What I Believe

I am fortunate to have been exposed to many powerful ideas about education through my years as a teacher, coach and union leader, and I will share some of the thinkers and works that have been most formative in my beliefs. In the following pieces, I refer to our members as educators. That is intentional. Our union includes paraprofessionals, clerks, and assistant principals and curriculum coordinator, along with teachers. We are all educators. I believe all of our members contribute to the effectiveness of what happens in our classrooms every day. Everything we do must connect back to our impact on the education of our scholars.

• The Role of the Union: Unions are labor, professional and social justice organizations, we must be active in protecting the conditions that allow ALL members to balance healthy professional and personal lives.

• Evaluation: Has the potential to support growth when done properly, assessment results should not be used as a measure.

• Assessment: Common Assessment can play a powerful role, but current implementation on the state and district level is seriously flawed and detrimental to professional culture.

• Professional Culture: Educators must work collaboratively and must feel autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Role of the Union

My actions as union president have been grounded in the vision of the union as put forth in the CEA bylaws. It is a vision that asserts the importance of the economic well-being of all members even as it advocates for a role as proactive educational leadership and advocates for social justice. I led the most recent revision in the winter/spring of 2018. This vision inspires me:

The Cambridge Education Association is a member-driven organization dedicated to supporting scholars to learn and reach their fullest potential in all areas of their lives. We build power through organizing and use that power to promote our members’ interests within schools, the district, and the greater community. The Cambridge Education Association serves the three frames of unionism as a labor organization, a professional organization, and a social justice organization. All CEA members are educators because we all contribute to the learning environments in our schools and the development of all scholars.

As a labor organization, the CEA will improve the quality of our members’ economic and professional lives through collective bargaining, contract maintenance, labor regulations and laws. Educator working conditions are scholar learning conditions.

As a professional organization, the CEA will put educators at the center of decision making about the quality of teaching, scholar achievement and equity. Scholar learning conditions are educator working conditions.

As a social justice organization, the CEA will keep scholars at the center of our work by promoting equity and opportunity for all scholars and educators while dismantling systemic classism, racism, and oppression in our schools.

In addition, the world of education has become increasingly dominated by high stakes tests. My beliefs on the role of the union in response to this shift are influenced by the work of Patrick Dolan (http://www.wpdolan.com/) with whom I worked at NEA Foundation convenings of labor/management teams. He claims that testing has narrowed our definition of what it means to be a good teacher to how to help scholars do well on tests. He believes unions need to redefine what it means to educate our children (and future citizens), and I fully agree with him.

Evaluation

The union must be vigilant in ensuring fair and effective evaluations. The state requires each district have an evaluation system. I believe that we need to negotiate and implement a system that effectively helps educators grow rather than build a system that merely complies with state regulations. It should not be a system designed to weed out bad teachers, but rather it should support growth of all educators. I believe this can be done (it is done in pockets here in Cambridge) but I also believe that our current system is not achieving this purpose sufficiently. The current system has a better chance than our previous system, but it needs significant revision and more consistent implementation across the district.

High stakes testing should not be used in the evaluation system. I agree with what is known as “Campbell’s Law”, something I learned about in a course on evaluation that I took last summer with Kim Marshall (http://www.marshallmemo.com/about.php)

* Campbell’s Law (Donald Campbell, 1976)

The more any quantitative indicator is used for decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the processes it is intended to monitor.

Assessment

Assessment is an extremely hot and complex issue. The union needs to be an active force in ensuring we benefit from the positives without being subsumed by the negatives. Using assessment well (by both educators and scholars) is fundamental to good teaching and learning, but it can be (and has been) used to drive education in a direction that is not in the best interests of scholars. I only touch on the major points here - there is much more to my beliefs about assessment than this.

Starting with the positive, when an assessment is well designed and aligned with instruction, it can provide powerful feedback to educators and scholars about what scholars know and can do. Ideally, if scholars are not yet successful on an assessment, they will have the opportunity to work to improve with support from educators. Educator and scholars work together, now knowing the scholar’s strengths and weaknesses based on the assessment. In addition, if educators use common assessments, they can share best practices and resources to improve their practice (see my beliefs on Professional Culture.) Looking at scholars work from common assessments is an effective way to use assessments to improve consistency and clarity of expectations, and useful feedback to educators about their practice.

High stakes testing does have an upside. It has drawn our attention to significant inequities both within and across schools and districts. Without this hard evidence, we may have blindly continued practices that have been perpetuating achievement gaps for many subgroups, particularly scholars of color and scholars with lower socio-economic status. In the world beyond K-12 education, tests can play a major role in opportunities for our scholars (the SAT for example.) We would be remiss as educators if we did not prepare our scholars to be successful on these tests, including providing opportunities to practice in a testing environment.

However, there are many dark sides to assessment. The union needs to be a strong force in pushing back against these destructive realities. High stakes testing has narrowed our instruction in schools to focus on that which is measured on the test. If the test is well designed, this would not be a bad thing, but few tests assess higher order thinking skills, ability to collaborate and perseverance, to name a few. So much of scholars’ time is now spent on English Language Arts and Math (both extremely valuable content areas) that Science, Social Studies, the Arts, Technology, etc. have all taken a back seat. We need to promote more holistic means of assessment (which is often very difficult) and keep in the forefront of our minds that high stakes test results are not the be-all end-all definition of good schools and teaching.

A particularly dark side of high stakes testing has been its effects on scholars. Not only do schools spend a significant amount of time doing the actual testing, the psychological impacts on scholars can be tremendous, especially scholars of color. I can’t count the number of times educators have told me that on MCAS days, no other learning can happen. Scholars are exhausted from the testing, and are often worn down by the difficulty of them. The tests are designed to place scholars on a continuum, and in order to do so, there must be questions to do that at every level. Scholars who are on the verge of passing, are taking questions designed to distinguish between a proficient and an advanced scholar (in other words, designed for proficient scholars to get incorrect) This puts them in a poor frame of mind to do well on the other questions. We do need to teach our scholars perseverance, but I believe there are more humane ways to do that.

Professional Culture

I believe that if we want our scholars to do their best, we must have a vibrant professional culture. For a professional culture to thrive, teachers need three elements: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. In the book Drive, (http://www.danpink.com/drive/), Daniel Pink writes about what motivates us all to do our best at work, school and home. He claims that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the most critical factors. I believe schools today are losing ground on all three and I believe the union needs to be an active force in returning these elements to our workplace.

We all need to feel autonomy - control over what we do. The union needs to work hard for enough flexibility on district requirements to ensure educators feel sufficient autonomy.

Educators also need to feel like they can do this work. This is another dark side to assessment: educators are often faced with evidence that shows they are not meeting the needs of their scholars. We do need to face this data, but we need to do it so that it does not affect the self-efficacy of our educators. The union can promote ways to look at scholar work together to celebrate successes in addition to reflecting on how we need to improve.

Finally, there is purpose. Many educators entered the profession because they believe in the purpose of education: to prepare the next generation to be successful and make our world a better place. High stakes testing has narrowed our purpose - to be successful now, scholars need to do well on a test. The union must be a constant voice in the push to broaden our definition of success in order to ensure that educators feel a deep purpose for their work.