TEACHED Films Available Free Online

Kelly Amis’s three TEACHED films are available for free online at: www.snagfilms.com/films/search?q=teached:

TEACHED Vol. I Premieres Online with SnagFilms
Film Series about Education Equality in America now available for Free Online Viewing
 

Washington, DC - The first three films of the innovative TEACHED short film series--The Path to Prison, The Blame Game: Teachers Speak Out and Unchartered Territory--premiere online today with SnagFilms, a distributor specializing in independent and documentary film founded by internet pioneer Ted Leonsis and backed by venture capitalist Miles Gilburne and Revolution LLC founder Steve Case.

Produced and directed by a former teacher, education writer and first-time filmmaker, the TEACHED short films provide a candid assessment of the American education system, revealing the extent and impact of systemic failures and lingering race and income-based inequities on urban, minority youth in particular.

The first three films of the series, referred to collectively as "TEACHED Vol. I," premiered at the Napa Valley Film Festival in November 2011 and have since won "Outstanding Achievement for Short Documentary" at the Williamsburg International Film Festival and the jury prize for "Spirit of Independence" at the Amsterdam Film Festival.

"The short film format was designed to be more conducive for education, non-profit and student groups to use in outreach and community-building events," says filmmaker Kelly Amis, "The films can easily be interspersed with guest speakers, panel discussions, audience participation and strategic planning. In this way, the films--and ideas about how individuals can get involved--can be presented to viewers at the same time. The short film format is also responsive to today's growing demand for online short videos. We want to reach a broad, diverse audience to join the fight for education equality and we think free, short films online will support that effort. We are so excited to be featured by SnagFilms; it's a great opportunity."

The TEACHED Vol. I films premiering online today are:

·         The Path to Prison  (7 min.) 
A former gang-member from South Central, Los Angeles helps explain how so many capable and intelligent young men—especially African-American males—end up uneducated and incarcerated in the 'home of the free.'

·         The Blame Game: Teachers Speak Out  (16 min.) 
Public school teachers speak candidly about their profession and the consequences for students—especially urban minority students—of policies that treat all teachers as equal and make it difficult to fire a teacher even in the most extreme circumstances.

·         Unchartered Territory (17 min.)
Featuring some of the most successful pioneers of this still-developing frontier, Unchartered Territory explains what charter schools are, why they were created and why some are performing so well and others…not so much.

About the Filmmaker

Amis started her career as a Teach for America teacher in South Central, Los Angeles and has been an advocate for education equality ever since. A Fulbright Scholar, Amis served as a Legislative Aide for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Director of Education for Fight for Children, and Program Director for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. She launched Loudspeaker Films in 2009 as an independent film production company committed to social justice issues. TEACHED is Loudspeaker Films’ first project. 

StudentsFirst NY Responds to Deborah Kenny on Rating Teachers

Micah Lasher of StudentsFirst NY responds to Deborah Kenny’s NYT op ed:

Charter school leader Deborah Kenny’s op-ed in today’s The New York Times argues against the move by many states toward teacher evaluations based on multiple measures, including both student progress on achievement tests and the reviews of principals. She criticizes the evaluation systems, in essence, for being too rigid for a profession as complex as teaching.

Her concerns are not without merit. However, Dr. Kenny’s charter schools – by dint of their legal status – already have the full power to hire and fire teachers at will. This, of course, obviates the need for the kind of formal teacher evaluations that our traditional public schools, which serve the vast majority of our kids, so desperately need.

Attacking new teacher evaluation systems that are, for the first time, enabling district public schools to make decisions based on teacher quality, does violence to the cause of improving the quality of education for the overwhelming majority of students who don’t attend charter schools.

Let me stipulate a few things. First, I wholeheartedly support the kind of quality education that Dr. Kenny’s schools provide to their students. She and I would agree that all students should have such an option, and that we should get rid of the statutory and political obstacles that restrict school choice. We’d also agree that the kind of freedom her schools enjoy, to make decisions based on what’s in the best interest of students, should be expanded to all district schools.

