On “building teachers” + “institutionalized fraud”

The New York Times Magazine also got in on it with a profile called “Building A Better Teacher” (with video). It’s unfortunate it takes 10 (internet) pages to reach the conclusion that balance between two strategies (method and content) is the goal every teacher should be aiming for. But the article is worth a read for anyone interested in teaching and education. Below are some highlights. The first excerpt is taken from the first half of the article where the importance of method is being discussed, illustrated though a successful teacher education curriculum designer marketing a brand of instruction that focuses on a general “taxonomy” of effective teaching, regardless of subject or content:

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All Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining. In Boston, he declared himself on a personal quest to eliminate the saying of “shh” in classrooms, citing what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh.’ Are you asking the kids not to talk, or are you asking kids to talk more quietly?” A teacher’s control, he said repeatedly, should be “an exercise in purpose, not in power.” So there is Warm/Strict, technique No. 45, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.”
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I noticed that while the discussion touches on the idea of “thinking outside of one’s self”, it left out any mention of the specific element of true, deep love for the students one teaches, which for this writer assumes a connection to lives outside of the classroom, not just “good will” — community ties, family ties, common cultural/social ties; in other words, another shared, common reality aside from that taking place during the hours which students are forced to be in the school building. The best teachers I know are able to build this type of bond with their students, and it shows.

This second highlight illustrates the second half of the article, which focuses on the “content” focused school of teacher education theory. In other words, prioritizing the equipping of teachers with specific skills for teaching specific subjects. But, if that element of common reality that transcends the classroom is missing, are either of these strategies good enough?

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In the lesson I watched, Wilma is using a word problem to teach her class a concept called “unit rate.” The problem has to do with a boy named Dario who buys seven boxes of pasta for $6. How expensive is a box of pasta? The correct answer, 86 cents, is found by dividing six by seven, but in the quickness of the moment, Wilma wrongly divides seven by six. This produces the number of boxes Dario can buy for a dollar, not how much money it takes to buy a box. As a result, students spend the rest of the class with the wrong impression that the pasta costs $1.17, as well as the wrong idea of how to think about the problem.
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(SOURCE: New York Times) Building a Better Teacher : ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.

Lemov himself pushed for data-driven programs that would diagnose individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. But as he went from school to school that winter, he was getting the sinking feeling that there was something deeper he wasn’t reaching. On that particular day, he made a depressing visit to a school in Syracuse, N.Y., that was like so many he’d seen before: “a dispiriting exercise in good people failing,” as he described it to me recently. Sometimes Lemov could diagnose problems as soon as he walked in the door. But not here. Student test scores had dipped so low that administrators worried the state might close down the school. But the teachers seemed to care about their students. They sat down with them on the floor to read and picked activities that should have engaged them. The classes were small. The school had rigorous academic standards and state-of-the-art curriculums and used a software program to analyze test results for each student, pinpointing which skills she still needed to work on.

But when it came to actual teaching, the daily task of getting students to learn, the school floundered. Students disobeyed teachers’ instructions, and class discussions veered away from the lesson plans. In one class Lemov observed, the teacher spent several minutes debating a student about why he didn’t have a pencil. Another divided her students into two groups to practice multiplication together, only to watch them turn to the more interesting work of chatting. A single quiet student soldiered on with the problems. As Lemov drove from Syracuse back to his home in Albany, he tried to figure out what he could do to help. He knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.

Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions. The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.

This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.

That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”

The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance.

Incentives are intuitively appealing: if a teacher could make real money, maybe more people would choose teaching over finance or engineering or law, expanding the labor pool. And no one wants incompetent teachers in the classroom. Yet so far, both merit-pay efforts and programs that recruit a more-elite teaching corps, like Teach for America, have thin records of reliably improving student learning. Even if competition could coax better performance, would it be enough? Consider a bar graph presented at a recent talk on teaching, displaying the number of Americans in different professions. The shortest bar, all the way on the right, represented architects: 180,000. Farther over, slightly higher, came psychologists (185,000) and then lawyers (952,000), followed by engineers (1.3 million) and waiters (1.8 million). On the left side of the graph, the top three: janitors, maids and household cleaners (3.3 million); secretaries (3.6 million); and, finally, teachers (3.7 million). Moreover, a coming swell of baby-boomer retirements is expected to force school systems to hire up to a million new teachers between now and 2014. Expanding the pool of potential teachers is clearly important, but in a profession as large as teaching, can financial incentives alone make an impact?

Lemov spent his early career putting his faith in market forces, building accountability systems meant to reward high-performing charter schools and force the lower-performing ones to either improve or go out of business. The incentives did shock some schools into recognizing their shortcomings. But most of them were like the one in Syracuse: they knew they had to change, but they didn’t know how. “There was an implementation gap,” Lemov told me. “Incentives by themselves were not going to be enough.” Lemov calls this the Edison Parable, after the for-profit company Edison Schools, which in the 1990s tried to create a group of accountable schools but ultimately failed to outperform even the troubled Cleveland public schools.

Lemov doesn’t reject incentives. In fact, at Uncommon Schools, the network of 16 charter schools in the Northeast that he helped found and continues to help run today, he takes performance into account when setting teacher pay. Yet he has come to the conclusion that simply dangling better pay will not improve student performance on its own. And the stakes are too high: while student scores on national assessments across demographic groups have risen, the percentage of students at proficiency — just 39 percent of fourth graders in math and 33 percent in reading — is still disturbingly low. And there is still a wide gap between black and white students in reading and math. The smarter path to boosting student performance, Lemov maintains, is to improve the quality of the teachers who are already teaching.

But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.

It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?

Lemov thought about soccer, another passion. If his teammates wanted him to play better, they didn’t just say, “Get better.” They told him to “mark tighter” or “close the space.” Maybe the reason he and others were struggling so mightily to talk and even to think about teaching was that the right words didn’t exist — or at least, they hadn’t been collected. And so he set out to assemble the hidden wisdom of the best teachers in America.

LEMOV WAS NOT the first educator to come to the conclusion that teachers need better training. In the spring of 1986, a group of university deans sat in an apartment near the University of Illinois at Chicago, tossing bets into a hat. They had come together to put the final touches on a manifesto that would denounce their own institutions — the more than 1,200 schools of education — for failing to adequately train the country’s teachers.

They planned to mail the document to about 100 universities, along with an invitation to join their crusade, a coalition they named the Holmes Group, after a Harvard education-school dean from the 1920s and ’30s who pushed to prioritize teacher training. The bets they scribbled on pieces of paper were their guesses as to how many of their colleagues might agree to join them.

“People were saying, ‘Well, you’re lucky to get 30,’ ” Frank Murray, the dean of the University of Delaware’s school of education, and one of those present, recalled recently.

By the end of the year, nearly every invited dean had signed on. The process of studying their own sins was “painful,” Judith Lanier, the chairwoman of the Holmes Group and then the dean of Michigan State University’s education school, wrote in an introduction to the final report. But the consensus was inescapable. Three years before, a report from a presidential commission declared the nation to be “at risk” because of underperforming schools, citing dipping test scores and frightening illiteracy. “Our own professional schools are part of the problem,” the Holmes Group’s report declared.

Though the Holmes report stirred controversy in some quarters — the dean of the College of Education at the University of Cincinnati denounced it as “divisive” and “exclusionary” — almost nobody denied the need for change. Yet reform proved difficult to implement. The most damning testimony comes from the graduates of education schools. No professional feels completely prepared on her first day of work, but while a new lawyer might work under the tutelage of a seasoned partner, a first-year teacher usually takes charge of her classroom from the very first day. One survivor of this trial by fire is Amy Treadwell, a teacher for 10 years who received her master’s degree in education from DePaul University, a small private university in Chicago. She took courses in children’s literature and on “Race, Culture and Class”; one on the history of education, another on research, several on teaching methods. She even spent one semester as a student teacher at a Chicago elementary school. But when she walked into her first job, teaching first graders on the city’s South Side, she discovered a major shortcoming: She had no idea how to teach children to read. “I was certified and stamped with a mark of approval, and I couldn’t teach them the one thing they most needed to know how to do,” she told me.

