A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
Professional Development
Blog Entries
These days, you either love Teach for America and its teachers, or you hate them. The love, it seems to me, stems from an obvious source. Young, often privileged, kids are choosing the hard, hard work of teaching in some of our most struggling schools. (There are easier resume stuffers out there.)
The hatred is more complex, but I think it's instructive, even if it is unfair. The very existence of TFA shines a spotlight on some of our biggest national shortcomings, but policymakers who support TFA seem oddly oblivious to that fact. Here are a few of those shortcomings as I see them:
We Still See Teaching as Missionary Work, Not as a Profession. We cheer TFA teachers for their missionary zeal. We admire them for working 80 hours a week but understand why they often leave after a couple of years. Regular teachers who work fewer hours, we say, are just "putting in their time." Without that Ivy League degree, we assume, teaching was likely one of their only options anyway. This mindset does little to elevate teaching as a profession. (Nancy Flanagan shares similar thoughts here.)
Teachers Don't Get the Support They Need. When They Do, It Makes Headlines. TFA has learned from the struggles of its new teachers over the years. It gives its teachers intense, individual support, and it strives to strengthen its support systems all the time. You'd think all teachers could expect that kind of ...
Long Beach Unified School District in California has long been recognized as a model urban school system. Winner of the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2003, it has been a finalist for that award five times.
The district hasn’t achieved this success by flitting from reform to reform or looking for silver bullets. Rather, it has spent most of the past two decades building on the same educational strategies, focusing on data, community buy-in and staff development. We recently spoke to Superintendent Christopher Steinhauser (who has spent the past 28 years in the district as a teacher, principal, deputy superintendent and, since 2002, superintendent) about the “Long Beach way.”
Public School Insights: What prompted Long Beach to undertake big reforms for its kids in the first place?
Steinhauser: We've been on this long journey since about 1992. What really prompted it at that time was a massive economic meltdown. Our city was closing its naval base. And McDonnell Douglas [a major area employer] was going through a massive shutdown. They laid off 35,000 employees over a two year period. Also, if you remember, those were the days of major civil unrest in the LA area. We were having massive flight from our system, mainly of Caucasian students.
Basically what we did was say, “Okay. We have got to stop this.” So our board adopted several major initiatives. We implemented K-8 uniforms. We were the first district in California to end social promotion. We introduced a program called the 3rd Grade Reading Initiative to help with that goal, and we also developed a policy that eighth-graders who had two or more Fs could not go on to high school. And we launched a major partnership called Seamless Education with our local junior college and ...
Amanda Ripley ran a piece in The Atlantic this week praising Teach for America for its work to define what a great teacher looks like. That article had me running all hot and cold. Here I'll focus on what left me cold: The overuse of standardized tests to define greatness.
We're already creating students in the image of these tests. If I'm to believe The Atlantic, we'll be creating teachers in their image, too. Not only will we use test scores to determine which teachers are doing the best teaching. We'll use them to decide what character traits, academic background, hobbies and who knows what else teachers should possess. We could hitch everything, everything to that engine. (See Diana Seneshal's provocative piece on why that should ...
Long Before the Aldine Independent School District in Texas won the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education, it was a model for school district reform. We at LFA wrote about Aldine's success back in 2003.
Since that time, Aldine has kept up its steady progress. The district has not lurched from one reform strategy to another. It has not hired on a succession of superintendent saviors. It has made progress without the knock-down, drag-out fights that the media can't resist.
Instead, Aldine has stuck with strategies it formed over ten years ago and trusted its own veteran staff to lead the hard work of school improvement. Superintendent Wanda Bamberg recently told me the story of her district's success.
Listen to our conversation on the Public School Insights podcast (~17:08)
Public School Insights: Back in 2003, we discussed Aldine’s focus on curriculum, the work you were doing to make sure you use data very well and staff development. There were a lot of other pieces to the puzzle, of course, but those were three of the big ones we noted. Do you have a sense that you are still carrying on in the same tradition now, or has there been a lot of change?
Bamberg: There really hasn't been a lot of change. I think that we have been following some of the same instructional plans that we started even before 2003. We started a lot of these things in the late 1990s.
One of the things that is different is that the system we have in place for capturing the scope and sequence [of the content we teach in our classrooms], our curriculum and lesson plans, and of course our assessment data is more sophisticated now than it used to be. Our system now has all three components together so that we are able to look at the scope and sequence, put in the [accompanying] lesson plans and then come back look at the data in the same system. So the difference might be that we have tried to become even more tightly aligned and tried to refine our processes. But there has been no major change in the ...
Jack Grayson has been many things in his 86 years. A farmer, FBI agent, journalist, importer/exporter, professor, business school dean, and member of three presidential commissions. But he has made a lasting name for himself as one of the nation’s most outspoken champions of productivity and quality.
Grayson rose to national fame almost forty years ago as Chairman of the U.S. Price Commission, which helped avert hyperinflation in the early 1970s. His brush with economic turmoil convinced him that productivity was key to the nation’s well-being, so he founded The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), a non-profit that helps organizations boost performance by improving their processes. As APQC chairman, he is devoting all of his time to the organization’s work in education.
