Advancing the Teaching Profession

The Only Fight Worth Having

According to Richard Perez-Pena of The New York Times, NJ governor Chris Christie’s take on school reform was met with a welcome reception at a recent Harvard Graduate School of Education event. Christie received his first ovation with this one-liner: “The only reason I’m engaging in this battle with the teachers’ union is because it’s the only fight worth having.”

Christie’s statement is not surprising. What stings is that such simplified logic apparently went unquestioned—and was even encouraged—by this audience of Harvard faculty and students. 

Yes, teachers' unions need to change dramatically, adopting a stronger focus on teaching and learning. And yes, longstanding issues of performance pay, quality-blind transfers, and cumbersome processes for removing incompetent teachers must be resolved —now. Students and families deserve better.

But such issues (often linked in the public mind to unions) do not comprise “the only fight worth having” in public education. In fact, to focus on these problems is to ignore many, many other roadblocks to transforming the teaching profession for the benefit of all students:

1.      Administrators who fail to cultivate the enormous leadership talent of hundreds of thousands of effective teachers. (Why not re-organize school schedules in ways that spread the expertise of our most effective teachers? This is truly one of the great lost opportunities in our schools.)

2.     School board members who base critical decisions about curriculum on their own ideological interests, rather than on empirical evidence about what works for students.

3.      State legislators who refuse to equitably finance high-need schools. (In so doing, they ensure that the most disadvantaged students have the least access to effective teachers and optimal conditions for teaching and learning.)

4.      Policymakers who insist on perpetuating either-or debates at the expense of real change. (A juicy sound bite does little to help a struggling student or a first-year teacher. Real change will demand that we transcend either-or politics and look instead at how to structure schools around what works for students.)

The “only fight worth having” is the fight for better schools for all our children. And that fight cannot be an A versus B match. (“In one corner, The Governor! In the other, The Union!”) It must instead be an ongoing campaign challenging stakeholders at all levels to work together to create the schools (and teaching profession) our students deserve.  

Now, there’s a fight worth winning.

Preparing Teachers for Long-Term Success

 

“In school time, two years is a blip on the screen."

Anna L. Martin’s recent series of short essays on The Answer Sheet do highlight problems with the Teach For America (TFA) model. But Anna’s pieces also offer an astute perspective on how the teaching profession can better fulfill the hopes of the students and families she serves. 

A TFA alum and bright young teacher working with our New Millennium Initiative, Anna is now in her seventh year of teaching at the school where she was initially placed. While her essays touch on the need for better preparation for TFA recruits, Anna focuses instead on a central point: any model that imagines a two-year life cycle for teachers is problematic.

Anna rightfully acknowledges that she might never have entered the classroom without TFA, while offering several observations about the weaknesses of the two-year cycle. What schools really need, Anna argues, are teachers who have truly mastered their craft—and who are deeply embedded in and committed to their school communities.

She points out, “Building relationships and creating a collaborative environment conducive to the kind of educational outcomes achieved by high-performing districts and countries outside the United States takes time… In a weird way, TFA seems almost to be supporting, rather than dismantling, the idea that excellent teachers are widgets — easily replaceable, easily replicable.”

Rich lessons abound in Anna’s firsthand account of what it’s like to work in a school with high turnaround—about 30% of her school’s employee base is dedicated to TFA placement. We learn about the promising young people—like Anna—who are attracted to teaching by TFA’s recruitment strategies. We learn about missed opportunities—for teachers to learn from their more experienced peers, for students and families to be served by teachers who know their communities well, and for bright, hard-working TFA alumni to develop as teacher leaders within their placement schools.

I am proud to have gotten to know Anna thanks to her involvement in our virtual Teacher Leaders Network as well as our New Millennium Initiative — powerful groups of young teachers in sites nationwide who are developing solutions for some of the most vexing problems of the teaching profession.

Here’s what is impressive to me about Anna’s essays. She provides an informed critique that emphasizes the factors that matter for students’ success. She sees that neither TFA or education schools (at least as they are designed today) has adequately addressed the needs of all students. Moving past this false dichotomy (teacher education schools vs. alternative routes) is essential to improving teaching effectiveness.

Anna and other Bay Area New Millennium Initiative team members will soon release a potent policy paper on the future of teaching. Their concrete suggestions (generated after extensive research and debate and grounded in classroom experience) address many of the key issues Anna highlights in her short essays: preparing teachers for long-term success, providing high-quality professional development on the job, and reshaping the career paths available to talented teachers. 

Wise policymakers—those who recognize the importance of developing and keeping extraordinary teachers—should listen carefully to the ideas of teacher leaders like Anna. She is not alone. We are in touch with thousands of teachers across the United States who are deeply committed to their profession but recognize that bold changes will be necessary to meet the needs of 21^st-century learners.

 

Redefining Teacher Preparation

Is America finally ready to invest in teaching?

The question looms.

Last month, I sat in on the International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York. Participants included education ministers and union leaders from high-performing nations as well as American education leaders (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, NEA president Dennis Van Roekel, and AFT president Randi Weingarten).

Andreas Schliecher, a researcher at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), offered a compelling analysis of countries with high-performing students (and narrowing achievement gaps).  What do these countries have in common? They invest in teaching as a knowledge-based profession. Teacher preparation is serious business: top-notch recruits are paid to prepare for a teaching career. 

American teacher education policy is very different—and yields poorer results for students. Our policies promote short-cut, low-quality preparation for entry into the teaching profession. There is often little connection between pre-service preparation and on-the-job support. New recruits have few incentives to receive serious training before they teach, and they are not rewarded for remaining in the classroom.

TEACHING 2030, which I co-authored with twelve accomplished teachers, presses American policymakers to invest in better teacher education for tomorrow’s students. (The image at left is taken from graphic facilitator Sunni Brown's depiction of a recent 2030 team conversation.) Relying on classroom expertise as well as research on best practices, we developed a vision of a great teacher preparation system: 

1.    Universities, school districts, and non-profits will fuse their resources to prepare future teachers;

2.   Teacher preparation will be built on a sound liberal arts education — then candidates can choose from various tracks of professional preparation, each one focusing on different roles and responsibilities;

3.   Teacher education will be cohort-based, preparing new recruits to teach as teams in high-need schools;

4.   All new teachers will complete a substantial internship in a community-based organization in order to develop deep knowledge of the context of how and where students and their families live;

5.   All new recruits for a teaching career will be expected to serve in an extensive internsh ip in a virtual teacher network, where they also learn specific skills in using multi-user virtual environments to educate students anytime, anywhere, as well as how to spread expertise among teaching colleagues;

6.   Pedagogical preparation will be built on a mixed use of live and digitally recorded “lesson studies” in which teams of candidates learn to critique teaching and assess student learning using emerging technologies;

 7.   Each teacher education candidate will have a program of learning with common tasks to accomplish and performance assessments to measure when (and what) they are ready to teach;

8.   Passing performance assessments, not completing “seat time” in college courses, will determine when teachers are ready to teach independently – and in what schools and under what conditions;

9.   Teaching responsibilities (and differential compensation) will be determined on the basis of what one knows and can do as an independently practicing teacher (identified through performance assessments) and one’s proven knowledge and skills; and

10.   Schools will be red esigned for teacher learning (as in other high-performing nations) so new recruits can develop under the supervision of expert vete rans who have been specially prepared as mentors. 

This is the future of teacher education we envision — one that will ensure equity and excellence for all students. American students and schools will only be able to catch up to (and surpass) other nations’ educational systems through dramatic transformation of its teacher preparation policies. To learn more, order a copy of TEACHING 2030.

Gen Y Teachers and the Future of the Profession

Today the American Federation of Teachers and the American Institutes for Research released a very important report on the future of teaching — revealing what Generation Y teachers believe they need in order to teach effectively. The report, built on a plethora of surveys, focus groups, and case studies, should serve as a wake-up call for those who tend to simplify the problems facing the profession.

Here are key findings:

1.    Gen Y teachers seek “more frequent feedback on their teaching” than their more veteran colleagues — but also want more assistance from their peers (not just from administrators);
2.    Gen Y teachers want more time and opportunities to improve their practice through meaningful collaboration;
3.    Gen Y teachers embrace performance pay plans, but believe that their effectiveness cannot be accurately measured through standardized test scores alone;
4.    Gen Y teachers are enthusiastic about new networking technologies that can improve teaching and learning.

These findings mirror what we are learning from the young teachers involved in our New Millennium Initiative. Generation Y teachers have no problem whatsoever with calls for more accountability among the teaching ranks. However, having studied assessment and accountability issues in depth, they are deeply skeptical of the mechanical tools being used in states like Florida, where the governor was recently called to task  by Rick Hess for “setting one-size-fits-all prescriptions” for teacher evaluation.

I’m inspired by what this report reveals about Generation Y teachers’ attitudes toward their profession. Compared with young teachers in 1999-2000, Generation Y teachers in 2008 were more likely to say they hoped to “stay in teaching as long as I am able” and less likely to report being “undecided” about their career plans.

How can we help each talented young teacher to “stay in teaching as long as I am able”?  This study offers concrete answers from the teachers themselves. And the very conditions highlighted by Generation Y teachers (collaboration with peers, frequent feedback on their teaching, equitable and reliable assessment, and technology-imbedded learning environments) are right in line with what research tells us works for students.

Through TEACHING 2030, we are developing a vision that considers the needs of 21st-century students and the new generation of teachers who will serve them. We must invest in working conditions and policies that will help students and teachers succeed in meeting 21st-century expectations. We must be willing to rethink ways to structure teachers’ work so we make the most of their talents while benefiting all students. (For example, teacherpreneurs could work with students while also serving as learning architects, web curators, teacher educators, researchers, policy mavens, and other innovative roles… opportunities that will appeal to the Generation Y teachers who are destined to be among the profession’s leaders.)     

As we imagine a brighter future for America’s students and schools, it is time to listen to the hopeful voices of our Generation Y teachers — and to acknowledge the sincere efforts of teacher unions whose leaders are increasingly committed to making sure these voices are heard. 
 
 

Questing for Better Teacher Evaluation

In a recent LA Times article, John Deasy, the incoming superintendent in Los Angeles, reframed the teacher evaluation debate with telling words:  "We are not questing for perfect. We are questing for much better."

Instead of using new value-added tools in lock-step mechanical ways, the nation’s second-largest school district (700,000+) is working to find a way to use the data in helpful ways to both identify effective teaching and improve it.

It’s a challenging task. Teachers’ unions appear to be adamantly opposed to the use of any unstable data in any high stakes decision. And district leaders often counter the union’s stance by claiming that the VAM measures are more reliable than spotty classroom observations conducted by ill-trained administrators who do not have time to assess teachers (even if they are well prepared to do so).

In this LA Times piece reporting on LAUSD’s new evaluation initiative, journalist Teresa Watanabe offers a much more nuanced view of the inherent problems with VAM — but does not go so far as to suggest that the uses of the statistical tool have to be couched in either-or terms. Watanabe also notes that “Many teachers and union leaders say they are not necessarily opposed to value-added methods but want to understand them and have a say in how they're used.”