But that’s not on the table right now. In traditional public schools, teachers unions have spent years successfully building a political consensus in opposition to giving principals that kind of power – which is why reform-minded policymakers, who deal in the art of the possible, have enacted complex and, yes, imperfect systems for evaluating teachers. These systems, nonetheless, mark a watershed moment in education policy: for the first time, teacher quality will matter in staffing decisions. This is an unqualified step in the right direction.

Dr. Kenny’s argument boils down to this: until all principals have full authority to remove ineffective educators based on pedagogical judgments, the longstanding status quo – in which teacher quality has no role whatsoever in decision-making – should persist.

What then, for the more than 90% of New York’s students who don’t have seats in a charter school like the ones run by Dr. Kenny?

Ironically, this is the same argument made by the defenders of the status quo: until we have a perfect measure, there should be no measuring. (Which, as a practical matter, would have the effect of slowing down the development of that elusive “perfect” measure.)

When those who don’t actually want accountability make this argument, it’s disingenuous. Coming from someone who does, it’s unhelpful – and by undermining an increasing focus on teacher quality in public education, it’s destructive.

Choice, Merit Pay on Ballot in Washington, Idaho

A spot-on editorial in the WSJ earlier this week. Kudos to DFER’s Lisa Macfarlane for leading the charge there:

School Reform on the Ballot

Unions try to block choice and merit pay in Washington and Idaho.

The education reform movement has been gaining speed across the country, and a pair of important ballot initiatives next week in Washington and Idaho will either extend or retard that progress.

Evergreen State voters will decide on Initiative 1240, which would allow up to 40 charter schools over a five-year period. A mere 40 charters sounds very modest in a state with 2,345 public schools. But Washington is one of only nine states that has no charter schools, and three times—in 1996, 2000 and 2004—the Washington Education Association and its union allies have used their dues money and scare tactics to defeat charter initiatives.

The losers have been Washington students, about one in four of whom fails to graduate from high school in four years. That puts the state 37th in the nation for high school completion. Fewer than half of fourth and eighth graders were proficient on national reading and math tests in 2011.

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Brooklyn Prospect Charter School Increases Diversity

This is an exciting development:

Now in its fourth year, Brooklyn Prospect Charter School is one of a small but growing group of schools that actively seeks to fill its seats with students from different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups. Researchers say schools like it are getting a boost from urban middle-class parents who are quietly saying "No" to the typical suburban exodus once their kids reach kindergarten.

"Many of them express a deep attachment to the city," said University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau. "They see the suburbs as sterile, as boring. They also see the suburbs as not a realistic preparation for their children for life."

These parents increasingly push local schools to accommodate them, a development that Lareau says is "good for cities and good for America."

Observers caution that the trend of white middle-class parents sticking with urban schools is still small and won't soon reverse the USA's decidedly mixed record on school integration since the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared "separate but equal" schools unconstitutional.

At the moment, researchers say, the phenomenon seems limited to a handful of mostly East Coast cities: New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. But it's also happening in New Orleans, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco.

"All we can say at this point is that this provides the best opportunity in a generation for us to integrate our urban schools," said Mike Petrilli, whose the new book The Diverse Schools Dilemma, appears in stores . 

Another, Jennifer Stillman'sGentrification and Schools: The Process of Integration When Whites Reverse Flight, appeared last August. A third book, MarketingSchools, Marketing Cities, by Temple University education researcher Maia Cucchiara, is due out this spring.

For activists who never gave up on the dream of integration, Petrilli said, the change is palpable. "For four decades now, the issue of urban schools has been one of predominantly poor and minority kids and how to serve them well," he said. "Suddenly we have this influx of middle-class kids."

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Teacher Vote on Newark Contract Delayed

The teacher vote on the Newark contract has been delayed, likely until Friday. Quite a spirited debate!

On one side of the table was the union firebrand Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. On the other was the state education commissioner handpicked by Gov. Chris Christie, who became a star among fellow Republicans for aggressively taking on public employee unions.

During months of intense and late-night negotiations for a new teachers contract for the chronically troubled Newark school system, the parties settled on what they believed would be a landmark compromise.

