Point / Counter Point - " What if the NFL Played by Teachers' Rules? "

In the past, I have posted some info on the problems with our education system. We spend more per student than most any other country and we still wind up with students who rank 25th in the world, falling behind countries like Poland and Luxembourg.

Why aren't US Students the best ??

The education system has changed radically since my generation was educated and not for the better. There has been too much effort devoted to "social education ' and not enough to the basics that every child needs to be able to think and reason. The largest Unions in our country are Teacher's Unions and they are like any other Union, only devoted to preserving " The Union " and not very interested in the welfare or education of our students, regardless of what they state.

I could go on for a bit but I felt it best to host a POINT / COUNTER POINT debate.

Frank Tarketon wrote the first piece as an OPED in the Wall Street Journal. He is a a NFL Hall of Fame quarterback with the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Giants from 1961 to 1978, is an entrepreneur who runs two websites devoted to small business education.

The response comes from James Marshall Crotty, a FORBES magazine contributor who specializes in educational issues. Take a read and decide for yourself.

All I know is what we are doing presently is NOT working and to feel that to continue to throw more money at the issue is NOT solving anything. There has to be accountability for the failure to achieve the results desired. The big question is HOW do we achieve it??

What if the NFL Played by Teachers' Rules?
Imagine a league where players who make it through three seasons could never be cut from the roster
By FRAN TARKENTON - OPINION / Wall Street Journal

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league. It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

Let's face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?

No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.

Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real -life American public education system. Teachers' salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn't rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they've been teaching. That's it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you're demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation's children.

Inflation-adjusted spending per student in the United States has nearly tripled since 1970. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, we spend more per student than any nation except Switzerland, with only middling results to show for it.

Over the past 20 years, we've been told that a big part of the problem is crumbling schools—that with new buildings and computers in every classroom, everything would improve. But even though spending on facilities and equipment has more than doubled since 1989 (again adjusted for inflation), we're still not seeing results, and officials assume the answer is that we haven't spent enough.

These same misguided beliefs are front and center in President Obama's jobs plan, which includes billions for "public school modernization." The popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. We've been spending billions of dollars on school modernization for decades, and I suspect we could keep on doing it until the end of the world, without much in the way of academic results. The only beneficiaries are the teachers unions.

Some reformers, including Bill Gates, are finally catching on that our federally centralized, union-created system provides no incentive for better performance. If anything, it penalizes those who work hard because they spend time, energy and their own money to help students, only to get the same check each month as the worst teacher in the district (or an even smaller one, if that teacher has been there longer). Is it any surprise, then, that so many good teachers burn out or become disenchanted?

Perhaps no other sector of American society so demonstrates the failure of government spending and interference. We've destroyed individual initiative, individual innovation and personal achievement, and marginalized anyone willing to point it out. As one of my coaches used to say, "You don't get vast results with half-vast efforts!"

The results we're looking for are students learning, so we need to reward great teachers who show they can make that happen—and get rid of bad teachers who don't get the job done. It's what we do in every other profession: If you're good, you get rewarded, and if you're not, then you look for other work. It's fine to look for ways to improve the measuring tools, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Our rigid, top-down, union-dictated system isn't working. If results are the objective, then we need to loosen the reins, giving teachers the ability to fulfill their responsibilities to students to the best of their abilities, not to the letter of the union contract and federal standards.

Mr. Tarkenton, a NFL Hall of Fame quarterback with the Minnesota Vikings and the New York Giants from 1961 to 1978, is an entrepreneur who runs two websites devoted to small business education


What if the NFL Played by Teachers' Rules?
James Marshall Crotty - Forbes Contibutor

And you thought Hall of Fame NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton could just scramble away from would-be tacklers. Turns out that “The Mad Scrambler” is a mad scribbler too. In an October 3 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, the former Vikings and Giants star, and successful serial entrepreneur, persuasively and succinctly argues for an NFL-style teacher retention and reward system based on in-classroom performance.

Surely, he must realize that several million teachers are fans of professional football. In fact, several high school teachers I’ve known coach high school football. I don’t think “Frantic Fran” is going to get many invitations to speak at teacher’s union banquets anytime soon.