The mechanics of teaching were not always overlooked in education schools. Modern-day teacher-educators look back admiringly to Cyrus Peirce, creator of one of the first “normal” schools (as teacher training schools were called in the 1800s), who aimed to deduce “the true methods of teaching.” Another favorite model is the Cook County Normal School, run for years by John Dewey’s precursor Francis Parker. The school graduated future teachers only if they demonstrated an ability to control a classroom at an adjacent “practice school” attended by real children; faculty members, meanwhile, used the practice school as a laboratory to hone what Parker proudly called a new “science” of education. But Peirce and Parker’s ambitions were foiled by a race to prepare teachers en masse. Between 1870 and 1900, as the country’s population surged and school became compulsory, the number of public schoolteachers in America shot from 200,000 to 400,000. Normal schools had to turn out graduates quickly; teaching students how to teach was an afterthought to getting them out the door. Thirty years later, the number was almost 850,000.

In the 20th century, as normal schools were brought under the umbrella of the modern university, other imperatives took over. Measured against the glamorous fields of history, economics and psychology, classroom technique began to look downright mundane. Many education professors adopted the tools of social science and took on schools as their subject. Others flew the banner of progressivism or its contemporary cousin constructivism: a theory of learning that emphasizes the importance of students’ taking ownership of their own work above all else.

At the same time, well-educated women and racial minorities who once made up a core of teachers began to see that they had other career options, and in increasing numbers, they took them. That left the ever-growing number of teaching jobs to a cohort with weaker academic backgrounds. The labor pool was especially shallow in cities, which, abandoned by the middle class, faced perpetual teacher shortages. Nancy Slavin, the head of teacher recruitment for the Chicago public schools, described to me a phone call in 2001 that particularly alarmed her. A prospective substitute teacher wanted to know why she hadn’t been selected for an assignment. Slavin explained that her conviction for prostitution made her ineligible. “Well,” the woman replied, a bit indignant, “I’m in a teacher-training program.”

Traditionally, education schools divide their curriculums into three parts: regular academic subjects, to make sure teachers know the basics of what they are assigned to teach; “foundations” courses that give them a sense of the history and philosophy of education; and finally “methods” courses that are supposed to offer ideas for how to teach particular subjects. Many schools add a required stint as a student teacher in a more-experienced teacher’s class. Yet schools can’t always control for the quality of the experienced teacher, and education-school professors often have little contact with actual schools. A 2006 report found that 12 percent of education-school faculty members never taught in elementary or secondary schools themselves. Even some methods professors have never set foot in a classroom or have not done so recently.

Nearly 80 percent of classroom teachers received their bachelor’s degrees in education, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Yet a 2006 report written by Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College, the esteemed institution at Columbia University, assessed the state of teacher education this way: “Today, the teacher-education curriculum is a confusing patchwork. Academic instruction and clinical instruction are disconnected. Graduates are insufficiently prepared for the classroom.” By emphasizing broad theories of learning rather than the particular work of the teacher, methods classes and the rest of the future teacher’s coursework often become what the historian Diane Ravitch called “the contentless curriculum.”

When Doug Lemov, who is 42, set out to become a teacher of teachers, he was painfully aware of his own limitations. A large, shy man with a Doogie Howser face, he recalls how he limped through his first year in the classroom, at a private day school in Princeton, N.J. His heartfelt lesson plans — write in your journal while listening to music; analyze Beatles songs like poems — received blank stares. “I still remember thinking: Oh, my God. I still have 45 minutes left to go,” he told me recently. Things improved over time, but very slowly. At the Academy of the Pacific Rim, a Boston charter school he helped found, he was the dean of students, a job title that is school code for chief disciplinarian, and later principal. Lemov fit the bill physically — he’s 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds — but he struggled to get students to follow his directions on the first try.

After his disappointing visit to Syracuse, he decided to seek out the best teachers he could find — as defined partly by their students’ test scores — and learn from them. A self-described data geek, he went about this task methodically, collecting test-score results and demographic information from states around the country. He plotted each school’s poverty level on one axis and its performance on state tests on the other. Each chart had a few outliers blinking in the upper-right-hand corner — schools that managed to squeeze high performance out of the poorest students. He broke those schools’ scores down by grade level and subject. If a school scored especially high on, say, sixth-grade English, he would track down the people who taught sixth graders English.

He called a wedding videographer he knew through a friend and asked him if he’d like to tag along on some school visits. Their first trip to North Star Academy, a charter school in Newark, turned into a five-year project to record teachers across the country. At first, Lemov financed the trip out of his consulting budget; later, Uncommon Schools paid for it. The odyssey produced a 357-page treatise known among its hundreds of underground fans as Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

I first encountered the taxonomy this winter in Boston at a training workshop, one of the dozens Lemov gives each year to teachers. Central to Lemov’s argument is a belief that students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions. Educators refer to this art, sometimes derisively, as “classroom management.” The romantic objection to emphasizing it is that a class too focused on rules and order will only replicate the power structure; a more common view is that classroom management is essential but somewhat boring and certainly less interesting than creating lesson plans. While some education schools offer courses in classroom management, they often address only abstract ideas, like the importance of writing up systems of rules, rather than the rules themselves. Other education schools do not teach the subject at all. Lemov’s view is that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar.

At the Boston seminar, Lemov played a video of a class taught by one of his teaching virtuosos, a slim man named Bob Zimmerli. Lemov used it to introduce one of the 49 techniques in his taxonomy, one he calls What to Do. The clip opens at the start of class, which Zimmerli was teaching for the first time, with children — fifth graders, all of them black, mostly boys — looking everywhere but at the board. One is playing with a pair of headphones; another is slowly paging through a giant three-ring binder. Zimmerli stands at the front of the class in a neat tie. “O.K., guys, before I get started today, here’s what I need from you,” he says. “I need that piece of paper turned over and a pencil out.” Almost no one is following his directions, but he is undeterred. “So if there’s anything else on your desk right now, please put that inside your desk.” He mimics what he wants the students to do with a neat underhand pitch. A few students in the front put papers away. “Just like you’re doing, thank you very much,” Zimmerli says, pointing to one of them. Another desk emerges neat; Zimmerli targets it. “Thank you, sir.” “I appreciate it,” he says, pointing to another. By the time he points to one last student — “Nice . . . nice” — the headphones are gone, the binder has clicked shut and everyone is paying attention.

Lemov switched off the video. “Imagine if his first direction had been, ‘Please get your things out for class,’ ” he said. Zimmerli got the students to pay attention not because of some inborn charisma, Lemov explained, but simply by being direct and specific. Children often fail to follow directions because they really don’t know what they are supposed to do. There were other tricks Zimmerli used too. Lemov pointed to technique No. 43: Positive Framing, by which teachers correct misbehavior not by chiding students for what they’re doing wrong but by offering what Lemov calls “a vision of a positive outcome.” Zimmerli’s thank-yous and just-like-you’re-doings were a perfect execution of one of Positive Framing’s sub-categories, Build Momentum/Narrate the Positive.

“It’s this positive wave; you can almost see it going across the classroom from right to left,” Lemov said. He restarted the clip and asked us to watch the boy with the binder. At the start his head is down and he is paging slowly through his binder. Ten seconds in, he looks to his left, where another boy has his paper and pencil out and is staring at Zimmerli. For the first time, he looks up at the teacher. He stops paging. “He’s like, ‘O.K., what’s this?’ ” Lemov narrated. “ ‘I guess I’m going to go with it.’ ” After 30 seconds, his binder is closed, and he’s stowing it under his desk.

All Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining. In Boston, he declared himself on a personal quest to eliminate the saying of “shh” in classrooms, citing what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh.’ Are you asking the kids not to talk, or are you asking kids to talk more quietly?” A teacher’s control, he said repeatedly, should be “an exercise in purpose, not in power.” So there is Warm/Strict, technique No. 45, in which a correction comes with a smile and an explanation for its cause — “Sweetheart, we don’t do that in this classroom because it keeps us from making the most of our learning time.”

The J-Factor, No. 46, is a list of ways to inject a classroom with joy, from giving students nicknames to handing out vocabulary words in sealed envelopes to build suspense. In Cold Call, No. 22, stolen from Harvard Business School, which Lemov attended, the students don’t raise their hands — the teacher picks the one who will answer the question. Lemov’s favorite variety has the teacher ask the question first, and then say the student’s name, forcing every single student to do the work of figuring out an answer.

