If I Were Allowed To speak To Arne Duncan...what I might suggest

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Dear Mr. Arne Duncan,

Today I noted in a group that I belong to on Facebook you will be "allowing" a call to talk to you and talk with teachers concerned about changes in education. Each of us was asked what we might say. I am unsure how to dive in. I'm a teacher in an underperforming school in urban poverty, teaching mostly immigrant students in CA, from my perspectives the attempt to leave No Child Behind failed to such a tremendous degree that the hubris driving your current work utterly astounds me. But I suppose I might start with these points:

1. To be fair to children, communities, teachers and schools we need an accountability system that measures growth towards standards or benchmarks.
It appears that was either too complicated to grasp, or something that wasn't considered for its ability to help level some playing fields. But why not look at the growth of a student. Over other kinds of measures?
This would be a complete game changer. I would suggest testing kids in 3rd grade, 6th grade, 8th grade, and 10th grade. There are too many tests and too much specific practice, for specific tests that compete with good instruction and time on instruction. I would also suggest that our standards in California need an over haul in many areas....... science and math in particular, they need to be far fewer, and reduced down to simple understandable terms for students and parents.. They should equate to essential literacies for reading, writing, and math and science thinking. And it would seem to me teachers might drive that work. And from them you might take direction.
I wrote a set addressing another kind of domain that you might consider as well. See above at the link. A real growth model MIGHT mean people would fight to get, work with, and teach students that in the current structure are seen as "the problem." Additionally in areas of real need the potential for growth would really reverse equations. I would love to see models that don't reinforce have/have not...or education as something one gets for their own and then everyone else.


2. Recent efforts to criticize and reform the educational system have focused on "the bad teacher" and"bad school" problem. These issues are most commonly associated with troubled inner city schools, and also schools embedded in low income, high immigrant, high second language learner communities where many social and community factors play a large role in a child's education and development. Issues that need to be more broadly addressed. These many factors need to be factored along with the condition and efficacy of the school. They are wedded together in a Deweyan knot.. the school creates the community and the community creates the school. Resources from the government need to be increased to these schools at double and triple the levels of schools without these problems.
When I look at what is happening in California in underfunding over time, in current cuts, and in the mess of poor policy over time it seems to me a perfect storm of ignoring this to levels bordering on the ridiculous.


3. Attacks on teachers as"bad teachers" have often been veiled attacks on women in general, in particular older woman who have worked for multiple years and who have achieved some level of salary security. ..it should be remembered that unions are not the enemy..... they were needed and are needed to preserve school's greatest assets, experienced teachers. Teachers take their college education and make very little in comparative compensation over a life time. They are the backbone of our educational system and are key players in making our communities still communities.... there are those, who for political benefit, seek to privatize all public efforts, seek to demean and destroy all public processes and organizations..... administrators have and have always had the tools to help ineffective teachers out of the profession. It is awful to see this ignored. The attack on schools and teachers should not be joined..... it is so discouraging to hear this from an Education Steward....the attack on older experienced teachers should not be joined in pursuit of lower paid, and perhaps more compliant young teachers happy to have a job.... the key to having as many great teachers as possible, is their recruitment, their education at universities, and in school systems their development, and their pay. Pay them 50K to start, 75K after a 3 year probationary period, and 100K when they have advanced to intelligently measured levels of excellence.
This will get you what schools need... in schools with great problems, add an additional 20K for every teacher at the school. And maintain class sizes at the lowest amount possible to insure education.

(Given the costs of living in many place in California...... 100K is not really that much.. you get what you pay for in many ways.....and why is this never discussed in real terms for what low salaries did to erode the professionalism)

4. Testing with the CST is far from perfect as a student achievement measurement tool. I'm sure other states mirror that. Develop a new test at 3rd, 6th, 8th, and 10th grade that is vertically integrated and that includes reading, writing, science and math including both multiple choice, written work, and problem solving. Consider the impact that would have done well on the way instruction would change to address it as we now see narrowed workbookian test prep all year in classroom. Give no opportunity to mis-understand that something far more is desired by using a far superior mechanism to test.

5. Make sure that every class has a good presentation technology, internet access, and that every teacher and student has a well supported computer and computer network that is accessible both at school and home. When will every child a laptop be the rule. How can I say this clearly enough, in poverty schools we had next to nothing.

6. Make sure junior high schools and high schools offer students opportunities to explore and develop vocational interests through hands-on, real world activity. This is utterly a game change worthy of paragraphs. It matters fundamentally.

7. Create real, functioning partnerships between schools, families, and communities, and businesses that value the child as a human being rather than merely a prospective consumer or producer.

8. Make university/school and research/school relationships valuable.

Yes, there are other issues I would like to address but these are among the ones that I might like to bring to a Secretary of Education. It's hard not to want to tell the stories of kids, not to ask that successes be seen, not to talk about the deleterious effects of failure labels, and the seemingly planned nationwide attack on the teacher of public school. It would be difficult at best to feel I had any voice to be heard at all given all that has gone on, the incredible nerve of the top down. But the teacher in me screams to tell the stories of the children, their progress, their hopes, their dreams. Since I started teaching I always wondered why we didn't build a system that allowed children to be seen through time. So we might continue to know one another, so we would see who became what or hear when things were tough. Know the struggles, know the jobs, know the things they thought of us. Data like this seems to me still to be far more important than we realize. If we can build a system on computers to help elect a president, or a facebook, I believe we can build a system on-line that allows us to delve more deeply into school, into what we do. This isn't a National standard... what it is , is a National Consciousness of what school is,what it does. A place that asks people to define school, define good teachers, report what they do, talk about what assisted them. I think at some point we might begin to address how much we don't understand well, how much complexity is there and we might look at this data on teachers that affected lifetimes to see the common threads.
It might be time to address these things within the Department of Education.
Over another set of mandates.

For now,
Sarah Puglisi