Yet, precisely because of the studied resistance he will get, Tarkenton is showing the same courage post-football that he clearly demonstrated in his storied gridiron career. The question I have for all of you is whether Mr. Tarkenton’s analogy holds. Should teachers be treated like professional football players, whose salaries, job security, and other perks are determined almost exclusively based on individual performance metrics, regardless of the quality of their management, stadiums, equipment, coaching, practice facility, the quality and ambition of their fellow players, their level of fan support, age, health, competition, weather, whether they primarily play indoors or outdoors, or sundry other factors that might empirically affect their performance?

What’s more, how do we ascertain the quality of a teacher? Are there pedagogical equivalents for football’s tackles, sacks, pancake blocks, rushing yards, passing yards, completions, catches, and touchdowns, let alone wins and losses? I know such a metric would make picking and choosing teachers a lot simpler, but is there something ineffable in the teaching and learning process that resists such easy statistical measurement? Especially when teaching success seems to depend so mightily on the quality and drive of the student material one is given?

I totally agree with Mr. Tarkenton that the billions that Mr. Obama plans to spend on “public school modernization” is akin to dressing up the ballroom on the RMS Titanic. It will not appreciably move the needle on student learning. And I also agree, as an inner city educator who had to invest his own resources in providing basic services and supplies to a debate team I coached, that teachers are not properly rewarded for such outsized initiative (Mr. Tarkenton, if you want to throw financial support behind my important work teaching debate to at-risk black and Hispanic teens, I am ready to make that reception).

I disagree, however, with Mr. Tarkenton that the root cause of this country’s declining academic performance rests primarily in bad teachers. Rather, I think the root cause lies in families of origin, where the critical thinking, reading, and listening skills so essential to success in a global high-tech economy, need to be modeled from the earliest possible age. When parents engage in lifelong learning, their children follow suit. There’s only so much a star athlete, star coach, and star teacher can do to achieve excellence when those he is working for, or working with, do not share the same no-excuses commitment to excellence.

Taking Teachers off the " Sainthood " pedestal and holding them accountable for their work, just like any other professional.

Name the most powerful union in the state of Massachusetts ? The Teamsters ? NOPE....The Public Employees Unions ? Nope.... The Teachers ? YOU GOT IT.

In Massachusetts there is no more powerful Union than the Teachers. While I understand the value of education, the manner in which Teachers have been elevated to " Sainthood " and to be above review by taxpayers defies logic. We pay more per pupil for education in the State of Massachusetts and in return, we get "Meh" for results.

Governor Deval " Spend it all" Patrick and his pal the " Empty Suit ' in the White House want to throw more money at an issue that we have already inundated with cash to no real gain.

The main reason is that the Teachers Unions and the Administrators placed themselves above reproach. They have told us that being a teacher is a thankless task, they have to do soooo much with soooo little, all the while, in reality, we've been giving teachers, administrators and school systems more money than ever. Don't get me wrong, there are GOOD teachers but there are some really god-awful ones and there are more of the latter than the former.

Like any other system, without checks and balances, how can we tell what we are getting back from our educators?? Do Teachers work hard ? YES, they do. But so do many others, with just as much importance to society and without 2 weeks off at Christmas, a Winter break, a Spring break and 10 weeks off for the Summer. And let's not forget " Teacher conference days " that happen 10 times a year.

The problem is that we allowed the UNIONS to build up this idea of the " Teacher as Saint" and no one has been monitoring the work they do. When grades plummeted, we heard a litany of reason like bad parents, too much TV, etc. They used distraction to pull attention that for the last 20 years, we have not had the best educators assisting our children, and without regular reviews, they have been without proper guidance. Any worker who isn't reviewed by a boss on a regular basis will have lower performance. Teachers are no different.

At the same time, we've added a lot more " Administrators " to the public sector in school systems and they don't contribute anything but more drag to a slow moving system. You need more classroom strength and less fat-arses sitting in offices waiting for retirement.

In the BOSTON GLOBE today was this tripe:

"As state education leaders prepare to vote tomorrow on a sweeping overhaul of the way administrators and teachers are evaluated, local school officials say one key area remains a concern: finding time for overburdened principals to actually do the evaluations."

Well any manager in any other workplace will tell you that they have very little time to spend on evaluating staff BUT that is part of being a BOSS....to cry about it just because you now HAVE to do it in school systems is pretty shallow. Get over yourself School Administators, as all of us in management have been dealing with this same issue for YEARS.

