Leonie Haimson Mashes ChalkBleat's Elizabeth Green Bias

Leonie and Elizabeth used to be pretty friendly - I was also friendly with her.

Chalkbeat “Roundtable” discussion on Eliz. Green controversial piece in which she called Success charters a model educational system.  See what I just tweeted  about it below. 

https://chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2018/01/16/a-chalkbeat-roundtable-the-promise-and-perils-of-charter-networks-like-success-academy/

The incredible bias of this piece in responding to critiques that the original piece was too biased makes me think that Chalkbeat editors must be trapped in a bubble w/o any awareness of how isolated they are. 

	leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson)
1/17/18, 8:15 PM Egregiously biased discussion fr/ 3 charter school founders, 2 who say district schools can be as good as charters (!), 1 parent criticizing both, and not a single charter critic. Biased selection exacerbates problems in @elizwgreen superficial encomium to Success. @carolburris twitter.com/chalkbeat/stat…

The Insidious Nature of Green's Sunday Times Article

UPDATED Mar. 8, 12 am with Aaron Pallas comment and you must read Jim Horn's piece at Schools Matter.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/03/teachers-are-built-non-school-of.html

I learned the most about teaching from other teachers. Duh!

BIGGEST SIN: CLASS SIZE ISSUES OFF THE TABLE

CHECK BIO OF MAIN CHARACTER DOUG LEMOV*.

CAN THIS GUY HOLD DOWN ONE JOB? LIKE ACTUALLY TRY TEACHING ON ONE PLACE FOR A LITTLE WHILE. GIVES YOU A BIT OF PERSPECTIVE, YOU KNOW. I THINK THAT PEOPLE LIKE LEMOV LEAVE TEACHING FULL-TIME BECAUSE THEY DON'T LOVE IT ENOUGH TO STAY.

Forgot test scores, measure the love quotient when you talk about teachers who can teach others.

There's a lot more than teacher methodology underlying Green's article which I talked about yesterday. It seem to look like not standard ed deform stuff by de-emphasizing incentives and firing teachers. But when you dig a little it is ed deform. The Times wouldn't print anything less.

A parent commented on the NYCEdNews list:

I thought the piece was generally valuable in looking at actual classroom practices and considering their relationship to content, and challenging the effectiveness of carrot-and-stick approaches to improved learning. But I was startled that she cited the "value-added" model several times without skepticism, particularly stating that teachers' stats for raising student performance are consistent over time. I thought that statistical argument had been debunked. Diane Ravitch makes a strong case in her new book that studies show that teachers' stats for improving student test scores fluctuate dramatically over time and are not a predictor of future performance.

Of course Green had to ignore the research that shows value-added is unproven because the rest of the thesis laid out doesn't work without it. The article is all about measuring by test scores. My favorite quote "he [Lemov} decided to seek out the best teachers he could find – as defined PARTLY [my emph] by their students' test scores [which can so easily be manipulated]..

Exactly what were the other PARTS than test scores?

A lot of the last part of the article is good touchy, feely stuff - good ideas for teachers to use. And we all can benefit. Talk of the video taping set me to chuckling. I was involved in a program to improve teaching by video taping lessons and cataloguing the kinds of questions I was asking - in 1969.

I learned so much of what is talked about in this article (which offers a blueprint of the high and mighty descending to give actual working teachers "The Word") by seeing experienced WORKING teachers (are there any left) in the context of working in their class - in action. I adapted their stuff to my personality and made a lot of it work. Almost every teacher I ever knew had mastered classroom management - at least 85% of them - or they left, often to become people who end up training other teachers.

What if every so-called great teacher who left to become some guru actually stayed in the classroom and taught for an entire career? Maybe close the achievement gap (that's a joke folks.)

"What makes a good teacher" asks Elizabeth? She asked all the wrong people.

She could have talked teacher quality with teachers in the trenches...

People like
Pissed Off
Chaz's School Daze
Under Assault
NYC Educator
Accountable Talk
Have a Gneiss Day
The Jose Vilson: The Blog

And the newer generation of teachers: It's Not All Flowers and Sausages

Mrs Mimi said the other day:

WHY ARE WE GIVING POWER TO EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER COME IN CONTACT WITH A SCHOOL OR THOUGHT ABOUT SCHOOL OR SAID THE WORD "SCHOOL" EXCEPT FOR TEACHERS???!?!?!