In a recent paper penned with classroom experts, my CTQ colleague Alesha Daughtrey and I make the claim that VAM can be effectively used in performance evaluation if teacher leaders are engaged deeply “in efforts to sharpen (the) models and their underlying assessments.” We suggest that “if more opportunities are made available for teachers to understand as well as use the results, in light of both the assessments upon which they are built and the classroom context in which they are generated, many more of them will be responsive to the evidence.”

Now a group of young teachers from our New Millennium Initiative have taken the idea further, suggesting that teachers should be assessed with VAM data, not in absolute terms, but as evidence that can be used to improve their teaching and student learning. They point out that a VAM data point is not static — and teachers should be assessed on how they interpret and use evidence to advance student learning. (Watch for their upcoming new report here).

Lee Shulman, president emeritus of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has said: “One of the most dangerous ideas in assessment is the myth of a ‘magic bullet,’ some powerful test with psychometric properties so outstanding that we can base high-stakes decisions on the results of performance on that measure alone.”

Teaching effectiveness must be defined broadly and measured with a variety of tools. There are many, many teacher leaders, like the ones I am working with on pushing out our vision of the future of teaching (our TEACHING 2030 team, pictured here), who have some remarkable ideas about how to do so.

Dr. Deasy is correct. We must quest for better. If we listen to expert teachers, we'll get there.

5 Teacher Myths That Distract Policymakers

Reposted from the Washington Post Answer Sheet blog ---

By Valerie Strauss

This was written by Barnett Berry, founder and president of the Center for Teaching Quality, Inc., based in Hillsborough, N.C., which seeks to improve student achievement by advancing teaching as a 21st-century, results-oriented profession.

___________________________

By Barnett Berry

There’s a lot of talk today about making our schools better and our teachers more effective. Researchers confirm that the right teachers can make a big difference in how much students learn, even in the most challenging schools. But scholars, educators, union leaders and policy wonks still disagree, sometimes vehemently, over what good teaching looks like. And it’s a high-stakes question. Political leaders at every level are demanding we evaluate and pay teachers based on student test scores and value-added statistical formulas. If that turns out to be a bad strategy, the long-term ramifications for the nation could be staggering.

Incredible as it seems, 11 years into the new millennium decision makers are still opting for a patchwork teaching policy that often lowers entry standards to keep salaries and preparation costs down.

We spend too much time debating 20th century arguments — e.g., whether or not Teach for America or university-based certification programs are the best ways to recruit and train teachers. What we need instead are millions of well-prepared, highly savvy teachers who know how to teach the iGeneration and work successfully in teams in order to serve diverse public school populations that include large numbers of English language learners and students from poverty.

Teaching in the 21st century is complex, challenging work, and the fiction that “anyone can be a teacher” threatens our future. We have entered an era of rapid and inexorable change, where the real “high stakes” must be measured at a global level. We don’t have time for myths. Here are five that often distract policymakers from creating the results-oriented teaching profession students deserve.

Myth #1: Teacher preparation matters little for student achievement.

Research Realities: Some research suggests that new recruits from Teach for America and other fast-entry programs perform about as well as those from traditional, university-based teacher training – leading many to assume that in-depth teacher preparation matters little for student achievement. But what if neither approach is giving us the teachers we need? The National Bureau of Economic Research found that beginning teachers with more extensive clinical training (including a full-year internship – like doctors get) actually produce higher student achievement gains than those from either traditional university programs or alternative pathways. Recent research also tells us that teacher who enter with too little preparation are likely to leave the profession much sooner than those who have a thorough grasp of the fundamentals – and they’re less likely to be effective over time.

Myth #2: Teaching experience matters little for student achievement.

We keep hearing that teaching experience beyond the initial three years or so does not necessarily produce higher student test scores. But recent studies say that more experience does matter (up to 20 years) for student achievement when the conditions are ripe – that is, when teachers teach the same subjects and grade levels consistently, especially during their first five years of teaching. Other researchers have shown that experienced, expert teachers know more than novices and organize their knowledge of content, teaching strategies, and students more effectively, retrieve it more readily, and can apply it in novel and creative ways. More seasoned experts are also better prepared to overcome some of the stressful working conditions found in many high-needs schools. Experience does not guarantee effective teaching, but when schools are organize to draw on its best teachers, it matters a lot.

Myth #3: Removing incompetent teachers will fix our schools.

Research Realities: In any professional workplace, dismissing ineffective employees makes common sense. But the best evidence indicates that the percentage of ineffective teachers in American public schools is far lower than media reports might suggest. For example, the Teacher Advancement Program, which includes many thousands of teachers across the United States, uses both student test results and observational methods to assess teaching effectiveness. Only a very small fraction of TAP teachers are rated ineffective. Over 85 percent have been deemed proficient (with a score of 3 or above) and almost one-third earn a score of 4 or above on a 5-point scale. There’s ample evidence that we are obsessing on a small problem while we give short shrift to professional development strategies that could move large numbers of teachers from satisfactory to excellent.

Myth #4: Teacher tenure rules make it impossible to get rid of poor teachers.

Research Realities: A recent study by The New Teacher Project clearly shows that the difficulty in removing ineffective teachers has much more to do with ill-trained and supported administrators than tenure rules. Another report from the Center for American Progress concluded that poor evaluation procedures – not tenure – are most likely to account for a school district’s inability to fire poor performers. Teacher tenure is prevalent in “high achievement” nations like Finland. In America, poor teacher evaluation is common (epidemic, in fact) in school districts with or without unions and tenure. Tenure reform is necessary, but the bigger issue is eliminating the widespread educational malpractice associated with broken evaluation systems, which not only stymie teacher development but student achievement.

Myth #5: Merit pay will motivate teachers to teach more effectively.

Research Realities: In the most rigorous study to date, scholars from Vanderbilt University and the RAND Corporation plainly conclude that “rewarding teachers with bonus pay, in the absence of any other support programs, does not raise student test scores.” Performance pay plans can make a difference for student achievement when they are designed to improve the school climate and encourage teacher collaboration. Studies of effective performance pay systems tell us that: (1) teachers must be involved in the design and implementation; (2) costs need to be known and made public prior to program launch; (3) the system cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach – districts and schools need to be able to adapt based on local contexts; and (4) one or two direct measures of student learning (like standardized test scores) cannot be the only basis for rewards.

These myths drive today’s teaching policies and continue to ground solutions in yesterday’s challenges. They distract us from the demands that teachers already face today and that will only intensify tomorrow. We need to identify our most effective teachers, using fair, rigorous and valid measures, and let them lead the way in removing ineffective colleagues. Most important, we need to invest far more in teacher education and school redesign policies reflective of 21st century demands on our public schools. More than anything else today’s policy focus must spread the expertise our best teachers, in and out of cyberspace.

In TEACHING 2030, a new book I’ve authored with 12 outstanding teachers, we build a compelling case that for teachers to be effective now and in the future, they must know how to:

(1) teach the Googled learner, who has grown up on smartphones and virtual reality games and can find information (if not understanding) with a few taps of the finger;

(2) work with a student body that’s increasingly diverse (by 2030, 40 percent or more will be second-language learners);

(3) prepare students to compete for jobs in a global marketplace where communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creative problem solving are the “new basics”;

(4) help students monitor their own learning – using sophisticated tools to assess whether students meet high academic standards and fine-tuning instruction when they don’t; and

(5) connect teaching to the needs of communities as economic churn creates family and societal instability, pushing schools to integrate health and social services with academic learning.

As described in TEACHING 2030, far too preparation programs, including both alternative and traditional ones, cultivate teachers with these skills. Even fewer schools are organized to create opportunities for our best teachers — or teacherpreneurs — to teach students regularly as well as lead pedagogical and policy reforms outside their classrooms. Now’s the time to transcend the usual debates over how to make our schools better and our teachers more effective – and break free of the myths that keep us fighting 20th century battles. Instead we need to look hard at the realities, framed by research evidence as well as the challenges teachers face everyday, in pointing the way toward a 21st century teaching profession demanded by our nation’s public schools.

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Lessons the U.S. Needs to Learn about the Teaching Profession

Last week I was privileged to attend the International Summit on the Teaching Profession in New York City, co-sponsored by (among others) the Asia Society, WNET New York and USDOE. The Summit, which immediately preceded WNET's wonderful annual Celebration of Teaching & Learning, gathered education ministers, national union leaders and accomplished teachers from the United States and from nations with high performing and rapidly improving educational systems.

The International Summit is described here by guest blogger Liana Heitin at Education Week’s Teacher Beat blog. Heitin does a nice job in laying out the basic facts of who was there and for what purpose — but bypasses some of the most important messages about why U.S. teaching policy is way off the mark in comparison to other (top-ranked) nations represented at the Summit. As Heitin notes, in high performing nations, unions and government work together. But there is a lot more to be learned. Here are the key lessons:

1. High performing nations have not changed their teachers. They have changed their teaching development systems.

2. Ministers of Education in top-ranked nations have no problem talking about the importance of teacher working conditions — most notably time for them to learn from each other.

3. Other nations recruit top talent to teaching but recognize that high flying academics are not always the best teachers.

4. In Shanghai high performing schools have time and resources to help low performing schools. There is no competition between “traditional” schools and “charters.”

5. Top-performing nations pay for rigorous, formal, and extensive pre-service preparation of all new recruits to teaching. There is no need for a Teach for Finland or Teach for Singapore.

For insight take a good look at the OECD report presented at the conference — Lessons from PISA: What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Reform Efforts — and ask questions about why U.S. policymakers can’t get it right.

[Here’s another blog commentary — by Maureen Downey at the Atlanta Journal Constitution — that includes more highlights from the OECD report. And you can watch a webcast of the Summit's closing session here.]

America supports teachers. Now let's move forward.

In a recent back-and-forth conversation, education policy experts Diane Ravitch and Rick Hess offer persuasive explanations for the heavy criticism being heaped on teachers (and their unions). Diane speaks about the many reformers who have made teachers accountable for unreasonable (NCLB-esque) goals — advocates who, without sufficient evidence, make the claim that high needs schools are overrun with teaching incompetence. Rick argues that today's unflattering attitudes toward teachers are nothing new and that the current attacks on the profession are more about failing policies than inept classroom teachers.

They both have a piece of the truth, but there are some other larger issues in play — and additional evidence that needs to be considered.

It does not take a rocket scientist to see that the attack on teachers in Wisconsin and Florida is much more about union busting than about advancing teaching as a results-oriented profession.

In Wisconsin, the public is now learning of the many financial concessions the union has made to help resolve the budget crisis, while Governor Walker keeps demanding to strip teachers of their collective bargaining rights while giving a bye to the rights of other unionized public employees (e.g., police and fire) who have tended to support his political outlook.

In Florida, Governor Scott has re-introduced a teaching effectiveness bill that will definitely misuse value-added student achievement data for assessing teacher performance. The Florida union has put forth proposals from some of the state's best teachers (link to FL report) who call for the thoughtful use of this data in both teaching evaluations and strategic compensation. Governor Scott has clearly ignored the suggestion to build out Florida's results-oriented system of evaluation and pay, leveraging the Gates Foundation-funded reforms in Hillsborough County (Tampa) where union president Jean Clements and superintendent Mary Ellen Elia are jointly leading the way.

