The Teacher Wars (40 page)

Administrators were constantly arriving with new reform plans and then fleeing after a year. (In the last seven years Caputo-Pearl worked at Crenshaw, there were five principals and twenty-four assistant principals.) Because of missing paperwork, the school
briefly lost its accreditation in 2005. Frustrated with constant mismanagement, Caputo-Pearl began organizing with parents to demand more basic resources for Crenshaw, including new computers. The group called itself the Crenshaw Cougar Coalition, and it eventually wrangled $2 million for Crenshaw from the district, and $1.5 million for ten other struggling L.A. high schools. Around the same time, Caputo-Pearl co-founded a dissident caucus within the United Teachers Los Angeles union, a group whom UTLA president A. J. Duffy referred to as “
leftist crazies.” Bottom line: Caputo-Pearl was stirring up a lot of trouble for a lot of different people. In 2006 the district transferred him, against his will, to an affluent middle school across town. After hundreds of parents, students, and teachers protested in front of district headquarters—and the protests were covered in the
Los Angeles Times
—he was reinstated.

In 2007, with a total lack of stable leadership at Crenshaw High, Caputo-Pearl and a few other veteran teachers pretty much took over. There are a small number of formally teacher-led public schools across the country, but this was an ad hoc setup. The group had its own idea of how to revitalize Crenshaw: not through management reforms, but by overhauling the curriculum. Poor children often hear that they need to do well in school in order to escape their communities. What if, instead, kids understood that doing well in school could help them become more effective advocates for their families and neighbors?

Working with education researchers and local nonprofits, the teachers created a novel plan called the Extended Learning Cultural Model, which won millions of dollars in funding from the Ford Foundation and then President Obama's school turnaround program. It eschewed most of the popular strategies in the accountability playbook, like mass staff layoffs or turning a neighborhood school into a charter school. Instead, taking a page from theorists like Ted Sizer, the plan broke Crenshaw up into teacher-led “small learning academies” with themes such as business and social justice. Within each academy, teachers worked together to create interdisciplinary units built around neighborhood problem solving. In the fall of 2011, the tenth-grade Social Justice and the Law Academy
focused on school improvement across L.A. For their final project, students analyzed a data set that included test scores at various schools, neighborhood income levels, school truancy rates, and incarceration rates.

In math, students graphed the relationship between income and social opportunity in various south L.A. neighborhoods. In social studies, they read conservative and liberal proposals for school reform and practiced citing data in their own written arguments about how to improve education. In science, students designed experiments that could test policy hypotheses about how to improve schools. And in English class, they read
Our America
, a work of narrative nonfiction about life in the Ida B. Wells housing projects on the South Side of Chicago.

Working with researchers at UCLA and the University of Southern California, Crenshaw students conducted surveys on local food and health issues. Student volunteers grew produce in a community garden and sold it at local farmers' markets. One senior earned $1,000 per semester coordinating this work as an intern at Community Services Unlimited, a nonprofit that focuses on urban agriculture and food issues. Placing students in professional internships, some of them paid, was a key element of the Crenshaw reform plan. “Extended learning time” is a popular school reform strategy, but Crenshaw's teacher-reformers believed it shouldn't just take place in the classroom.

What was heartening about Crenshaw's plan was that
it was rooted in solid research on the reasons why kids drop out of school: because they find it boring, they don't see how it connects to the world of work, and they would rather be earning money. The Crenshaw program provided teachers with intensive professional development and paid them bonuses for it. A big focus of the training was how to fit these creative, interdisciplinary units into the new Common Core shared standards. Every assignment had to be aimed at meeting the goal of “high literacy” for students—deep reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing.

What was controversial about the Crenshaw reform agenda was that it was explicitly political. It asked students to question the social forces shaping their lives and to work actively to improve their
low-income neighborhood. There was no doubt the school was a hotbed of feisty left-wing politics, and that this alternate approach to school reform differed from the technocratic, centrist character of the contemporary school accountability movement. When I visited the Crenshaw campus in 2011, several classrooms were plastered with posters declaring: “No more prisons!” At a faculty meeting, teachers debated the questions: “Is school oppressive? How can we make it less so?” The mood was a bit reminiscent of the old communist Teachers Union in mid-twentieth-century New York City. The TU had also united low-income parents with radical teachers in a quest to make the curriculum more relevant for black and Latino kids. And it had also alienated the powers that be.

Caputo-Pearl had begun his career through Teach for America, but seeing the group's increasingly close relationship with the charter school sector—and watching how charter schools left schools like Crenshaw depopulated and overwhelmed by the most challenging students—he had become a critic; he even wrote an anti-TFA column for the
New York Times
Web site. These sorts of opinions were bound to rub certain people the wrong way, especially the new L.A. superintendent appointed in 2011, John Deasy, a charter school fan whose signature reform was purchasing iPads for all 600,000 Los Angeles public school students. (Deasy had also been the first American school superintendent to embrace Charlotte Danielson's comprehensive classroom observation framework, when he worked in Coventry, Rhode Island, in the 1990s.)