So in the end, we wasted taxpayers money, placed Teachers on a pedestal (whether they were good, bad or indifferent) and allowed the Greedy Union types to game the system. All to the detriment of our country and the education of future generations.

Well as much as the recession has brought misery to far too many, it has also fiscally forced the hands of our school systems to start evaluating those who teach our children. I hope they use a better evaluation than the system they created to teach children with as if the system to evaluate is as bad as the rest of the administrative schlock they have used, we'll get more " Meh " out of an already faulty system of educating our Children.

Teacher Grades: Pass or Be Fired
By SAM DILLON - NY TIMES
Published: June 27, 2011

WASHINGTON — Emily Strzelecki, a first-year science teacher here, was about as eager for a classroom visit by one of the city’s roving teacher evaluators as she would be to get a tooth drilled. “It really stressed me out because, oh my gosh, I could lose my job,” Ms. Strzelecki said.

Her fears were not unfounded: 165 Washington teachers were fired last year based on a pioneering evaluation system that places significant emphasis on classroom observations; next month, 200 to 600 of the city’s 4,200 educators are expected to get similar bad news, in the nation’s highest rate of dismissal for poor performance.

The evaluation system, known as Impact, is disliked by many unionized teachers but has become a model for many educators. Spurred by President Obama and his $5 billion Race to the Top grant competition, some 20 states, including New York, and thousands of school districts are overhauling the way they grade teachers, and many have sent people to study Impact.

Its admirers say the system, a centerpiece of the tempestuous three-year tenure of Washington’s former schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, has brought clear teaching standards to a district that lacked them and is setting a new standard by establishing dismissal as a consequence of ineffective teaching.

But some educators say it is better at sorting and firing teachers than at helping struggling ones; they note that the system does not consider socioeconomic factors in most cases and that last year 35 percent of the teachers in the city’s wealthiest area, Ward 3, were rated highly effective, compared with 5 percent in Ward 8, the poorest.

“Teachers have to be parents, priests, lawyers, clothes washers, babysitters and a bunch of other things” if they work with low-income children, said Nathan Saunders, president of the Washington Teachers Union. “Impact takes none of those roles into account, so it can penalize you just for teaching in a high-needs school.”

Jason Kamras, the architect of the system, said “it’s too early to answer” whether Impact makes it easier for teachers in well-off neighborhoods to do well, but pointed out that Washington’s compensation system offers bigger bonuses ($25,000 versus $12,500) and salary enhancements in high-poverty schools.

“We take very seriously the distribution of high-quality teachers across the system,” he said.

The evaluation system leans heavily on student test scores to judge about 500 math and reading teachers in grades four to eight. Ratings for the rest of the city’s 3,600 teachers are determined mostly by five classroom observations annually, three by their principal and two by so-called master educators, most recruited from outside Washington.

For classroom observations, nine criteria — “explain content clearly,” “maximize instructional time” and “check for student understanding,” for example — are used to rate the lesson as highly effective, effective, minimally effective or ineffective.

These five observations combine to form 75 percent of these teachers’ overall ratings; the rest is based on achievement data and the teachers’ commitment to their school communities. Ineffective teachers face dismissal. Minimally effective ones get a year to improve.

Impact costs the city $7 million a year, including pay for 41 master educators, who earn about $90,000 a year and conduct about 170 observations each. The program also asks more of principals. Carolyne Albert-Garvey, the principal of Maury Elementary School on Capitol Hill, has 22 teachers — she must conduct 66 observations, about one every three school days.

“I’ve really gotten to know my staff, and I’m giving teachers more specific feedback,” Ms. Albert-Garvey said. “It’s empowered me to have the difficult conversations, and that gives everyone the opportunity to improve.”

Several teachers, however, said they considered their ratings unfair.

A veteran teacher who said he did not want to criticize the school system openly, said that a month after he inherited a chaotic world history class from a long-term substitute, the visiting evaluator cut him no slack for taking on the assignment and penalized him because a student was texting during the lesson.

Another teacher who expects to lose her job next month because of low ratings said at a public hearing that evaluators picked apart her seventh-grade geography lessons, making criticisms she considered trivial. During the most recent observation, her evaluator subtracted points because she had failed to notice a girl eating during class, the teacher said.

