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Blog Entries
Is teaching a young person's game? That seems to be the prevailing belief in some quarters.
Teachers with lots of experience cost more, and that makes them easy targets in a deep recession. Some pundits have taken this issue well beyond complex debates over seniority rights. They're pushing for something new: Call it juniority rights.
A growing number of bloggers and think tank folk are arguing that we should let older teachers go because they're older. Teachers with juniority don't merely cost less than their more experienced peers. They also have that Teach for America (TFA) cachet. An ideal school system, it seems, would regularly push the old-timers out. Some are suggesting that we let teachers stay in their jobs for 5-10 years, max.
And just how would we sustain this brave new world? I'm not seeing many answers. Some industries do just fine with a steady stream of younger workers. (Entertainment, marketing, and summer amusements come to mind.) But teaching, a job held by some four million people? Please.
So can we blame experienced teachers for feeling a bit insecure? When the number of years on your resume or the amount of gray in your hair becomes your chief liability, you may have reasons to worry. The debate over seniority rights ...
Hallelujah! A recent study shows that an improvement strategy may actually work at scale. And it may even work well. What a relief after a spate of studies suggesting that nothing ever really works for anyone anywhere. But control your enthusiasm. Even this promising strategy has fallen under the budget axe.
According to Deb Viadero in EdWeek, a Stanford study "suggests that putting literacy coaches in schools can help boost students' reading skills by as much as 32 percent over three years." (The program focuses on K-2 classrooms.) And the more coaching, the better:
Teachers and schools that experienced more coaching sessions tended to spur bigger learning gains in their students. Some teachers recieved no coaching over the course of the study, while others had as many as 43 sessions.
The program seemed to work best in schools where teachers have real authority and strong relationships with their peers:
The schools where the most coaching took place were...places where teachers felt they had a voice in what went on in their building and where professional networks among teachers were already strong. (Those ...
We spend an awful lot of time in this country debating the relative merits of "traditional" and "alternative" approaches to education. We'd do far better to spend our time looking for what works, whether it's new or old, sexy or boring, alternative or traditional.
The National Research Council's new report on teacher preparation bears out this point. The report's authors found that "there is more variation within the 'traditional' and 'alternative' categories that there is between these categories." What's more, they found "no evidence that any one pathway into teaching is the best way to attract and prepare desirable candidates and guide them into the teaching force."
And that's our biggest problem. We lack evidence to inform our ever more strident debates between new and old.
It's natural to exalt the new and disdain the old. It's common to see the best new programs as standard-bearers for all new programs and the worst old programs as the embodiment of all old programs. The best new programs represent the promise of another way. The worst old programs represent all the burdens of tradition and complacency.
But the NRC study suggests that all those new, shiny alternative programs could add up to little more than a parallel system that does nothing more than the ...
Kathleen Parker could have been writing about school reform when she penned the following lines: "What some may see as cooperation is viewed by true believers as weakness. Any attempt to compromise is viewed as surrendering principle."
Her target is tea party members. Many of them are ganging up on GOP policy makers who made the tough decision to vote for bank bailouts when our financial system was on the verge of collapse. But cooperation has become a dirty word in school reform, too. That has to change.
Collaboration has become particularly déclassé since Arne Duncan cited it as a reason for some states' success in the Race to the Top. Some bloggers assume that buy-in from unions and other groups on the front lines of any big change ...
I find reactions to Florida Gov Christ's veto of SB 6, which would tie the bulk of teacher pay and evaluation to test scores, curious. We're hearing more about political tactics than about the wisdom of the bill itself. What's more, some people are portraying supporters of this bill as the only standard-bearers for school reform. That's just not a good idea.
Let's please not forget that testing experts have questioned the bill's fundamental mechanism. Experts at the National Academies of Science warned policy makers that they should not yet place too much weight on test scores in teacher evaluation systems. Sorry to keep bringing this up, but I'm truly surprised that such an important statement has received almost no attention in all the articles and blog postings devoted to SB 6 and Crist's veto. Isn't the whole point of the National Academies to ensure that policy makers are guided by science?
So many pundits are making support for the bill--and other bills like it--into the litmus test for reform. Why? Does it really make sense to put all our reform ...
As the debate about school reforms heats up, it's getting tougher to have reasoned, thoughtful conversations about specific reform strategies. You're either a wild-eyed zealot pushing for scorched-earth change or a dour obstructionist doing all you can to defend the status quo. There is little room for doubt in this super-heated environment.
I see this dynamic at work in the growing crop of opinion pieces urging states to give no quarter on teacher evaluation and merit pay reforms. The standard for many pundits seems to be 50 percent. If you don't base at least half of a teacher's evaluation on test scores, you must be a weak-kneed servant of special interests. An editorial in yesterday's Washington Post offers just the latest example of this argument.
But aren't there some questions we should ask before we base most of our pay and evaluation decisions on test scores? Do we know how this will affect teacher morale? Do we know how it will influence teacher recruitment? Do we know how many teachers would stick around under the new regime? Are we sure ...