All the techniques are meant to be adaptable by anyone. To illustrate cold-calling in Boston, he showed clips of four very different teachers: Mr. Rector, whose seventh graders stand up next to their chairs as he paces among them, lobbing increasingly difficult geometry problems; Ms. Lofthus, who leans back in a chair, supercasual, and smiles warmly when she surprises one second grader by calling on him twice in a row; Ms. Payne, whose kindergartners jump in their seats, clap and sing along when she introduces “in-di-vid-u-al tuu-urrns, listen for your na-aame”; and Ms. Driggs, a petite blonde with a high voice who calls the process “hot calling” and tells her fifth graders that the hardest part will be that they are not allowed to raise their hands.

But perhaps the greatest master of the techniques in the taxonomy is Lemov himself. When I first met him during the lunch break at the Boston workshop, he spent most of our conversation staring at the floor. He was perched on a windowsill in a small side room, hugging his large body close to him. “I’m a huge introvert,” he told me, explaining how, at Harvard Business School, he took a Myers-Briggs personality test that labeled him more introverted than all his other classmates. “It’s strange to me that I do what I do and that I like it as much as I do,” he said.

After lunch he returned to the main room to teach, and it was as if he had left the shy Lemov on the windowsill. A different man stood up tall and square-shouldered, with a presence that made all 30 of the teachers crane their necks toward him. When he told a joke, they laughed; when he pointed to the screen, their eyes raced after his finger. One teacher at my table, Zeke Phillips, from Harlem’s Democracy Prep Charter School, raised his eyebrows at a colleague and whispered, “This stuff is good.”

When Lemov began his project, he was working in the relative obscurity of Uncommon Schools. His decision to spend half his time building the taxonomy meant he had less time to carry out the network’s main business, opening schools. But his fellow managing directors made a calculation that the time spent building a vocabulary for teachers would be worth the slower pace. They were beginning to expand beyond their handful of schools, and they needed a hiring plan. Their first schools often relied on experienced teachers like Zimmerli, plucked from other public schools. They could continue to buy the best talent away from other schools, but as more charter-school networks emerged, the competition for the obviously great teachers was growing fierce.

They decided that rather than buy talent, they would try to build it. Today, Lemov’s taxonomy is one part of a complex training regime at Uncommon Schools that starts with new hires and continues throughout their careers. Lemov began expanding the taxonomy beyond Uncommon Schools only recently, offering workshops, like the one I attended in Boston, to a wider audience. His main clients are other charter schools, but they also include Teach for America and an immersive training program in Boston called the Match Teacher Residency that uses medical school as the model for preparing educators. His methods are also used at Teacher U, a new teacher-training program in which Uncommon Schools is a partner. Lemov is interested in offering teachers what he describes as an incentive just as powerful as cash: the chance to get better. “If it’s just a big pie, then it’s just a question of who’s getting the good teachers,” Lemov told me. “The really good question is, can you get people to improve really fast and at scale?”

ANOTHER QUESTION IS THIS: Is good classroom management enough to ensure good instruction? Heather Hill, an associate professor at Harvard University, showed me a video of a teacher called by the pseudonym Wilma. Wilma has charisma; every eye in the classroom is on her as she moves back and forth across the blackboard. But Hill saw something else. “If you look at it from a pedagogical lens, Wilma is actually a good teacher,” Hill told me. “But when you look at the math, things begin to fall apart.”

In the lesson I watched, Wilma is using a word problem to teach her class a concept called “unit rate.” The problem has to do with a boy named Dario who buys seven boxes of pasta for $6. How expensive is a box of pasta? The correct answer, 86 cents, is found by dividing six by seven, but in the quickness of the moment, Wilma wrongly divides seven by six. This produces the number of boxes Dario can buy for a dollar, not how much money it takes to buy a box. As a result, students spend the rest of the class with the wrong impression that the pasta costs $1.17, as well as the wrong idea of how to think about the problem.

Hill is a member of a group of educators, who, like Lemov, are studying great teachers. But whereas Lemov came out of the practical world of the classroom, this group is based in university research centers. And rather than focus on universal teaching techniques that can be applied across subjects and grade levels, Hill and her colleagues ask what good teachers should know about the specific subjects they teach.

The wellspring of this movement was Michigan State’s school of education, which, under the direction of Judith Lanier, one of the original Holmes Group members, took the lead in rethinking teacher education. Lanier overhauled Michigan State’s teacher-preparation program and helped open two research institutes dedicated to the study of teaching and teacher education. She recruited innovative scholars from around the country, and almost overnight East Lansing became a hotbed of education research.

One of those researchers was Deborah Loewenberg Ball, an assistant professor who also taught math part time at an East Lansing elementary school and whose classroom was a model for teachers in training. In 1990, Ball filmed her third-grade math class at the Spartan Village Elementary School, and those videos became the foundation for a great deal of teacher-training research.

On one tape from that year, Ball started her day by calling on a boy known to the researchers as Sean.

“I was just thinking about six,” Sean began. “I’m just thinking, it can be an odd number, too.” Ball did not shake her head no. Sean went on, speaking faster. “Cause there could be two, four, six, and two — three twos, that’d make six!”

“Uh-huh,” Ball said.

“And two threes,” Sean said, gaining steam. “It could be an odd and an even number. Both!”

He looked up at Ball, who was sitting in a chair among the students, wearing a black-and-red jumper and oversize eyeglasses. She continued not to contradict him, and he went on not making sense. Then Ball looked to the class. “Other people’s comments?” she asked calmly.

At this point, the class came to a pause. I was watching the video at the University of Michigan’s school of education, where Ball, who has traded in her grandma glasses for black cat’s-eye frames, is now the dean — and one of the country’s foremost experts on effective teaching. (She is also on the board of the Spencer Foundation, which administers my fellowship.) Her goal in filming her class was to capture and then study, categorize and describe the work of teaching — the knowledge and skills involved in getting a class of 8-year-olds to understand a year’s worth of math. Her somewhat surprising conclusion: Teaching, even teaching third-grade math, is extraordinarily specialized, requiring both intricate skills and complex knowledge about math.

The Sean video is a case in point. Ball had a goal for that day’s lesson, and it was not to investigate the special properties of the number six. Yet by entertaining Sean’s odd idea, Ball was able to teach the class far more than if she had stuck to her lesson plan. By the end of the day, a girl from Nigeria had led the class in deriving precise definitions of even and odd; everyone — even Sean — had agreed that a number could not be both odd and even; and the class had coined a new, special type of number, one that happens to be the product of an odd number and two. They called them Sean numbers. Other memorable moments from the year include a day when they derived the concept of infinity (“You would die before you counted all the numbers!” one girl said) and another when an 8-year-old girl proved that an odd number plus an odd number will always equal an even number.

Dropping a lesson plan and fruitfully improvising requires a certain kind of knowledge — knowledge that Ball, a college French major, did not always have. In fact, she told me that math was the subject she felt least confident teaching at the beginning of her career. Frustrated, she decided to sign up for math classes at a local community college and then at Michigan State. She worked her way from calculus to number theory. “Pretty much right away,” she told me, “I saw that studying math was helping.” Suddenly, she could explain why one isn’t a prime number and why you can’t divide by zero. Most important, she finally understood math’s secret language: the kinds of questions it involves and the way ideas become proofs. But still, the effect on her teaching was fairly random. Much of the math she never used at all, while other parts of teaching still challenged her.

Working with Hyman Bass, a mathematician at the University of Michigan, Ball began to theorize that while teaching math obviously required subject knowledge, the knowledge seemed to be something distinct from what she had learned in math class. It’s one thing to know that 307 minus 168 equals 139; it is another thing to be able understand why a third grader might think that 261 is the right answer. Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. She theorized that it included everything from the “common” math understood by most adults to math that only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

The idea that just knowing math was not enough to teach it seemed legitimate, but Ball wanted to test her theory. Working with Hill, the Harvard professor, and another colleague, she developed a multiple-choice test for teachers. The test included questions about common math, like whether zero is odd or even (it’s even), as well as questions evaluating the part of M.K.T. that is special to teachers. Hill then cross-referenced teachers’ results with their students’ test scores. The results were impressive: students whose teacher got an above-average M.K.T. score learned about three more weeks of material over the course of a year than those whose teacher had an average score, a boost equivalent to that of coming from a middle-class family rather than a working-class one. The finding is especially powerful given how few properties of teachers can be shown to directly affect student learning. Looking at data from New York City teachers in 2006 and 2007, a team of economists found many factors that did not predict whether their students learned successfully. One of two that were more promising: the teacher’s score on the M.K.T. test, which they took as part of a survey compiled for the study. (Another, slightly less powerful factor was the selectivity of the college a teacher attended as an undergraduate.)

