Article review

The following are excerpts of an article published in the online version of The Atlantic. It is an interview with the new chancellor of the Washington DC public schools, Michelle Ree. I actually just cut and pasted some of the points that I thought to be most interesting, but the interview overall was very good and I'd recommend following this link to read the whole thing. Its very lively, and she is straightforward in her answers. I actually don't really know how to respond to many of her points. Part of me wants to say "yea! right on", and another part of me gasps at what I see to be a fairly judgemental attitude. I'm excited someone so young and passionate has been given the chance to be at the helm, but she also closed 23 schools, restructured 26 other and fired 46 principles and vice principles. Yikes, the gal sounds like she was on a war-path. But, DC is a horrible place for schools, so maybe that is just what was required. Beyond that, as you'll see by the questions I've cut and pasted, she talks some about bringing "professionalism" to the profession, and yet, makes no bones about the fact that she is not interested in ever returning to the classroom. Her responses to creating avenues for growth and advancement, but also staying in the classroom as a teacher are ridiculously lame as well. They amount to increasing a teachers responsibility in the school... she's adding on to the teachers plate"stuff" that is pretty hollow and very time consuming. She isn't creating a growth trajectory for a teacher who desires to stay in a classroom, but not follow the path of an administrator. I almost got the feeling that her attitude is one of: "I kicked ass in the classroom, and if 18 hour days is what it takes to do this, then this is what you'll need to do. Pay sucks, and you don't get any respect, but this is what will be required of you as a teacher, or your not good enough to be a teacher.... oh and by the way... there is no way I'm ever going back!" I think she is going to have some seriously burnt out teachers on her hands in just a couple of years.
Tell me what you think!

-hux

Michelle Rhee, the young chancellor of the D.C. public school system, talks about her career path, what makes a good teacher, and her efforts to transform a struggling school district
by Rachel Brown

Today, Teach for America recruits from among the best students at top colleges and universities, and an Urban Institute study last spring found that high school teachers in the program were actually more effective than veterans with longer experience. Risen draws a distinction between the new generation of educators and the old, writing that “traditionally, a good teacher was considered to be someone who had trained in education schools, been certified by state boards, enlisted in unions, and committed to a lifetime career—elements tightly interwoven with any district’s political structure.” Rhee has set out to change those structures, beginning with her proposals to tie teacher pay in D.C. to student performance, rather than the existing seniority-based scale defended by the teachers’ unions. To her, changing the way teachers are paid and are held accountable is an essential part of making schools better, and those who support or oppose the plan are largely split along generational lines. - Michelle Ree

Ok. One thing that I did want to get into is that teaching tends to be a fairly limited profession in terms of advancement opportunities. But a lot of young college graduates want their careers to be on a trajectory that will keep moving up. It’s something that I definitely confronted and that some of my younger colleagues confronted when we considered leaving teaching. Is there a way teaching can allow for career growth, without assuming that growth means becoming an administrator? (bold type is interviewer Rachel Brown)

I think there are a lot of ways. There have been programs across the country piloted to show how teachers can take on more responsibility within their own schools. Without moving out of the classroom you can become a mentor teacher to new teachers coming in, you can take increasing responsibilities with extracurricular activities, serve on school improvement teams and that sort of thing. You can take a free period off to direct a particular project in the school. So I think there are various ways that we can actually continue to push teachers to develop their skills outside of the curriculum and the classroom—to give them the sense that they’re learning and gaining new skills.

I guess the downside of that might be that a lot of times it seems like we take the best teachers out of the classroom, with top teachers being tapped to become administrators. Why do you feel like there is that assumption that a good teacher will make a good administrator?

I think that’s the case in any profession. When I was running The New Teacher Project, when we wanted to promote we always promoted from within, and we looked at the best site managers to make them partners and that sort of thing. So that idea is not specific to teaching and education. Any field that you go into, you take the best people who are at the lower rungs and you develop them and promote them up.

I hear a lot of talk among reformers about how teaching should be a “prestige profession” like law or medicine. What are the obstacles that you think may be preventing teaching from having that status, beyond the obvious differences in compensation?

I think that as long as we have a profession that does not at all differentiate people by what they’re producing, whether it’s through compensation or evaluation or certification, then we’re never going to be a profession like medicine or law. That’s the bottom line. You know, anybody can become tenured. And everybody does become tenured. There’s no aura of selectivity—there’s no gate that you have to pass through.

One thing that I’ve encountered personally in talking to a lot of veteran teachers is this idea that programs like Teach for America or the D.C. Teaching Fellows de-professionalize education. They see it as a kind of glorified internship.

I’ll tell you what de-professionalizes education. It’s when we have people sitting in the classrooms—whether they’re certified or not, whether they’ve taught for two months or 22 years—that are not teaching kids. And whom we cannot remove from the classroom, and whom parents know are not good. Those are the things that de-professionalize the teaching corp. Not Teach for America, not D.C. Teaching Fellows. That, I think, is a ridiculous argument.

Do you think that teacher prep programs—traditional ones, like what you see in schools of education, are even necessary? Or maybe just elements of them, like student teaching?

I wouldn’t say I think they’re necessary, though I think it’s fine to have programs like that. It’s also fine to have faster tracks, like Teach for America or The New Teacher Project. I’m much less concerned with the front-end pieces and much more concerned with ensuring that we have effective teachers in the classroom and being able to measure that in a meaningful way, early on in someone’s career.