Unions and districts both need
to advance the agenda

Unions need to pursue an agenda that will lead to enforcing high standards among their ranks — no question. But school district administrators, who jointly sign off on the collective bargaining agreements that are hotly criticized by some reformers and many ambitious politicians, must change a lot also.

Unions must focus more on professional performance and the interests of learners — supporting the removal of the incompetent teachers who don’t meet reasonable standards of practice (as Toledo OH has been doing for decades). At the same time, school districts must ensure that valued added achievement data are used properly, in a non-mechanical way, as part of a context sensitive, multiple-measures evaluation system. District leaders much also assure that administrators are well trained (and competent) to conduct and lead fair evaluations. This is what we see happening in Hillsborough (and several other communities as well).

Finally — for those who think the public does not, in the end, support public school teachers, examine this  Rasmussen poll, just released. It reveals that almost 60% of likely Wisconsin voters now disapprove (with 48% strongly disapproving) of Governor Walker. The same poll shows that 77% of Wisconsin voters have a positive opinion of teachers.

More teachers need to lead the way in bringing about the transcendent teaching effectiveness reforms demanded by our failed education policy system. We cannot continue to tolerate an approach to teaching policy that undercuts efforts to recruit, prepare, support and pay the neighbors, friends and fellow citizens whom we depend upon to teach our students. Wisconsin is sending a message. America supports teachers. Let's move forward to preserve and improve the teaching profession.

Bold indicators - for the 20th century

The Center for American Progress and the Education Trust have published a policy brief focusing on the "essential elements" of teacher policy they believe must be present in the reauthorization of ESEA.

Problem is — they left out some of the essentials.

Their policy prescriptions earnestly address the 20th century problems that so many policy wonks seem determined to fix, whether or not they still have much relevance. Here in the second decade of the 21st century, the CAP/Ed Trust proposed ESEA indicators often miss the mark. They ignore important research on the conditions that will allow teachers to teach effectively in the new millennium and thus assure that all students have access to expert teachers every day.

Here are a five examples of inadequate indicators.

CAP and Ed Trust call for mandates requiring states to collect and report on:

1. The percentage of teachers beyond their first year of teaching. But they disregard the fact that high-needs schools require teachers with at least 4-5 years under their belt -- the point at which classroom teachers develop a more finely tuned practice.

2. The percentage of course sections taught by in-field secondary teachers. But they ignore that many administrators mindlessly shift elementary teachers from grade to grade without any consideration of their training and experience.

3. The percentage of teachers prepared by a high-performing teacher preparation program. But they overlook the fact that ineffective teachers can graduate from "effective pathways" without ever having to demonstrate that they are competent.

4. The percentage of teachers with fewer than ten absences. But they fail to account for poor working conditions (e.g., like inept administrators) that may be undermining teachers' capacity to teach effectively.

5. The percentage of teachers in the top quartile of teacher impact on student growth. But without recognizing the instability of the current statistical models, the narrow range of testing data available, and the need to use all data in more measured and non-mechanical ways.

Most important, none of their proposals call for states to collect evidence on the spread of effective teaching by expert practitioners, in and out of cyberspace. This is how schools improve.  If we are going to create the kind of teaching development system students deserve, we must have indicator systems that align with today's school realities — indicators that will actually drive the changes we must have to create a high performing, results-oriented teaching profession across the board.

Are Teacher Unions Anachronistic?

Today’s New York Times raises important questions about the fracas over unions and the teaching profession in Wisconsin. A news analysis explores the possibility that unions, including those representing teachers, may have become anachronistic — ending with a quote from a private sector employee: “I know there was a point for unions back in the day because people were being abused,” she said. “But now there’s workers’ rights; there’s laws that protect us.”
 
Perhaps she is right when it comes to basic employee law, and the rights of workers to fair wages and basic working conditions (e.g.,hours worked per week and job safety). But as Diane Ravitch recently wrote in the Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog, the unions still have a role to play in advancing teaching as a profession — in terms of advocating for basic conditions that all teachers must have to teach effectively:

I recently visited Arizona, a right-to-work state, and parents there complained to me about classes of 30 for children in first and second grades, and even larger for older students; they complained that the starting salary for teachers was only $26,000, and that it is hard to find strong college graduates to enter teaching when wages are so low.

Too many policymakers, unfortunately, would prefer to opt for cheap and compliant teachers, and not those who are more well-prepared and willing to aggressively advocate for the kinds of conditions and teaching practices they know will help students learn more. Much as it has been during 150+ year history of the American common school, too many policymakers want teachers to be seen, but not heard.
 
But isn't it time to invite classroom experts  — whose deep knowledge of teaching, students, and families is a precious public resource — to inform and shape education policy?  Isn’t it time for teacher leaders to enforce standards among their ranks and work with policymakers and the public in creating a 21st century results-oriented teaching profession? 

And isn’t it time for teacher leaders to press forward the discussion about transforming unions into  professional guilds that seek not only to maintain but to advance public education as the cornerstone of our democracy? This is the vision for the teacher unions of tomorrow set forth in our new CTQ/TLN book TEACHING 2030. We need a collective voice of teachers now more than ever — functioning not as maligned defenders, but as respected leaders who are about the business of creating the world's finest public school system.

More Evidence that Newspapers Shouldn’t Be in the Teacher Evaluation Business

The controversy over using value-added ratings to judge teachers in Los Angeles — which has been the subject of many blog posts, including my own August comments — continues unabated with the release of a new report from the National Education Policy Center, challenging the methodology used by an L.A. Times consultant and reporters to create a massive ratings database and publicly identify what the newspaper claims are ineffective teachers.

Last week, L.A. Times writer Jason Felch, the lead reporter on the project, attempted to trump the release of the NEPC report by breaking the embargo date requested by the Center. (Embargo dates are routine business for newspapers and newsmakers—a necessary partnership that assures fair and wide distribution of newsworthy developments.)

It is transparently clear that Mr. Felch, who was given an advance copy of Due Diligence and the Evaluation of Teachers by its authors, jumped the gun in an effort to reduce the report’s splash and to muffle growing concerns both about the methodologies used to make the analysis and the ways in which the L.A. Times has used the data. Felch and the Times have not only mined the data to produce dozens of news stories but provided public access to the database through an online search engine  that rates individual teachers by name and ranks the top 100 elementary teachers and schools in the vast LAUSD system.

The NEPC researchers found many flaws in the analysis conducted by Richard Buddin, a senior economist at the RAND Corporation (working as an independent contractor). Both Felch’s series of stories and the database developed by Felch and his editors relied entirely on Buddin’s work to identify “effective and ineffective teachers.” Yet when the NEPC researchers did their own analysis and compared it with Buddin’s results, they found that, for reading, “only 46.4% of teachers would retain the same effectiveness rating under both models,” and for math, only 60.8%.

The NEPC determined that the Buddin/Times statistical approach was “producing biased estimates of teacher effects because it omits variables that are associated both with student test performance and how students and teachers are assigned to one another.”

You can read the NEPC authors’ meticulous description of their own methods and analysis for yourself. What’s particularly notable is their contention that the nature of the data called for a more conservative approach to determining teacher effects:

Because the L.A. Times did not use this more conservative approach to distinguish teachers when rating them as “effective” or “ineffective”, it is likely that there are a significant number of false positives (teachers rated as effective who are really average), and false negatives (teachers rated as ineffective who are really average) in the L.A. Times’ rating system.

While the NEPC researchers concentrated on what they perceived as flaws in Buddin’s methodology and conclusions, that doesn’t let Jason Felch and the L.A. Times off the hook. After claiming that teachers’ personal rights to privacy (and, indeed, fair treatment) were trumped by “the public’s right to know,” Felch and his editors had an obligation to vet and re-vet their methodology before playing that First Amendment trump card. We can now see they did not go nearly far enough.

  Remarkably, when Mr. Felch broke the NEPC report embargo and reported on its findings, the L.A. Times headline proclaimed: "Separate study confirms many Los Angeles Times findings on teacher effectiveness." Perhaps Felch and his editors were banking on the public’s aversion to reading reports about statistical methodology. But anyone who reads the NEPC executive summary will see that the newspaper’s choice of headline was self-serving and disingenuous — and that’s putting it mildly.

In response, the NEPC researchers were quick to release a fact sheet about the Times story, challenging its interpretation of their work and bluntly stating that the August publication by the Times of teacher effectiveness ratings was “based on unreliable and invalid research.”

WHAT IS most troubling about all this brouhaha — beyond the very real damage that the Times’ reckless actions has done to teachers who did not deserve the treatment they got — is this: Results-oriented teacher evaluations are very much needed. I could not agree more with Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute that VAM can be used to evaluate teachers, but only “carefully.”

Back in August I noted that:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, under the auspices of its Measuring Effective Teaching project, is taking a very thoughtful approach to teacher assessment by looking at multiple measures of student achievement and linking other metrics (e.g., classroom observations, teachers’ analyses of student work and their own teaching, and levels of student engagement) to capture a more robust and accurate view of who is effective and why.

Very few accomplished teachers are likely to argue against better methods of determining who is effective and why. In a soon-to-be JUST-RELEASED paper from the Center for Teaching Quality, three teachers well-versed in the issues surrounding evaluation policy call for the strategic use of value-added data, with the VAM models’ limitations in mind. They strongly recommend that classroom experts be engaged to help sharpen these tools and their underlying student assessments, and by doing so, produce accountability systems that better support effective teaching and learning.

In a sensible society, concerned about the future of the children in its public schools, we would not — and I hope we will not — leave the evaluation of effective teaching to reputation-seeking journalists and their attention-seeking news organizations.

Using VAM the right way. With teacher leaders LEADING the way.

Harvard professor Heather Hill and several research colleagues have published one of the more thoughtful pieces of research on value-added models and their validity for evaluating teachers on the basis of student test score gains.

The article, “A Validity Argument Approach to Evaluating Teacher Value-Added Scores,” appears in the American Educational Research Journal.

Using sophisticated quantitative measures, the researchers tested how well the value ratings of middle school math teachers correlated with their mathematical knowledge and quality of instruction. The results are compelling, revealing the utility of VAM in some circumstances, but also pointing to a serious flaw in the models because of the mis-identification of teachers.

The researchers found high correlations of VAM estimates among three different types of statistical models used to rate teachers. And, to quote from the abstract, they “found teachers’ value-added scores correlated not only with their mathematical knowledge and quality of instruction but also with the population of students they teach.”

Perhaps most importantly the researchers found that a large percentage of math teachers studied had very low ‘quality of teaching’ ratings, but very high VAM estimates. In this case, low quality meant operationally that examination of the teachers’ instruction revealed “very high rates of mathematical errors and/or disorganized presentations of mathematical content.”

Case studies of these teachers explained a lot of these “false positive” VAM results — results that could make such teachers eligible for significant performance bonuses in most merit pay plans (and, not insignificantly, send the message that their teaching practice was exemplary).