Ball also administered a similar test to a group of mathematicians, 60 percent of whom bombed on the same few key questions. Wilma, incidentally, scored near the bottom on the M.K.T. test, in the 12th percentile.

Inspired by Ball, other researchers have been busily excavating parallel sets of knowledge for other subject areas. A Stanford professor named Pam Grossman is now trying to articulate a similar body of knowledge for English teachers, discerning what kinds of questions to ask about literature and how to lead a group discussion about a book.

Ball is very clear that she doesn’t think knowledge alone can make a teacher effective, and as part of her efforts to transform the University of Michigan’s teacher-training program, she has begun to classify the particular classroom actions that are also crucial. She and the faculty have settled on 19 practices they want every student to master before graduation. These include some skills related to special knowledge for teaching, but they also include some broader skills, even some that seem to belong in the classroom-management arena, like an ability to “establish norms and routines for classroom discourse.”

Ball and Lemov have never met, and Ball had not heard of Lemov’s taxonomy until I told her about it over a late dinner last December in Ann Arbor. We were joined by Bass, the mathematician, and Francesca Forzani, an alumnus of Teach for America who is managing the university’s teacher-training overhaul. Ball had just declared that teaching “is decidedly not about being yourself,” but the other two were having trouble articulating just how teachers should behave. “That’s one thing our program doesn’t address right now,” Forzani said. “How to get and hold the floor.” To answer that question, they began to dissect Ball’s methods. What did she do to capture her audience’s attention? Bass mimicked how Ball brings order at faculty meetings. “Oh, I notice Deborah is paying attention, and Francesca, and Elizabeth,” he said, going through our names. Ball laughed. “That’s a joke!” she said, explaining that she is mocking a common classroom technique that she finds manipulative — a way of embarrassing talkers by not addressing them. Her preferred approach, she said, is to say something like, “Elizabeth, I’m a little worried you might not have heard what Hy is saying.” Bass shook his head, still thinking about the faculty meetings. “But it works!” he said.

Watching their conversation was like witnessing Lemov’s taxonomy in the act of creation. The slightly manipulative narration of this-person-is-paying-attention is a version of something Lemov calls Narrate the Positive; Ball’s preferred approach, acting as if the distracted student was actually just not able to hear was Lemov’s Assume the Best; and getting and holding the floor by adopting a different persona — that was what Lemov calls Strong Voice. The more I talked about the taxonomy with Ball and her colleagues, the more it became clear that she was just as much a master of the 49 techniques as Bob Zimmerli. There were just two small differences. First, whereas Lemov’s taxonomy is content-neutral, Ball connects hers to math. The second difference was that, while these practices were so ingrained they seemed imprinted on Ball’s soul, when it came to talking about them, to passing them onto her students, she had no words.

THESE DAYS LEMOV is almost single-mindedly focused on the mechanics of teaching, the secret steps behind getting and holding the floor whether you’re teaching fractions or the American Revolution. The subject-free focus is a deliberate decision. “I believe in content-based professional development, obviously,” he told me. “But I feel like it’s insufficient. . . . It doesn’t matter what questions you’re asking if the kids are running the classroom.”

But of course, content comes up for every teacher that uses the taxonomy. I met one such teacher, Katie Bellucci, this winter when I visited Troy Prep in Troy, N.Y., just outside Albany. She had been teaching for only two months, yet her fifth-grade math class was both completely focused on her and completely quiet. Pacing happily in front of a projector screen, she showed none of the false, scripted manner so common among first-year teachers. She moved confidently from introducing the day’s material — how to calculate the mean for a set of numbers — to a quick cold-call session to review what they had already learned and finally to helping students as they tackled sample problems on their own. She even sent a disobedient student to the dean’s office without a single turned head or giggle interrupting the flow of her lesson. Her cold calls perfectly satisfied Lemov’s ideal. First, she asked the question. Then she paused a slightly uncomfortable second. And only then did she name the student destined to answer.

Bellucci, the daughter of two teachers, is a slim brunette with natural presence and a calm confidence. But her control of the classroom, she says, is thanks to the taxonomy, which she began to learn last summer, practicing different techniques in classroom simulations with her fellow teachers. The simulations were specific and practical; Bellucci told me she spent several hours practicing how to tell a student he was off task. “Without it, I’d be completely on my own,” she said. “I’d be in the dark.”

Like a good lesson, the taxonomy includes both basic and advanced material. Lately Bellucci and her mentor teacher, Eli Kramer, a dean of curriculum and instruction at Troy who also splits fifth-grade math responsibilities with Bellucci, have advanced to a technique called No Opt Out. The concept is deceptively simple: A teacher should never allow her students to avoid answering a question, however tough. “If I’m asking my students a question, and I call on somebody, and they get it wrong, I need to work on how to address that,” Bellucci explained in February. “It’s easy to be like, ‘No,’ and move on to the next person. But the hard part is to be like: ‘O.K., well, that’s your thought. Does anybody disagree? . . . I have to work on going from the student who gets it wrong to students who get it right, then back to the student who gets it wrong and ask a follow-up question to make sure they understand why they got it wrong and understood why the right answer is right.”

Part of the challenge with the higher-level techniques is that they involve not just universal teaching practices but actual math. Bellucci doesn’t just have to remember to return to the student who made the mistake; she has to figure out some way to correct that mistake in the student’s brain. For these kinds of challenges, Bellucci leans on Kramer’s seven years of experience teaching math, plus her own applied math degree from nearby Union College. She also improvises.

In other words, she could use help explaining content — the kind of thinking Ball is trying to teach education students with Math Knowledge for Teaching. Lemov and other Uncommon Schools administrators are unfamiliar with M.K.T., but some are recognizing that content can’t be completely divorced from mechanics. This fall, Uncommon Schools administrators began building new taxonomy-like tools around specific content areas. Among the subjects under analysis are elementary- and middle-school reading, upper-grade math and all levels of science.

Lemov and Ball focus on different problems, yet in another way they are compatriots in the same vanguard, arguing that great teachers are not born but made. (The Obama administration has also signaled its hopes by doubling the budget for teacher training in the 2011 budget to $235 million.) A more typical education expert is Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. He has an understandable reason: While study after study shows that teachers who once boosted student test scores are very likely to do so in the future, no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?

Indeed, while Ball has proved that teachers with M.K.T. help students learn more, she has not yet been able to find the best way to teach it. And while Lemov has faith in his taxonomy because he chose his champions based on their students’ test scores, this is far from scientific proof. The best evidence Lemov has now is anecdotal — the testimony of teachers like Bellucci and the impressive test scores of their students. (Among the taxonomy’s users are a New Orleans charter school that last year had the third-highest ninth-grade English scores in the city behind two selective public schools; the highest-rated middle school on New York City’s school report card; and top schools in Boston, Milwaukee, Denver and Newark.)

THOMAS KANE, a Harvard economist who studies education, used to belong to Rockoff’s skeptical camp. But he is one of several researchers who told me recently that he now has a more open mind. “I still think tenure review is important,” he said. “It’s just, I don’t think we should throw in our towel on the other things.” There is simply too much potential in improving the vast number of teachers who neither drag their students down nor pull them ahead.

By figuring out what makes the great teachers great, and passing that on to the mass of teachers in the middle, he said, “we could ensure that the average classroom tomorrow was seeing the types of gains that the top quarter of our classrooms see today.” He has made a guess about the effect that change would have. “We could close the gap between the United States and Japan on these international tests within two years.”

Kane is serious about finding the answers. He took a leave from Harvard in 2008 to work on a $335 million Gates Foundation project that will identify and support effective teaching practices. One study involves filming some 3,000 classrooms across the country and measuring them against a variety of practices, including an M.K.T.-based rubric created by Hill and her colleagues.

