To Spouses: Thank You!

I’ve been a public school teacher since 2003, but I’ve known that I was going to be a teacher since 1992, when I was in the seventh grade. When I was in middle school, I had no idea what or where I would end up teaching, and I certainly had not heard of Manchester--the beautiful town that I am proud to call home.

It’s funny how life works out sometimes. I have ended up teaching high school English about an hour from where I grew up, and it’s fair to say that the notion of teaching public school crept into my soul 25 years ago, while sitting in a 7th grade math classroom in the heart of the projects near downtown Nashville, and consumed it.

I’ll be the first to admit that the all-consuming nature of following my passion of educating young people frequently creeps into the safe space where family life should exist. In honor of Valentine’s Day, I would like to thank my wife and my kids for being so incredibly understanding. My wife didn’t come from a family of teachers and, when she married me, I don’t think she knew at the time what she was getting herself into. For that matter, neither did I. Never would I have predicted all of the ups and downs and persistent changes that have happened in public education over the past decade or so. Never would I have predicted being able to sit across the table from the state’s Commissioner of Education, Dr. Candice McQueen, and discuss education policy with her--thanks to the Hope Street Group Tennessee teacher fellowship. Never would I have imagined being invited to a White House ceremony honoring some of America’s most distinguished teachers.

For the non-teachers out there--and especially to the teachers’ spouses--I want to explain something that is most difficult, even for an English teacher that typically employs vernacular with relative dexterity.

Teaching is difficult because it’s a never-ending job. I can literally never turn it off. I’m always looking for new and better ways of doing things (hence, the gradeless classroom that I operate). When I sit on the couch and watch a TV show, or when I’m listening to music in the car, in the back of my mind I’m always wondering how any of it can be effectively utilized in my classroom. Everything that I see and experience is fair game.

Teaching is difficult because Darwin’s evolutionary theory of “survival of the fittest” has never been truer than in public education today. I must adapt to and master changes to my standards, how students are tested, and how I am evaluated. This would be much easier if I had the same group of students year after year, but that’s mostly an impossibility. Accomplishing this feat with a brand new group of people that I literally just met and adapting to their interests and their needs requires an utmost attention to detail. Teachers must efficiently adapt to their environments, or quickly find themselves both ineffective and irrelevant. I must also help my colleagues fight off predators who wish to steal public education’s most valuable resource--money. This fight is frustratingly unending but entirely worth it because I love my students, and they need someone in their corner fighting for them.

When I come home exhausted in the afternoons, please understand that the source of the exhaustion (at least for me) is occasionally physical, but mostly mental. I literally make hundreds of crucial and not-so-crucial decisions every single day. Then, once I'm home, there’s the mental journey to prepare for the next day and do it all over again. Please forgive me when I sit in line at the fast food restaurant and take five minutes to decide what I want to eat. Sometimes, I'm just over making any more decisions.

Spouses, I want you to know that teachers need and deeply appreciate your support. We need you there to listen when we've had a frustrating day; we need your help around the house while we're evaluating papers and busy saving the world; sometimes, we need you help setting up our classrooms at the beginning of the year. No one else can support us like you can and, even though we don't always say it, from the bottom of our hearts, we thank you. I'm extremely lucky to have a wife who understands all this, and I especially want to thank you for being my rock.

2016: A Year in Review

2016 has been an amazing year, and it has served as another reminder to take the bad with the good. I would like to reflect on the top five educational stories, both personally and as a public school teacher in Tennessee.

At the top of my list is having the privilege of attending the national teacher of the year ceremony at The White House. I traveled to The White House because I was recognized as one of America’s most distinguished educators, and I participated in honoring Ms. Jahana Hayes as the national teacher of the year. The ceremony itself only lasted 30 minutes, beginning with a short speech from Ms. Hayes, who is a history teacher at John F. Kennedy High School in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her passion-filled opening remarks set a powerful tone and her enthusiasm for the teaching profession was palpable.