Riddle me that one.

Perhaps it's because we want them to remain Candidate Numero Uno on the old chopping block when it comes time to passing around some blame. Or keep them in our line of sight so that they are at a arms reach for some extensive finger pointing?

Instead Green spoke to:

Doug Lemov: "after a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter school founder."
Successful? Based on what? I love this: Lemov "set out to become a teacher of teachers [because] he was shamefully aware of his own limitations." So he left teaching. Nice.

And Deborah Loewenberg Ball, "an assistant professor who also taught math part time at an East Lansing elementary school and whose classroom was a model for teachers in training."

[Note this comment from Columbia prof Aaron Pallas:
Aaron Pallas said...

Norm,

You're a bit harsh on Deborah Ball, my former colleague at Michigan State. She was a full-time elementary classroom teacher from 1975 to 1988 before and during graduate school -- and continued teaching third and fourth grade mathematics for four years as an assistant professor. Not a dilettante by any stretch of the imagination.

- when people you respect speak, I listen so I take it back. 13 years is a serious amount of time in a classroom. I wonder though how views change in the midst of the ed deform movement. I'll try to say more about what I think it would take to upgrade teaching and also on the accountability question - I always felt my major accountability was to parents and students not bureaucrats.]

What about trying full time teaching, year after year, decade after decade? You gain a certain perspective and context when you talk to teachers. Then talk to us about training teachers.

In my 6 week summer of training to become a teacher in 1967, all my instructors were teachers, assistant principals and principals (in those years supervisors actually had to teach for a long time before rising up) and I learned more from them and my later colleagues than anyone.

What Green has done under the guise of what looks like a more genial approach than Joel Klein's "lets go on a witch hunt" using Lemov's "we can't replace them fast enough, so let's retrain those heathens" is to validate the ed deform model of blame the teachers.

Green's biggest sin: She used the words "reformers" and Michelle Rhee in the same sentence.


Related: South Bronx School blog does some research into Doug Lemov and why Whitney Tilson likes him and as he so often does, takes it over the top.
Whitney Tilson Is In Love With Doug Lemov

*Thanks to SBS for the bio:

.......Founder of School Performance, an Albany-based non-profit that provides diagnostic assessments, performance data analysis, and academic consulting to high performing charter schools. He is a founder and the former principal of the Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter School in Boston, regarded as one of the highest performing urban charter schools in the country. After leaving Academy of the Pacific Rim, Mr. Lemov served as the Vice President for Accountability at the State University of New York Charter Schools Institute, the leading authorizer of charters in New York, where he designed and implemented a rigorous school accountability system. He has since served as a consultant to such organizations as KIPP, New Leaders for New Schools, and Building Excellent Schools. Mr. Lemov is a Trustee of the New York Charter Schools Association and of KIPP Tech Valley Charter School. He has a B.A. from Hamilton College, an M.A. from Indiana University, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

Let's see. When I was 42 years old, I had taught 17 years of self-contained grades 4-6 classes and one year as a special ed cluster, mostly in one school while getting MA's in Reading instruction and computer science.

Elizabeth Green's Front Page Sunday Mag Article on Teachers - I'll Hold My Congratulations

I've only read a third of the article, Building a Better Teacher, but I'm heading for the treadmill at the gym to finish it. So far I am not happy based on who is quoted - Klein, Rhee, Gates and Hanushek. It's all about the teacher. All other factors disappear in a sea of data. I saw so many things in the first 2 pages to criticize I could not go on.

This quote should get some people riled:

"A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure 'value-added' to a student's performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school's control produced just a tiny impact, except fro one: which teacher the student had been assigned to."

Elizabeth's homework is to read the first week of posts from Eduwonkette, which dealt with the issue of teacher quality in depth. After I finish reading Elizabeth's article we'll decide if we should add Elizabeth the kick line.

EDUWONKETTE (JENNIFER JENNINGS)
Sunday, September 23, 2007

The Teacher Effectiveness Kickline

From Eli Broad and Michael Bloomberg to George Miller and Checker Finn, we’re awash in chatter about measuring and rewarding teacher effectiveness. This week I’ll consider some of the problems with these proposals. What’s missing from this discussion, I argue, is a full exploration of their potential consequences for students, teachers, and schools.

Let me note that I am not opposed to measuring and rewarding teacher effectiveness in principle. But it’s more complicated than most commentators would like to acknowledge, and I hope this week’s postings will help us think about that complexity.

