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Editor’s note: This week, we’re running a series of guest blogs in which accomplished teachers offer ideas for how to spend stimulus funds. Today, California teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron offers her contribution. The opinions she expresses are of course her own and do not necessarily represent those of LFA or its member organizations.
A knock at my door signals its arrival. “Sign here,” mumbles the delivery guy. At last. My stimulus package has arrived, and I know just how to spend it. My mythical program will solve everything, increasing both morale and teaching quality, and in so doing, increase student achievement. What is this magic bullet of which I boast? The Tapping Teachers Interests Program.
MY PROPOSED STIMULUS INVESTMENT: TTIP (tee-tip) is a teacher-driven elective program that provides funding for each teacher to have one period a day to teach the subject of his or her choice. There is a tangible difference between teachers who teach just because they are credentialed to do so, and those who truly love what they ...
Editor’s note: We wondered what ideas accomplished teachers might have about good ways to invest stimulus funds. Answering our call, members of the Teacher Leaders Network to give us their straight-from-the-classroom perspectives. The ideas, of course, are their own and do not necessarily represent those of LFA or its member organizations. In the first of four teacher contributions, Ariel Sacks offers her thoughts:
This June will complete my fifth year of teaching at a high-need public middle school in New York City. At age 30, I’ve developed skills as a teacher and a leader, and I’m looking to advance my career. But the only way, it seems, to move up in the field of education is to leave my students and move out of the classroom.
This year, startling numbers of my colleagues across the city with three, four or five years of experience will leave teaching. They aren’t leaving because they feel ineffective or because ...
A New York Times analysis finds that schools led by principals trained through non-traditional routes “have not done as well as those led by experienced principals or new principals who came through traditional routes”:
The Times’s analysis shows that Leadership Academy graduates were less than half as likely to get A’s as other principals, and almost twice as likely to earn C’s or worse [on the city's grading system for public schools]. Among elementary and middle-school principals on the job less than three years, Academy graduates were about a third as likely to get A’s as those who did not attend the program.
This kind of analysis has the potential to redraw battle lines and unsettle ideologies held by educators and reformers across the political spectrum. ...
Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge blog recently summed up the findings of a new study on the impact of family conflict on student achievement:
Children from troubled families perform “considerably worse” on standardized reading and mathematics tests and are much more likely to commit disciplinary infractions and be suspended than other students, according to a new study. Writing in Education Next, Scott Carrell of UC-Davis and the University of Pittsburgh’s Mark Hoekstra offer evidence that “a single disruptive student can indeed influence the academic progress made by an entire classroom of students.”
Robert adds his own thoughtful interpretation of the study's ...
The title of this interview, which is also the title of Robyn Jackson’s recent ASCD book, is sure to raise a hue and a cry among those who believe we should urge teachers to work more, not less. Yet Jackson is far more concerned with how teachers work than with how much they work.
We recently spoke with Dr. Jackson, a National Board Certified Teacher and former school administrator, about her book’s big lessons. She uses an old adage to sum up an overarching message: “The person working hardest in the room is the only person learning.” Even the most dedicated teachers fall short if they do the work their students should be doing. Master teachers, by contrast, inspire students to do the important work on their own.
By no means does Jackson excuse teachers from hard work. Master teachers,
she argues, must understand where students are, where they need to go, and what support they need along the way. They must hold themselves to very high expectations for promoting student success and seek feedback on their performance.
Jackson’s work holds important lessons for policymakers, not just teachers: Support educators’ capacity! Simply urging people to work harder is not a feasible reform strategy.
You can download the entire audio interview here or listen to six minutes of interview highlights:
[A transcript of these highlights appears below]
Alternatively, download the following excerpts from ...
Like many others, members of the New York Times editorial board hope stimulus funds for education will promote sound economic reform even as they forestall economic ruin. Fair enough. But let's make sure that, in our haste, we don't opt for superficial reforms that don't properly address longstanding systemic problems.
The way the Times describes one essential target of reform--the inequitable distribution of effective teachers--gives me pause. According to this morning's opinion page: ...
The battle over traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs is distracting us from a much more important conversation about teacher quality: How do we substantially increase teacher capacity and effectiveness? That's the conclusion Linda Darling-Hammond and David Haselkorn reach in a new Education Week commentary.
To make their case, Darling-Hammond and Haselkorn cite a Mathematica study that found few differences between the impact of traditionally and alternatively certified teachers on student performance in hard-to-staff schools. While this study is bound to "fuel the debate" about traditional vs. alternative routes, they argue, many commentators are missing the more important point:
The real story, however, is that none of the teachers in these high-need schools did well by their students. The students of teachers from what the study called “low coursework” alternative programs actually declined in their reading and math achievement between fall and spring, while those taught by their traditional-route counterparts improved little. Students of teachers in the "high coursework" alternative programs, and those of their traditional-route counterparts, improved by only 1 and 2 percentile points, respectively—not nearly enough, given how far behind these students already were.
Put bluntly, no one who is serious about raising standards and closing achievement gaps can find these outcomes acceptable. It is time to put aside the tired debates over routes into teaching and focus on a clearer destination: substantially higher levels of teacher effectiveness, especially for those teaching ...
The Teacher Leaders Network just hosted a fascinating discussion on creativity in the classroom. A number of teachers involved in the discussion zeroed in on a matter that has again been looming large in debates about national standards: The tension between standardization and personalization. They wrote about the challenge of teaching basic information all students need to know "whether they find it creative or not" while engaging students' individual interests.
In other venues, similar discussions have drawn extremists like flies to honey. In the comments section of one top blog, for example, a privatization zealot credited the lack of common standards in private schools with those schools' alleged success: "No one argues that private schools are failing," Of course, we don't exactly have common measures for determining a private school's success or failure. And comparisons of private and public school NAEP scores show essentially no difference between private and public school performance. By why let data cloud ideology?
On the other side, the most immoderate critics of ...
Yesterday, Diane Ravitch took New York Times columnist NIcholas Kristof to task for his naive belief that a platoon of "miracle teachers" will save our schools.
Ravitch zeroes in on Kristof's unsophisticated use of an oft-quoted study on the importance of teachers:
A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap
This little research fragment has taken on a life of its own in the columns of otherwise astute national journalists who believe they have found The Answer to ...
In less than 5 short years, "Teachers TV" has grown from an idea harbored by a British Schools Minister into a popular and influential British television channel devoted solely to education. Now, there are efforts afoot to help something similar take root in American soil.
We recently spoke with Andrew Bethell, Teachers TV's CEO and creative director. Bethell described the accomplishments of the television channel, which has broadcast thousands of often riveting mini-documentaries about what's happening in British schools.
The documentaries offer authentic accounts of successful practice and real-life struggles to improve. They also feature broad education reform strategies--without ever losing sight of those strategies' impact on actual schools and students. As Bethell is careful to point out, Teachers TV focuses on more than just teachers: It highlights the work of ...
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