Advancing the Teaching Profession

Getting Beyond the Ripe Rhetoric

Dan Brown’s recent piece on the HP is a must read. Dan, an excellent charter school teacher (and author of  The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle), has penned an insightful retort to Nicholas Kristof's “effusive essay” on DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and her vilification of teacher unions along the road to reform.

Dan’s essay raises several questions: Just how many terrible teachers are there who need to be removed immediately? Will test scores serve as the single arbiter of who is and is not an effective teacher? If principals are going to be the ultimate judge of who teaches, then are they ready for the task and do they know how to make sound personnel decisions? (Remember Rhee has fired one-third of the district’s principals. Are the ones she replaced them with any better? How do we know?)

You get my point — and Dan’s as well. The issue of improving teaching and learning is a bit more complicated than Mr. Kristof’s portrayal suggests.

Reformers might start with identifying the best teachers — using a mix of measures such as peer review, student work samples, contributions to school-community partnerships, test scores, National Board Certification. Then they need to give these successful teachers more opportunities to prepare and induct the next generation of teachers — and help design the teaching policy reforms we so desperately need. 

Top-down solutions to the problems facing the teaching profession have not worked for 150 years. No doubt, unions have to change – and a lot. But so do many of our school administrators. Dan is not a member of any teachers' union — nor was I when I taught. Journalists should take note and try to see  through the ripe rhetoric. Dan gets it just right in his headline: "Teachers are the keys, not the roadblocks to reforming schools."

Flawed Research on Teacher Education and How Teachers Need to Be Educated

In an earlier post I was pretty hard on Mathematica – whose flawed research on effects of so-called traditional and alternative teacher education inform policymakers and practitioners of little if anything on what to do to improve the education of teachers. Now Jennifer Jennings (of EduWonkette fame) and Sean Corcoran of NYU offer a much deeper, scholarly analysis, rebuking Mathematica’s claims that there was “no benefit ... but ... no evidence of harm, either” to student achievement from “placing an alternative certification teacher in the classroom when the alternative was a traditionally certified teacher.”  Jennings and Corcoran pointed to the fact that the Mathematica study failed to “distinguish the treatments” and drew upon primarily K-2 teachers (and thus is not generalizeable to a larger group of either alternatively- or traditionally-prepared teachers). They pointed to several instances where the Mathematica researchers “minimized results” when the actual data showed that alternatively-prepared teachers’ students performed more poorly. The Jennings/Corcoran examination is a must read for anyone serious about improving teacher education.

However, I have been making the argument that it is past time to transcend this worthless debate over teacher education — alternative or traditional.  It is not a case of “either-or;” it is a case how do teachers need to be prepared for the 21st century.

Yesterday’s New York Times piece on education and the “assimilation” of the dramatic rise in English Language Learners could not make a more powerful case. The poignant piece, penned by Ginger Thompson, describes how schools —yes, even those in suburban Virginia — are struggling to both properly educate and integrate a new class of immigrants to America. Teachers are just not prepared to do more than help these students, with big ambitions of fulfilling the American dream, to pass the state test.  Well-meaning and dedicated teachers just do not have the tools to get beyond helping their ELL students learn the “sound bites” that can connect them to the answers on the state’s high stakes standardized tests.

Among many powerful points, Thompson paints a teaching corps that does not have the “cultural knowledge” to teach English Language Learners effectively and schools that are not designed to assimilate them with other students. Good teacher education can do both.

Performance Pay and Using Test Scores to Assess Teachers: So What Did the President Mean?

Yesterday’s speech by President Obama on education (and the teaching profession) was important. He pointed out even more clearly the need to advance performance pay, use data to track student progress (like in Long Beach, California), and take a hard look at charter schools (closing those that do not work and are bilking the taxpayers). The policy pundits at EduWonk suggest that teacher unions are “scrambling” because when the President said, “Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement,” he meant using test scores to judge teachers.

Outcome data must be used in any performance pay system worth its salt — but I am certain President Obama and the terrific team he is putting together know full well that current standardized tests cannot be the sole metric in judging which teachers add value and should be paid more. The reasons are legion — but tops on the list are the factors that only 30% of our nation’s teachers can have a standardized test ascribed to them, the current tests address so little of the 21st century skills the President is touting, and value-added estimates are not stable enough to be used as a sole arbiter of who is an effective teacher. This is the conclusion of many labor economists — including one who is a good friend of mine who is reporting that value-added estimates of teacher effects tallies just a mere .3 correlation from one year to the next. Not so good if one is to make a valid, high stakes decision.

So why does the question of whether test scores are to be used in P4P plans have to be yes or no? Why not — in Obama-like fashion — advance both ideas? Why not ask teachers, who cannot be judged solely according to test scores, to use the data in explaining why their students are doing better or not? Why not ask teachers, like they are doing successfully in Denver and Austin, to assemble other valid data on the effects of their efforts to raise student achievement? Why not ask teachers to design new 21st century assessments, as a part of a new P4P plan, and use the data to inform a more robust accountability system? Why not ask our best teachers (like our TeacherSolutions team or the Kansas team sponsored by the Kauffmann Foundation) to design the pay for performance systems that students deserve — and get beyond the either-or thinking and action of the past.