Monday: Tunnel vision syndrome - The teacher effectiveness debate focuses only on a narrow set of the goals of public education, which may endanger other important goals we have for our schools.

Tuesday: No teacher is an island - The teacher effectiveness debate ignores that teachers play many roles in a school. Experienced teachers often serve as anchoring forces in addition to teaching students in their own classrooms. If we don’t acknowledge this interdependence, we may destabilize schools altogether.

Wednesday: Ignoring the great sorting machine - If students were randomly assigned to classrooms and schools, measuring teacher effects would be a much more straightforward enterprise. But when Mrs. Jones is assigned the lowest achievers, and Mrs. Scott’s kids are in the gifted and talented program, matters are complicated immeasurably.

Thursday: Overlooking the oops factor - Everything in the world is measured with error, and the best research on teacher effectiveness takes this very seriously. Yet many of those hailing teacher effectiveness proposals missed out on Statistics 101.

Friday: Disregarding labor market effects - The nature of evaluation affects not only current teachers, but who chooses to join the profession in the future and where they are willing to teach. If we don’t acknowledge that kids that are further behind are harder to pull up, we risk creating yet another incentive for teachers to avoid the toughest schools.

Here we are at mile 26 of the teacher effectiveness marathon - the previous posts are all archived here.

One of the summer’s highlights was a talk at AEI by Chicago labor economist Derek Neal. (Footnote: AEI talks generally make me want to impale myself on a Powerpoint projector, but this one was exceptional.) For those who weren’t there, you can watch the video here.

Neal found that low-performing kids in Chicago got shafted when the Chicago accountability system went into place, and again after NCLB was implemented. His talk wasn’t about teacher labor markets, but he made a critical point in this area. If the measurement of teacher effectiveness doesn’t take into account that some kids start off further behind that others and I am labeled a bad teacher as a result, why would I teach in a low-performing school? We have a hard enough time staffing these schools to begin with, in part because of salary differentials but also because of working conditions. If these teachers feel disrespected as professionals because the measurement system doesn’t acknowledge that they have a tougher job, I predict that we’re going to have a harder time recruiting and retaining teachers in these schools. This is conjecture, I know – we really have very little evidence about such a system because no one has implemented a comprehensive teacher effectiveness plan yet. (If you know of any studies on this issue, please email them to me.)

The best part, I thought, was towards the end of the discussion, where Doug Mesecar (Asst. Secretary at Ed) and Neal go back and forth in response to Mesecar’s question, “Are you saying our teachers are not professionals?”, i.e. that they're not good enough to get everyone to proficiency no matter how far behind they start. Most folks back down when challenged with the “soft bigotry of low expectations” rhetoric, but Neal was having none of it.

That’s it for teacher effectiveness, folks – I hope that this week has made you think through some of the issues we don’t hear much about in this debate.

(Kickline roster (from left to right): Eli Broad (Broad Foundation), Kati Haycock (Ed Trust), Michael Bloomberg (NYC), Michael Petrilli and Checker Finn (Fordham).)


That's it for my blast from Eduwonkette past. Elizabeth Green is assigned to write each post 20 times on the blackboard. Or in Powerpoint.

Spinning Randi Attack on Green as "Tongue in Cheek"

They must have put Kool-aid in the coffee. Or the UFT PR department is trying spin control over our report on Randi Weingarten's remarkable assault on reporter Elizabeth Green at the DA on Weds. This comment from a union flack on my report of Randi's attack on reporter Elizabeth Green is indicative of the way they will try to spin it.

I don't want to resort to "fighting words" by saying you "lied" or "failed," but you did in fact completely misrepresent Randi's words, tone, and intent in reference to Liz Green. Randi's words were tongue-in-cheek and did not lend themselves to misinterpretaion except by those people who desired to do so. Randi to my knowledge has many time expressed respect and appreciation for Elizabeth's reporting. Please don't tar Randi in this way on this matter. It is absolutely ill-founded.

Did Randi not say Green's reporting on the DA as it happens "blow by blow," which was entirely untrue by the way, were "unethical?" And did she not during the meeting say, "Do you hear that Liz?" Every single delegate I spoke to did not take these words as tongue in cheek but in fact thought Green had infiltrated the meeting.

