the failure of the education system to provide equitable opportunities for my students. I know this because I see these connections everyday in my school and city, and because it has been well-documented by the nation's top scholars. Mr. Goodwin, if you're interested in doing some homework, you should read the work of Gary Orfield, Professor, UCLA and Pauline Lipman, Professor, University of Illinois-Chicago on the political economy of schooling and the civil rights implications of school funding formulas; Daniel Solorzano at UCLA and Pedro Noguera at NYU on the school-to-prison pipelines for Black and Latino students; and Kris Gutierrez at the University of Colorado at Boulder on culturally competent educators. These readings will get you started on understanding the reasons why social justice education is needed in this country, and why we know that these connections are more research-based and relevant than the policies backed by the 1% trying to capitalize on public schooling. Part of being a well-educated professional is knowing the research, and the research says it’s time for some meaningful change in our public schools and systems.  

"Heaven help New York, and especially the students of teachers like Sam. With "educators" like that, they don't have a prayer." 
 

The implication that I could not be a good teacher because I fight for justice and a quality education for our students, and believe that tests deform that quality when their importance is exaggerated, is outrageous. The quality of a teacher can never be measured by student test scores alone; not even by basing 40% of an evaluation on scores, as has been proposed in the new teacher evaluation system. A teacher, for example, that has a gift for connecting with struggling or hurting students in his or her class and helps them achieve an emotional state where they can learn again is a quality teacher. This process is often not reflected in test scores. A teacher who raises their student's test scores through endless test prep is not, and should not be, the definition of a quality teacher.  Do we need a better (or actually, one at all) supervision program to mentor and support teachers? YES! Instead of educational consultants, we should hire more coaches and master teachers as mentors to do the real work of supervision and support in the classrooms. 

Of course those positions cannot be contracted out to your unqualified friends. I refuse to simply allow the Mayor and Governor or you, Mr. Goodwin, to use the educational crisis facing our students as a political chip in the great game of ‘how to make the rich richer’. That has been the biggest "reform" we have seen under Mayor Bloomberg:  more million dollar contracts to private companies, billions spent on high stakes testing, more highly-paid consultants in DOE central, a transfer of public monies into private hands under the veil of charter schools, fewer teachers and resources, larger class sizes for our students, and privatization of our public school space. It is disgusting, and as a teacher who cares passionately about my students, I won't stop fighting.  

Thank you Mr. Goodwin for laying bare the paucity of your knowledge and the corruption of your belief system. Yours are not opinions based either on fact or experience but on a script written by the wealthy and powerful; people who do not want those whom they oppress to learn to think critically about that oppression.  And thank you for the free publicity for this movement. You had so little to say about the issues that you allowed my words to speak for themselves. Real teachers, doing the day-to-day work of educating students, have no voice these days. Our sweat equity cannot buy air-time from the 1%. 
   
 

In Solidarity, 
 

Sam Coleman, 3rd grade dual language public school teacher, Brooklyn. 
  

Here is the full text of my email that he quotes, and below that is the email I was responding to on the GEM list serve: 


Hi James, 
     

I am a 7th year elementary school teacher in a school with high ELL and IEP populations, 95 percent free or reduced lunch. We have never met our AYP and probably never will. So I know where you are coming from. I don't usually get into email list discussions, but I thought the emails on this list were sort of a funny grouping. You had me all the way to here "We need to focus on student accountability instead of teacher accountability". 

Here is an alternative way to think about it. 
 It is just as easy to blame students and their parents as it is to blame teachers. Blaming individuals with names, file numbers, report cards, test scores etc is the way politicians and the wealthy avoid taking responsibility for their failures, or the repercussions of their greed. Could students be more responsible? Sure. Could teaching improve in NYC? Sure. More importantly, could supervision improve in our schools? Obviously. Would teaching and learning improve overall?. A little.  

But those are the easy questions, with easy answer. And plenty of room for blaming individuals. The harder questions are about systemic, historic racism. The purposeful privatization of public education. About the widening wealth gap that is responsible for the high levels of poverty among public school families. The same poverty that is a major factor (for many complicated reasons) in student's ability to be as "Responsible" as we might want. Which of course is reflected in teachers ability to be as "Successful" as our mayor says we should be. The answers to these hard questions require collective action. We can't do that while we play their blame game.  
 

We will not improve education by requiring some mythical level of responsibility from teens who are over policed, under-respected and physically and emotionally stressed out by poverty and racism.  
We will improve education if we fight along side our students and their families for a higher minimum wage, strong rent laws, just immigration laws, progressive taxes, ending the school-prison pipeline, pushing ourselves to be culturally competent educators, small classes, less testing, fair funding. . . .you get the point.   

Teachers are not to blame for failing schools. Students and parents are not to blame for failing schools. We need to push the press to re-frame the dialogue. Americans want simple, and the press gives it to them by the barrel. This serves power.  As educators, we need to push everyone, including ourselves, to think more critically about the causes of the current situation. And then ORGANIZE with the students, parents and each other to fight the hard battles that will begin to change the system that brought us here. 
in solidarity, sam 


Dear Mr. Nazaryan, 

Your assumption that teachers are the problem concerning NYC public schools is deeply flawed.  
As a former Teaching Fellows,and apparently now working for the Daily News,you contend that if teachers who are not effective in improving student learning are weeded out of the system through a rigorous DOE controlled evaluation system, education in NYC will improve. You cite your experience at The Brooklyn Latin School, in Bushwick Brooklyn, as a model for what  teachers can achieve with hard work and constructive criticism from the administration. 
I contend that in the school you cited, you could select the teachers at random and get the same results. 

The point being that when you have students who are highly motivated and willing to learn, it doesn't matter who the teacher is. 

Please note the following statistics from the 2009-2010 School Report Card and Comprehensive Educational Plan (CEP) for Brooklyn Latin School: 
- 281 students enrolled 
 - Average class size-20 students                                                                                                       -17 teachers on staff with only 6.7% having more than five years experience teaching 
-12% teaching a subject they are not certified for. 


- No student suspensions for the 2008-2009 school year (no data for 2009-2010). 
 

- No ESL students and 3 Special Ed. students 
- High 90% student attendance rate 
- Students take four years of Latin 


- No overage students 
 

When you have a student population as described above, you are guaranteed success.The vast majority of our high schools have unmotivated, over aged, low skilled students with populations of ESL ( English as a Second Language ) and Special Education students. In addition many students are excessively absent from classes. 
We need to focus on student accountability instead of teacher accountability. In addition, we need to restructure a school system that gives more importance to social promotion than student learning.  
Your position on teacher evaluations is either sincere but naive or based on another agenda. I am wondering how many years you taught in NYC schools and why you left teaching to work for the Daily News. 
 

Sincerely, 
James, Teacher for 22 years 

ED NOTE: I was also going to respond to Nazaryan since Brooklyn Latin occupies space in my old school, PS 147. In fact they now "own" my old magnificent double size classroom  -- my second home -- where I taught for most of my 27 years in the school.