Case 1: This teacher has been trained as an elementary generalist, with 8 years of teaching experience. The case study recounts that she reads a problem out of the text as “3/8 + 2/7” but then writes it on the board and solves it as “3.8 + 2.7.” She calls the commutative property the community property. She says proportion when she means ratio. She talks about denominators being equivalent when she means the fractions are equivalent. In many instances, the teacher’s teaching “clouded rather than clarified the mathematics of the lesson.”

But she does exhibit the “tough-love style of behavior management” popular today in many high-need schools. She knows how to organize discussions of math among her students. If you entered a classroom as an evaluator she would be rated as a teacher who has high expectations — another reform mantra. The researchers were puzzled as to how she earn such a high VAM rating, suggesting that it may have been the consistent computational exercises she assigned (in other words, teaching to the test).

Case 2: This teacher has been teaching for four years, entering the profession as mid-career switcher. While he does not hold a degree in mathematics, he has completed many math courses in his academic training, and his previous work outside of education gave him practical experience in using math. Knowledge of math was not his problem. He understands math conceptually, but he has little skill in detecting problems in his students’ mathematical reasoning. And while he made frequent mathematical errors (some serious), often “his students quickly correct(ed) them.”

Overall the researchers concluded that there was “very little mathematics occurring” in his classroom as the teacher offers only the “briefest of mathematical presentations, typically referring students to the text and assigning a series of problems.” He only provided routine supervision of and feedback on student work. The researchers concluded that his high VAM ratings were best explained by the high ability of the students he taught, who had many other in-and out-of-school opportunities to learn math.

Conclusion: Based on the data analysis and case studies, the researchers offered a clear warning to policymakers about the proper use of value-added methods: “Although we do recommend the use of value-added scores in combination with discriminating observation systems, evidence presented here suggests that value-added scores alone are not sufficient to identify teachers for reward, remediation, or removal.”

Our own work with teacher leaders in a variety of CTQ programs suggests that many classroom practitioners are ready to accept and use VAM as part of a comprehensive teacher development and evaluation system — but not in any automated way. In a soon-to-be released policy paper, which includes expert insights from teachers Renee Moore, Marsha Ratzel, and David Orphal, we make the case that if teachers are able to unpack and use VAM data as part a comprehensive evaluation process, then more practitioners will embrace the tool.

Under our proposal, instead of a far-off statistician make a summative judgment of an individual teacher on the basis of a VAM rating, trained onsite evaluators (including expert teachers) will use VAM data in a non-automated way to make sense of who is effective or not, and why that’s the case, in the context of their teaching and working conditions.

Now is the time to cultivate the many accomplished teachers in our schools who can lead the way in ensuring that VAM’s potential as a useful evaluation tool is not ultimately lost because policymakers ignored the warnings of Heather Hill and other VAM researchers to do it right.

Reference: Hill, H., Kapitula, L. and Umland, K. (2010) A Validity Argument Approach to Evaluating Teacher Value-Added Scores. American Educational Research Journal.

The Top 10 Teaching Policy Issues NCTQ Somehow Forgot

The National Council for Teacher Quality (no organizational relationship to us here at the Center for Teaching Quality) has once again published its annual report on teaching policies across the nation. Unfortunately, the NCTQ report card builds on a very narrow view of what it takes to develop the nation’s teaching profession — and apparently is locked into 20th century thinking and actions.

The report card points to four problem areas: performance management policies that are disconnected from teacher effectiveness; vague and/or weak guidelines for teacher preparation; licensure requirements that do not ensure that teachers have appropriate content knowledge; and obstacles that prevent expansion of the teacher pipeline.
 
But NCTQ bypasses many other critical areas that state teaching policies must address. In fact, the list of overlooked issues is so long I could fill a lot of virtual space ticking off the inadequacies of the NCTQ report. Don’t worry, I won’t. I’ll just give you my top 10.

10 Policy Issues States Must Address but NCTQ Ignores
 
1. Performance management policies that do not hold administrators accountable for creating conditions necessary for teachers to teach effectively (like time for elementary teachers to teach science);
 
2. The lack of capacity in state agencies to assemble linked teacher-student databases that educators can use to improving teaching and learning;
 
3. The development of common tools and strategies so that educators can use value-added ratings in valid and reliable ways (check out the new research of Heather Hill, Tom Kane, and Jesse Rothstein);

4. The lack of attention to joint funding for higher education and school districts (as well as non-profits and social service agencies) required to fuel the teacher education reforms (e.g., urban and rural teacher residencies) that are so important for the schools of tomorrow;
 
5. Weak guidelines for holding traditional and alternative certification programs accountable for performance and teacher retention (the NCTQ report focuses only on university-based teacher education programs for some strange reason, despite the growing alternative pipeline);
 
6. The lack of attention to “grow your own” teacher development programs that build capacity for local communities to cultivate new recruits who are more likely to know students and families and remain in teaching for the long haul;
 
7. The lack of focus on developing teachers with content-specific teaching knowledge (and not just subject matter knowledge);
 
8. The guarantee that no teacher teaches special education without extensive training in serving the increasing numbers of different students with serious and diverse learning challenges;
 
9. The lack of attention to creating more hybrid teaching roles so that effective teachers can lead policy and pedagogical reforms without totally leaving the classroom; and
 
10. Obstacles that prevent all preparation programs from ensuring that new recruits know how to: (a) teach the “Googled learner” (who can find any piece of content at the tap of a finger); (b) work with growing numbers of second language learners, and (c) develop and use tools in the classroom to measure student progress toward meeting the Common Core standards.

Sorry, NCTQ, but your agenda is far too narrow. There is so much more to be done to ensure public policy will advance the results-oriented teaching profession students deserve.

A new vision of teacher tenure

Stephen Sawchuck at Education Week is always spot-on in identifying the hot teaching policy issues in his lively Teacher Beat blog. Take this recent post on teacher tenure. Imagine if instead of focusing on tying tenure to student 'achievement' (determined using 20th century tools built on 19th century principles of teaching and learning), we instead focused on tying tenure to student learning and the spread of teaching expertise, in and out of cyberspace. This idea captures much of the vision for a 21st century teaching profession we seek to advance at the Center for Teaching Quality.

Our ground-breaker book Teaching 2030 — which reimagines tenure, teaching roles, leadership for school reform, and much more —  is officially released this week.

Teachers and Nanny Cams: Compliance vs. Trust

Guest blogger Jon Eckert is an assistant professor of education at Wheaton College in Wheaton IL. Before joining the Wheaton faculty in 2009, Jon served for a year as a Teaching Ambassador Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education and in the Office of the Secretary. He taught and coached for 12 years in the middle grades in Illinois and Tennesee, where he completed his doctorate at Vanderbilt in 2008.

by Jon Eckert

For some, Mike Petrilli’s recent commentary in Education Next might conjure up some fairly humorous images of a tiny “nanny cam” embedded in a stuffed bear to catch teachers behaving badly, or a principal sitting at his or her office with a bank of monitors similar to a prison cell block to ensure that all is well in the school. But is he taking a potentially valuable tool for educators over “a bridge too far” and instead, continuing to de-professionalize the teaching profession?

In this piece, he begins by advocating for the use of electronic recording of classrooms with benefits similar to those achieved by having cameras in police patrol cars. I am a teacher of nearly 15 years, including four in Tennessee where my middle school science students achieved excellent value-added ratings. As a Teaching Ambassador Fellow at the U.S. Department of Education, I worked in both the Bush and Obama administrations on teacher quality issues and matters related to assessment and accountability. I see the tremendous benefit of digitally recording and analyzing the work of teachers and students. One of the most painful, vulnerable, and productive ways to grow as a teacher or prospective teacher is to analyze and reflect on your teaching or the teaching of others on video.

Currently, I am a professor in the oft-maligned world of teacher education, where this month I am also teaching a physics unit to 44 fifth graders and digitally recording each day’s lesson for analysis by me and my teacher education students. Later this spring, my students will be required to record one lesson a day for a week, view each lesson each night, and analyze what they have seen and how they can grow.

As Petrilli points out in his commentary, the Gates Foundation MET Project is using 360-degree cameras in the classrooms of 3,000 teachers to evaluate and provide feedback to teachers. Again, there is tremendous potential value in this type of practice.

However, midway through the commentary, Petrilli asks, “But why not go further?” This marks the point where we part ways.

He goes on to make the case that video cameras should be used for “monitoring” teachers. In his view, constant video monitoring will reduce child abuse, school violence, ineffective teaching practice both behaviorally and compositionally, and increase access for parents. There are at least three problematic assumptions that undergird Petrilli’s argument:

Assumption #1: We can define teaching effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, via constant electronic vigilance. Gross incompetence, such as teachers reading the newspaper, texting, or losing complete control of the class might be readily evident in Petrilli’s world of electronic vigilance. However, a decent principal can already identify this with the tools at his or her disposal. Effective teaching is not always seen easily, as scholars have found, when it comes to teacher evaluation, there are “limits to looking.” Effective teaching often rests on how teachers think about their students’ academic and socio-emotional progress and what they do about it before and after class.

Assumption #2: Effective teachers “have little to fear” because their effectiveness will be self-evident. There is no guarantee that those who are watching know what they are looking for and how they will determine what good teaching looks like on a video. A plethora of studies, including one by the New Teacher Project, suggests that teacher evaluation is undermined because administrators are not trained to assess teaching adequately. While Jacob and Lefgren found that some principals are quite good at identifying the top and bottom 10-20% of teachers, giving administrators a video monitor will not make them any better at this task. Not all principals are uniformly effective at evaluating teaching. It takes time and training and principals who were effective teachers themselves.

Assumption #3: Teachers cannot be trusted. Tony Bryk eloquently argues for and illustrates the power of trust in schools and its connection to improving schools. If we do not trust teachers to have good intentions toward students, why would we believe that having a camera in a classroom would keep them from simply perpetrating the offense elsewhere out of the view of the camera? What does this say about our respect for teachers and the complicated and challenging work they have to perform?

Ultimately, if we feel we need a “nanny cam” in every classroom in America to ensure compliance and competence, then we have lost our sense of teachers as trusted molders of minds and citizens. We are reduced to thinking of them as technicians transferring information in a prescriptive manner. If this is the role we expect teachers to assume, no amount of monitoring will repair the damage such marginalization will do to our democracy.

Learn more about Jon Eckert here.

Straight Talk at the "Straight Up" Blog

Rick Hess is definitely “straight up.” Gotta really appreciate his blog, including his latest guest posts by Roxanna Elden (expert teacher and TLN member) and ed researcher Dan Goldhaber.

In her guesting debut, Roxanna unpacks the language of self-proclaimed school reformers who use terms like “status quo” to denigrate the efforts of teachers and bash the unions who seek to support them. Roxanna cautions us that teachers — beset by years of policy mandates that do not work — often see value in a number of seemingly "status quo" strategies. She writes: “Most teachers are open to growth and change, but we have also experienced changes so poorly planned, last minute, and disruptive that the status quo doesn't seem like such a bad alternative.”
 
