Cuomo Should Address School Culture

Governor Cuomo take note. My colleague Meghan Groome of the New York Academy of Sciences made an important point today in an op-ed in Newsday. In Cuomo's state of the state address this week, he proposed an education commission to address teacher accountability, student achievement and management efficiency. 

While these are all fine issues, focusing solely on them creates a huge blind spot to something that is limiting our educational system.  As Groome tells Newsday:

Too many of our most promising teachers give up on the job early in their careers.

We are always looking to fix schools and make them more efficient.  Yet all the accountability and managerial fixes in the world will only go so far if teaching talent is not cultivated and retained.

About a third of new teachers leave the field within the first three years, and one half leave after five years, according to researchers at Stanford and Michigan State universities....A conservative national estimate of the annual cost of teacher attrition is nearly $3 billion, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington-based public policy organization. In addition to the general costs of recruiting and hiring, schools invest hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in valuable professional development and orientation programs, often mandated by law. When teachers leave, schools have to make the same investments over again....Not only does it cost a lot to replace teachers, high teacher turnover is associated with lower student achievement.

In her article, Groome talks about the reasons teachers leave. She lists some "repeat offenders" that she has come across as a former teacher herself, as someone who currently works with teachers on a daily basis, and as a scholar who studies the dynamics of teaching math and science in inner cities:  

[A] mismatch between good teaching practice and accountability measures; too much chaos and too little stability in their schools; too many responsibilities for the amount of time they have in their work day; and, in some places, too little pay to make a middle-class lifestyle feasible.

Surveys of teachers in New York City show that school culture, primarily working conditions and how supportive school administrators are, influence teachers' career decisions immensely.  "Teachers want a principal who listens to their ideas and colleagues with whom they can collaborate on a regular basis," Groome writes. 

These are simple, but essential things -- especially for those at the start of their careers. Researchers studying beginning teachers in Michigan found that those who described their work environments as unsupportive were about five times more likely to leave their schools before the following year."

Groome proposes commonsense solutions to help retain teachers. These include helping teaches build  communities of like-minded colleagues; establishing positive professional, supportive relationships with colleagues and administrators in and outside their schools; and facilitating professional growth.

Groome ends her piece with a powerful statement that Cuomo and his fledgling education commission would be wise to consider:

Focusing on these facets of school culture provides direction for policy makers and school administrators -- and one that is far more actionable than addressing the issues of the crumbling infrastructure of American schools, the current structure by which we pay teachers, and persistent achievement gaps determined by ZIP code.

Comments

[school bells]

Students often have peer groups. Bullying is one of the alarming happenings in school. This should stop.

[JCGrim]

Defining School Culture
School culture must be defined beyond broad concepts of working conditions and supportive administration as they are often reduced to lazy interpretations by the media, edu-privatizers and politicians as referring to teacher pay scales, extra-classroom duties, and working hours. Instead, the foundation of high quality school culture is achieved by scientifically proven methods- reduced class size, enhanced curriculum, experienced, professional teachers and administrators, school autonomy and collaboration, and equal allocation of resources according to community needs. These reforms directly benefit children and their learning opportunities.

Which leads to the next question
Why doesn’t Cuomo endorse evidence-based reforms and instead chooses to focus on the business buzz words of accountability, achievement, and efficiency? According to the current edu-business ‘reformers’, accountability, achievement and efficiency are defined as: merit pay, teacher evaluations based on fraudulent use of standardized test scores, employment determined by invalid value-added measures, closing schools and firing entire staffs based on unstable percentile rankings, and replacing them with for-profit charters. All changes that have been repeatedly discredited by research, yet are mandated in Obama’s Race to the Top and are promoted by Jeb Bush’s privatization of public schools in FL, GWBush’s NCLB, and the Walton, Gates, and Broad Foundations. These are the practices Cuomo is shielding by appointing his commission.

Inner-city re-gentrification
A few years after busing was imposed on the south to integrate schools, the segregationists became very interested in accountability and testing. Private schools cropped up all over the south, in church basements and neighborhood buildings. Admittance to the busing schools was based on passing a test in a not-so-secret means to keep “those” kids out of the white neighborhood schools.

The current privatization efforts via accountability cannot be separated from this history of successful re-segregation and more recently 12 years of re-gentrification of the inner cities. Charters and vouchers re-segregate children based on family income, class, race, and disability under the guise of giving families “choice”, when in fact, every charter chooses its students (and families) and expel the undesirables.

1%ers own the narrative
Cuomo's commission is not looking into known reforms that benefit children because that would force him, both political parties and their 1% donors to turn their eyes away from the poverty and racial isolation in which so many of our children live. According to Diane Ravitch their race to save kids from failing schools “absolves the conscience of the billionaires boys club" whose business practices are directly related to impoverishing communities.

For thirty years giant corporations have destroyed small, local businesses, eliminated workers rights, cut wages and benefits, and outsourced jobs for cheaper labor costs. They formed public/private partnerships that grant them insider access to crony contracts to perform services previously done by public employees. Their practices are impoverishing a once vibrant working class. Now they want our public schools.

Rest assured Cuomo's commission will issue a report when the heat dies down and will say whatever the governor and his donors want it to say. The 1%ers own the narrative in the corporate media, but they don’t own the history of their shameful behavior.