These days, many school reformers are fond of reciting lessons they have learned from business. Be innovative. Focus on outcomes. Get the incentives right. The rest, the theory goes, will follow.
But Grayson says such reformers are missing the biggest lesson of all: Focus on process! He admits that talk of process can be dry as dust, especially when all of DC is abuzz with talk of innovation. But it is process improvements that brought the best American businesses out of the industrial age, he insists.
Yes, innovation and outcomes are critical. But if reformers ignore the hard work of building schools’ capacity to produce the best outcomes, even the most innovative school systems may well go the way of GM.
Listen to Grayson's interview on the Public School Insights podcast (~23:15).
A quick warning about our recording: It has a lot of background noise. If the side conversations and occasional pop music become too distracting, read the edited transcript below.
Public School Insights: A lot of people are talking about the promise of innovation in improving education. Do you think innovation itself holds the key to solving our problems in public education?
Grayson: No. Innovation will certainly help, and innovation in any area is the leader. It’s the new idea. But you do not want to leave the old idea behind because ...
“Although U.S. students in grade four score among the best in the world [on international literacy comparisons], those in grade eight score much lower. By grade ten, U.S. students score among the lowest in the world.” (emphasis in original)
A bit concerning, to say the least…
In response, the Carnegie Council for Advancing Adolescent Literacy has issued a call to action. Driven by the vision of comprehensive literacy for all, their new report Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Success argues that we need to re-engineer schools for adolescent learners. To prepare our students for success in the global economy, we must focus on their literacy.
This report paints a detailed picture of what literacy instruction in an ideal secondary school should look like. It goes in-depth on two vital, but often ignored, keys to making that image a reality: teacher preparation, support and professional development, and the collection and careful use of data. The report also ...
The word “innovation” is getting stretched awfully thin these days. But I have a hard time coming up with a better word to describe what's happening at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota.
One of the nation’s largest producers of teachers, St. Cloud State is reinventing teacher education. The University’s “co-teaching” model of student teaching prepares new teachers for the challenges of the job while keeping master teachers in the classroom. The best part? The model also benefits children right away. Four years of research show that students in co-taught classrooms outperform students in classrooms using other models of student teaching. They even outperform students taught by a single experienced teacher.
St. Cloud State University Professor Nancy Bacharach recently told us more.
A New Direction in Student Teaching
Public School Insights: We’ve all heard about student teaching. I gather that the work that you are doing right now at St. Cloud State University in co-teaching is not your grandfather’s student teaching.
Bacharach: Exactly. As we were looking at the student teaching experience here at St. Cloud State and reading the literature that was out there, we found that very little has changed in the last 75, 80 years of student teaching. We were looking at our own experiences from a number of years ago, and ...
"School reformers [should] begin working with teachers--rather than around them." This is the overarching theme of a new report by Barnett Berry. The product of collaboration between NEA and Berry's Center for Teaching Quality, the report examines how to get top teachers into the classrooms that need them most. Its title says it all: Children of Poverty Deserve Great Teachers.
The report offers welcome relief from the either/or thinking that mars so many education policy discussions. We spend so much time following the horse race between traditional and alternative routes into teaching, for example, that we miss the bigger question: How do we better prepare teachers to succeed in struggling schools, regardless of where they come from?
I can't possibly summarize the whole report here, but I can offer a few glimpses of what it has to offer.
The report "begins by rejecting several myths with compelling evidence." Myth number one: If you topple the "barriers" posed by traditional certification, effective teachers will simply flood into struggling schools. Myth number two: If you ...
There is a school turnaround strategy for every taste. At least, that's the impression I get from the National Journal's most recent panel of experts. Asked to name the best strategies for turning around schools, different experts list different ideas. Pair struggling schools with the best teacher training institutions, writes Steve Peha. Create a year-round calendar, writes Phil Quon. Shutter struggling schools and start from scratch, writes Tom Vander Ark.
Each of these ideas has merit in some cases--I myself love the first idea, like the second, and am not fully sold on the third. But none is a necessary ingredient for all or even most schools.
So what do we know about turnarounds? Two big themes stand out in much of the school turnaround literature:
- There is no detailed prescription for what works in all cases.
- There is, however, abundant evidence that a school will not turn itself around unless it gives teachers the support they need to succeed.
These themes are also clear in the many turnaround stories we profile on this website. Policy makers should take note.
The Reconstitution Myth
It's high time to slay the reconstitution dragon. Despite what you may hear these days, you do not have to kill a school to save it.
Here's what Emily and Bryan Hassel write in Education Next, which is hardly a pro-union rag: “Successful turnaround leaders typically do not replace all or most of the staff at the start, but they often replace some key leaders who help ...
The history of education reform is strewn with the wreckage of dazzling new education technologies no one ever taught teachers to use. Hayes Mizell of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) sees history repeating itself in the Race to the Top.
Mizell suggests in a recent blog posting that RTTT's investment in powerful new data systems will founder on lack of teacher professional development:
The Department seems to have made two faulty assumptions: (a) improved data systems, in and of themselves, will result in improved instruction, and (b) educators currently have the knowledge and skills they need to use data to improve instruction. Unfortunately, the proposed requirements do not mention professional development. States applying for Race To The Top funds do not have to ...
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