Parentella

Steve Franklin presented at the #14oconf. Here is the video and below is the transcript of his speech.

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Good afternoon. My passion is education and that is what I’m here to talk about. My name is Stephen Franklin, and I have spent the last 11 years working at an LAUSD middle school located in the east San Fernando Valley. 96% of our students qualify for free meals. Many speak English only as a second language, and many are still acquiring its skills. My school’s neighborhood has serious gang problems, and like the rest our District, almost one out of every two students—almost 50% are expected to not complete high school—to drop out.

I know that there is a major focus on technology here at 140. My school is ripe with technology, but unfortunately we are often unable to utilize it. Why? Because electives such as performing and visual arts are being replaced with repeated or double English and math classes. Many students receive double periods each day of math or English, but no elective course. At my school, our room for the now extinct metal shop is a conference room. The wood shop room is occupied by a science class. A school that used to offer students agriculture, horticulture, typing, computers, home economics, plastics and a school newspaper now has only 3 electives teachers—and two don’t even have a credential in electives. In our school of 1500 students, our computer labs are not used as a classroom, but rather as a place where students can surf Wikipedia and type out their projects on Microsoft word.

Why is all of this happening? We all know why: the focus on the standardized test. The Federal government, along with State governments, dangles grants as carrots, carrots for schools to raise test scores. My school’s scores, compared to the rest of the state, are dismal. Our API—academic  performance index, is at 643. But, this is the highest it’s been. We’ve gone from the high 400s to 643 over the last several years. Sound good? It’s not. The “good” schools are at or above 800 on the thousand point scale. But raising scores like we have—does this mean our students are really doing better? Well, it depends on your definition of better. Clearly, we have done a fantastic job of raising test scores, but this does not mean true learning is occurring.

Consider this old tale: A man tells another man he taught his dog to speak English. The other man says, “let me hear him.” “He can’t,” replies the first man. “But you said you taught him English.” “That’s right, I taught him, but that doesn’t mean he learned. “

As many of you are aware, we have quite the controversy in this town about teaching, evaluating teachers, and the all-mighty test. The Los Angeles Times recently decided to run a series of stories called “Grading the Teachers.” They published, on their website, teachers’ classes tests scores for our district’s hundreds of elementary schools. They subjectively then categorized teachers via a formula they created, called Added Value. Teachers found themselves in categories titled “above average,” below average,” and so on. Naturally, an outrage occurred. Our union, UTLA, even called for a boycott of the LA Times.

Teachers were furious. After all, we all know, we teachers and every semi-intelligent person from here to Singapore to the moon knows that test scores are usually quite meaningless—especially as an evaluative tool of teacher effectiveness. Consider this: take a teacher whose students have a perfect score—if they get a perfect score after a year of his/her teaching, the teacher is considered merely average. Added Value measures how far a teacher raises his or her students’ test scores versus the child’s previous year. So if my students have an incredible score, and then after having my class, they fall a few points to still, an incredible score, I am considered below average.

Like many other teachers, I wrote a letter to the editor. It read as follows:

The Times must be as qualified to judge good teaching as I am to judge good journalism. That being said here’s my take on your article: You posit that raising students’ test scores equals good teaching. No. Or at the most maybe. Raising student test scores means getting students to raise their scores on a State test. When somebody can prove that high test scores produce critical thinkers, good citizens, and productive members of society, then and only then can we say that the teaches who taught them are “good.”

In the aftermath of making this data public, we have seen parents demand their children be put in different classes, a great debate about teacher evaluation has risen to new heights, and sadly, we have seen the suicide death of an elementary teacher who was distraught about his L.A. Times rating. His former students credit him for who they are today:  critical thinking college-bound individuals.

The State tests are absurd for a multitude of reasons: they are given a month before teachers finish the curriculum –but they test based on the entire year; some test students on information they haven’t learned about for two years (this is the history portion); and further, the students have no incentive to do well on the test.

My letter to the editor was noticed by highly acclaimed LA Times columnist Steve Lopez, he of the fame from the book and later the film, The Soloist. He wanted to talk about my ideas about teacher evaluation. He liked what I had to say, and also noticed I am a former LAUSD and LA County Teacher of the Year, and that I have a master’s degree from USC in public policy. We met and what was supposed to be a 25 minute jam session turned into a full 90 minute album of an interview. The next Sunday, Mr. Lopez’s article about me was a centerpiece of the paper.

I told Mr. Lopez two things about my teaching philosophy that really caught his attention.

• First, I believe that students don’t care how much we teachers know, until they know how much we care. I could talk for hours about what I do to that end.
• Second, that I think we’re asking the wrong question in education. The sacred State tests ask this question: How smart are you? I think the question we should be asking is this: How are you smart? Every child is brilliant in one way or another. The test ignores brilliance in areas like art, fashion, politics, and anything else creative or applied skills-based. I see my job as this: find a student’s area of brilliance and help guide them in that direction.

A few months ago, I got a message on Facebook from a former student who had been in a history class of mine. She was writing from Rome—studying international politics on a semester abroad in Italy. A former leadership student of mine almost got a job as a White House intern. Students from our “ghetto” school have gone on to Berkeley, Yale, Harvard and other top universities.  The film “Waiting for Superman” would scare a parent from wanting to send their child to a school like mine—it implies that only charter schools with an entry lottery offer a good public education in the U.S. They’re wrong. They’re dead wrong. I see what goes on in my school and our neighboring schools. We have drama students go on to finish first or second in State competitions. I have brought my leadership students to Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston. We fundraise like crazy, so that no child is left behind… for financial reasons. We’ve even had the first lady of the United States come to praise our school’s achievement.

Now, I could go on and attack students for their apathy, I could attack administrators, other teachers, unions, and parents. I could go off on the sacred tests a little more. I could rip apart the teacher evaluation system. I could show you charts about where our students rank in math compared to other nations.  I also could talk about the “it takes a village” cliché. This isn’t my message. To be sure, the system needs a lot of fixing in a lot of ways.  They have whole conferences about that kind of stuff, across America all the way up to the U.S. Department of Education. What I want to get across is this: what we’re doing is a lot of judging books by covers. I challenge the naysayers to read the pages in the middle and see some of the amazing things going on in public education, from the ghetto to the Great Plains. Those pages will show the bigger picture about the sate of “now” in public education. And with a bit of ownership and some needed reforms, the epilogue just might surprise you—with a positive ending . Thank you.

Related posts:

1. The Los Angeles Times Education Series
2. 140 Conference Los Angeles 2010: Edu Panel
3. Test Score Hypocrisy
4. Putting Standardized Tests to the Test
5. My most memorable teacher

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 6th, 2010 at 2:13 am and is filed under Conferences, Education Policy, Education Reform, Public Schools, Steve Franklin, Teacher Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.