And then there is the very thoughtful essay from Professor Goldhaber, making the case for the careful use of value-added models in assessing teaching effectiveness. As he and I have discussed in the past over a beer (me) or bourbon (Dan), the various statistical wrinkles and the messiness of student attribution require us to take a cautious and comprehensive approach to using VAM. One way for VAM to be thoughtfully put to work is to have teachers co-develop the metrics and then drive its application in determining effective and ineffective teaching. (We'll soon post a paper at the CTQ website that I co-wrote with several teacher leaders for the Gates Foundation. It makes the case for this approach.)

But let's remember that, in terms of tools, VAM is a creation of late 20th century statistics and measures academic growth pretty much in 20th century terms. Indeed, we might even say that the standardized tests currently in use (from which VAM results are derived) are actually built on 19th century principles of teaching and learning.
 
We are now entering the second decade of the 21st century. We have the smart teachers (e.g., Roxanna) and the smart tools (including smartphones in the hands of most educators) to reframe accountability and school reform. We have students who deserve cutting edge assessments respectful of the real work done by the professionals who serve them.

If we want to rid ourselves of the "status quo," let's start there.

As we stretch the school dollar, let's not rip out the seams of our public system

I just came across Bruce Baker’s scathing critique of the new “15 ways to stretch the school dollar” policy brief, penned by Mike Petrilli and Marguerite Roza for the Fordham Institute.

Baker’s analysis turns the brief on its side (if not on its head), using pages of hard evidence to poke holes in the claim that the proposed reforms would actually reduce state spending on schools or help districts make better budget-trimming choices by eliminating "onerous" policies. Both the brief and Baker's response are must-reads for anyone trying to peel the onion of school funding mandates.

The policy issues raised by Petrilli and Roza need to be addressed. But it's important to do so carefully and thoughtfully, and despite Baker's aggressive style, he does lay out research-based counter arguments that deserve a full response, also framed by credible research.

As I looked through the list of 15 policy recommendations to "stretch" school dollars, I had some questions of my own. For instance, Petrilli and Roza propose that states and school systems:
 
• End ‘last hired, first fired’ practices. I would ask what happens when administrators, who know little about teaching and learning, undervalue the pool of experienced teachers who have grown up in a community and know students and families well.

• Remove class-size mandates. I would ask what happens when teachers cannot differentiate instruction and don't have time to carefully assess progress on the Common Core Standards because they have too many students to teach.

• Eliminate mandatory salary schedules. I would ask what happens when an impoverished school district does not have finances in place to ensure that teacher pay does not fall below the level necessary to attract talent.

• Redesign teacher compensation. I would ask what happens (this would be a good thing) to the savings when many teachers perform well within the incentives-driven redesign, and the district needs more money for salaries, not less.

• Redesign sick leave and stop spending on substitutes. I would ask what would happen if ALL administrators were expected to do some teaching (an issue that P&R do not address), both to reduce the need for subs and to keep all school professionals current about what it takes to teach today's students.

• Limit the length of time that students can be identified as English Language Learners. I would ask what happens when students are automatically or arbitrarily removed from a program, even when their teachers make the professional judgment that they still need those services.
 
School reformers often call for education policy solutions that are far too detached from the realities of the classroom and what it takes to educate students in the 21st century. It's hard to imagine that some of these proposals could survive a thorough vetting by expert teachers and principals who understand what it takes to be successful in every kind of school these days. I'd encourage policymakers to carry out such a vetting before leaping into new policy pants.

There are certainly other actions school districts can take to cut costs. As I mention above, one might be to create the expectation that all administrators teach and work with students some of the time. If they're not qualified to do that, perhaps they should be the first to be let go. As a decision maker responsible for educating students to high levels, I would definitely pursue this idea well before I let go all of my experienced and proven teachers (because they cost too much) -- or before I eliminated substitute teachers, who make it possible for teachers to spend time sharpening their teaching practice on behalf of the students they serve.

Let's be very careful how we stretch the school dollar. We don't want to rip out the seams of America's public school system, which I and many others still believe is vital in holding our democracy together. 

Teacherpreneurism, not incrementalism, will give us 'peak performance' schools

I share the optimism of TLN blogger Ariel Sacks (see this recent post) and her hopes for creating a large force of teacherpreneurs to lead excellence in the schools of tomorrow. It’s a major concept we decribe in TEACHING 2030, the new book co-authored by myself, Ariel and 11 other accomplished teachers. I’m so hopeful about this Big Idea, in fact, that I fully expect to be promoting Ariel and many others as teacherpreneurs in the decades to come.

As Ariel notes in her post, over 20 members of the Teacher Leaders Network had an often-riveting conversation with Education Secretary Duncan in mid-December, during a live virtual conference. The online event was one of a series of webinars co-hosted by CTQ and the Education Department to inject more expert teacher voice into the national ed policy debate. (Watch for a policy paper and podcast on “TLN Talks with ED” in late January).

Ariel’s excellent elevator speech on teacherpreneurism did indeed catch the ear of Mr. Secretary. But somehow I do not think he fully understood our call for 600,000 teacherpreneurs by 2030 — and the goal to finally blur the now-sharp lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them.

In response to Ariel’s description, Secretary Duncan pointed to the federal Teacher Incentive Fund program as an example of his Department’s support for more substantive teacher leadership, suggesting TIF will support the kinds of roles she identified as “teacherpreneurial.”

With all due respect to the Secretary, I question that interpretation. The Teacher Incentive Fund grants, at least in their current incarnation, do not encourage a “rethinking of the teaching profession” as an instrument to drive continuous improvement in teaching and learning. Neither the specs of the grant guidelines — nor the uninspiring “career ladders” being built from TIF funds — suggest that anyone in Washington imagines TIF as a catalyst for transforming teaching into a full-realized profession capable of leading America’s public schools to peak performance in the 21st century. 

Through our extensive work in Jefferson County, Colorado, those of us at the Center for Teaching Quality know the TIF process and criteria well. I certainly agree that the TIF grants are promoting some positive, incremental change in the direction of more teacher leadership and responsibility-sharing. But the reforms are still “so 20th century.” For the most part, they still reinforce the keen distinctions between teachers and administrators, with the former clearly at the bottom of the organizational pyramid.

Here is what I am sure of: TIF does not advance the spread of teaching expertise in and out of cyberspace. It does not promote teachers as bridge builders between schools, communities and other vital student and family service providers. It does not open doors for teachers to become education game developers and masters of mobile technologies in the cause of learning. It does not promote teachers like Ariel and my other Teaching 2030 co-authors as change agents empowered to revamp university preparation programs (which the Secretary justly calls for). Those who shape the Teacher Incentive Fund’s policies would never imagine that its investments could produce situations where the highest paid person in a school system is a practicing teacher.

TIF could help drive these and many other reforms that would nurture and promote the teacherpreneurial spirit. Absent that policy vision, be assured that the Center for Teaching Quality and the 1000-plus members of the Teacher Leaders Network will forge ahead in 2011, in full pursuit of a true, results-oriented teaching profession.

Teaching 2030, the new book describing our vision of the teaching profession we need in the 21st century, will be available in bookstores and online no later than January 9.

Edging toward Professionalism

Last week The Bill & Malinda Gates Foundation released initial findings from its Measures of Effective Teaching investigation — a much needed $45 million effort to determine which teachers are good or not, and why.

As other research has found, the Gates investigators concluded that the value- added calculations of a teacher's performance can fluctuate significantly but not enough to preclude the data from being used as part of a more comprehensive system of evaluation. (A position I've argued here since this blog's inception.) As Education Week summed it up: "So far, the study...appears to support the notion, advocated by teachers’ unions and others, that evaluations should be based on multiple measures."

Perhaps, most importantly, the initial findings revealed much stronger correlations between classroom conditions, teaching practices and student achievement.  Most notable were similarities in the predictive effect of teachers' value-added histories and students’ perceptions of a teacher’s ability to challenge students with rigorous work.
 
As the MET findings suggest, success in accurately identifying effective teachers will require erudite interpretation from those who know teaching and learning and the context in which practitioners teach. The researchers concluded that “reinventing the way we evaluate and develop teachers will eventually require new infrastructure” — using digital video as well as peer observations.

In determining who is an effective teacher, it's time for classroom practitioners (and their unions) to take the lead in establishing and enforcing standards among their ranks and beginning to function more like professional guilds.
 
Dina Strasser, a TLN member from our virtual community, engaged in a lengthy conversation earlier this fall with a doctor-turned-teacher over what it might take for teaching to fully evolve as a profession. It makes for interesting reading.
 
Perhaps Vinnie Basile of Westminster 50 (Colorado) — a participant in the CTQ/TLN New Millennium Initiative — put it most clearly and simply:

Transforming the union into the professional guild is the central, unifying solution to many of the otherwise divided issues in education reform. It empowers teachers to take control of their own career paths, enforcing a set of standards that in many cases would far exceed the expectations of policymakers and the general public.

The MET research edges teaching toward professionalism by helping establish empirical links between what teachers do and how students learn — and why. But only teacher leaders can truly make sense of all of this data. And they are in the best position to ensure that the data are used to drive changes in everyday classroom realities and the improvements in the lives of students and their families and communities.

Hybrid Thinking

Once again a Tom Friedman op-ed column in the New York Times has me thinking about how we can advance more thoughtful action in public education.

Friedman’s latest, “Got to Get This Right,” speaks to the need for a new brand of “hybrid politics” that transcends the usual partisan gridlock and pushes difficult choices we must make to rebuild our nation. He challenges the hardened, 20th century policy positions assumed by those on different sides of the political aisle.

In education, and specifically in teaching policy, we find the same calcified thinking — tired strategies that are short-circuiting the energy needed to rebuild our public schools for the 21st century.

Consider these teaching policy choices — and how the second of each of the following pairs offers some hybrid thinking that transcends the endless bipolar debates over “what to do about teachers.”
 
TIRED: Teachers do not need substantial preparation before they begin teaching. Districts and non-profits, not universities, are best suited to train the next generation of educators — primarily on the job – with no expectations that they’ll stay long enough to become expert professionals.
 
HYBRID: Teachers — because of advancements in cognitive science, the new science of teaching reading and math, and the growing demands of working with second language learners as well as teaching the “Googled,” social media-driven student— need more preparation than ever before. New public-private partnerships can drive teaching residency programs that deeply prepare teacher leaders to manage a wide array of teaching faculty who enter from different pathways with diverse career trajectories.
 
TIRED: School districts must tightly define and distinguish administrators from teachers and vest more authority in building principals to hire and fire those who teach.
 
HYBRID: School districts need to blur the lines of distinction between administrators and teachers and offer more opportunities for the latter to create and lead their own schools and take more control over who enters teaching, how they are evaluated and rewarded, and who advances up the ladder of professional leadership.
 
TIRED: Teachers will be paid primarily on performance, based on value-added statistical methods that identify those who help their students make gains on current standardized achievement tests.
 
HYBRID: Teachers are compensated on the basis of their meaningful qualifications and experiences as well as on multiple measures of performance — including advancing student learning. These measures include not only standardized test results but more authentic forms of assessment, as well as the ability to assist struggling colleagues and spread teaching expertise; to support students in coping with life’s exigencies, and to build strong school-community relationships.

