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So would you favor closing failing schools to bring in a team of proven turnaround teacher recruiters?

A strategy that has, somewhat, been used around the country to turnaround school is to remove a certain amount of staff and replace them with a few teachers a principal wanted to take with them. The whole theory behind "reconstitution" is that school leaders get to build a team from scratch (reusing the old teachers from the failed team or not) to get things going. You rarely see teacher support for any of these measures, but it seems to me the idea is the same.

Imagine teams of 10 or so experienced teachers, one of whom may or may not be more of an administrator, perhaps they're all teacher-administrators in some form. These dream teams compete for the opportunity to go into turn around situations and act as the anchor for five years in those schools. They have to use data from the time they're at a school and from after they leave a school to prove their efficacy because they're competing against other dream teams. They rebuild the systems and policies, assess the professional development needs of those who will stick around, make decisions about folks who aren't going to stick around, and build their replacement team who will continue implementing their work when they're gone.

You know, it almost sounds like how the best charter operators start out except they find it's too hard to go into the existing buildings and structures and change the policies, PD, and hiring and firing of teachers the way they feel they need to in order to be successful.

I haven't thought this out in any details, but this is exactly the sort of idea that can work under a system of greater school-based autonomy and flexibility coupled with a well-thought, powerful accountability system.

I think this idea can work. People crace teams. People crave meaning and want to do good. Peple crave excellence. I heard the discussion locally of funding nationa certification for entire teams of teachers.

YES! Entire teams of teachers! Nationally certified to teach the national standards! Let's call them "cadres!"

(Couldn't resist... Sorry, John.)

But really it's an interesting premise if it isn't carried too far, to allow the TEAM rather than the administration to decide on a new hire if, say, they had an opening for a speech therapist or a new teacher. I should imagine that each teacher within a team should be a free agent, able to come and go at will or at the end of a contract year or whathaveyou. Surely there should be some way out of a team or some way to move across districts should the teacher or staff member wish.

I cringe when I hear the term "turnaround". So swaggering and macho, and such an echo of neo-cons' talk about Iraq and Afghanistan --"We'll fix those places!" Look how potent we've been there. I understand the sense of urgency, but that doesn't make the turnaround concept viable.
"Turnaround" reeks of Americans' woeful hastiness, their addiction to slapdash faux solutions.

To do school reform right we need to program kids' brains right k-8. That demands a smart curriculum --slowly and carefully honed over the next decade or two. And non-stupid professional development. It demands good, old-fashioned discipline so that kids actually listen and think and work. It demands a revisiting of old-fashioned pedagogy and a skepticism about new-fangled unproven brainchildren of careerist ed professors. There are other pieces I'm not mentioning. There are no quick and simple fixes. But if all this painstaking, slow labor is performed, then someday inner city high schools might actually become places of real learning.

Parachuting in crack commando squads will help some, but it's not a sustainable solution for our benighted system.

Jason--I don't mean to suggest that reconstitution is generally the way to go. I'm more interested in the concept of effective teams. In Chicago, for example, Strategic Learning Initiatives has worked with 8 struggling elementary schools to strengthen existing teams in the schools, and their schools' growth has outpaced other public schools' growth by a factor of five. One of their elementary schools is the most improved elementary in the city, and others are not far behind. They've shown these strong results four years running, and they did their work at the fraction of the cost of a normal turnaround. (See our interview with SLI's John Simmons.)

It's dangerous to prescribe any specific turnaround model. The research base just isn't very strong for the reconstitution model or any other model, for that matter. (Reconstitution doesn't have a terrific track record in Chicago.) But if a school must be reconstituted, the team approach seems like a promising way to go. 

Also, I'm not sure about the "dream team" approach if the team sticks around for only five years. We've seem any number of miracle schools regress into their former dysfunction when they lose their leadership or their core staff--even if they believe they reshaped the culture. I'm not saying it can't work. I'm just saying that stability can be worth something, a point that receives scant attention.