Lemov, for his part, finds hope in what he has already accomplished. The day that I watched Bellucci’s math class, Lemov sat next to me, beaming. He was still smiling an hour later, when we walked out of the school together to his car. “You could change the world with a first-year teacher like that,” he said. (source)

Trial Begins for Ex-Chicago Police Lt. Accused of Torturing More than 100 African American Men – Democracy Now

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A former police commander accused of overseeing the torture of more than 100 African American men goes on trial today in Chicago. Former Lieutenant Jon Burge is accused of lying when he denied in a civil lawsuit that he and other detectives had tortured anyone. He faces a maximum of forty-five years in prison if convicted of all charges. The accusations of torture date back forty years, but Burge has avoided prosecution until now. For nearly two decades, beginning in 1971, Burge was at the epicenter of what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of black men to coerce confessions. In total, more than 100 people in Chicago say they were subjected to abuse, including having guns forced into their mouths, suffocation with bags placed over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. We speak to attorney Flint Taylor and torture victim Darrell Cannon. [includes rush transcript]

Guests:

Flint Taylor, attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He has represented many of the torture victims and was directly involved in spearheading the special prosecutor’s investigation.

Darrell Cannon, one of dozens of men to come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of the Chicago police. Darrell says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than twenty years in prison, but after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. He was released three years later.

AMY GOODMAN: A former police commander accused of overseeing the torture of more than 100 African American men goes on trial today in Chicago. Former Lieutenant Jon Burge is accused of lying when he denied in a civil lawsuit that he and other detectives had tortured anyone. He faces a maximum of forty-five years in prison if convicted of all charges.

The accusations of torture date back forty years, but Burge has avoided prosecution until now. For nearly two decades, beginning in 1971, Burge was at the epicenter of what’s been described as the systematic torture of dozens of black men to coerce confessions. In total, more than a hundred people in Chicago say they were subjected to abuse, including having guns forced into their mouths, suffocation with bags placed over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted on their genitals.

The police department fired Burge in 1993 for mistreatment of a suspect, but did not press charges. A decade later, then-Illinois-governor George Ryan released four men on death row he said Burge had extracted confessions from using torture. Public outcry eventually led Cook County to appoint two special prosecutors to look into the allegations. In 2006, prosecutors found there was evidence to show beyond a reasonable doubt that torture had occurred, but the statute of limitations had expired.

Two years ago, federal prosecutors finally brought charges against Burge, though not for torture. They say he lied in a civil suit about the torture, and they’ve charged him with perjury and obstruction of justice. The trial is expected to last six weeks.

We go now to Chicago, where we’re joined by two guests. Darrell Cannon, one of dozens of men to come forward with allegations of abuse at the hands of the Chicago police—Darrell says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than twenty years in prison, but after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. Now he’s suing Chicago for wrongful conviction. We’re also joined by Flint Taylor, an attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. He has represented many of the torture victims and was directly involved in spearheading the special prosecutor’s investigation.

Flint Taylor, let’s begin with you. Just lay out the scope of what is about to happen today in a Chicago courtroom.

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, it’s very significant what’s finally happening, decades after it should have. This trial, although it will not deal with allegations of torture itself, will deal with obstruction of justice and perjury. The reason that it won’t deal with the crime of torture itself is because the mayor of the city of Chicago, who at that time was the chief prosecutor, Richard Daley, back in 1982, when evidence was presented to him that definitively showed that there was police torture under Burge and by Burge, he chose not to prosecute Burge and not to move to have him released from the police department, but rather continued to prosecute men for many years after that who had been falsely accused of torture.

Darrell Cannon here, my client, was tortured in 1983. If Daley had moved in 1982 with the evidence he had to remove Burge from the police force and prosecute him for torture, we would not have Darrell Cannon spending twenty, twenty-five years behind bars and not having him tortured by electric shock. So, the real crime here started many years ago with the cover-up, a cover-up that was engineered by the mayor himself and his first assistant at that time, who went on to be the chief prosecutor, Richard Devine. That really is the background to why we are having this prosecution now only for obstruction of justice and perjury, rather than for the crime against humanity which is torture.

AMY GOODMAN: Go back to 1971. Can you reconstruct what began then, Flint Taylor?

FLINT TAYLOR: Certainly. Burge was at a POW camp in Vietnam in the late ’60s. Of course, in Vietnam, we now know, there was electric shock used on people in POW camps of Vietnamese prisoners. At that time, it appears that Burge learned the techniques that he brought back to Chicago. In 1972, he became a detective at a South Side police station, where they interrogated suspects, almost predominantly African American suspects. In 1973, we first hear of the first victim of torture. That man was tortured with electric shock with a bag over his head, beaten into a false confession. From that point forward, the cases started to stack up through the ’70s, ’80s and all the way to 1991.

At the same time, Burge had moved from detective to sergeant to lieutenant in charge of the violent crimes unit to a commander of an entire police area. And so, as the cases of torture increased, he continued to be promoted. And more and more people, not just detectives, but supervisors and subsequently, as I mentioned, prosecutors, the chief prosecutor, the superintendent of the police, successive superintendants, they all came to know what was going on, and their response to it was rather than to stop the scandal, stop the systematic torture, was to promote Burge.

And only when the evidence mounted too high—there were two public trials—and the community became so outraged and demanded that Burge be fired, that anything was done. But to this day, and until a two years ago, there were no charges. And, in fact, the special prosecutor that you mentioned in your piece actually issued a whitewash report and in fact said the statute of limitations barred prosecution, when, of course, the US attorney found otherwise.

AMY GOODMAN: Of course, torture is an extremely serious charge. As you said, it violates national and international law. But I’m surprised that just for obstruction of justice and for perjury, he faces forty-five years in prison.

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, that’s the statute of limitations problem and one of the many unaddressed issues in Chicago. We are very pleased that Burge is being prosecuted, but there is much left to do, and that includes dealing with federal and state statutes, legislation that would make torture a specific crime. And since it’s a crime against humanity, there would be no statute of limitations, like there is no statute of limitations for genocide or murder. And in that instance, in the future, if there were another Burge or other torture—another torture ring and it were covered up successfully for many years, then he could still or they could still be prosecuted for torture.

And that is a major issue that’s still being dealt with by the activists here in the city of Chicago, along with the fact that twenty or twenty-five men are not as “fortunate”—and I put quotes around “fortunate”—as Darrell has been to be out now. And those men are still behind bars so many decades later, because of tortured confessions. And we’re fighting those cases one by one. But, in fact, all those men should be given new trials, and they should be new trials without the tortured evidence, obviously.

And the other aspect that we feel very strongly about, the men, the henchmen that worked under Burge, and that includes the two right-hand men of Burge, self-admittedly, who tortured Darrell at the remote torture site, those men have yet to be charged. Now, there’s an ongoing investigation into their perjury and obstruction of justice, but to this point, they haven’t been indicted for the scores of cases where men have said that they tortured them. So there’s much unfinished business, as well as there’s many, many victims and survivors of police torture here in the city of Chicago who have received no compensation because of a similar statute of limitations in civil cases. So—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go back—

FLINT TAYLOR: —we feel that—

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to come back to this discussion in a minute, Flint Taylor, an attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago, has represented a number of men who say they were tortured by Jon Burge, the police commander who’s going on trial today. We’ll also hear from Darrell Cannon, who is one of those victims. He served twenty years in prison.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to one of the people who says he was tortured. We’re joined by Darrell Cannon. He says police tortured him in 1983 and forced him to confess to a murder he didn’t commit. He spent more than two decades in prison. But after a hearing on his tortured confession, prosecutors dismissed his case in 2004. Now he’s suing the city of Chicago for wrongful conviction.

We’re also joined by Flint Taylor, an attorney who represents a number of the torture victims. But let’s go to Darrell Cannon.

Darrell, tell us what happened to you. Talk about how you were picked up and what you admitted to and what happened to you in Burge’s custody.

DARRELL CANNON: It was on November the 2nd, 1983, between the hours of 6:30, 7:00 in the morning. A group of all-white detectives invaded my apartment, where I stayed with my common-law wife and my son. They kicked open the door, and they cursed her out. They searched for me. They finally found me. They gave me my clothes. They ransacked the entire apartment, found nothing. They took me downstairs, placed me on my knees in front of the vestibule, until the rest of the detectives had searched other apartments. Then they came down, put me in a car. They drove around looking for another guy that they say was complicit in this particular crime. After they didn’t find him, they took me to the police station. I stayed there for a short period of time.