These and many other hybrid concepts are explored in the new book Teaching 2030, which I’ve co-authored with 12 outstanding teachers from across the United States.

Friedman frames his argument for a hybrid approach to national and international policy in dire terms: “it’s the only workable course for the country right now…so that never again will we see polls that indicate that half the country thinks our best days are behind us.”

Much the same can be said for policies to improve our public schools: if we want to see better days that assure all students the learning opportunities they deserve, we can no longer frame the solutions in either-or terms. We absolutely must have “and-both” thinking and action.

Tom Friedman Has Some of It Right – But He Needs to Do a Little More Homework

Tom Friedman’s op-ed piece in last Saturday’s New York Times suggests that it's time for policymakers to get serious about teaching in America. Friedman calls for emulating the teacher development systems of Finland and Denmark that have transformed teaching from a factory-line job to a knowledge profession by investing “massively” in how teachers are recruited, prepared, and rewarded. So far, so good.

Friedman then goes on to praise Race to the Top investments by the Obama Administration, while bemoaning the perceived failure of our schools to teach "the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate." Yet many accomplished teachers who are eager to teach in ways that build just these skills are complaining that Obama's R2T investments continue support for a narrow, test-driven curriculum that discourages time-consuming strategies like project-based instruction — the very kind of teaching that requires students to work together and apply what they are learning to solve authentic problems.

Friedman apparently does not yet know that high performing nations invest in teachers in much different ways than those prescribed by America’s current federal policies. Top-scoring nations like Finland invest in:
 
1. Teacher education, so that all recruits have extensive preparation, fully paid by the federal government, in a wide array of relevant pedagogical strategies, before they begin to teach;

2. Good professional working conditions, so that all teachers have up to 50% of their time devoted to working with each other on assessing student progress, refining their lessons, and developing new pedagogical skills; and

3. Purposeful student assessment systems, so that teachers always know whether students are learning what we've agreed they need to learn, and what to do next if they are not.

It's true that the USDOE has recently invested about $160 million in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, in an attempt to build better student assessments that will recognize and promote quality teaching. However, very little of the R2T's $4 billion in "change dollars" actually pushes states to invest in serious teacher education, including provocative new approaches proposed by those who teach. Instead the focus is on alternative certification that truncates training.The R2T framework, which continues to promote 20th century reform strategies,  also does very little to help educators and other leaders focus on the future of learning and the need to transform teaching practice to meet the needs of students "growing up digital." 

I think that Mr. Friedman, an erudite observer of the global economy, senses the need to finally professionalize teaching in America. I hope he'll take the time to become more fully informed about what other competitive nations are doing to build a 21st century teaching profession — and the steps we need to take to do the same.

David Brooks Can’t Have It Both Ways

I was fascinated by David Brooks’ op-ed in the New York Times this week: “The Two Cultures.” It’s an interesting analysis of how conservatives and liberals think about current economic policy.
 
Brooks — who has called for highly mechanistic reforms in teaching and public education — reprimands liberals for their overly rationalistic approaches to getting our nation’s economy moving in the right direction. Indeed, he virtually taunts them for claiming that “the performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models” and for ignoring indicators that recognize human psychological responses to growing deficits and the “fear” growing out by anticipated increases in interest rates.
 
In describing the failure of the liberal model undergirding the Democrats’ stimulus package, he continues his sharp-edged rant: The “liberal technicians” have “amputated those things that can’t be contained in (their models), like emotional contagions, cultural particularities, and webs of relationships.”
 
So why, I wonder, when it comes to thinking about teaching and public education, has Brooks consistently favored the short-cut, 1980s-styled mechanistic teacher training models promulgated by those who oppose teaching as a profession? He has called for teachers to be judged primarily by value-added methods — the very VAMs developed by statisticians using macroeconomic models. Brooks's writings have suggested that schools need to be judged primarily by standardized test score results — irrespective of the context in which teachers teach and students learn. Or, to put it in his words, he proposes a school reform philosophy “that excludes psychology, emotion and morality.”
 
But maybe he’s had a change of heart. Given his analysis of the faulty thinking behind liberal economic policy, will Mr. Brooks soon call for more intensive professional preparation for 21st century schools to ensure that teachers know a great deal about how and why children learn (psychology) as well as how to teach fractions? Will he recognize the instability of current value-added models in assessing teacher effects? Will he call for professionally trained evaluators to use hard quantitative evidence of student learning, but in the context of the many complexities of teaching  and schooling?

Will he point out that certain teaching working conditions — e.g., “emotional contagions, cultural particularities, and webs of relationships” — do affect teachers and their efforts to improve student achievement?
 
I hope he does begin to raise these important questions. And if he does not, I hope that policymakers, practitioners, and the public will ask him and others who seem to lose their train of thought when it comes to education policy, “Why not?” What is good for sound economic thinking and action might be good for sound education thinking and action as well.

Will a new Congress make smarter teaching policy decisions?

In last week’s midterm elections, the GOP gained at least 60 seats in the House of Representatives and will have a voting majority beginning in January 2011. Republicans will nominate Rep. John Boehner as Speaker of the House and have locked up the votes to ensure he wins.
 
Pundits are already debating whether incoming Speaker Boehner or the President will have the upper-hand on education policy. In a recent article, The Washington Post suggested that Republicans and Democrats might very well continue to agree on tough-minded school accountability. It’s true that Rep. Boehner had a heavy hand in enacting No Child Left Behind in 2002. Even so, he will lead a caucus of Republicans who largely ran for office on a platform of diminishing the federal role in public education and “balk” at any increases in federal spending for schools.
 
In our soon-to-be released book Teaching 2030, 12 expert teachers and I write about by how reallocating resources to develop and utilize teacher leadership can build the kind of results-oriented teaching profession that students deserve. In nations where students perform at much higher academic levels than in the U.S., most administrators teach and many teachers have time to lead. In that kind of arrangement, schools are much closer to being “teacher-led,” and their policies and practices are much more likely to be enhanced because they are implemented by professionals who work with students on a daily basis.
 
In America, barely 50% of the $500 billion spent annually on public education is focused on instruction, and only about 43% of all of the nation’s education staff are classroom teachers. In high-performing nations, about 75% of the education resources spent go directly to instruction, and classroom teachers represent somewhere between 60 and 80% of all staff. As a result, teachers on average spend only about 35 percent of their time in direct instruction of students. The other 65 percent is devoted to preparing and critiquing lessons, observing other teachers, grading papers, tutoring students, and working with parents and colleagues — all of which help create conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively.
 
Looking at the facts, I believe we can get seriously better results by not just spending more money, but also spending it differently, investing in strategies that give our best teachers opportunities to lead outside of their classrooms — in their schools, districts and states — while continuing to teach students part of the time.
 
In 2011 we need to begin to blur the lines of distinction between those who lead schools and those who teach in them. As a new Congress takes control of federal education policy, we need to challenge politicians from both sides of the aisle to create a profession of teaching that neither party has been willing or able to do up until now.

To Improve Teaching, Improve Key School Conditions, Says Team of Expert Teachers

States seem to be “racing” to ensure great teachers for every student, all of a sudden.

But our in-house review of a number of Race to the Top state applications suggests that policymakers are ignoring one of the most critical factors related to finding and rewarding effective teachers: the conditions under which they work.

I am not talking about some of the conditions found in local collective bargaining agreements. I'm talking about what we know from research and from classroom experts about conditions that matter for student learning.
 
In a few weeks, CTQ will be releasing a new report prepared in partnership with the TeacherSolutions Teacher Working Conditions team — a group of 14 accomplished teachers who work in mostly high-needs schools and districts, both urban and rural. They draw on current research and CTQ case studies to identify essential, research-based principles that must undergird sustainable and effective teaching reforms. Among them are:

• Schools must promote aligned, out-of-school learning experiences for students beyond the school walls, as well as growing online opportunities to connect schools with local and global communities;

• Teachers must have the opportunity to make decisions about instruction in their classrooms and schools in order to reach students with diverse and unique needs; and

• Administrators must be accountable for ensuring teachers are in teaching assignments for which they are prepared and have opportunities to develop skills they need to meet new pedagogical challenges.

The team also calls for much more prominent teacher leadership roles in schools, shared accountability with higher-ups for student performance results, and the development of more "hub" schools in high needs neighborhoods that offer community services while also protecting academic priorities.

Contrary to the current reform rhetoric — which seems to depend upon heroic educators posing as caped crusaders to swoop in and save children with magical teaching — the upcoming TeacherSolutions report provides ideas backed by solid research that can make the schools and teachers we already have more successful.

The team includes: Eldred “Jay” Bagley (Philadelphia); Glenda Blaisdell-Buck (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC); Mitzi Durham (Clark County, NV); Larry Ferlazzo (Sacramento, CA); Brian K. Freeland, Jr. (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC); Lori Fulton (Clark County, NV); Leona Bost Ingram (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC); Kristoffer Kohl (Clark County, NV); Mona Madan (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC); Kathie Marshall (Los Angeles); Delores Maxen (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC); Susan “Ernie” Rambo (Clark County, NV); Taylor Ross (Jefferson County, AL); and Gamal Sherif (Philadelphia).
 
Funded by the Ford Foundation, their year of TeacherSolutions work will identify both the policies and practices needed to ensure great teaching for all students.

Stay tuned!

Fixing Our Schools Requires More Than Hiring Smarter Teachers and Firing Incompetent Ones

A new, well-documented essay by Richard Rothstein unpacks many of the myths about improving public education, including the role that teachers play in closing the student achievement gap.

The media frenzy over Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman documentary has reinforced the conventional wisdom offered up by many self-labeled reformers that we can have better schools by simply  recruiting smarter teachers and firing incompetent ones.

But Rothstein points to “decades of social science research” revealing that two-thirds of the difference in the quality of one school compared to another is attributable to non-school factors. He writes:

…(O)n average, disadvantaged children who have high-quality teachers will do better than similar children whose teachers are less adequate. But good teachers alone, for most children, cannot fully compensate for the disadvantages many children bring to school. As we noted, differences in the quality of in-school experiences can explain about one-third of the differences in achievement.

And some of the key in-school factors that do make a difference have to do with the conditions under which teachers work — including access to quality curriculum materials and whether or not they have opportunities to learn from each other. Smart teachers, in other words, must have consistent opportunities to use their smarts to advance learning.

Our own CTQ research shows that other conditions also matter a great deal, including: teachers’ level of preparation for the students they teach; whether or not they are assigned to grades and subjects for which they have been trained; and whether school programs are connected and well-aligned with after-school learning opportunities.
 
Rothstein’s demystification of the often hyperbolic claims about how to accomplish school reform sheds new light on the complex relationship between teaching quality and student achievement. If we are willing to pay attention to the facts and solid research he brings to bear on the issue, we can get serious about creating a unified vision for how all students can have the public education they need and deserve.

What Is Teacherpreneurship?