In 2012 Deasy announced that Crenshaw would be “reconstituted” and the social justice academy would be shut down. Every teacher had to reapply for his or her job, and half would be removed from the school. These mass dismissals have become a common practice at underperforming large urban high schools. The policy, one of several school turnaround strategies suggested by Race to the Top, is based on a faulty premise: that veteran teachers are to blame when schools experience many years of low test scores. In fact,
Donald Boyd's 2010 study of teacher transfer requests in New York City found that teachers who choose to leave underperforming, high-poverty schools tend to have been less effective, as measured by value-added, than teachers who stay in tough assignments over the
long haul, like Caputo-Pearl. A number of other studies have found similar results at the district level—teachers who flee urban school systems are less effective than those who stay. It is the constant churn of first-year teachers and administrators that makes these schools and districts so unstable.
Nevertheless, at Crenshaw, Caputo-Pearl was dismissed. So were union rep Cathy Garcia and the leader of the award-winning debate team. Most longtime observers of Los Angeles politics believed the school's activist educators were being targeted, regardless of classroom performance. Twenty-one of the thirty-three laid-off teachers were black, and twenty-seven had over ten years of experience.

Had Crenshaw's reform model worked for kids? Deasy said it hadn't, citing persistently low test scores. “
It is a fundamental right to graduate, and it is not happening at Crenshaw,” he said. “Students are not learning. Students are not graduating. Students are not able to read.” He wanted more Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes at Crenshaw, a potentially good idea that could have been pursued in tandem with the Extended Learning Cultural Model. What Deasy didn't say was that the
achievement data at Crenshaw was trending upward, especially for African American and special-ed students. Since 2007, the graduation rate had increased by 23 percent, and there was a 19 percent reduction in student suspensions.

Turnarounds of comprehensive high schools are widely considered one of the toughest jobs in school reform.
At Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, test scores remain abysmal three years after all the teachers were pink-slipped. But accountability reformers there are celebrated for raising graduation rates. What was different at Crenshaw was that teachers—and union activist teachers, at that—were driving the reform.

Ultimately, it's impossible to say if the Extended Learning Cultural Model could have revitalized Crenshaw, but it probably should have been given more of a chance to try. The plan was focused on the curriculum—what books kids read and what questions about the world they ask and answer—a crucial aspect of education that is usually neglected in debates over teacher evaluation and standardized testing. Developing new curricula is one of the most interesting,
intellectually engaging aspects of schooling. It is a responsibility that, if granted to more teachers, could potentially help convince many well-educated, ambitious people to remain in the classroom. And Crenshaw's curriculum was rigorous and aligned with the Common Core, especially its focus on teaching kids to use evidence to back up persuasive arguments. The plan had attracted positive national attention from funders and the U.S. Department of Education. What had been the problem?

Caputo-Pearl, who is now president of the L.A. teachers union, believes he and his colleagues were targeted for challenging orthodoxies about what works and what doesn't in education reform. Deasy “crushed” the Crenshaw reforms despite community support, Caputo-Pearl told me, “because it competed with him philosophically.”

When American policy makers require every public school to use the same strategies—typically without confirming if their favored approaches are actually effective for kids—they reduce the discretion of the most motivated teachers, like Alex Caputo-Pearl and Lenore Furman, whose contributions to the profession should be scaled up, not shut down or ignored. This is an age-old problem in American education reform. Our system is highly decentralized in terms of curriculum, organization, funding, and student demographics and needs, yet we have expected local schools to implement one-size-fits-all reform agendas imposed from above. Since political reality suggests we aren't likely to drastically centralize our education system anytime soon, perhaps it is time to look not just to nationally prominent politicians or philanthropists or social scientists to improve our schools, but also to teachers themselves.

When I visited Colorado in the midst of its divisive legislative battle over value-added measurement, I talked to Christina Jean, a social studies teacher who went on to work as an instructional coach in the Denver public schools. Like many smart young educators, she was cautiously optimistic—excited about the nation's renewed commitment to closing achievement gaps, but anxious that the imperative for meaningful collaboration to improve teachers' practice would be overlooked in the rush to impose new canned curricula and multiple-choice tests. “A lot of the discourse is about getting
rid of bad teachers,” she said. “Very rarely do I perceive teachers shown as anything other than cogs in a machine.” To improve the profession's prestige over the long haul, she told me, it is crucial that the job feel not embattled but empowering and be “challenging and stimulating to adults. I am an intelligent person who has this love and passion for educating kids. So let me use what I know to create an experience for my students that reflects my expertise.”

LESSONS FROM HISTORY FOR IMPROVING TEACHING TODAY

Throughout this book I have tried to be more analytical than sharply opinionated. Nevertheless, my study of over two hundred years of the history of public school teaching has led me to draw some conclusions about the policy pitfalls that have dogged education reform, as well as the potential paths forward. Here are some ideas for improving both the teaching profession and, consequentially, the quality of our schools.

TEACHER PAY MATTERS

There is a mantra in education policy circles: “Money doesn't matter.” Accountability reformers love to cite evidence that the United States spends more per student than many other nations, whose kids kick our kids' butts on international tests. It's true that there are many things American schools spend money on that don't improve academic achievement, like cheerleading uniforms and football equipment.
But education finance expert Bruce Baker has demonstrated that one particular type of spending—higher teacher pay—is absolutely associated with better student outcomes. We must take this evidence seriously, because we are not paying teachers the upper-middle-class salary that would align with our sky-high expectations for their work.