They took me out of the police station. They took me to a restaurant that caters to truckers and police officers. They left me double-handcuffed in the back seat of a defective car while they went in and had breakfast. They came out from breakfast. They took me to a remote area, where they drove through a pipe, came out on the opposite end of an isolated area where there was nothing but water and railroad tracks around. They got me out the backseat of the car, and they proceeded to ask me some more questions about a homicide that had took place. I told them I had no knowledge about the homicide.

They then did a mock hanging, where I’m cuffed behind my back and one of the detectives would get on the bumper of the detective car, the other two detectives would lift me up to him, and he would grab my handcuffs from behind. They would let me go. That will cause my arms to go up backwards, almost wrenching the inside my shoulders. That method went on for—I don’t know how long. But eventually, it wasn’t successful, because of the fact that there was a fine-mist rain out that morning, and John Byrne, which is the tallest detective, he kept slipping off the back of the bumper.

They did switch to a second torture treatment, which was the shotgun, where they got their shotgun, pump shotgun, out the back—out the trunk of the car, and Peter Dignan, which is another one of the detectives, the most vicious one out of all of them, he proceeded to ask me some more questions about the murder and to tell me what they knew had already occurred and wanted me to fill in the gaps. I refused to do so. He took a shotgun shell, showed it to me, and his exact words were, “Listen, nigger”—and that’s when he turned his back to me. I heard a clicking sound, which seemed like it was the shell being placed in the chamber. He turned back around to face me, I no longer seeing a shotgun shell. So they continued to ask me questions. I refused to answer. One of them said, “Go ahead, blow that nigger’s head off.” And that’s when Peter Dignan forced the shotgun in my mouth. And he said, “You’re not going to tell me what I want to hear? You’re not going to tell me?” I said, “No.” And that’s when he pulled the trigger. They did a mock execution three times. The third time they did it, when I heard the trigger pull, in my mind, I thought he was blowing the back of my head off, because the hair on the back of my head stood straight up when I heard that click.

By them not being successful in getting what they wanted out of me, they then did a third treatment, which was they put me in the backseat of a detective car. They unhandcuffed my cuffs from behind, put them in front. John Byrne had a gun to my head and told me, “Don’t move,” when they redid the handcuffs. They put me sideways in the backseat of a detective car and made me lay down across the seat. They pulled my pants and my shorts down, and that’s when Byrne took an electric cattle prod, turned it on, and proceeded to shock me on my testicles. They did this what seems like forever with me, but it wasn’t that long. At one point, I was able to kick the cattle prod out of the detective’s hands, and that knocked the batteries out. He got the batteries, put them back in. One of them tried to take his feet and put it on top of one of my feet, the other one did the same thing, to stop me from kicking. Then this is when they started using the electric cattle prod on me again, while telling me that they knew that I wasn’t the one they wanted, but I had information that could lead them to the other person that they wanted. They continued to do this until finally I agreed to tell them anything they wanted to hear. Anything. It didn’t matter to me. You know, if they said, “Did your mother do it?” “Yes, yes, yes.” Because the diabolical treatment that I received was such that I had never in my life experienced anything like this. I didn’t even know anything like this here existed in the United States.

You know, it wasn’t until years later that I heard about torture in Chile and other places. This was after I was in the penitentiary. And it was amazing to me that these things had previously happened to me here in the United States, and the more we screamed about it, the less people cared to do anything about it. You know, and to this day, it is still amazing to me that there is a statute of limitation in the United States on torture, but there is not a statute dealing with arson and other things of this nature here. So, they should not be able to hide behind any kind of alleged statute. Wrong is wrong. Right is right. What these despicable detectives did could never be justified in the United States under any shape, form or fashion.

AMY GOODMAN: Darrell Cannon, what happened after they took you to this isolated area and tortured you in these various ways? Where did they then bring you?

DARRELL CANNON: What? The torture site?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes. Where did they—

DARRELL CANNON: Is that—OK, the—

AMY GOODMAN: You were held in this car. They tortured you in various ways. Then what happened?

DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am. From there, they took me back to the police station. Before we went to the police station, they drove around again, looking for another guy that they said participated in this. To me, it seemed like they wanted to keep me away from the police station all day. Keep in mind, they arrested me at a quarter to 7:00 in the morning. Their shift was over with at 7:00 a.m., but yet and still, they didn’t leave my presence until probably well after 3:00 that afternoon.

Why was that necessary? I was already in custody. They had other detectives involved in the case, anyway. It was just a thing where they had fun. They had fun torturing me, and they lost track of what time it was, as a process of this. And like I said, to keep me away from the police station was did intentionally, because I’m pretty sure that they knew that my common-law wife had called an attorney. An attorney probably had came down to the police station looking for me. But until they were finished doing what they wanted to do with me, they didn’t want any interference.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, did you tell your attorney what had happened then?

DARRELL CANNON: I agreed to everything they said. You know, in fact, they had already told me that they didn’t deem me as a perpetrator, but they felt that I knew who the perpetrator was. And I kept telling them I didn’t. As a result from having been tortured in the manner in which I was and them feeding me various information, it got to the point where I started speaking back to them what they had already spoke to me. And as a result of that, that evening, a state’s attorney came in, along with the detectives that was involved in my torture, and spoke to me about the alleged crime. And afterwards, I repeated to that particular state’s attorney everything that the detectives had been told and everything that I had repeated back to the detectives.

AMY GOODMAN: But did you tell your—

DARRELL CANNON: As a result from that, I was charged with murder.

AMY GOODMAN: And did you tell your lawyer what the police, what the detectives, what Burge had done to you? Had you told your lawyer about the torture?

DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am. I wasn’t allowed to see my lawyer until the following day, on November 3rd. I went to court, and before I came out before the judge, my attorney came back to the bullpen. And at that time, I told him what had happened to me the day before. He instructed me not to talk about it or say anything else, that he would deal with it in court at a later date. Then he went on to tell me that the hearing that we was getting ready to go before the judge was just a preliminary hearing to read off the charges and to ask me how I pled. And I pled not guilty.

AMY GOODMAN: You were convicted, though, of murder?

DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am.

AMY GOODMAN: And how long did you serve in prison?

DARRELL CANNON: I ended up doing twenty-three-and-a-half years in prison, with the last nine of those twenty-three-and-a-half years did in solitary confinement in an institution called Tamms Supermax.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you end up there?

DARRELL CANNON: The system felt like it was better to put me in a place to keep me quiet, because throughout the last twenty-some years, I’ve continuously raised the issue about having been tortured. I was having hearings. So Tamms was designed for, quote, “the worst of the worst” in the Illinois prison system, even though my record does not indicate that I am the worst of the worst. I’ve never harmed the staff or inmates, anything else. But that was the justification for putting me in Tamms. And in Tamms, reporters are not allowed to come and visit you. You weren’t allowed to have phone calls. So that was a way of probably trying to hush me up.

AMY GOODMAN: You got out in 2004, because prosecutors—

DARRELL CANNON: No, ma’am. No, ma’am. 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: But in 2004, the prosecutors dismissed the case based on these allegations of torture?

DARRELL CANNON: Yes, ma’am. But the parole board refused to release me. The parole board took the banner up and decided that I must have been complicity in some type of way in the alleged crime, so they considered me to be a parole violation, even though there was no evidence of such. So it took me additional few years fighting the parole board in federal court before I finally won. And that’s how I got out in 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: Flint Taylor, can you put this in the context of the four men that were on death row that eventually led to what we’re seeing today and the moratorium on the death penalty that was eventually imposed in Illinois by the former governor, George Ryan?

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, there was a very significant victory for the convergence of two movements here in the city of Chicago—the human rights movement, the movement against torture, and the movement against the death penalty. And what happened was that Ryan became convinced not only that men should not be given the death penalty and should not be on death row, but that there were innocent men among those on death row and that they were innocent partially because they had been tortured into giving false confessions. And that’s why he pardoned the four men that he pardoned, at the same time that he cleared death row and gave—commuted the sentences of 164 men and women that were on death row at that time to life without parole. There have been many significant victories here, not the least of which is the indictment of Jon Burge and the fact that he’s actually going to trial.

