The Two Faces of the Department of Education: Bloomberg/Walcott Flailing Teachers, Suransky Leading Teachers into the Age of Common Core Standards, Who Will Prevail?

There two NYC Departments of Education.

 One is lead by Dennis Walcott, the extension of Mayor Bloomberg, the mayor will announce his budget on May 5th, probably followed by layoff letters to thousands of teachers. For the mayor it is a power struggle: sadly the victims will be the 1.1 million school children. When Mayor Mike was a kid the sign of manliness was standing on the curb seeing who could pee further into the street. The mayor is making up for his “peeing contest” losses, the current peeing contest pits the mayor against anyone who challenges him.

 Endless school closings, releasing highly inaccurate and misleading test scores, co-locating charter schools in already crowded public schools, kindergarten waiting lists, the expensive and punitive ATR pool, attacks on tenure and seniority rules:  all confrontations on the political level intent on diminishing the power of parents, advocates and unions.

 The other Department of Education is led by Shael Suransky. He has committed the city schools to the full implementation of the Common Core State Standards (http://www.corestandards.org/).

 The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers.

 New York State, along with forty-five others states is moving to align their state standards with the Common Core. On April 28th David Coleman, the “primary architect” of the standards laid out the plan (“Bringing the Common Core to Life”) in a webinar watched by superintendents, principals and school teams around the state (see link to webinar here (http://usny.nysed.gov/rttt/resources/bringing-the-common-core-to-life.html)

 Whether the Core Standards are simply one of a long list of  ”new things” that will be cast aside in a few years or actually create a new path is an essential question. The concept: agreeing upon what students should know on a national level is worthy, the problem is that these efforts in the past rarely translated to what teachers do each and every day in the classroom.

 Mike Schmoker and Gerald Graff in a superb Education Week commentary (“More Argument, Fewer Standards” http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/04/20/28schmoker.h30.html?tkn=PRRF54RHRCeyzfqwopy6j4CPHSwi9lW46%2B8I&cmp=clp-edweek)) muse about the complexity of the standards,

  What concerns us is that for all their merits, these standards are still overlong, redundant, and often confusing. Consequently, the most important and powerful standards are at risk of being marginalized—or overlooked entirely.

All standards are not created equal. We believe it is far more critical for teachers to help students to analyze, evaluate, and support their conclusions with evidence than it is for them to spend precious time on puzzling standards like these:

“Compare and contrast the structure of two or more texts and analyze how the differing structure of each text contributes to its meaning and style”; or

“Analyze different points of view of the characters and the audience or reader (e.g., created through the use of dramatic irony) creating such effects as suspense or humor.”

“Overlong, redundant and often confusing” standards will be a death knell, classroom teachers will simply smile, nod and go on teaching the material they are currently teaching.

This will be unfortunate because the essence of the standards is  “…less is more. To this end, let’s make sure that this time around, these new, national standards are seen as true pilot documents, to be learned from, reduced, and clarified as we closely study their implementation by teachers.”

In the sixty networks encompassing the 1600 schools Suransky is encouraging schools to continue the journey of embedding the standards into day-to-day instruction. In some of the networks principals are encouraged to use Circular 6 administrative assignments for common teacher planning time for teachers to create curriculum maps, to identify appropriate grade or subject specific rubrics and artifacts, to empower teachers to work together to impart to students key skills that relate to college and career readiness.

Schmoker, in his excellent books, “Results Now” and “Focus,”  tells us,

Argument is the primary skill essential to our success as citizens, students, and workers.

…. as the new standards urge us, to give students hundreds of opportunities, every year, to dismantle and defend arguments about increasingly rich, complex texts. From the earliest grades, let’s have them argue about the pros and cons of almost anything: literary characters and interpretations, global warming, capitalism vs. socialism, Sarah Palin, or the comparative quality of life in the United States and Canada (based on statistical analysis). Let’s ask students to explain their reasoning for which alternative-energy source we should invest in as they read, talk, and write about what they are learning in novels, textbooks, newspapers, and magazines.

Suransky, in a toxic political climate, is attempting to move the system from test prep/Progress Report grade driven to an instruction driven system.  His predecessors knew nothing about instruction and basically told principals ,”raise test scores, I don’t care how you get there.” Shael, the education chancellor, is telling the sixty network leaders and the 1600 principals, that the correct standards are the essence of school improvement, to “raise the bar” for all must be our mantra and teachers are at the heart of the teaching/learning process.

Walcott, the political chancellor, will, Quixote-like(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote), tilt at wind mills, pursuing the love of an illusory Dulcinea. Suransky, the education chancellor, will try and convince the educators in the system that classroom by classroom, school by school, network by network, we can learn from the standards and participate in the renaissance of a school system.

A schizophrenic school system suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder(http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/dissociative-identity-disorder-multiple-personality-disorder)  both flails and woos it’s employees.

We live in interesting times.