Indeed, the President himself has articulated his vision for the future of education by calling for higher quality tests that can tell us more about the knowledge and skills our students are learning and the system (not just the teachers) that enables them to do so.

The Right Stuff for 21st Century Teaching

The debate over 21st-century skills seems, unfortunately, to rest on century-old thinking. Ed Week reported recently on the “flak” over whether schools should focus on the  “soft skills” of creativity, collaboration, and communication  — as called for by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills — or more on the procedural skills of reading and math — as called for by reform groups such as Education Trust, Fordham Foundation, and the National Center for Teacher Quality.

What seems to be left out of the debate is that if schools are to produce more academically able  students, then teachers need to be prepared and supported to help students develop ALL of the skills they will need for successful lives in a world that is being transformed by digital technologies and connectivity.

We are learning a great deal from our teacher colleagues who participate in the Teacher Leaders Network and our TeacherSolutions 2030 team. Among other skills, 21st century teachers need to be prepared to connect subject matter for their students while also serving as coaches and information mavens for the “Googled Learner” who will increasingly need to be able to collaborate and produce in networked virtual environments.

The new generation of teachers must have more pedagogical preparation, not less, but focused on the right stuff -- like teaching second language learners or using varied student learning data to drive instruction. To teach effectively, teachers will also need the right kind of working conditions — that give them time to learn from their expert colleagues and participate in a wide array of school-community partnerships needed to serve diverse students and their families. 

However, too many so-called reformers, according to Deborah Meier, treat teachers — especially experienced ones — as the “main stumbling block.” Until these “reformers” cease vilifying teachers as the problem — and draw upon them to find unique solutions — efforts to improve students’ thinking and basic skills only will advance student achievement incrementally

MetLife: 25 Years of Listening to America’s Teachers

Since 1984, MetLife has listened to America’s teachers. Its most recent national survey, released last week, celebrates the 25th anniversary of a unique endeavor to open a window for policymakers into the minds and daily professional lives of K12 educators.

The latest MetLife report captures and compares teacher perspectives from 1983 through 2008 as it considers the future of the teaching profession. The findings suggest that teachers are more satisfied today with their careers and their relationships with parents and students, and they are generally supportive of education’s increased focus on academic standards.

The vast majority (67%) believe that their teacher education programs have prepared them for the challenges they face, up from 46% in 1984. Principals agree. The majority of school leaders report that the quality of new teachers entering the profession is “stronger” than before. Today’s teachers are far more likely to advise their students to pursue teaching as a career than their counterparts of yesterday. This is very good news.

These findings by the respected Harris Interactive organization challenge the conventional wisdom that teachers are ill-prepared and cynical about their jobs. But the surveys also surface a number of problems that beset today’s teachers -- greater concerns about the misuse of standardized tests, lack of support in teaching students with special needs and English Language Learners, and the paucity of opportunities to access the deep and continuing support needed to use technology to advance 21st century learning.

A close look also reveals that urban teachers are far less positive about their teaching experience. As the Executive Summary highlights: “Teachers and principals tend to rate urban schools significantly lower on school quality, and teachers and principals in schools with a high proportion of minority students give significantly lower ratings on academic standards, curriculum, and student preparation.”  

This valuable annual survey is only one example of the many efforts that MetLife is making to bring the insights of teachers to light. CTQ is proud to be working with MetLife Foundation as the sponsor of our TeacherSolutions 2030 initiative, which is engaging 12 expert teachers in a study of the evolution of their profession, with an eye toward what must happen to make teaching an important and vibrant career in the next decades to come.

Over the next year, MetLife’s support will allow us to publish these successful teachers' insights into how to build new assessments for 21st century teaching, learning, and accountability – and how to create new leadership opportunities that will attract and retain well-prepared and talented teachers for all schools, urban, suburban, and rural alike.

I have no doubt that teaching has a bright future -- if policymakers listen to teachers. Thanks to MetLife for asking.

More on Mathematica and the Merits of Teacher Education: Another Study Bites the Dust

Okay – here is another must read for those who are willing to raise questions about the research that's out there on the effectiveness of teacher education.

Check out the illuminating post by Aaron Pallas, who takes apart, piece-by-piece, the relevancy of the recent Mathematica study on the merits of traditional (university-based) versus alternative (short-cut) teacher preparation. If my own posts did not convince you of Mathematica’s methodological flaws and the overstated conclusions, Aaron’s will. 

With eloquence, Aaron relegates the $9 million investigation as "precise, but irrelevant."  Among a number of salient issues, he points out that because “the alternatively-certified teachers and traditionally-certified teachers in the study were not necessarily representative of graduates of the programs they attended,” the study is much ado about nothing. Another empirical--and expensive--effort to settle the teacher preparation debate bites the dust.