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Stasia Honnold quit her job as a middle school English teacher. Why? She loved her kids, her colleagues and her principal. What she didn't love was the growing focus on multiple choice tests as a measure, often the sole measure, of her students' progress. When poorly applied, accountability regimes can drive good teachers like Honnold away from the profession.
We certainly need accountabiliy, but we have to pay close attention to how accountability--and the language of accountability--affects great teachers. As debates over school reform get nastier, teachers like Honnold can get labeled as obstructionists. What's worse, the very things that drew them to teaching can get lost in the din.
Let's not forget why great teachers are in the business in the first place. They love to teach, but they also love to learn. They're serving their students, but they're also serving their subject area. They see their subject's relevance to their students, but they also see its inherent worth.
In the end, great teachers want to uphold the value of intellectual work. They know that learning is exciting.
Those are the teachers we don't want to drive out of the profession. They're also the teachers who are most likely to decry the effects of standardized tests on schools. They don't want ...
Two visions of the Great Teacher have dominated recent accounts of school reform:
- The savvy free agent who works on commission to boost test scores.
- The misty-eyed martyr whose inner strength keeps him on the paths of righteousness, however rocky they may be.
Both of these oddly incongruous visions are alienating good teachers. And neither addresses the kinds of conditions that promote good teaching.
Few teachers believe either vision of the Great Teacher fully represents them. Most teachers aren't in teaching for the money, but neither do they have endless reserves of strength and charity to carry them past any obstacle.
In the end, teachers want a good working environment. They want support, time to work with colleagues, help in maintaining orderly classrooms. They want to feel like their jobs require human, not superhuman, efforts and talents. The rhetoric of school reform can really knock the wind out of these teachers' sails.
It's pretty clear that the martyr method of school staffing won't work. A recent study of teacher turnover in charter schools found that teachers were much more likely to leave charter ...
About two weeks ago, we posted a conversation with two leaders from Boston's City Connects (CCNX) program, which is working with 11 schools to link each child to a "tailored set of intervention, prevention and enrichment services in the community." The approach has helped raise grades and test scores for the mostly low income children in these schools.
We recently spoke with people in two CCNX schools. Traci Walker Griffith is principal at the Eliot K-8 School, and Kathleen Carlisle is the CCNX site coordinator at the Mission Hill School. Each has an insider's view of this remarkable program at work.
Public School Insights: How has City Connects worked in your school? What changes have been made since it began?
Traci Walker Griffith: A number of changes have occurred at the Eliot School. I came in as principal in March of 2007. In May of 2007 the school was identified as one that would take on City Connects.
We were fortunate because the mission and vision of the Eliot School aligned with City Connects in that we are serving the whole child--academically, socially, emotionally. So we have worked amazingly well together in identifying students’ academic and social/emotional needs. And as we began the program I found that the structures and systems that it offers—whole class review, individual student review, and providing a school site coordinator to maintain and sustain partnerships—really aligned with what we wanted to start at the Eliot School at the time.
Kathleen Carlisle: I would echo many of the things that Traci just said. The whole child philosophy especially stands out in my mind—that is a City Connects and also a Mission Hill philosophy. And I think that the presence of City Connects in Mission Hill has especially impacted the identification of student needs and ways to meet those needs, be they social/emotional, academic, health or family. I think there has been greater connection between supports and needs, and also consistent follow-up.
Public School Insights: Do you have a sense of the results of the City Connects work in your respective schools?
Traci Walker Griffith: When I came on at the Eliot, a school identified as underperforming and in correction, all of the pieces we needed to put in place to increase student achievement were aligned with what City Connects was working on: identifying services and enrichment opportunities for students both inside and outside the school; working with community agencies that in the past had difficulty working ...
Every child can learn, but teachers are unteachable. That seems to be an unspoken premise of the current national debate on school reform.
Okay, I exaggerate. But the punditry's enthusiasm for Teach for America stands in stark contrast to the radio silence on issues like staff development and teacher support. Great teachers are born and hired, it seems, not made.
I hope at least some people will take note of a new IES study on teacher induction programs. The study found that teachers who received "comprehensive induction" support for two years were more likely than those who did not to raise their students' scores in reading and math. Mathematica Policy Research carried out the study, which was a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT).
The three-year study's findings are surely music to the ears of people who support induction programs. An interim report last year showed no significant impact on test scores after just one year of induction support. The second year appears to be the charm. It may well be that new teachers need more than one year of mentoring to ...
Because hope springs eternal, we still hold out high hopes for research that will lead to dramatic improvements in our most troubled schools. But much promising research will fall flat in schools if we don't give people in those schools the conditions to use it well. That's one of the insights I draw from our recent forum on education research.
On June 8, the Learning First Alliance and the Knowledge Alliance convened a forum entitled "Using Evidence for a Change: Challenges for Research, Innovation and Improvement in Education." With generous support from the WT Grant Foundation, the forum brought together some very smart people with diverse perspectives on the issue. (See our new report on the forum.)
Quite a few of the panelists' comments have really stuck with me. For example, Susan Freiman, an award-winning staff development teacher in Maryland, made a strong case for giving schools a more direct role in the whole research enterprise. We've fawned over her on this site before. The success of Freiman and her colleagues at Viers Mill Elementary School prompted a visit from President Obama last fall.
