In April of 2004, I, along with a few hundred other Teach For America corps members, schlepped from our teaching placements in Washington Heights, the Bronx, and Harlem to Pace University in downtown Manhattan, where we were nearing the end of our master’s program. Pace had invited Linda Darling-Hammond to speak, and given her scathing criticism of TFA, this was something we weren’t going to miss.
When I learned this week that Darling-Hammond had been chosen by several Democrats to advise on issues of education policy – including Obama and Clinton – I decided to dig out my notes from that lecture.
Perhaps Darling-Hammond tailored her speech at Pace for an audience of new teachers, assuming that we were more concerned with the immediate educational needs of our students than with the broken system that had led to their predicament in the first place.
Or maybe it was because she was in a room full of 2nd year “green beret education elite” (as she had previously called us in her 1994 Phi Delta Kappan article, “Who Will Speak for the Children?”). Either way, the majority of her talking points dealt with details: which books to read, why performance-based assessment was superior to multiple-choice, the benefits of collaborative planning.
When she did speak in broader terms, she blamed large class and school size for the achievement gap, and said the key to helping children was more funding for public schools.
To evaluate Darling-Hammond’s stance, let’s look at Newark, a city that spends $20,000 per student, more than double the national average. In 2006, only 38.8% of Newark’s high school students graduated with a normal high school diploma. Of those students who graduated, only a third passed the 8th-grade level High School Proficiency Assessment. Last year, Newark earned F’s on 13 out of 16 state assessments in reading and math. And yet, when you factor in the city’s drop out rates, the amount of money spent on each high school graduate exceeds one million dollars.
The average public school teacher’s salary in Newark is $77,000 – and many earning that salary are below average teachers. But when a teacher’s union leverages an iron-clad collective bargaining agreement, as it has in Newark and New York, it’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher.
In this New York Times article, Joseph Del Grosso, the new president of the Newark Teacher’s Union, responded to Corzine’s new funding formula by indicating that even more money will be needed:
Joseph Del Grosso, president of the Newark Teachers Union, which represents 5,000 teachers in the city’s public schools, said he was disappointed by the 2 percent increase for the Newark district. “You might as well say you’re flat-funding the district,” he said.
This is why Darling-Hammond’s approach is dangerous. Without genuine reform, money pumped into a district like Newark is wasted.
Mathmatica’s 2005 study of Teach For America found that despite their lack of formal education training beyond what Teach For America provides, TFA corps members produced higher test scores than other teachers in their schools, including veteran and certified teachers.
One KIPP charter school in Newark, which was founded by former TFA corps members, receives a fraction of the aid that traditional public schools in Newark receive, and yet their rates of achievement far exceed those of neighboring public schools. This is where reform begins.
The fact that Darling-Hammond has been chosen as an advisor does not bode well for students in places like Newark and New York, especially given her anti-Teach For America sentiments. To say more funding is needed, but to simultaneously disregard methods of genuine reform is to bloat the system with wasted dollars and perpetuate the status quo.