“I’m 25 years in the system, and before, I always got outstanding ratings,” she said. “How can you go overnight from outstanding to minimally effective?”

A report issued by the Aspen Institute in March said one of Impact’s accomplishments was to align teacher performance with student performance, noting that previously 95 percent of Washington’s teachers were highly rated but fewer than half of its students were demonstrating proficiency on tests. Still, the report quoted teachers who complained of cold-eyed evaluators more interested in identifying losers than in developing winners.

“After my first conversation with my master educator, I felt it was going to be worthwhile — she offered me some good resources,” the report quoted one teacher. “My second master educator was kind of a robot, not generous in offering assistance, a much tougher grader.”

This month, Mary Gloster, who taught science in three states before she was recruited to Impact in 2009, was at Ballou High, one of the city’s lowest-performing schools, to share the results of some classroom visits.

She met with Mahmood Dorosti, a physics teacher who won a $5,000 award this spring. “Don’t even think about it — you’re highly effective,” she told him.

Next was Ms. Strzelecki, 23, who came to Ballou through Teach for America. The two sat at adjoining desks, with Ms. Strzelecki looking a bit like a doe in the headlights.

But Ms. Gloster, who had watched her teach a ninth-grade biology lesson the week before, offered compliments, along with suggestions about how Ms. Strzelecki might provide differentiated teaching for advanced and struggling students.

“You did a really good job, kiddo,” the evaluator ruled, grading her as effective, the equivalent of a B (the same rating she got on previous observations).

“What I liked about Mary was that I felt she was on my side,” Ms. Strzelecki said later. “Some teachers feel the master educators are out to get them.”

That is a common perception, said Mark Simon, an education analyst for the Economic Policy Institute, which receives teachers’ union financing. Ms. Rhee developed the system, he noted, during tough contract negotiations and did not consult with the teachers’ union in its design.

“That was a missed opportunity,” Mr. Simon said, “and it’s created a lot of resentment.”

Providence Mayor, " we have a responsibility to balance our budget. We have a very difficult situation. It’s unprecedented."

Next door in Rhode Island, they have been hit pretty hard by the Recession....When Massachusetts had an unemployment rate of about 10% (with real unemployment at about 17% when you included underemployed), Rhode Island has an unemployment rate of 14% (real unemployment being about 22% for them), 2nd highest in the land except for Michigan.....Ouch!

The Mayor of Providence has had to move to much more drastic measures to get costs under control....The seniority system and how we employ Teachers does not allow us to keep the BEST Teachers, only those who have the highest seniority...That said, we also spend more per capita on students in the USA than any other country in the world and we only rate "Average" in the world for education.

The three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.

25th in MATH ?!?? Are you kidding me?? We need higher Math scores if we are to keep up with the other countries and continue to innovate.

So when people get irate at the idea of what the Providence Mayor is doing, I look at it and say it can't be that bad as the present system only reinforces lower performance for education....In this manner, the Providence Schools system will be able to keep the BEST teachers, not just the ones who have been there the longest.....

How long would you be employed at your job if year after year you were only rated as " average "....likely you would be out except in a public sector union where " average ' get reinforced.

NOW, we need to do the same for the ADMINISTRATORS as they are just as responsible for the low rating of our education system.....Send them packing too.


Providence teacher dismissals seen as blow to seniority system
01:00 AM EST on Saturday, February 26, 2011
By Linda Borg - Providence Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — No matter how you slice it, school experts say, the decision Thursday by the city School Board to notify teachers that they might be terminated at the end of the school year strikes at the heart of their union contract’s seniority system.

Mayor Angel Taveras says that the decision he recommended to the board is strictly about balancing the city and the School Department budgets. He says that termination will save money because teachers who are dismissed and not rehired will not end up in a substitute teaching pool.

But David V. Abbott, the state’s deputy education commissioner, said the difference between layoffs and dismissals is this: When a teacher is laid off under state statute, he or she is put on a recall list. Although that teacher is no longer working and no longer paid, that person exists in an employment “limbo.” The teacher hasn’t been actually dismissed.

If a job becomes available for which that teacher is qualified, that person must be rehired based on seniority.

“If you are laid off, you have the right of recall,” Abbott said Friday. “You still have one stick in your bundle. If I’m dismissed, I’m out of work and I need to be rehired.”