But, Amy, it’s important to understand this case in the context, as Darrell mentioned, not only internationally, but nationally. We sit here in Chicago actually prosecuting a torturer. That hasn’t happened nationally. The administration hasn’t seen fit to even give serious investigation to people like Cheney and Rove and those who tortured across this world in our name. And in the same way that the conscience of this country cannot be cleansed without proper prosecutions of those who approved and participated in torture in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and places like that, the conscience of the city of Chicago cannot be cleansed until there’s a complete dealing with all of the issues of torture, starting with the mayor, on all the way down, and starting with the men behind bars and starting with all the men that need to be prosecuted. So there has to be an understanding that what we’re dealing with here is a microcosm of what’s going on and isn’t going on nationally, in terms of prosecutions, in terms of restorative justice, in terms of dealing with the victims and the survivors of torture, and compelling the court system and the powers that be to deal responsibly and thoroughly and in a just manner with the whole scope of torture as an issue, both nationally and locally.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Michael McDermott, explain who he is, one of the chief prosecution witnesses.

FLINT TAYLOR: Well, all these years, the first time that anyone who worked with Burge came forward in any form was in 1989. And they—a detective anonymously wrote me and my partners, while we were on trial in a civil torture case, and told us about other victims of torture and told us that other men, including those who tortured Darrell, were participants in this ring of torture. That started our investigation, and it started us to unpeel the 110 victims of torture that we know about today. But no one—that man or woman didn’t come forward publicly. It was an anonymous contact. It was anonymous letters. And we never knew who that person was.

It wasn’t until 2004, after the men were pardoned and we had lawsuits for them, that we were able to go out and talk to retired detectives who were black, and they told us, now that they had retired, that they knew certain things. They had seen the torture box. They knew it was an open secret. They heard screaming. But Burge kept them out of the loop, because he knew—because they were African American, he didn’t trust them with the secret of the torture.

However, when the government investigated the case recently, with the power of immunity, the grant of immunity, they were able to get this white detective, who had been involved in several cases of where torture was alleged, including one that—of a victim who was going to testify for the government, and they gave him immunity, and apparently, although we haven’t seen the transcript, he reluctantly told what he knew about this incident of torture and perhaps others. Now, he is not a voluntary witness. He is not a happy witness. He is very scared. But we’re have hopeful that his testimony will be significant in terms of finally revealing at least one instance of torture from the inside and breaking the code of silence in that way. And if it is, and that’s what his testimony is, then it’s going to be obviously a significant crack in the conspiracy or code of silence.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. We will certainly follow this trial. It begins today, the trial of Jon Burge, not for torture, but for perjury and obstruction of justice. Flint Taylor, thanks for being us, attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago, and Darrell Cannon, who was one of the torture victims of Jon Burge’s whole group. Darrell Cannon served more than two decades in prison.

Medical Apartheid

There is a dark history of medical experimentation on African people from the Black Germans during the holocaust to the original recipients of German racial wrath in Namibia and the genocide they committed there before the Jewish Holocaust. See videos below and for the transcript in PDF for sharing you can get it from  the Articles Section.



Student Strike at University of Puerto Rico Enters 28th Day.

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Student Strike at University of Puerto Rico Enters 28th Day

In Puerto Rico, an ongoing strike by students at the University of Puerto Rico is coming to a head. Riot police have surrounded the main gates of the university’s main campus and are trying to break the strike by denying food and water to students who have occupied the campus inside. The strike began nearly four weeks ago in response to budget cuts at the university of more than $100 million. On Thursday, a mass assembly of more than 3,000 students voted overwhelmingly to continue the strike. The next day, riot police seized control of the main campus gates. We go now to Puerto Rico, inside the occupied campus at the university.

Guests:

Giovanni Roberto, student at the University of Puerto Rico and a spokesperson for the striking students.

Christopher Powers, professor of comparative literature at University of Puerto Rico.

AMY GOODMAN: In Puerto Rico, an ongoing strike by students at the University of Puerto Rico is coming to a head. Riot police have surrounded the main gates of the university and are trying to break the strike by denying food and water to students who have occupied the campus inside.

The strike began nearly four weeks ago in response to budget cuts at the university of more than $100 million. Students called on the administration to reconsider the cuts and sought guarantees, such as no fee increases and no privatization of campus services. Students initially called for a forty-eight-hour strike, but more than three weeks later the strike continues and has spread to ten out of eleven campuses. On Thursday, a mass assembly of more than 3,000 students voted overwhelmingly to continue the strike. The next day, riot police seized control of the main campus gates.

The striking students have received widespread support from professors at the university, as well as unions around the country. Crowds have gathered outside the university gates, where police have encircled the striking students inside. Parents, family members, other supporters have tried to throw bottles of water and food over the fence to support the strikers.

We go now to Puerto Rico inside the occupied campus at the university, where we’re joined by Giovanni Roberto, a student at the University of Puerto Rico and a spokesperson for the striking students. We’re also joined by a professor at the university, outside the campus, who’s supporting the students. Christopher Powers is a professor of comparative literature at UPR. He joins us on the phone.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Giovanni, we’ll begin with you. Describe the scene right now and what your demands are.

GIOVANNI ROBERTO: Hi, Amy, and hi, people watching.

Our first—our main demand was that we reject certification of the trustees of the university that tried to limit the tuition waivers to students. Especially they tried to make people that have a Pell Grant or other economic help not to be part of the tuition waiver, which in the University of Puerto Rico, which is a public university, most of students have economic aids in order to go to the university and study. So we identify that the administration, what they wanted to do is to attack especially poor students, trying to limit their right to have a tuition waiver.

Right now in the university, we are inside. We remain for more than twenty-seven days on strikes. We are occupying the whole campuses. As you say, ten out of eleven campuses are shut down by students. Inside the university is calm. We are—we have been receiving a lot of people outside the fences helping us to resist the possibility of the police to get in.

Since the first day, the administration demonstrate no will to negotiate with students. Our first demand was that they’re beginning to negotiate. We only want to negotiate with the administration our demands. We have been working for more than one year. And after that, we have no other solution than to go on strike, as we’re doing now, trying to push the administration to negotiate. And they only use the force. They’re trying to get the police in and trying to make us get out. And that’s one of the demands.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me bring Professor Powers into this, professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Can you talk about the scene there, as well, the students outside, the professors—the students inside, the professors outside?

CHRISTOPHER POWERS: Yes. Well, thank you for having me on the show.

I’m a professor at the Mayagüez campus of the UPR, so I’m not in San Juan right now. But I can report that the strike is being maintained at all of the eleven campuses—that’s a minor correction—because the eleventh campus was closed today by the staff union, which represents about 2,000 maintenance workers in the system. The staff union has also closed the administrative buildings, the central administrative buildings located in the botanical gardens, this morning. They moved in heavy machinery, closing the gates, and have called for a weeklong strike in support of the students. So all of the campuses are closed right now. And the union is calling for the closure, as well, of auxiliary institutions, as well. So the strike has indeed spread to the entire system.

It has also sparked widespread support on the part of professors, for one, but also the broad public. Parents are involved in supporting the students in an unprecedented way compared with the strikes in the past. The use of force to close the main campus has sparked wide sympathy with the students. It should also be noted that the University of Puerto Rico is a university of 64,000 students. It’s the largest university in the Caribbean. And it’s also the premier institution of higher learning in the country. It’s considered part of the cultural patrimony of the island. It has produced the island’s best and brightest. And in the context of the colonial status of the island, in which historically so much of Puerto Rican—Puerto Rico’s resources have been sold out to foreigners, the UPR is widely regarded as the last best resource that the nation has to keep. So attack on the integrity of the institution, the restriction of access for working-class students, and the fears of privatization of the university have sparked very wide public support.

AMY GOODMAN: Who controls the budget exactly, I mean, in relation—for people on the mainland in the United States, given the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico?

CHRISTOPHER POWERS: Right. Well, the budget of the university is controlled by the presidency and the board of trustees. According to a law from 1966, 9.6 percent of the income into the general funds of Puerto Rico are to be used by the university. However, the current conservative, pro-statehood New Progressive Party government issued a law called “Law No. 7,” which is widely unpopular on the island, which gave them emergency powers to effect fiscal measures. And this law has been implemented in the, oh, year-and-a-half or so of the Fortuño administration to lay off public workers, and now it’s been applied to deny funds that have been historically available to the university. This has caused a deficit which could be $100 million or more, although those are based on estimates at this point.

