Teaching Theatre: Karen Sklaire's Solo Show

Yeah. He don’t care about what we think- he just wants to shove this testing bullshit down our throats.  Yo, I’m sick of sitting all day and doing nothing.  They take away our programs and don’t ask us how we feel. This school used to be fun- why did he even bring you here if you’re gonna be like the rest of the teachers? What’s the point? 

Karen Sklaire is an idealistic teacher who decides to change from an acting career to teach drama in the South Bronx. She recounts her experiences in New York City schools in her one-woman show, Ripple of Hope: One Teacher’s Journey to Make an Impact. A sold-out hit at the fringe theatre festivals in Washington D.C. and New York this year, she is doing an encore performance on Thursday, October 29th at 6pm in Long Island City for the Flying Solo Festival. If you loved Nilaja Sun’s 2006 play No Child as much as I did, you will find that Sklaire’s show has an equally heartbreaking, funny, sometimes cynical take on trying to teacher young people drama even in this theatre mecca city. In the decade since Sun was a teacher, budget cuts, high stakes testing, and mayoral control of the schools have made the conditions Sklaire must face more daunting: disillusioned and defiant students; burned out colleagues; a freaky, faceless bureaucracy; and like her show, it’s a solo affair. 

Starting out, Sklaire recounts briefly what brought her to teaching, including the events of 9/11, a speech by Robert F. Kennedy from 1966, and Hilary Swank’s performance in Freedom Writers. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. Her first day is a nightmare, and the disconnect from her childhood experiences in Connecticut and those of her students is painfully obvious, but there is no help or support, and even the principal tells her if she has a problem she has to solve it herself. In desperation when a particularly out-of-control boy is about to start a fight, she grabs her iPod and picks Michael Jackson (“who doesn’t love him?”). This provides the first breakthrough moment, a glimpse of the joy that is possible, as Le Jean gets everyone dancing and smiling while he shows off his MJ moves. 

Along the way, Sklaire learns that life isn’t like the movies, where heroic teachers overcome the odds. Trapped in a job that is increasingly stressful, and an abusive relationship with her principal, Sklaire hits a wall, broken. Although she doesn’t reveal it in the play, it’s likely that Sklaire found her way back by writing, and seeing the potential for redemption and meeting her original goals by turning her stories into theatre. At its heart, Ripple of Hope is more about the possibilities afforded us through creative expression than it is about teaching per se. Sklaire, like any good teacher, wants to pass on her passion for performance to her students, see them proudly on stage in the spotlight, instead of bent over a test or worksheet, trapped in a chair and desk. 

Get tickets for Ripple of Hope here. 

When “harder” is not better: The problems with the lame rationale for reforming standards

In my last few posts, I have written about the many problems and issues with edTPA and the new certification requirements for teachers that are being rolled out first here in New York and soon nationally. My friend and colleague Jessica Hochman has just written eloquently about the unintended consequences of edTPA and the fear and demoralization that have ensued, poisoning the necessary relationships that should be built on trust between teacher educators, candidates, their cooperating teachers, and the K-12 students they work with.

Now Linda Darling-Hammond and Randi Weingarten have teamed up to call for an end to the test-and-punish approach to improving education, and seek a new way to hold educators accountable with a support-and-improve model. Their suggestions would help “teachers and school leaders develop the knowledge and skills they need to teach much more challenging content in much more effective ways.” Clearly, they are responding to the growing resistance to the Common Core Standards, which got a boost from comedian Louis C.K. recently who took his parental frustrations to Twitter  and television talk shows. Using “much more” twice in one sentence, these two important educational leaders sound like a needle stuck on a record scratch. As Bob Shepherd  has pointed out, their uncritical acceptance of the claims made by proponents of the Common Core Standards suggests they are either unaware or willfully ignoring that those claims are both false and misleading. Darling-Hammond and Weingarten lament “an out-of-control testing system” and parenthetically report that there are over a hundred tests in use in New York City. Dr. Laura Baecher of Hunter College was recently interviewed by Diane Staehr Fenner about the impact of edTPA on English Language Learners in the city’s public schools. “The amount of emotional, physical, and financial stress teachers are under to complete the edTPA mirrors the stress many ELLs are under this spring – almost non-stop testing. Teachers in New York City public schools report that their ELLS will have received less than four days of instruction over the course of 4 weeks between April-May.”

Holy cow, are we really that insane? Let’s recap. Pre-K standards include things like: With guidance and support, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing; collaborate with peers. You know, so they can be “college and career” ready. In Kindergarten, we expect they can analyze and compare two- and three-dimensional shapes, in different sizes and orientations, using informal language to describe their similarities, differences, parts (e.g. number of sides and vertices/”corners”) and other attributes (e.g. having sides of equal length). I recently saw a lesson from the Go Math!curriculum where they were expected to sort three dimensional stacking and/or sliding shapes into a Venn diagram. Mostly the children were excited about building towers with the shapes. Was Randi Weingarten listening when Governor Mark Dayton said at the Education Minnesota Rep Convention on April 26^th that putting a barf bag in 4th grade test packets was not education reform? 