Her staff have the luxury of applying and adapting the research it receives from her district. She and her colleagues study it, test the strategies it supports, review their outcomes, adjust their approach when they need to, and then begin the cycle again. “It’s the whole plan, do, study, act, use [cycle].”
But none of this can happen if people in schools lack the conditions for doing it well, she said. They need time to study the research, collaborate with their colleagues and review the results of their work. They need staff development to build ...
The more we fixate on the "good teacher," the less we seem to concern ourselves with good teaching.
That's the thought that came to me as I read about new plans in Cincinnati to get top teachers in struggling schools. I don't know enough about the program to judge it. It does address a critical problem.
But the story also drove home how seldom we hear about the conditions that foster good teaching. Most news stories on ed reform leave the impression that a good teacher is a good teacher is a good teacher, no matter where he teaches, no matter what challenges he faces, no matter how toxic the climate in his school is. Good teachers, it seems, are widgets to be deployed to all manner of schools, where they'll climb every mountain and ford every stream.
In most of our policy discussions, we tend to treat teachers like a currency that carries the same value no matter where we spend it. (Let's find the five dollar teachers and spend them in the neediest schools, which too often have to make do with the one dollar variety). Perhaps that's what happens when the language ...
These days, we hear a great deal about problems with current teacher evaluation systems. The received wisdom seems to be that teachers will always close ranks and protect their worst colleagues. Why else cling to systems that rate almost every teacher as top notch?
A new study out of Chicago offers a very different view of what teachers want. When teachers evaluate each other, it turns out, they're a good deal more discerning than the district has been. In a pilot study of 44 Chicago schools, "37 percent of teachers received one of the two highest ratings, compared to 91 percent under the district’s existing system," reports Catalyst Chicago.
In fact, teachers turned out to be more demanding than principals.
They were less likely than principals to give a “distinguished” rating—the highest—on instruction, a finding that bolsters the view that teachers themselves are the toughest judge when it comes ...
One step forward and two steps back. If you're a school leader who has made real progress against tough odds in the past few years, then brace yourself for those two steps back. Budget cuts and layoffs may threaten much of what you've done. And to add insult to injury, some people will read you sermons on efficiency as you dismantle much of what you and your staff have worked for.
A piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle tells the heart-breaking story of a Blue Ribbon school that has to undo many of its reforms as it cuts staff. "Stability drove the success of Dold's school," authors W. Norton Grubb and Lynda Tredway write:
"I have an incredible staff," Dold says. "My teachers don't leave, unless they retire or move." On her watch, E.R. Taylor Elementary became a National Blue Ribbon School, one of just 25 in California, and one of 300 in the United States. How? Dold led her entire faculty to collaborate to catch struggling readers early. Three reading-recovery specialists ran 120 intense, daily half-hour lessons for every struggling first-grade reader.
"Six years ago," Dold recalls, "just 17 percent of our Latino students were proficient readers. Now 50 percent are."
,,,
Their reward for such inspiring results? The last bilingual paraprofessional? Gone. After-school staff? Cut. A popular upper-grade teacher with a pink slip says, "I can't wait any longer. I need to pay my mortgage." This year's cuts could top the past nine.
Some commentators have portrayed budget cuts as a threat to the status quo rather than a threat to reform. But that sort of thinking betrays a narrow conception of reform. If reform is purely structural--pay teachers differently, hire and fire ...
Yesterday, the Learning First Alliance, a partnership of 17 national education associations representing over ten million parents, educators and policymakers, released the following statement:
“The Elementary and Secondary Education Act should make effective professional development a top priority. The federal government should support frequent, job-embedded professional development for teachers, principals and other school and district staff. It should offer dedicated funds for a comprehensive, sustained and intensive approach to improving staff effectiveness in raising student achievement. The National Staff Development Council’s definition of and standards for staff development identify the characteristics of professional development that are most likely to increase achievement.”
The Learning First Alliance is entirely responsible for the content of this website. The National Staff Development Council is a member of the Alliance.
You can read our full press release here (PDF). ...
It was in a pedagogy seminar years ago that I learned one of the most important lessons I have ever learned about what it takes to motivate people: Don't assume the worst in them. That lesson seems lost on far too many policy makers and pundits.
Oddly enough, it was also lost on the person leading the seminar. (We'll call him Nathan.) He assumed the worst in me. From the start, he signaled to my peers that I was a difficult student. It began on the first day, when I leaned far back in my chair to give him a clear view of my neighbor, who was asking him a question.
"Stop!" he cried, cutting her off in mid-sentence. "Notice that Claus is slouching in his chair, playing the confident man. Emily [who was across the table from me] is sitting upright, close to the table, listening carefully. Your students' body language can tell you a lot about their attitude."
When I protested that he had misread my cues, he used my protest as more evidence that I was a problem student.
I was dumbstruck. I was an adult among adults. What's more, I wasn't used to my new role. In school, I had always been the good child. I had been meek. I used to come home from school with facial muscles sore from the strain of wearing a compliant, attentive face all day. I would drive my more rebellious older brother to distraction with my constant fears that I could get into trouble somehow and ...
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