In effect, every teacher who is terminated has to reapply for his or her job as would any new teacher entering the system.

“It is a way to get around seniority,” said Tim Duffy, executive director of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees. “In order to give the administration the flexibility to recall the teachers they need, they had to give out dismissal notices.”

But Duffy also says that the shift from layoffs to dismissal notices moves Providence — and Rhode Island — into “uncharted territory.”

Will the dismissed teachers be entitled to a hearing before losing their jobs? What will an appeals process look like? Will the district have to state why each teacher is being dismissed?

“Termination for fiscal reasons,” he said, “is different from termination for ‘we don’t like you’ reasons.”

Duffy says that the mayor, whose schools face a $40-million budget shortfall next year, doesn’t have a lot of choices.

“The mayor is looking into the abyss,” he says. “He doesn’t have any options. The biggest driver in the city’s budget is education. You have to take a look at personnel costs.”

The termination process, Duffy says, gives Taveras a chance to consolidate schools and match teachers to the needs in each school.

But Taveras dismisses the common perception among teachers that his decision was motivated by a desire to eliminate seniority-based hiring.

“Why did I do this?” he said. “Because we have a responsibility to balance our budget. We have a very difficult situation. It’s unprecedented. That’s why we have taken an unprecedented step, even though it has caused turmoil.”

Taveras says that the city will let teachers know whether they’ll be able to keep their jobs as soon as possible. He also says that the city will do everything it can to make sure that the terminations do not damage teachers’ careers.

“This is not about ruining anyone’s future prospects,” he says. “It’s about getting our budget under control.”

Further complicating matters, Providence recently changed the way it fills vacancies. Starting last fall, teachers are no longer chosen for openings based solely on seniority. They have to submit to an interview process, held by the school principal and a team of colleagues. In addition, they have to submit a model lesson plan and a writing sample.

The goal is to select the best person for each position, not simply hire the most senior person for the job.

And statewide, the situation gets still more complicated in the months to come. Many other school districts may be altering the use of seniority in assigning teachers.

State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, in an October 2009 memo, informed districts that they can no longer base teacher assignments solely on seniority.

In a memo sent to school districts this week, Gist wrote that the state’s Basic Education Plan, which took effect July 1, 2010, “requires districts to recruit, hire and retain highly effective personnel based on student and district needs.”

“As I noted in my memo,” Gist wrote, “teacher assignments based solely on seniority cannot comply with this requirement. Under Rhode Island law, these are personnel-related considerations that must be used in the planning and implementation of a reduction in the teaching force for budgetary or program reasons.”

As teacher contracts come up for negotiation, districts will have to include new language that limits the role of seniority in hiring.

US fights to open school in Taliban area....U.S. troops to refurbish school "in friendship with the People of Afghanistan"

The educational indices of Afghanistan are among the lowest in the world.
Any effort to increase the level of literacy can only yield a better future for Afghanistan....

Fri, Dec. 31, 2010
US fights to open school in Taliban area
By TODD PITMAN
Associated Press

Over the past six months, U.S. troops have wrested the school away from insurgents. They have hired Afghan contractors to rebuild it, and lost blood defending it.
The tiny school has yet to open, and nobody's quite sure when it will.

American commanders have called the Pir Mohammed primary school "the premier development project" in Zhari district, a Taliban heartland in Kandahar province at the center of President Barack Obama's 30,000-soldier surge.

The small brick and stone complex represents much of what American forces are trying to achieve in Afghanistan: winning over a war-weary population, tying a people to their estranged government, bolstering Afghan forces so American troops can go home. But the struggle to open Pir Mohammed three years after the Taliban closed it shows the obstacles U.S. forces face in a complex counterinsurgency fight, in which success depends not on firepower, but on the support of a terrified people.

Similar battles are occurring across the country. In Marjah, for example, a former Taliban stronghold in neighboring Helmand province, several schools have opened since American-led troops overran the district in February. But many parents still are too afraid of violence and Taliban threats to let their children attend.

In Senjeray, too, "there are teachers ... and we've found them and talked to them," said Capt. Nick Stout, a company commander from the 101st Airborne Division's 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment. "We say, 'When the school's built, do you want to come teach?' And they say, 'No, no, I don't, not at all.'"

