This is what an excellent public school sounds like

While I was producing my profile of Saranac Lake High School choral director Helen Demong yesterday, I kept thinking about public education in general.

Demong does something which, on its face, is pretty hard.  She teaches incredibly complex music — much of it classical — to students who enter her program, many of them arriving with very little grounding in the arts.

She demands that her students comport themselves like, well, adults.  They are held to technical standards that are extraordinarily high.   They also present themselves with dignity and poise.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Demong does what we all want our public schools to do, forcing young people to think and reason and work, while also guiding them through a complex transition from childhood to adulthood.

Most of us have experienced teachers this good at one time or another and it’s why so many of us consider public education a near-sacred institution.

But it’s also fair to ask, especially in a state like New York where we spend incredible amounts of money on education, why this isn’t more common.

Yes, schools are faced with severe budget challenges these days.

But according to the APRAP report releaed by the Adirondack Association of Towns and Villages, the number of school teachers in the Park rose 34 percent over the last four decades, while the number of students dropped by 31 percent.

In theory, that means we should still have the people-power to deliver brilliant, innovative, risk-taking, and demanding education to our kids.

We should be attracting instructors accomplished enough — in their fields of instruction and as teachers — to demand excellence from the young people in our schools.

I’m not suggesting that our schools and our teachers are inferior.  Helen Demong is living proof that we have pockets of real excellence.  And our overall standards are, to borrow Garrison Keillor’s phrase, above average.

I’m just wondering if we can’t pursue her model of demanding instruction and her level of ambition more aggressively in other fields, from math and science departments to English and foreign language programs.

As always, your thoughts welcome.

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19 Comments on “This is what an excellent public school sounds like”

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  1. If Clapton is God, Warren Haynes is Jesus says:

    Brian,

    Her students are electing to take chorus. By doing so, they have an inherent interest (unless they choose the course due to outside pressure) in the actual content of the course. Therein is the difference between her students and those who are required to take Algebra or Global Studies or Science or English and hate it. Now obviously a good, effective teacher like Ms. Demong (Is this Billy’s Demong’s mother?) still improves learning to a great extent. But genuine interest makes a world of difference.

    Some educators have suggested that this is the problem with education in America, we don’t offer enough classes of interest to most students. And given our current fiscal mess, this situation is about to get far worse. It does beg the question, however, of how can we engage more students in more areas of interest?

  2. If Clapton is God, Warren Haynes is Jesus says:

    I would also add that as the Regents and graduation requirements have increased, it leaves little time in many students’ schedules for elective coursework. And these increased requirements fall at the feet of the folks at the State Education Dept. in Albany. And on the fiscal side of the coin, these “mandates,” if you will, are, surprise, unfunded. Which leads many districts to cut back on popular elective courses in order to provide the mandated courses. Again, this situation will most likely worsen as North Country schools bear the brunt of the state aide cuts and deal with the double whammy of the proposed property tax cap.

  3. Brian says:

    This requires excellent teachers. But the culture in the north country is to piss on teachers and blame them for all the social and economic ills. and call them greedy because they want to be paid in relation to the investment they made in obtaining their required master’s degree. To attract large numbers of excellent teachers, you have to pay them accordingly. And people in the north country don’t want to do that.

  4. Mervel says:

    So since this teacher is excellent I am assuming she is paid more and has much more job security than the non-excellent teachers?

  5. Brian says:

    Good idea, Mervel. So why don’t you design some quantifiable metric to measure “good” music teachers vs “bad” ones? We’ll eagerly await your proposal.

  6. Mervel says:

    Well I think we probably agree that we don’t need to design a metric although they can help. Parents, teachers, students, administrators, they know who the good teachers are and they know who the bad teachers are. As Brian stated she is a model of what we are looking for and it didn’t take a specific metric to figure that out.

    Does our system right now foster excellence? As you state the key to education IS excellent teachers. Most teachers are good teachers in my opinion some are excellent and there is a percentage who are in the wrong field. A professional system that does not identify who those people are and reward them accordingly will not foster excellence.