At any rate, the austerity measures that the board of trustees and the presidency are trying to impose have been disproportionately directed at students, professors and staff and have not at all touched the bloated budgets for the central administration and the chancellors’ offices. So there’s a very—you know, a sense of injustice and unfairness in the application of the austerity measures, and the students are not taking it. They have maintained the strike and haven’t budged from the camps that they’ve set up at the gates of the various universities.

It’s a very multi-sectorial movement, the students. It’s not just the traditional activists who are protesting. The tuition waivers that Giovanni was mentioning apply to groups like athletes and musicians, so these students are also involved in the protests. It’s a very exciting movement. And the mood is quite electric. And the students, like I’ve said, have inspired a lot of inspiration and support on the part of the population. There’s a phrase circulating now that this new generation of students is the basta ya generation, the “enough is enough” generation.

AMY GOODMAN: Giovanni Roberto, what are your plans now, with the SWAT teams having moved in? Where do you go from here?

GIOVANNI ROBERTO: Well, we’re still demanding the administration to negotiate, actually. I think the general strike called for tomorrow is a good step forward in order to push the administration and push the government, as part of that administration, to sit down in the table of negotiation. We’re only demanding that we need to negotiate our demands.

Right now, we’re going to still have—we’re going to continue to strike. We are not going to let us intimidate by the police. We know that if the people remain supporting us, as they have been doing for the last three weeks, we don’t think the police are going to get in or try to get in, because that will be a political—a serious political problem for the government, because we think that all that support, in water and food or in picket lines in front of the university, will transform in mass mobilization in this country. And that’s what we’re hoping, that all of that solidarity that have been expressed in different ways in the last three weeks transform, today and tomorrow and the rest of the weeks, in mass mobilization and mass protest, especially in the strike of tomorrow. So we are going to remain on strike, and we’re going to continue asking negotiation with the administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you had support from students on the mainland United States? And what have been the effect, for example, of the student protests in California? Have you been following them, Giovanni?

GIOVANNI ROBERTO: Yeah, we received a letter of students and professors of Berkeley and CUNY in New York, from Canada, from Spain, from Venezuela, and from other countries, from República Dominicana. We have received international attention, because, like in California, we are receiving attacks, a budget cuts attack. And we think that the defense of the public university obviously is not only here in Puerto Rico; it’s an international fight against privatization and against things that affect students. So, obviously, what happened in California affects us. Before the strike, we made two occupations of two faculties, in some way inspired by what’s happened in Berkeley and the fight that Berkeley was having there. So I think for them to us and from our fight to them, there’s a relationship between our fight and an inspiration, a mutual inspiration, right now.

AMY GOODMAN: I understand there was a father who was trying to bring food to his son, a student inside, who was attacked. Giovanni Roberto, what happened?

GIOVANNI ROBERTO: Yeah, he was trying to get in bread and water, which is in the morning for breakfast, and the police attacked him and pushed him to the ground and then arrested him in front of all the students. We have a video of that. That same day, in the morning, too, another student was trying to get in, and the police attacked the student, pushed him to the ground, hit him while he was on the ground, and then arrested him. That happened two days, yesterday, happened again with artists that wanted to get food inside the university—actors, singers, famous Puerto Rican singers. They didn’t allow them to get food, and they had to throw it over the fences in order to get the water inside the university. There’s a law that don’t allow any food or water to get in, according to a judge.

So, right now the situation is tense outside. We have more food than ever. That’s important to people to know. We are creating ways to get food and water inside. And the solidarity of the people is so impressed that now we have food like for two weeks. So even there you see the picture. No matter the police, what try the police, we know that we’re going to continue the strike and that we’re going to win this strike. We have the whole country on our side. We have the right to do this. And we are defending only public education, public university. That’s not a crime. One of our slogans is that we are students, not—we’re not making crimes, you know? So—

AMY GOODMAN: Christopher Powers, the support of unions, can you talk about that, like the AFL-CIO?

CHRISTOPHER POWERS: Yes. Well, there’s a general strike called for tomorrow. This strike was called both by the coalition of unions, which includes the Change to Win, the Federation of Workers of Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican Workers Union representing a broad variety of the union groups and leaders. It’s also being called for by all of Puerto Rico for Puerto Rico. The spokesperson, Juan Vera, the Methodist bishop, called for massive support and all of the members of this coalition of community and religious groups, known for their involvement in the Free Vieques movement, to participate in the strike. And as I mentioned earlier, also the staff union of the university is going on strike for the entire week and closed down the central administration facilities, as well as auxiliary facilities. So the union support for the students is massive.

AMY GOODMAN: This is hardly getting attention on the mainland. Can you talk about that lack of press coverage?

CHRISTOPHER POWERS: Well, I suppose one could relate that to— again, to the colonial status of Puerto Rico. This is really, I think, in my opinion, a very important struggle, in that the University of Puerto Rico is more important for Puerto Rico than, say, public universities in the States are for their states. And so, what is happening now is that the students are defending the right to a quality public education, that they are staying firm in the face of the attack on the integrity of the institution, the restriction of access for working-class students, and they are really serving as a model, as Eduardo Galeano wrote in a message of support to the students. He says that they are showing the shining path towards the future, while the rest of the world gets used to what is already there.

AMY GOODMAN: Christopher Powers, we’ll have to leave it there, professor at the University of Puerto Rico. Giovanni Roberto, student, one of the student leaders of the strike, speaking to us from inside the campus that they are occupying. Tomorrow, a major strike called across Puerto Rico, and of course we will cover it.

Detroit Police Kill 7-Year-Old Girl in Her Own Home

“You Got Bailed Out We Got Sold Out” – Thousands Protest on Wall Street.

DEMOCRACY NOW!

Thousands of people turned out for a protest on Wall Street Thursday to denounce the taxpayer-funded bailout and the role of large financial firms in the nation’s economic crisis. A coalition of union and community groups organized the march as the Senate opened debate on a measure to overhaul financial regulation.

AMY GOODMAN: In New York, thousands of workers and union leaders marched on Wall Street Thursday to express their outrage over the recession, predatory lending practices, and the federal response to the crisis. Independent journalist Brandon Jordan was on the scene and filed this report for DEMOCRACY NOW!.

BRANDON JORDAN: Approximately 10,000 people marched to Wall Street in protest of job losses, home foreclosures, questionable lending practices, and the tax-funded bailout of financial institutions. Before the announced rally, over 100 protesters disrupted the lobbies of two bank offices. Demonstrators entered the JPMorgan Chase office on Park avenue. [CHANTING]

PROTEST SPEAKER: JPMorgan Chase helped cause the great recession in many ways, including in issuing over $295.3 billion in subprime loans from 2005-2007. Through direct organization and investments. [CHANTING]

BRANDON JORDAN: The group then proceeded to the Seagram Building, which houses the offices of Wells Fargo and Wachovia. [CHANTING]

PROTEST SPEAKER: Wells Fargo helped cause the great recession in many ways including organizing [Inaudible] $74.2 billion worth of subprime loans.

JOSEPH FERDINAND: We tried e-mail, snail mail, phone calls, and it’s as though we didn’t exist. So, we took it up a notch and we came to them.

BRANDON JORDAN: At 4:00 p.m. as Wall Street’s closing bell sounded, thousands of workers rallied at City Hall in downtown Manhattan.

JACK AHERN: Americans are left counting pennies while the bankers are counting billions, and that just ain’t right.

BRANDON JORDAN: Following an hour rally. The crowd then marched down Broadway, past Wall Street to Bowling Green.

PROTESTORS CHANTING: You got bailed out. We got soldout. You got bailed out. We got soldout.

REV. LISA ROBINSON: As I talk to you, I have been served with foreclosure papers. So I’m here demanding that something be done. They came to the little people to be bailed out. Now it’s time for Wall Street to step up and do something for the people to help us maintain what we have. The main message is, stop predatory lending. We need jobs. Stop these astronomical interest rates and help the people that got you where you are today.

PROTESTOR: We’re down here to let the banks know that we’re tired of their mess.

BRANDON JORDAN: The rally was organized by a large coalition including National People’s action, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, moveon.org, and several community groups.