On the way back to Nashville, I had time to reflect on attending this absolutely sublime White House event. Continuing the spirit of this ceremony the best way I know how, I am committed to help my fellow educators elevate and express their voices and tell their stories. Teachers matter. No one knows how to improve the educational landscape better than us. We are the experts, and when we speak in unison, educators have a remarkably strong voice. It begins with educators telling their own stories and having honest conversations with stakeholders about what’s working in our profession and what’s not.

Next on my list is the complete meltdown of TNReady. Though not completely their fault, the Tennessee Department of Education took a black eye on this one. The failure of TNReady sent shock waves throughout the state’s public education system. Elementary and middle school students didn’t even get to take the exam, while high school students across the state went through the motions of taking the test and didn’t take it seriously. A state law was passed holding teachers harmless on their evaluations from these test scores, but this law doesn’t apply to schools and school districts. Meanwhile, TDOE changed testing vendors from Measurement Inc. to Questar and has some significant rebuilding to do in terms of its efficacy.

Number three on my list is something that happened within the last few days, when TDOE released its plan for public review of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). In case you haven’t been following, ESSA is the federal law that replaced No Child Left Behind, and it requires each state to develop its own plan on how it will meet the needs of its own students. Along with three other teachers from the high school, I recently attended a town hall meeting in Nashville where Commissioner McQueen and some of her TDOE cohorts explained the overview of their plan. I believe that TDOE’s ESSA plan needs some revision, but, overall, it sends a clear message that “all means all”--that TDOE is committed to educating all of Tennessee’s students, regardless of whether they are rich or poor, receiving special education services, or English Language Learners who just moved here from another country.

Number four on my list is the revelation from TDOE that the state’s science scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are “above the national average for the first time ever, doubled the national average for student growth, eliminated the performance gap between male and female students, narrowed the performance gap between white and black students in both grades, and narrowed the performance gap between white and Latino students in fourth grade.” Tennessee had previously scored above the national average in English Language Arts and math. This announcement is further proof that the public education system in Tennessee is on the right track. Historically, Tennessee has ranked at or near the bottom in public education.

Rounding out my top five education stories of 2016 is Mr. Trump’s appointment of Betsy DeVos as the future U.S. Secretary of Education. Putting a pro-charter and pro-voucher champion at the head of the nation’s public schools will certainly have “yuge” ramifications. One only needs to look at the education systems in Michigan and Louisiana (both are below the national average and dropping) to understand the devastating effects of diverting money from public schools in the name of school choice.

What We Learned – and Where We Can Improve – on Testing in Tennessee

The following blog was written by Tennessee’s Commissioner of Education, Dr. Candice McQueen on June 7th and has been edited for length. I appreciate her candor and her effort to communicate with interested stakeholders. If you would like to read the full version, you can find it on Classroom Chronicles at http://tnclassroomchronicles.org/learned-can-improve-testing-tennessee/ Below is a selfie that I took with Dr. McQueen at a recent Hope Street Group convening.

Today’s blog kicks off a summer series through which I want to share some of my thoughts on assessment. In my conversations with more than 10,000 teachers and parents over the past year and a half, and through the various letters and emails I’ve received, testing has been the issue about which I’ve received the most feedback – and understandably so.

There are very few people who would argue that no statewide check on student knowledge, skills, and standards attainment is the best direction for Tennessee. On the other hand, there are few people who believe the current assessment program in Tennessee is exactly right. Most of us are somewhere in the middle and are looking to continuously improve our testing program while not “throwing out the baby with the bath water.”

I am one of these individuals. I pledge to both create better tests aligned to Tennessee’s rigorous standards while also looking for opportunities to improve test structure, time, delivery, logistics, and scheduling. I ask that you engage with me in this conversation knowing that we are partners in this work.

As I’ve considered where we are and what we can do to move forward productively, I asked three questions. First, what is the goal of a new and improved test? It is meant to better show students’ ability and progress on both the breadth and depth of the content. This year’s test included questions that pointed to students’ ability to problem solve, think critically, write, and read more deeply.