  7. Mervel says:

    My children go to the Canton School system and we have not had one bad teacher yet and I fully support the salaries that the teachers my children have had earn, including the old guy who made 75K, he deserved every penny. What I have seen is a whole bunch of people who are making good salaries who are included in the instructional staff and are not classroom teachers. That needs to be looked at before you carve into the classroom teachers. I would bet that some of those extra people are part of the state mandate problem and will be more difficult to remove than actual teachers.

  8. newt says:

    Not to disagree with the others, above, but Clapton has 90% of your answer, Brian. After they get the basics in grades 1-6. students, especially, I think, American students, tend to respond best when in classes where they have an interest, be it “shop” (current term for this is meaningless), or calculus. The best teacher in the world cannot help students to hate the class they are in.
    After the Cmmr. of Education Mills arbitrarily (there was no research undertaken to support doing it ) mandated Regents degrees for all students, learning in my school took a nose dive. Courses oriented to vocational or creative interests were dropped in favor of more, and more, and more, math classes (largely remedial) to GET THOSE KIDS TO PASS THE MATH REGENTS! Angry, resentful, students, locked in classes with frustrated teachers, taking “Math B” over, and over again. Meanwhile, business, computer, and vocational classes were dropped. I remember a tech teacher telling me how 26 kids signed up for his Computer Assisted Drawing class, but after the “Math B” retakes and class shuffling to accommodate them were factored in, only 5 were allowed to take it. More academic kids suffered as higher level math, and other, classes were dropped so more teachers could teach Math B, and their classes were ever-more populated with their aforesaid angry, frustrated, resentful, confused, and older (having been held back) , peers. I guess it is still like this.

    “Raising standards”, and denying options based on real-world needs and interests, Brian. That’s why.

  9. If Clapton is God, Warren Haynes is Jesus says:

    Newt,

    To add to your point, the state ed. dept. basically dumbed down the exam in order that schools could meet the new mandate. When that failed, they instituted the 55-65 pass fail option for a local diploma. And when that was about to expire, they extended it. All this to meet a mandate they created of passing standardized tests that do nothing to encourage or actually assess critical thinking skills. Our obsession of using standardized tests to assess intelligence is a big part of the problem with education in America today. Meanwhile, the critical thinking skills that nearly everyone agrees are necessary for students to acquire, are left by the wayside….

  10. newt says:

    Indeed, Clapton. And you can learn critical thinking skills in almost any class, even one you like. Maybe even better, if you have an interest in it.

    I can remember the how challenging the Social Studies Regents were in the early ’80s, when I started teaching, and older teachers were even then complaining about how they had been dumbed down from the “old days.”

    A sub-rant that occurred to me is the one thing that public school teachers should be blamed for, and are not, is our collective supine reaction to the institution of these ridiculous “standards.” While one heard plenty of outrage inside the teacher’s lounge or in private conversations, almost nothing was heard publicly from teachers. It was all “I’ll keep my head down, do my best to cope, and not rock the boat.” from 98% of us. And, of course, NYSUT, our union, maintained it’s unspoken agreement with State Ed and the districts “You don’t mess with our pay, benefits, and job security, and you can make the kids study Chinese Opera 4 hours a day for all twelve years, for all we care. In fact, we’ll support you 100% and publish cute little articles in the union rag on topics like how Mrs. Delaney, in Hoosic Falls, is making studying Chinese Opera 4 hours a day FUN for her 6th graders!” Occasionally a letter of protest was printed in NYSUt monthly, and roundly ignored. Basically, we did nothing (I wrote a few letters to the editor and attended a few meetings, at least. A few teachers in the Plattsburgh area tried to do something. Once they staged a well-publicized meeting a PSUC in the Student Union. Betty Little even came. Reporters. They had about 100 chairs set up. About 17 people showed, mostly parents of kids being smashed by the system Couple of teachers.). Here endeth the rant.

    Granted, many teachers are busy outside class, often with school-related programs, family life, etc., but many had time to do something to protest this atrocity, and did nothing, when a little bit of organized public outrage might have made a difference, or at least preserved a shred of integrety. Sad commentary on almost the entire profession, IMHO. Ditto the college Teacher factories.

  11. Brian says:

    Mervel: most employers with incentive plans have ones that are based on some quantitative metric rather than the boss just arbitrarily deciding based on his or her own personal whim.

