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The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) just released a report reviewing the the status of teacher professional development in the United States. Their conclusion: We're making incremental progress in teacher induction and mentoring programs, but we lag woefully behind other nations in providing the kinds of professional development that improve student learning.
Surveys of teachers reveal that disjointed, one-time, "drive-by" professional development workshops remain the norm for large majorities of American teachers. This, despite strong research demonstrating the benefits of intensive, on-going professional development that is tied closely to teacher practice, focuses on student learning, supports school improvement priorities and forges strong working relationships among teachers. NSDC's findings could have profound implications for how schools allocate teachers' time and structure the school day.
The report describes the striking differences between teacher professional development practices here and abroad. NSDC's press release sums up these differences:
The United States is far behind [other nations] in providing public school teachers with opportunities to ...
The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) is inviting schools to apply for membership in the Learning School Alliance, "a network of 100 model schools committed to professional development practices that promote student achievement. The educators from these 100 schools will support one another in applying the principles and standards of professional development grounded in NSDC’s definition of professional learning, its standards for staff development, and its principles for professional learning identified in The Learning Educator: A New Era for Professional Learning."
"Participants will learn together in their own schools, with other schools through webinars and facilitated conversations, and at convenings hosted by NSDC. They will share openly their goals, their progress--and over time--their results."
You can learn more about the Learning School Alliance here. ...
Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher reminds us today that school improvement does not necessarily require a death-match between high-profile "reformers" and the education "establishment."
Fisher tells the story of a once struggling elementary school that has dramatically raised the achievement of its overwhelmingly disadvantaged student body: "Broad Acres did this without Rhee's reform tactics: no young recruits from Teach for America, no cash for students who come to class, no linkage of teacher pay to test scores."
In other words, Broad Acres made great strides without any of the capital "R" reforms that dominate national discussion about education. Nor did they make their gains over the dead bodies of recalcitrant teachers, administrators or community members.
What did Broad Acres do? The school fostered on-going faculty collaboration, gave strugging students individual attention, offered engaging out-of-school enrichment activities, and supported students' physical and mental well-being.
This is not to argue that we should abandon important discussions about those capital "R" reforms, which focus mainly on incentives and ...
Some radical reform zealots have used America's standing in international comparisons of student achievement to justify all manner of miracle-cure education reform propositions. (Abolish school boards! Abolish school districts! Abolish school buildings!)
Cooler heads have looked beyond mere rankings to examine practices common to the most successful countries. Most recently, Achieve, the National Governors Association and the Council for Chief State School Officers released a report on such practices.
As I read it, Benchmarking for Success offers some important (if implicit) lessons for reformers:
- Beware miracle cures that have little to do with what gets taught and how it gets taught;
- Seek coherence rather than erratic, disjointed interventions;
- Build public schools' capacity for success.
The report offers more specific recommendations for creating a world-class public education system. Here are a few highlights: ...
Dr. Susan B. Neuman has received much media attention recently as the apostate former Bush administration official who publicly opposes No Child Left Behind in its current form. As the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education who presided over NCLB's early implementation, she certainly made waves by arguing that schools alone cannot close achievement gaps.
But Neuman has received less attention for her affirmative vision of what we can do to improve poor students' odds dramatically. Her new book, Changing the Odds for Children at Risk, lays out "seven essential principles of educational programs that break the cycle of poverty." On Wednesday, she talked to me about her book and her thoughts on current education policy.
The book uses extensive research on child development and effective programs to make the case for responsible, substantive investment in areas such as early care and education, comprehensive family supports, and after-school. (Not surprisingly, Neuman was an early signer of the "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," a manifesto urging investment in more comprehensive supports for students' well-being.)
Neuman's thoughts on accountability deserve particular attention. She has famously criticized NCLB's accountability regime for emphasizing sanctions over support, but she is no critic of rigorous accountability. Rather, she argues that accountability structures should ensure sound program goals, adequate resources, timely course corrections, and strong outcomes.
You can download the entire interview here or listen to six minutes of interview highlights:
...
The Great Expectations School, Dan Brown's harrowing and touching memoir of his first year teaching at an elementary school in the Bronx, has won high praise from heavy hitters in education, including Susan Fuhrman, Randi Weingarten, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch.
Dan recently took the time to speak with me about the lessons of his experience teaching low-income children who could be by turns loving, enraged, vulnerable, brazen, curious and deeply disaffected. He shared his thoughts on the support new teachers need to function in this environment, specific strategies for serving children in poverty, and policy implications of day-to-day challenges in urban schools.
Hear five minutes of highlights from Dan's account of his first year:
Or, listen to about four and a half minutes of highlights from his discussion of education policy:
...
On Thursday, the Center for American Progress released Financial Incentives for Hard-to-Staff Positions, a report on teacher pay that draws lessons from fields like government, the military, medicine and private industry. The report offers very valuable analysis of the kinds of incentives that might coax effective teachers into hard-to-staff schools.
Yet it also disappoints in a couple of respects. For one, it offers little information about effective pay-for-performance structures in other fields. (It will hardly end acrimonious debates between supporters and critics of performance pay). It also minimizes the importance of other strategies for ensuring poor and minority students access to the most effective teachers and administrators.
Among the points that caught my attention are these:
- Teachers' base pay should be competitive with base pay in other fields. "In each of the sectors we studied, financial incentives for hard-to-staff positions are layered on top of a starting salary that is fundamentally competitive with candidates' job opportunities in other industries or organizations."
- Incentive pay in education tends to be way too low. "Employers across sectors are providing much larger incentives than
...
AFT President Randi Weingarten's recent address at the National Press Club made big news, but much of what she said went largely unreported. Not surprisingly, newspapers and blogs went for high drama with headlines
like: "Union Prez: Teacher Pay Tied to Performance Works." Weingarten's central argument--that the nation must invest in "collaboration, capacity and community" in difficult economic times--received much less attention.
Yes, Weingarten signaled the AFT's openness to innovative compensation and accountability plans that are "good for children and fair to teachers." Yet this isn't exactly news. Some of the nation's most established pay-for-performance programs were developed in collaboration with unions. ...
If you ask George Wood, the federal role in public education is out of whack. His concern: The feds have meddled with teaching and learning--not exactly their strong suit--and forgotten their traditional role as guarantors of education equity.
As executive director of the Forum for Education and Democracy, Wood has been working with leading education luminaries to call for changes to the federal role. The fruits of this work appear in the Forum's report, Democracy at Risk, which offers recommendations for more constructive federal involvement in public schools.
Wood, who is principal of the ironically named "Federal Hocking High School" in rural Ohio, recently spoke with us about some of these recommendations. (These recommendations resemble the recommendations LFA offers in its own recent report on the federal role in public education.)
Download the entire interview here or listen to about six minutes of interview highlights:
A transcript of these highlights appears below.
Alternatively, you can download the following ...
Yesterday, education blogger Corey Bower challenged the received truth that U.S. Education spending has skyrocketed:
[W]hile education spending in the U.S. appears to have skyrocketed over the past 85 years, it has actually shrunk as a ratio of wealth over the past 25.... [R]eal per-pupil expenditures almost doubled between 1980 and 2005, but real per capita [Gross Domestic Product] nearly quadrupled during that same timespan.... In other words, even though we're spending more money on education we're spending a lower percentage of our wealth on education.
Public schools have not enjoyed a full share in the fruits of economic growth. Let's hope that they--and the children they serve-won't experience more than their fair share of the nation's financial distress. ...
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