At the center of it was merit pay — the idea of paying teachers based on performance that has long been a flash point between critics of teachers’ unions who believe it would increase accountability, and union leaders who fear that performance would be based on test scores rather than the subtleties of classrooms.

Though Ms. Weingarten had criticized what she calls “merit pay schemes,” she and the other union leaders agreed to embrace the concept in exchange for a promise that teachers would have a rare role in evaluating performance, declaring it a way to rebuild respect for a $1 billion school system that has bled students and money to the suburbs and, increasingly, to charter schools.

Joseph Del Grosso, the leader of the local union who was jailed for striking 40 years ago, has been telling his members that approving the contract will turn them into “heroes.”

But suspicion tends to run high in this New Jersey city, long rived by politics of race and class. Many teachers worry that the bonuses will never appear. And a faction has staged an insurrection against union leaders, saying the contract will weaken job security and pit teacher against teacher. 

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Doug Lemov on Training Teachers

Doug Lemov with an article in the WSJ recently rooted in his new book, Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/111821658X/tilsoncapitalpar), and the implications for training teachers:

No one disputes that practice is the way to prepare for a cello concerto or a tennis match—complex, physically challenging activities that have to be executed without a coach's immediate direction or the chance for a do-over. But these activities are not unique. Thousands of other tasks that are done "live"—from delivering employee performance reviews to examining a patient, from hearing a customer complaint to reacting to a student's question—would benefit from practice beforehand. The problem is that we seldom think of these other kinds of work as the sort of things that can be improved by routine and repetition.

…Some of these strategies about practice are making their way into higher education. My colleague Norman Atkins, founder of the Relay Graduate School of Education in New York, likes to invoke the example of Michael Jordan, whose demanding methods of practice "reset" the habits of the Chicago Bulls and improved the team. Mr. Atkins adds, "Once you have good teachers who as a matter of course like to practice and rehearse and think, it's the most professional thing you can do. It will raise the expectations of teams in their field as well."

So his graduate school, in contrast to more theory-heavy programs, preps teachers for what they will do all day on the job. And he finds that they love it. "What they appreciate about practice is that they get immediate feedback focused on small bite-sized moves in a way they can't when they are teaching for real. And everybody gets a turn. If you swing and miss, you swing again."

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Asian Americans and NYC's Elite Public Schools

Two interesting articles about Asians. The first is about how they have come to dominate the elite public schools in NYC, where admission is granted solely by one score on one 95-question test (pure idiocy IMO):

On Saturday, more than 15,000 students are expected to file into classrooms to take a grueling 95-question test for admission to New York City’s elite public high schools. (The exam on Sunday, for about 14,000 students, was postponed until Nov. 18 because of Hurricane Sandy.)

No one will be surprised if Asian students, who make up 14 percent of the city’s public school students, once again win most of the seats, and if black and Hispanic students win few. Last school year, of the 14,415 students enrolled in the eight specialized high schools that require a test for admissions, 8,549 were Asian.  

Because of the disparity, some have begun calling for an end to the policy of using the test as the sole basis of admission to the schools, and last month, civil rights groups filed a complaint with the federal government, contending that the policy discriminated against students, many of whom are black or Hispanic, who cannot afford the score-raising tutoring that other students can. The Shis, like other Asian families who spoke about the exam in interviews in the past month, did not deny engaging in extensive test preparation. To the contrary, they seemed to discuss their efforts with pride.

They also said they were puzzled about having to defend a process they viewed as a vital steppingstone for immigrants. And more than a few saw the criticism of the test as an attack on their cultures, as troubling to them as grumblings about the growing Asian presence in these schools and the prestigious colleges they feed into. “You know: ‘You’re Asian, you must be smart,’ ” said Jan Michael Vicencio, an immigrant from Manila and a junior at Brooklyn Tech, one of the eight schools that use the test for admission. “And you’re not sure it’s a compliment or an insult. We get that a lot.”

Almost universally, the Asian students described themselves on one edge of a deep cultural chasm.

And this article in last weekend’s WSJ (which had a picture of Michelle Rhee, among others):

Asian-Americans are now the country's best-educated, highest-earning and fastest-growing racial group. They share with American Jews both the distinction and the occasional burden of immigrant success.