Second, what did we accomplish this year in the midst of delivery challenges? This year, we were unable to fully provide TNReady in the way we expected: online for all third through 11th graders.  But we accomplished a great deal...new and better test questions, navigating challenges related to online testing, learning how to better structure the testing experience, and re-discovering that our best way to continually improve is to listen – to our students, our educators, our parents, and our administrators.

Finally, how will we recover and what will next year look like? Our goals remain the same: ensure we have an assessment that better tests the reality of students’ content knowledge and skills, maximize instructional time, and deliver the tests as thoughtfully as possible as we move more online.

To this end, the department has already announced some changes – including reducing overall testing time. Furthermore, we are committed to phasing in online testing in a smart and reliable fashion that puts students first. Students deserve to be able to show what they know in a way that is as seamless and non-stressful as possible, and then to know how they are doing in their big-picture progress toward college and workforce readiness. Students also deserve the best instruction and rich learning experiences, rather than learning how to game questions on a test. This is what TNReady was always about and this is what we commit to achieving.

Measuring the Unmeasurable

Last week, I attended a convening of Hope Street Group teacher fellows from across the state. There are 30 of us who are all dedicated to elevating teachers’ voices in this state. On the first day of the convening, I was blessed to participate in a listening session over state testing with Dr. Candice McQueen, the Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE). She will travel around the state and conduct more of these listening sessions so that teachers can tell her directly how the state can improve its system of evaluating students.

Many great ideas were expressed in this listening session, the details of which I don’t want to publicize at this time because education policy is a tricky thing. Nothing is ever changed solely in isolation without affecting something else. I don’t know how many of the good ideas that we expressed are actionable, but I left that session feeling confident that Commissioner McQueen listened to them intently.

Lunch quickly followed this listening session, and at my lunch table we continued to discuss the weighty topic of evaluation, which veered into a discussion on how teachers and schools are evaluated.

Most teachers across the state are evaluated using the Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model, or TEAM. In a nutshell, this model that is used for classroom observations uses a rubric that lists characteristics in several different domains on a 1, 3, or 5 level, with 5 being the highest. After the teacher’s lesson is evaluated, there is a post-conference where the teacher meets with the evaluator (usually a principal) and the strengths and weaknesses of the lesson are discussed. Classroom observation(s) comprise 50% of a teacher’s overall evaluation score for that year, which is also on a scale of 1-5. According to TDOE, the TEAM evaluation model improves the quality of education and teachers feel more positive about it than ever. Anecdotally, no one at my table--nor any other teacher that I have ever talked to about the TEAM model--could support that notion. The way teachers are evaluated in this state is ridiculously flawed.

Schools have been graded using a school report card for a number of years now. New to this report card (thanks to the state legislature) will be grades that range from A to F for every school. These grades will be based primarily off of how well students perform on state tests as well as national tests like the ACT. This raised a series of questions during our lunch discussion. What performance levels signify an “A” versus a “B” or “C”? Are schools who obtain an “A” on the school report card actually graduating students who are well-prepared for college and the “real world,” or are they better at preparing their students to test well?

The larger issue here is that in education, we constantly strive to measure the unmeasurable. For example, on a student’s report card, a grade of 75 is a “D” and a grade of 85 is a “B.” As a teacher, how on earth can I honestly say that the “B” student has mastered 10% more of the knowledge than the “D” student? I can’t, because it’s it’s not quantifiable. Likewise, is a teacher who is considered to be a level 5 significantly better than a level 3 teacher on the TEAM rubric? On the school report card, will an “A” school be significantly better than a “B” or “C” school?

I greatly appreciate Dr. McQueen taking the time to listen to a group of teacher leaders from around the state. Without question, there are areas of improvement for TNReady. Because the law requires state testing, our students deserve to have the best evaluation system that we can provide. Hopefully, the state’s ensuing discussion over how to improve TNReady will boil over into other areas of evaluation that correspondingly have glaring areas of improvement. There are more organic methods of evaluating teachers and schools than subjectively grading them. When we figure this out, Tennessee educationally will be a model for the nation and the positive change will be precipitous.