  12. Mervel says:

    So you are saying metrics are impossible and qualitative factors based on peers, students, parents and administrators is simply a whim and is also impossible. So we can’t measure good teaching there are no bad teachers and we just have to go on seniority? That is the old model and it has been proven to not work. It does not make any sense to say well this is the ONE field among all fields that we cannot measure any difference in performance that there is no difference between any two teachers.

    But like I pointed out school systems know who the poor teachers are and who the excellent teachers are and they have a duty to act on that in my opinion.

    But as you point out that is not the total solution and the solution to our education problems will not be solved by beating up on teachers, I support teachers and frankly would like to see classroom teachers rewarded even more than they are now. But to foster excellence we must know what excellence IS.

  13. If Clapton is God, Warren Haynes is Jesus says:

    Newt,

    Excellent point about the teachers (and others in academia) capitulating on the use of standardized exams. Also a good point about the NYSUT going along for the ride as well. I hadn’t ever considered their ignoring this problem in order not to “rock the boat.”

    And sadly, despite knowing these exams do very little to assess the effectiveness of teachers, student scores on these exams are now going to be used as part of teacher evaluations. They’ll be no more effective at judging good teacher than they are at assessing critical thinking skills in students.

  14. newt says:

    No, they won’t. At least in our region. In my nearly thirty years of teaching, I saw very few “bad” teachers, anyway. You had some outstanding ones, really good ones, pretty good ones, and there it about stopped. Bad ones were almost always weeded out before they got tenure….I saw this happen several times. I think that test scores only strongly correlate to family socioeconomic standing (SES). In other regions, such where there are more good employment opportunities to compete with teaching, or school conditions are awful, you maybe can find more “bad” teachers.

    I do not condemn testing altogether. The tests students take, to some degree do set a standard for teacher performance. For example, the Biology teacher at my old school, to my knowledge, never had a kid fail her Regents. This was often remarked-upon by other teachers and students. She, among other things, held weekend study sessions at her house, providing snacks, to help her kids prepare for the test. Still does, I guess. She would be a great teacher regardless, but the testing set a standard of achievement that both she, and her students, could, with effort, attain. In cities, especially, better salaries might attract more people like her to the profession, as apparently happens with some charter schools. But testing, might very well do more good than harm.

  15. scratchy says:

    The very bottom line is testing and standards I needed. IF you don’t have them then there is no way to make sure schools are teaching what should be taught. I remember a high school government and economics teacher I had who would spent much of class time talking about his personal life and various clubs he ran and regularly showed movies only tangently related to the subject. He could get away with doing this because there was no regents in government and economics.

  16. scratchy says:

    Brian Mann,
    I have a small suggestion. Do not use the word “incredible” so much. If you keep using it then it loses its meaning.

  17. newt says:

    scratchy-

    You are so right about the value of testing. I had a colleague who drove his students rather mercilessly (if effectively) in the Regents course he taught, and did pretty much what you describe in a non-Regents one (or so his students consistently said). Abandoning testing for success in (appropriate for the student) courses would be a disaster.

  18. Mervel says:

    I don’t think testing is the answer at all. But to say that there is NO evaluation standard that will work beyond how long you have survived is the reason that people are reacting against this sort of lie. I support classroom teachers we need to invest in them and the entire field. But to do that you have to know what the outcome should be you have to say some things work and some don’t, some teachers work and some don’t. We have all had bad teachers, the unions job is to protect all teachers including crappy ones and that is okay that is the job of the union. The job of the teachers union is not to protect the education of students.

  19. Bret4207 says:

    This problem exists in other areas besides teaching. How do you gauge performance except by numbers? Number of kids that pass, widgits made, policies sold, tonnage produced, etc. Gauging the performance of a teacher is pretty subjective once you get beyond test scores, isn’t it? It’s like gauging a cook or painter or writer. I had teacher I loved, some I hated (borrrring) and a whole bunch that were just there in the room with me. I think a really good teacher should be paid more, but the union wouldn’t stand for that.

    BTW- I love reading my wifes union rag. It’s like Soviet propaganda almost, the teachers and more importantly the union are without fault, hard working, paragons of virtue. It’s so over the top as to be ridiculous.

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