Paying anyone--students or teachers--for test scores might be a bad idea. That's one of the big lessons I draw from Roland Fryer's now famous study of programs that pay students for good behavior, hard work or test results.
In fact, I think the implications of Fryer's study reach farther than that. The study offers a glimpse of how dangerous it could be to attach any big consequences--good or bad--to test scores alone. Here are some of the things I took away from Fryer's report:
We ignore inputs at our peril. It has become received wisdom that outcomes--and that usually means test scores--are all that really matter in school reform. But Fryer's study suggests that people in schools who call for more attention to inputs and the processes of arriving at outcomes aren't just whiners after all. The study found that cash rewards for certain behaviors--like reading more books--were more effective than cash for test scores. In fact, cash for scores seemed to have no effect on student achievement. Why? Incentives to do the right things, the things that promote learning, might well work better than incentives to do well on a test.
Getting kids too focused on their test scores may do them little good--and may even harm them--in the long run. Fryer's team noted that students getting cash for scores naturally grasped at test-taking strategies rather than, say, better study skills or deeper engagement in class materials:
Students [who were asked what they could do to earn more money on the next test] stated [sic.] thinking about test-taking strategies rather than salient inputs into the education production function or ...
I've worried before that too many pundits seem to see change as an end in itself. The bolder the reform, the better, whether or not it's likely to work. An editorial in Saturday's Washington Post betrayed shades of this thinking.
The Post laments that the boldest reform plans lost points in the Race to the Top competition. The authors have muted praise for the two winning states but write that "other states with even more ambitious plans lost out." Support from unions and school boards carried too much weight, they argue, and that sends a "mixed message": "Alas, the lesson that officials may take from the first round [of RttT] is that perhaps it's better to lower your sights sufficiently to achieve buy-in from the education establishment."
The writers even ask, apparently incredulous, "what was the real worry of the reviewer who considered [DC's] application 'too ambitous'?" They seem to think that's code for "too bold for the unions and school boards." But the reviewers actually go into some detail on the flaws of the DC plan, citing lack of progress in building data systems and lack of detail in other key areas.
But for many pundits, concerns about feasibility seem almost beside the point. You can't possibly be too ambitious.
That stance pretty much sums up what's wrong with the prevailing rhetoric of ...
Collaboration has been getting a bad rap lately, and that's unfortunate. First, there are the pundits who say that it figured too prominently in the selection of Race to the Top winners. Then there was this from Jeanne Allen:
Trained educators believe that collaboration leads to results. But that is not always the case in public education. Excessive collaboration often leads to--frankly--nothing.
Allen's larger point is that outsiders--business leaders and the like--make better school system leaders than career educators do. She notes that "some have never taught. Again, that's fine--and, in fact, often preferable." Best to keep our leaders free of that school taint, she suggests.
Though she doesn't name names, Allen knows who we're all thinking about: Michelle Rhee in DC and Joel Klein in New York City. Like so many other advocates and pundits, she seems to rest her whole case on events in those two cities. Whether you love Rhee/Klein or hate them, you have to admit that there are a whole lot of other reforms going on out there that don't require the outsider's iron fist. And career educators are leading many of them, maybe even most of them.
Let's have a look, for example, at districts that have won the Broad Prize for Urban School Leadership. Six of the eight are led by people who began their careers as teachers and made their way up the administrative ladder. Other successful urban superintendents, like Beverly Hall of Atlanta, followed a similar course. Collaboration didn't ...
A Conversation with Stephanie Hirsh and René Islas of the National Staff Development Council
As a national debate swirls around how to hire or fire teachers, we hear precious little about how best to support teachers in the classroom. If you ask Stephanie Hirsh, though, investments in the current teacher corps are among the most important investments we can make. It's just that we have to make those investments more wisely than we ever have.
We recently spoke with Hirsh, who is executive director of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC), and René Islas, her federal policy advisor. Schools don't have much to show for the billions of dollars the feds have spent on professional development (PD) over the past eight years, they told us. But 
unlike critics who would all but de-fund PD, they argue for much better use of PD dollars.
Hirsh and Islas believe that a "school-wide, team-based approach" to professional learning, an approach outlined in NSDC's Standards for Staff Development, will pay big dividends. And they believe that federal law can foster that approach in schools across the country.
Improving Our Investments
Public School Insights: Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) already includes money for professional development. Why do you think we need something different?
Stephanie Hirsh: The federal government is committed to improving teaching quality, and the single most powerful way to do that is through professional learning. We believe that the federal government has a responsibility to take a position on what effective professional learning is and how it wants to spend its dollars to support it.
The money that has been allocated for professional development over the last several years has not resulted in any significant overall improvement in teacher practice or student learning. New evidence gives us better information on the kinds of professional development that improve practice. So if we can focus the resources we have at the federal level toward more effective PD we can achieve better results.
In addition, PD as included in previous ESEA authorizations has promoted a fragmented, individualized approach to professional learning. The PD that we are advocating promotes a ...
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