---

Perched amid majestic mountain crags at the base of a fertile river valley, the village of Senjeray resembles a walled fort, 10,000 people living in a labyrinth of steep, hardened mud walls.

Pir Mohammed sits at the southeastern edge of the village, a pair of modest, single-story buildings that once served hundreds, maybe thousands of children. A small plaque at the entrance engraved with black words on light gray marble indicates U.S. troops refurbished the school "in friendship with the People of Afghanistan" in November 2002, a year after the American-led invasion.

Canadians finished the school and opened it in 2005. But in 2007, Taliban fighters attacked it, breaking windows and wrenching doors from their hinges. They took away a dozen students, cut the fingers off some and killed the parents of others, said Bismallah Qari, a 30-year-old black-bearded mullah from Senjeray.

The Taliban opposes Western-style education, and apparently saw the school as a symbol of government authority. Qari said the Taliban also believed children would be forced to study Christianity there.

Since then, Senjeray's children have had only one place to go: a handful of Islamic madrassas run by conservative mullahs like Qari that some American commanders say are radicalizing a new generation of Afghan youth, turning them away from President Hamid Karzai's government and the NATO coalition.

Speaking through an interpreter as American troops searched a recently filled hole in his madrassa they suspected held a weapons cache, Qari said he wanted his kids to attend Pir Mohammed, too, but "we can't do it."

"The Taliban won't allow us to go there," he said. "They'll kill us; they'll kill our children."

---

Pir Mohammed occupies ground highly valued by the insurgency - part of a corridor the Taliban use to traffic arms and guerrillas through villages along the Arghandab River and into Kandahar city.

In April, American troops seized the school in a military operation backed by Afghan troops. They found it in ruins, its rooms reduced to toilets littered with needles, apparently for drug use.

When Stout's unit arrived in May, he deployed two platoons to protect the school around the clock. On their second day, a U.S. soldier was shot in the lung, but survived.

For weeks, firefights erupted almost daily.

U.S. engineers knocked down walls and trees nearby where insurgents hide. Afghan security forces set up checkpoints on surrounding roads. And armored American trucks stood guard to defend the school's crumbling outer walls.

The school itself was turned into a de facto military base: Stout's men stacked sandbags in the windows and installed machine gun nests on the rooftops. They filled rooms with metal boxes of ammunition and anti-tank rockets, and slept on cots inside it.

The American occupation drew the ire of village elders. In mid-July, more than 300 turbaned men from Senjeray urged the provincial governor to pressure the Americans to leave Pir Mohammed. Stout said that in meetings afterward, elders told him the Taliban had pressured them to do so. Nevertheless, they reiterated the plea, and made a crucial promise in return.

"They were saying, 'Look, if you get out of the school, we'll protect the school,'" Stout recalled. "They said, 'We got it. We'll keep attacks from happening. And people will go there.'"

Withdrawing, in fact, was exactly what Stout wanted. It fit with the wider strategy of letting Afghan forces take on security, and freed Stout's troops to secure more ground elsewhere.

So the American platoons pulled out in mid-August, leaving their Afghan counterparts in charge.

---

Instead of the peace the elders promised, attacks increased, Stout said. Within days, the school suffered two grenade assaults and a pair of shoulder-fired rocket strikes, one of which killed a 7-year-old boy playing outside.

At meetings that week with mullahs and elders, Stout's team displayed a poster-sized photo of the wounded boy just after the explosion, his face bloodied with shrapnel.

"We said, 'Look, how does this sit in your stomach? Does this bother you?'" Stout recalled. "We told them: 'These people clearly don't care about you, your family, or your livelihood.'"

The elders agreed, and Stout made a proposition: "Come bleed with us and defeat the bigger problem: help drive the insurgents out."

At that, the elders drew back.

Some said they did not know who had carried out the attack. Others said there were no insurgents in Senjeray. Most said they were mere farmers, and if they cooperated with the Americans, the Taliban would cut their heads off.

Stout rebutted with a grim warning: "As long as you guys tolerate this, as long as you turn your backs, your children are going to continue to suffer."

The elders nodded. They promised to escort American troops through Senjeray, where attackers hidden on rooftops tossed grenades at U.S. patrols nearly every time they passed by.

But in the weeks that followed, nobody ever turned up.