The first excerpt from Teaching 2030, a new book written by myself and 12 expert teachers who are members of the Teacher Leaders Network, appears in the Fall issue of Education Week's Professional Development Sourcebook. The excerpt highlights our concept of a key role that we believe accomplished teachers can play in improving schools and growing the profession: Teacherpreneurship. We write:

Most importantly, teacherpreneurship is not about promoting a free-market vision for the profit of a few—but rather how our society can invest substantially in teachers who can expertly serve millions of children and families who are not in the position to choose a better school somewhere else or find the most erudite online teacher anytime, anywhere. Teacherpreneurship is all about the public good, not private gain.

via www.edweek.org

If you're intrigued, we urge you to read the 2000-wd excerpt and leave your comments about what we believe is a bold vision of the future of teacher leadership.

The book, subtitled What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools – Now and in the Future, is being published by Teachers College Press and will be available in bookstores and online by early December.

We believe Teaching 2030 will have broad appeal, and we're pleased to have pre-publication endorsements from former Secretary of Education Richard Riley, teaching scholar Linda Darling Hammond, American Enterprise Institute education policy director Rick Hess, and NEA president Dennis Van Roekel (among others).

Preparing Teachers, Singapore-Style

Ok, so you want to make math as “easy as 1, 2, 3” for students and have them learn at the high levels of international performance. What do you do? Do you recruit teachers who have math degrees (but little or no pedagogical training) and then expect those teachers to teach for only a few years? Do you focus on creating charter schools or revoking teacher tenure laws? Do you call on a Caped Crusader to swoop in and get rid of so-called incompetent teachers to close the achievement gap?
 
Nope. Not if your kid goes to school in Singapore (or a few well-heeled school districts in America).
 
Winnie Hu’s informative piece in the New York Times (9/30/10) tells the story of the investments some American school districts are making in SingaporeMath — a program where teachers are well-prepared in specific math pedagogy and are expected to teach a few concepts deeply. These investments to increase teacher know-how appear to be paying off in better student performance.  
 
My recent post on the latest McKinsey & Associates teaching quality research highlights Singapore not just because it recruits top talent to teaching, but because the southeast Asian nation takes teacher education seriously by paying for in-depth pedagogical preparation — and then gives teachers 10-20 hours each week to refine their lessons. They pay teachers well, but they do not reward them just for raising test scores. They draw on comprehensive evaluation systems that focus on teachers spreading their expertise to others.
 
As Ms. Hu notes, “school officials caution that SingaporeMath is not easy or cheap to successfully adopt.” It requires substantive investments in helping teachers gain the new skills and knowledge associated with teaching math concepts at a deep level. But is it not time to invest more in developing the profession that makes all others possible?

McKinsey Tells Us What It Takes to Recruit, Prepare & Keep Great Teachers

Researchers at McKinsey & Company have released (yet another) report on how to attract teaching talent to our nation’s schools. Drawing on growing evidence from the world's top-performing school systems (Singapore, Finland and South Korea) as well as surveys from top U.S. college graduates, Closing the Talent Gap totally challenges today’s conventional wisdom and many status-quo teaching policies posed by self-proclaimed reformers.

McKinsey’s convention-busting conclusions include:


1. Recruiting academic talent (the “top third”) to teaching is insufficient to improve student achievement, because even the best and brightest need serious pedagogical preparation for helping diverse learners meet 21st century academic standards;


2. Offering significantly higher salaries is necessary to recruit talented candidates, but not nearly sufficient (working conditions, such as ensuring effective principals and time for teachers to learn from each other are critical);

3. Providing incentives for teachers to teach for a career, not encouraging quickly-trained new recruits to opt for short-term classroom stints, is the key to establishing a long-term effective teaching workforce; and


4.  Encouraging top recruits into teaching will require a “prestigious” profession where they can receive high-quality preparation and a chance to work with effective peers in a challenging and supportive environment.
 

This week, the documentary film Waiting for Superman from Davis Guggenheim (Training Day, An Inconvenient Truth) premiered in select cities nationwide. The film is powerful in its attempt to address a complex national issue of critical importance to many families who depend on public schools. Some journalists and many leading policymakers may walk away from the film mistakenly believing the improvement of teaching quality in America can be accomplished simply by firing some teachers who can’t tailor their instructional practices to a high-stakes test — or by expanding the number of charter schools in our most challenged communities.

The McKinsey report clearly shows us that in many nations whose students outperform ours, charter schools are the exception, not the rule, and unions are not only prevalent, but valued organizations that work with administrators to improve teaching and learning. In fact, teachers in Finland, the highest-scoring nation in the world, are 100% unionized.  Could it be that truly effective school reform in America will require some truly global thinking about all that needs to change?

Superman, Meet Teacher Dan Brown

This week comes the long awaited release of Waiting for Superman — Davis Guggenheim’s poignant portrayal of the travails of school reform and the heartbreaking stories of students who do not have access to high performing charter schools or enough dedicated teachers. The film is powerful with a lot of emotional impact.

Some reviewers have described WFS as a “searing indictment” of the education system, particularly unions, with their work rules that allegedly handcuff administrators and policymakers from hiring the academically talented and energized teachers underserved students desperately need.

But there is more to the story than what is told in the hour and forty-two minute movie. Much more, in fact. Dan Brown, one of the outstanding young teachers in our Teacher Leaders Network, speaks volumes to the narrative that Guggenheim ignored or did not know how to craft as a filmmaker. Dan teaches at SEED Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. (one of the charters highlighted positively in WFS) and he has seen the film twice.  In a recent blog post, he offers a far more compelling description of what it takes for teachers to teach effectively in high needs school communities. Dan speaks boldly to the facts that at SEED teachers are “accountable without feeling terrorized,” and they “feel ownership” over their teaching while they get help in “becom(ing) better each year.”

At schools like SEED, well-prepared teachers are recruited and expected to stay in teaching for more than a few years (so they can know students and families well). They take seriously the need for ongoing training to improve their pedagogical expertise. Teachers are not seen as the problem, but the solution. And the solution is not a silver bullet — like implementing merit pay plans that have little effect on student achievement.

SEED’s recipe for success is not exclusive. Other successful schools, actually led by teachers and advanced by their unions, like the Math and Science Leadership Academy in Denver, CO also provide vivid images of what effective public schools look like and how they are created.

I understand that some school reformers, progressive educators, and even union leaders will be frustrated by what WFS missed or glossed over. However, WFS does highlight an important issue, and I am hopeful that policymakers, the public, journalists and yes, filmmakers too, will listen a bit more carefully to expert teachers like Dan about the qualities and working conditions that lead to good teaching in every kind of school.
 
By listening closely, we can all begin to elevate the debate over how to improve our public schools and look for true TeacherSolutions that ensure all students have access to well-prepared and qualified teachers.

VAM and The Law of Unintended Consequences

David Leonhardt’s New York Times Magazine piece on teacher accountability offers a reasoned view of the recent ruckus over publicly releasing names of teachers who generate high as well as low value-added test score gains. I could not agree more with Leonhardt’s assessment that it is time for results-oriented teacher evaluation. The big questions, of course, are (1) just what do we mean by “results,” and (2) how are we going to be sure we’re measuring for the outcomes we really want. Because we can be sure that the measurements we choose will heavily influence those outcomes.

Leonhardt rightfully notes that “schools generally do not allow parents to see any part of a teacher’s past evaluations, for instance” and that “for the most part (parents) have to hope for the best.” But while he points to several of the serious technical flaws in using even the most sophisticated value-added models to judge teachers, he ultimately shrugs them off.

VAM methods falsely identify teachers as ineffective (as well as effective) at very high rate. However, drawing on the viewpoints of several school reform advocates (including Kati Haycock) who seem comfortable with the VAM error rate, Mr. Leonhardt suggests that it’s far better to make mistakes in judging who is an effective teacher than not using value-added tools at all.

Leonhardt, like many of the reformers he quotes, seems to think there are only two choices to pursue when it comes to teacher accountability: Use test-based results, or not. While the “either-or” scenario painted by many journalists fuels the hot debates between reformers and union leaders, it does little to actually improve public education and ensure that all students will get the effective teachers they deserve.

With value-added error rates at 25% (and higher), it’s morally irresponsible for VAM to receive such overwhelming emphasis — and it’s educationally irresponsible to use it to fire teachers as called for by many self-proclaimed reformers. Millions of students will be harmed when suitable replacements cannot be found — and many students will also lose effective and caring teachers who were falsely identified as ineffective. With the accountability pressure turned up even higher (now careers are at stake), many teachers will feel compelled to just teach to whatever is on the current standardized test. Forget all about addressing the “creativity crisis” ballyhooed on a recent Newsweek cover. America can settle in for another generation of rote learning and remediation.

None of this means that value-added data should not be used as one piece of information in a comprehensive system of teacher accountability that all of us, including Mr. Leonhardt, want for our students and their families. But failing to recognize the downside of using flawed data to make life-changing decisions may lead to rewarding the wrong teachers — a development that will undermine parents even more as they seek to secure the best education for their children (and hopefully for everyone else’s kids as well).

New Report: Use VAM Data Carefully to Assess Teachers

Why do so many journalists and policy wonks think it’s okay to use imperfect data as a lone measure to judge teachers?

I agree that perfection should not get in way of progress. But the LA Times (and a number of think tank analysts) continue to justify the use of VAM — value-added estimates of individual teachers — as the sole determinant of who is effective in raising student achievement and who is not.

The pundits may give a slight tip of the hat toward multiple measures of effectiveness, but their conventional wisdom (as surfaced again in an August 28th LA Times article) is that “the benefits of singling out those who consistently succeed” far exceeds the bad “publicity” for those with “low rankings” (and the lack of fully reliable data be damned).
 
While Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that “no one thinks test scores should be the only factor in teacher evaluations,” he and many others may be encouraging school districts to make it the overwhelming factor when they give their blessing for newspapers to identify effective teachers solely on the basis of VAM mathematical formulas, as the Secretary did with some gusto in his August 29, 2010 article for the New York Daily News.

Meanwhile the hard research is piling up, showing how the use of standardized student test scores and value-added modeling in teacher evaluation can do lots more harm than good — and harm not just to teachers, but to schools in every kind of American community, by distorting the reasons for student success.

A major new study from a top national team of education measurement experts* offers up mounds of evidence to confirm how unstable the results of VAM evaluations are across time, across classes and across tests. These respected scholars, assembled by the Economic Policy Institute, found that applying value-added methodologies to student test scores does not fully control for the varied factors that affect student learning, including the effects of summer learning loss for some students.

They also reveal how VAM does not account for the fact that some students receive instruction in particular subjects from more than one teacher or that some are offered afterschool programs, while others are not. And they make an even more critical point:

Creating a system in which teachers are, in effect, competing with each other can reduce the incentive to collaborate within schools – and studies have shown that better schools are marked by teaching staffs that work together.

The Secretary suggests that the issue of publicly releasing the names of effective and ineffective teachers in the newspaper, based solely on VAM results, is an “emotional” one. But I would argue that this issue is far more about science than emotion.