At an impromptu press conference on the street after the meeting with a few reporters, Green amongst them, nothing was said by Randi to Green that I could discern.

When under pressure Randi tends to lash out at someone as a way of creating a common enemy to deflect incoming at her. Her reponses are instinctive and not always well thought out.

By the way, Randi showed us just what a fighter she was when she proclaimed she told Tweed "Fuck You!" at one point. Well, that convinced me.

Say It Ain't So Elizabeth

We knew it was coming. Still, it was a shock see this headline in today's NY Times:

Losing Money, New York Sun Is to Shut Down

Yes, the home base of Elizabeth Green, the best education reporter I've seen in NYC, is publishing its last issue today. Elizabeth is quoted in the article:

“I don’t think it’s going to be hard for people to remember the role of this newspaper,” said Elizabeth Green, an education reporter who had worked for The Sun for 16 months. She defined that role as “people committed to having a substantial conversation and holding our leaders accountable.”

And she certainly did hold them accountable. That the conservative NY Sun allowed her such free reign to write comprehensive articles that so often nailed issues that the other papers were ignoring is remarkable.

From her first days in NYC, she scouted out all the players on the ed scene, not just the spokespeople. She even reached out to the ICE as an opposition caucus to the Unity dominated UFT to get our point of view even if she didn't always use our quotes. She got to know everybody on the scene, often meeting them for breakfast (I'm still waiting for mine.)

She was probably the only reporter who had direct access to Eduwonkette when she was anonymous and everyone was trying to expose her. Elizabeth inspired a level of trust even among teachers who so often mistrust reporters and when there was a story brewing, many of us handed it off to her.

In our last conversation she said she didn't want to leave the education beat, something which so many reporters who finally get to know the local scene end up doing.

Here's hoping Elizabeth Green is grabbed up by someone, hopefully in NYC. But if she's not given the room to roam she had with the Sun, it would all be a waste. I told her that if she ever got to work for the NY Times, I would bet she would find limits on her ability to expose BloomKlein because they seem to have a dog in the race.

So here's the challenge to the NY Times education editor. Hire Elizabeth Green and turn her loose. If they do, I expect to get that breakfast Elizabeth owes me.

Update:
See Leonie Haimson's tribute to Elizabeth Green:

On the blog, I write about the loss of Erin Einhorn, Mike Meenan, and now Elizabeth Green– and also recaps some of Elizabeth’s greatest hits

Education beat losing its best reporters...and now Elizabeth Green.

Elizabeth Green on Eduwonkette's Impact

Green does it again with today's article on Eduwonkette, proving Green is the only ed reporter in NYC, and maybe the nation, with her finger on all the buttons.

Note Rotherham's usual attack about allowing an anonymous blogger. "I don't think this is going to be remembered as Ed Week's finest hour."

Andy, this isn't going to be remembered as your finest decade.

Interesting that Eduwonkette blogged for over 3 months and was already having a major impact before Ed Week came calling - exactly why they did. And on her first day of blogging, Rotherham promoted her blog - I guess it was seeing his head on that chorus line gal's body. Maybe he still holds a grudge.

But ed notes had the scoop as we were the first to promote the blog on the first day it appeared. The Wonkette talked about my favorite topic that entire first week - teacher quality. In addition to all her other skills, she's quite a photoshopper.

Rotherham talks about Eduwonkette as "having skin in the game." Do you know one of his major points of proof? She once used me as a stringer to cover a panel that Rotherham was on.

Green writes:

"Call me old fashioned and curmudgeonly, but I can't stand it when the wonks break out in a 'research shows' chorus with no references," Eduwonkette wrote in one post. "If research so valiantly and definitively shows it, you should be able to tell us whose research shows it." Then she quoted a top city administrator, Garth Harries, as speaking at an event about research showing that teacher quality has a greater effect on student learning than class-size reduction and yet, upon questioning, not being able to cite any studies to demonstrate it.

I was the one who challenged Garth Harries at the event mentioned in the article when he put out the usual "research shows" story on teacher quality since no one has figured out exactly how to make that judgement. Klein (and Weingarten, unfortunately) often say the same thing.

But, holy cow, when it comes to Eduwonkette, both Randi and I agree. But wait till the day comes when Wonkette takes as close a look at the UFT as she does the DOE. Where is the research on union ineffectiveness? Oh, I forgot. The 2005 contract and its aftermath.

Here is the link to the NY Sun article.