Qari, the local mullah, said Senjeray's residents were caught in the middle and could not control the insurgency.

"We told the Taliban we don't want your support, and we don't want the support of the U.S. Army," he said. "We told them: 'We can ensure our own security; just leave us alone.'"

---

Part of the difficulty of winning over people in Afghanistan is that NATO-led forces are trying to do it in full body armor.

American troops live in fortified bubbles surrounded by blast walls and dirt-filled barriers. Their window onto the country is often an alien landscape that is hard to see through inches-thick bulletproof glass covered in dust.

On the ground, American strategy often rests on fragile agreements between two groups worlds apart: young muscle-bound troops with crew cuts and tattoos and conservative white-bearded elders in turbans.

There may be no place tougher to win hearts and minds than Zhari. Here is where the Taliban movement was founded 16 years ago. A few miles to the west is Singesar, where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar once ran an Islamic school.

"Obviously there's a lot of Taliban sympathy out there," Stout said. "These people don't give a damn about us, ... and quite frankly, why would they? We're strangers, we've been here for a few months, we walk around the town with guns, 40 pounds of body armor and (a lot of) grenades."

Afghan troops, too, acknowledge the cold reception in Senjeray, where they are seen as foreigners trying to finish off an old war. Much of the Afghan army's rank and file here are drawn from the north - Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara - who fought the overwhelmingly Pashtun Taliban in the 1990s.

"The people in this town hate us," said Lt. Said Abdul Ghafar, an ethnic Tajik soldier based at Pir Mohammed. "The Taliban tell them we're not real Muslims, that we're infidels. So the children throw rocks at us and won't even say hello."

Ghafar said 12 of the three dozen Afghan troops at the school were wounded in their first three months there. Eight others never returned from leave.

On Sept. 6, just after midnight, U.S. soldiers inside a truck pulling security at the school spotted someone turning a flashlight on and off in a nearby orchard. The Americans fired a yellow illumination round that fell gently from the sky.

Suddenly, a silhouetted figure stood up and ran, and the gunner on the American truck opened fire. Within seconds, the entire undergrowth lit up with muzzle flashes. Red tracer rounds crisscrossed the sky. Orange rocket trails streaked by.

After about 20 minutes, U.S. mortars ended the battle.

The next day, Stout made a decision.

U.S. forces would occupy the school again. The elders had proved incapable of protecting it, and the Afghan troops could not do it alone.

That night, two American soldiers at Stout's outpost grabbed drinks from a dining hall.

"I really don't want to go back down to that school," one of them said, shaking his head. "Why do we have to do the ANA's job for them?" - the Afghan National Army.

His colleague, equally frustrated with the struggle to open Pir Mohammed, spat a few words of dark humor back.

"We should just drop a J-DAM on it," he said, referring to a bomb weighing up to 2,000 pounds.

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Sitting on a step behind his plywood office, Stout dug his combat boots into the dirt and pondered the war. The captain was part of the 2007 surge into Iraq, and said it took 10 months before things turned around there. Senjeray, too, will take time, he said.

Despite months of fighting, the Americans have readied the school to open. They hired Afghan contractors to paint stone walls and install new windows and latrines that together cost around $70,000. They also spent some $150,000 on security, building the shell of an adjacent police post.

But building a school like Pir Mohammed "is not just putting in windows and whatnot," Stout said. "Building is people actually buying into it."

American commanders no longer speak of military victory. The goal is to push the Taliban far enough away so teachers and children and can attend without fear of firefights or reprisals.

A recent U.S. operation has accomplished much of that: many Taliban fighters have fled Zhari, along with thousands of residents - some of whose abandoned homes were bulldozed or destroyed because they were booby-trapped by insurgent mines.

Convincing residents the school is truly safe is going to be "another battle," Stout said.

"If we can create an environment where neither of us interfere with their lives, that's winning for us," he said. "And that's what the people want. They don't like us. But they don't like the Taliban either."

For now, the American strategy appears to be working. Hundreds of people line up daily at the U.S. hilltop outpost for a cash-for-work program, something they would not have dared do just a few weeks earlier.

But the Taliban are not gone. On Nov. 1, a motorcycle bomber blew himself up at the entrance to Stout's base, killing two American soldiers.

The school was attacked the same day.

It has yet to open.