Mrs C.--Many of the best teams do have a voice in hiring, and nothing should keep teachers from looking for teaching jobs elsewhere. (Licensure laws differ among states, so moving from one state to the next can be more difficult). So no one compels a teacher to stay in a team. The best teams keep teachers because they want to stay.

Ben--I have a lot of sympathy for your argument that we should do the work of creating excellent curricula and then supporting teachers in using them. Talk about curriculum seems to be coming into fashion again now, as people realize that the Common Core standards can't work miracles on their own. 

As for "old-fashioned pedagogy".... I suppose that depends on how you define it. I spent a year teaching in a former communist country, where I got to see some of the worst sort of "old fashioned pedagogy" first hand. Many of the college students I taught were quite good at recall, but many couldn't construct an argument. I was quite shocked. I'm a strong proponent of content knowledge and a real skeptic of arguments that we should allow information to reside on the internet rather than in our brains. That said, my own experience as both a student and a teacher suggested to me that opportunities to apply knowledge in rigorous, vigorous ways lends it meaning and cemented it more firmly in the mind. One rather old-fashioned, endangered, but very valuable means of doing this: the extended essay. When I used to grade such essays, I rejoiced at the students who presented an argument and presented it well. i groaned over the essays that dutifully laid out a line of information much as the students had received it. 

That sort of thing does happen, it is "old fashioned," but I don't think it has all that much value. Again, I suspect you and I might be using different language to describe the same thing.

If we do it this way we are neglecting the key problems in education when it comes to the teachers themselves.

1. Lack of pay comparable to other professions. 56% of teachers in Texas have to work a second job. 47% have seriously considered leaving the profession in the last year. What do these stats tell us???

2. Far too much time spent teaching in the classroom during the school day, and not nearly enough time collaborating, observing, and building with colleagues. We need our secondary teachers to teach 3-4 classes a day, not 5. And with fewer students per class. Also, instead of a duty that means checking bathroom passes, we need them to be able to use that time to observe/assist in other classes with their colleagues to share knowledge, and build learning. They'll also, as a result, be able to engage in peer review as a major portion of their evaluations.

Which will greatly enhance our school system.

At some point I hope Randi Weingarten can convince Gates that the above is what will work. Because all these other things they are proposing won't change a thing unless and until we do the above.

Hey, I apologize for not responding to this post. I'm still figuring out how to find your blog--it's not linked as Learning First on Joanne Jacobs' blog (which means I should start coming here directly, I suppose).

I'll let my second comment answer this post and you can mull for a while.

Claus,

It's interesting to hear your account of Communist schools. I guess it is possible to crush critical thinking (I've tended to suspect that this is just a myth Americans console themselves with for not being as hard-core about academics as the Asians). Still...it seems to me that we are SO FAR from too much rote learning that there is zero reason to fear that we'll tilt too far in that direction.

We started school two weeks ago. Today one of my history students told me she'd learned more in two weeks in my class that she had all year last year. Last year's teachers: all about cooperative learning, reading strategies and projects. Me: all about lectures (with discussion) and quizzes.

Here are some lies that ed schools promulgate:
>Kids hate lectures.
>Lectures are inferior to cooperative learning as modes of teaching.
>Lectures do not engage kids' minds as well as cooperative learning and projects.
>Rote learning stultifies the mind and stifles the creative spirit.
>In these modern times, education needs to be radically different than it used to be. And we know exactly how it should be different.
>The "banking model" of education has been discredited.
>You can liberate the poor by keeping them ignorant of the Western intellectual tradition.
>Retention doesn't work.
>Teachers can never win a power struggle with a student.
>The only valid student motivators are engaging lessons and good rapport with the teacher; "sticks" don't work and are distasteful to boot.
>You should "teach the child" not the subject.
>You should never be "the sage on the stage".

It took nine years to be finally liberated of these ed school-forg'd mental shackles.

By the way, education schools and education establishment make me think of Communist countries --the official dogmas may not be challenged, regardless of how false they are. Of course there is no analogue to the gulags, but I suspect I'd be banished to professional Siberia if I said any of the above statements at job interviews.