Harder does not necessarily mean better. Expecting more of younger and younger children is damaging in ways that we can no longer ignore. Parents don’t want to see their kids in tears over homework and fear of the tests. We are destroying the primal human joy of learning, which is about connection and collaboration, not competition and ranking. We are not all the same, headed down a path of sameness. Instead, let’s return to marveling at our differences and teach our young that inside a classroom a small democratic society is taking form and coming to life. Let’s help our teachers know how important it is to guide and support that, and return to a foundation built on trust.

What’s wrong with evaluating teacher education programs in New York City?

Nothing, in theory. The NYCDOE has just released a report comparing the traditional teacher preparation programs at local institutions that provide over half of teachers for the public schools in the city. There isn’t tremendous variation when you look across the charts, and when you read the fine print and discover the caveats about the reliability of the data, as Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post did, you might just shrug off the whole thing as no big deal.

There are valid arguments to be made about the need for this sort of study. For starters, those considering teaching as a profession have a right to know if the program they choose will prepare them well and help them to find employment, among other things. It would also be good if there were ways to make the decision about which program to choose that went beyond comparing transit and billboard advertising, flashy brochures, tuition costs, and courses and credits needed for program completion. For example, students searching for a teacher preparation program might like to know some fairly important things such as the quality of the professors and adjuncts, the size of the classes, the presence of helpful advisors, the library resources, course scheduling and flexibility, the opportunity to choose electives or have options among requirements, the schools in which they will do fieldwork and student teaching, the teachers who will mentor them in those schools, just to name a few features. There’s no YELP for these things, and Rate My Professors isn’t much help either. There is always word of mouth. For example, I heard some young women on the subway commenting on the merits of the program at Relay. One was explaining to another, “I don’t even have to go to class. You pass these tests and you get an exemption from attending.” (Relay’s website refers to the possibility of “substitutions” for time in class). There were two national accreditation organizations, NCATE and TEAC, which have merged into CAEP under a new set of standards, but the transition will be murky and will take years, plus many in the field feel that everybody can get accredited and it’s not a particularly meaningful measure of quality.
 


There are the various rankings, starting with the most well-known, the U.S. News and World Report, Petersons, Forbes, even Standard & Poors. These pick a mix of variables and criteria and weigh them in different ways to line up the institutions from best to worst. Most recently, a controversial report prone to errors, missing data, and other validity issues from NCTQ & US News & World Report gave mostly scathing marks to all but four institutions preparing teachers. It’s evident the study was seriously flawed, and critics have pointed out that it is not so useful to just look at inputs such as syllabi and other material gathered from the internet (see Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond’s commentary and Professor Aaron Pallas from Columbia University’s Teachers College humorous take here, or a consolidated debunking assembled by Professor Roxana Marachi here).

But in the era of accountability craziness, somebody decided that an important measure of teacher preparation programs was how well kids did on standardized tests in schools that hired graduates of the programs, and this has jumped to the head of the line in terms of output measures. There are plenty of problems with measuring teacher quality based on how kids do on standardized tests over time, known in jargon as VAM, or value-added measures, but the problems with connecting the dots to the teacher’s graduate program take the cake. The bias, invalidity issues, and even just the logistics make the problems exponentially greater. My brilliant advisor at the University of Michigan, Professor Virginia Richardson, noted back in 2007:

“So why argue against the use of student achievement scores as the outcome measure of  interest?  Probably because success on getting students to learn curriculum material—as measured by standardized tests is, by itself,  a simplistic, inadequate, misleading and perhaps immoral measure of teacher education quality. We must also look at the ways in which teachers conduct their classrooms, and at other elements that affect the success of teaching including such aspects such as willingness and effort by the learner, a social surround supportive of teaching and learning, and opportunity to teach and learn.”

What’s more, the tests that students are taking are in the process of changing and transitioning to be aligned with the Common Core State Standards. The latest results in New York City were so messed up as to be deemed invalid and worthless by many, yet they will become the basis for judgments about teacher performance, and now teacher education program quality. Even a veteran reporter like Beth Fertig had a hard time figuring out what to make of them, and testing expert Daniel Koretz wasn’t much help judging from this interview. Chancellor Merryl Tisch, in a radio interview with Brian Lehrer, gave vague answers to questions about how cut off scores were determined and about critiques from historian Diane Ravitch, who has recently called for the resignation of Commissioner John King on her blog.

What’s perhaps most worrisome is that this keen focus on student achievement as measured on tests and the misuse and distortion of that data is a growing trend nationally. In the New York Times article covering the report comparing the twelve colleges in New York City, the reporter ended with a quote from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who feels this study was a “major step forward.” I would add – into a bottomless pit.