The science is clear: VAM stratagems — no matter how sophisticated their statistical procedures may be — are not capable alone of fairly and accurately identifying who is an effective teacher. There’s some irony in the fact that this major new study supports an analysis actually commissioned by the Secretary recently. The Secretary’s report concluded that over 1 in 4 teachers who are judged by VAM tools will be falsely labeled as effective or ineffective, even when there are three years worth of data available.
 
In its most recent story on teacher performance, the LA Times  identified and painted a powerful portrait of a number of effective teachers like Zenaida Tan and Hollie Bloch, two very experienced educators who teach in LAUSD. But the further irony is that while VAM helped the Times find these two teachers, there is at least one chance in four that Ms. Tan and Ms. Bloch might be labeled “ineffective” by the newspaper in some future year, using the same exact methods.

Returning to the EPI report, I could not agree more with America’s educational measurement experts that “although standardized test scores of students are one piece of information for school leaders to use to make judgments about teacher effectiveness, such scores should be only a part of an overall comprehensive evaluation.”

I agree with those who say that perfection should not get in the way of progress. A comprehensive system of evaluating teacher performance would include VAM measures as one component, but also an array of other metrics — e.g., teachers’ analyses of student work or how teachers spread expertise from one classroom to the next. What’s more, a really good system would reveal why some teachers were more effective than others and what we can do to increase their numbers and their spread.

Such a system also would rely on the leadership of classroom experts like Tan and Bloch, and not on school principals who have neither the time nor training to make the granular pedagogical decisions that reveal who is effective or not.

I agree with the Secretary that a public spotlight needs to shine on our nation’s most effective teachers. I’ve been advocating for just such practices for more than a decade. But let’s make sure we understand all the dimensions of teaching that make them outstanding. And then let's advocate — together — for a system that guarantees and rewards those expert practices.

____

* The distinguished authors of EPI's report include four former presidents of the American Educational Research Association; two  former presidents of the National Council on Measurement in Education;  the current and two  former chairs of the Board of Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences;  the president-elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management;  the former director of the Educational Testing Service's Policy Information Center and a former associate director of the National Assessment of Educational Progress; a former assistant U.S. Secretary of Education; a former  and current member of the National Assessment Governing Board; and the current vice-president, a former president, and three other members of the National Academy of Education.

The School Reform Policy Gap

The latest PDK/Gallup Poll reveals a significant difference in the opinions of the American public and the Obama Administration over the best ways to reform schools and assure teaching quality.

In 2010, more than one in three Americans actually gave the President a “D” or a “F” for his performance in support of public schools — a much poorer showing than the year before. What has changed? Since the 2009 poll, the Administration has laid out the specifics of its plan to turn around low-performing schools and improve teacher performance – and to significantly increase the number of charter schools in the U.S.

The poll surfaced several disconnects between current policy and public sentiment:
 
• While the Administration wants to make it easier to recruit teachers to high needs schools through short-cut alternative certification programs, the American people believe teachers need “more time to learn to teach in new ways.”

• While the Administration has put emphasis on firing “bad” teachers (e.g., Central Falls High School in Rhode Island), the American people believe the call for mass firings of school faculty is wrong-headed. In the poll, 54% prefer a strategy specifically aimed at improving teaching skills. Only 13 percent think it’s a good idea to close a low-performing school and re-open it as a charter (a la New Orleans).
 
• On the question of school reform priorities, Americans believe that improving the quality of teachers is “more important” (44%) than measuring student achievement through accountability testing (11%) or developing more demanding education standards (24%).

• A sizable majority of Americans (71%) believe teachers’ pay should be tied to their work, not just on a “standard scale basis.” But they are also increasingly skeptical about using current standardized tests to judge students and teachers — and they are now much less likely to want teacher pay to be “very closely tied” to students’ academic achievement. In the 2000 PDK poll, 25 percent called for teacher pay to be tightly linked to student test scores. In 2010, that percentage dropped to 19.

As I told Education Week reporter Dakarai I. Aarons recently, there is far more interest among the American public in supporting teachers than in firing them or paying them on the basis of test scores. That doesn’t mean the American people don’t want a results-oriented profession. They do. But they seem to understand (better than many policymakers) that most teachers who are not effective can become so.

Indeed, the 2010 poll suggests that Americans have quite a bit of faith in their public school teachers.

Far more public school parents today, compared to a decade ago, believe schools have “caused” their children to be “eager” about learning (63% in 2010, compared to 50% in 1998). What’s more, over 70 percent of Americans (not just public school parents) “have trust and confidence” in those who teach children in the public schools.

Far too many policy approaches today view teachers as the problem to be fixed — not as professionals who can create and enact solutions with the right supports. Could this negative outlook on teaching explain why more Americans are giving the President failing grades for his performance in supporting public education?

Teachers and Valued Added Tools: Finding the Right Way, Far from the Madding Crowd

Saturday’s Los Angeles Times focuses once again on the value-added data it has assembled to judge instructional performance in the LAUSD system. But the emphasis now is more on schools than teachers. The piece, penned by Jason Song, Jason Felch and Doug Smith, tunes in on which schools produce higher value-added gains than others — and why (well, only “kinda” on the why). The authors avoided putting too much of a spotlight on the newspaper’s earlier decision to use this same data set to identify publicly which teachers are THE effective ones and which ones are NOT.
 
Since last week’s LA Times article hit the press, some of the nation’s experts on value-added methodology (VAM), like Doug Harris, and advocates for their use, like Rick Hess, have challenged the newspaper's decision to publish individual teachers’ ratings. Both are quoted in Carl Bialik’s thoughtful critique in the Wall Street Journal, where he concluded that the metric being used is way too unstable to give consistently accurate results of which individual teachers are more effective than others.

Even Dan Goldhaber, a well-known labor economist who routinely develops and uses these tools in education contexts, “strongly opposes” making individual teachers' value-added scores public in the way done by the LA Times. In recent comments on the Web, Goldhaber noted that there are “legitimate reasons” — like pull out programs and migration of students in and out of individual teachers’ classrooms (which is very common in LA) — that “make the attribution of student (achievement) to (specific) teachers complex.”

The VAM tool can be very useful in helping teachers get better at what they do, as also suggested by the new Song, et. al. LA Times article. And the district and the union in Los Angeles should find a way to use value-added data to help teachers improve their teaching practice and spread their expertise. However, as an isolated metric, VAM is not a fair method (as some policy pundits and policy zealots suggest) to praise or condemn individual teachers.

Reformers have long yearned for tools to turn teaching into a results-oriented profession. I am one of them. But the growing enthusiasm for using value-added formulas to offer summative judgments on the effectiveness of individual teachers is unwarranted, when research shows that 25-30% of those identified as effective in one year would be identified as ineffective the next.

The policy and media voices advocating for the indiscriminate use of VAM tools remind me a bit of “the madding crowd's ignoble strife” described by 18th century English poet Thomas Gray. And I also recall the comment of Scottish historian Charles Mackay, who once observed:

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.

Teaching Effectiveness and the LA Times: A Debacle in the Making

In an interview yesterday with Amanda Paulson of the Christian Science Monitor, I told her that the decision by the Los Angeles Times to publish a list of effective and ineffective teachers, based solely on the results of one researcher’s take on value-added estimates, was absolutely “god-awful.”

Don’t get me wrong: As an organization we are dedicated to advancing a results-oriented profession, which means teacher evaluation metrics must include evidence of student learning. But the approach used by the L.A. Times is rife with huge problems — most notably the fact that value-added data on teacher effectiveness is far too unstable to use a sole arbiter of who is an effective teacher and who is not. Even the U.S. Department of Education, which is promoting the use of value-added data in teaching quality reforms, released a major research paper last month pointing to the substantial error rates associated with generating lists of good and not-so-good teachers using these methods.

This isn’t an ideological issue. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and I are frequently at odds about the best ways to assure teaching quality now and in the future. But we are in agreement on the poor judgment underlying the L.A. Times decision. Hess noted in his Education Week blog this morning that he is “increasingly nervous at how casually reading and math value-added calculations are being treated as de facto determinants of ‘good’ teaching.” And well he should be.

Elsewhere I have pointed to a lengthy list of inherent problems in using VAM to identify effective teachers — including the following realities:

1. Students are not randomly assigned to teachers, and VAM measures cannot fully sort out the effects caused by differences in students’ needs or preparedness — as distinct from teacher effects.

2. The lack of properly scaled year-to-year tests makes it difficult to evaluate gains at all points along the achievement continuum or to assess (for example) a physics teacher’s effectiveness based on her students’ previous scores in chemistry.

3. Many students in high-needs schools are highly mobile and do not complete a full year of instruction in a given teacher’s classroom.

4. Many students are taught the same subjects by more than one teacher — confounding the capacity of distant statistical models to isolate the effects from individual classroom instructors.
 
5. In addition, depending on the VAM statistical model a researcher uses, the same teacher can be identified as effective or ineffective.

6. Finally, researchers have found that the same teacher’s effectiveness rating can change depending on the school in which he or she teaches.

No wonder the USDOE report revealed that even when three years of VAM data are used, over 25 percent of the teachers will be “erroneously identified.” That should make any fair-minded person think twice about using such data to name names and possibly destroy careers.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, under the auspices of its Measuring Effective Teaching project, is taking a very thoughtful approach to teacher assessment by looking at multiple measures of student achievement and linking other metrics (e.g., classroom observations, teachers’ analyses of student work and their own teaching, and levels of student engagement) to capture a more robust and accurate view of who is effective and why.

If policymakers and the media mavens really want to learn about effective teacher evaluation, it’s time they turn to the wisdom of those who actually teach — like Larry Ferlazzo, a Teacher Leaders Network member, who penned a thoughtful response in this morning’s Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet to what will surely be a journalistic debacle.

I suspect the Los Angeles Times will soon hear from many teachers branded as “ineffective” who turn out to be “false negatives” (or a Type II error in statistical lingo), and the Times editors will need to re-think their approach to reporting on the debates about effective teaching.

I’m frankly startled by the Times's decision to publish this highly questionable data and risk humiliating many competent teachers by doing so. I wonder how journalists of national stature, who are trained to look at multiple sides of an issue and to be sure of their facts, could be so reckless?

Test Score Gains Fade in NYC and DC: Time to Focus on Teaching Quality?

News of test score “fade” from both New York City and the District of Columbia schools is surfacing. Both districts — often held up as emerging models of school reform — have used a combination of narrowed curriculum, lock-step teaching procedures, and high stakes teacher accountability to produce some short-term gains. But now the story lines of Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, two of the nation’s most well-known school superintendents, may need to change.

With the release of 2010 results, NYC passing rates dropped by more than 25 percent and the achievement gap (between white and minority students) widened substantially. In DC, school leaders had to admit that their heralded gains in the elementary schools over two previous years are now evaporating. They do not know why.

Test score gain can fluctuate for a lot of reasons, including statistical error and student mobility. and for these reasons (and others) experts claim that no test should be used as the primary arbiter of who is doing the best job of educating children.

Dan Koretz, one of the nation’s leading experts on student assessment, has concluded (p. 8) that high stakes testing often results in "substantial distortions of practice" in the classroom "and inflation of test scores." He writes: "The seriousness of this problem is hard to overstate. When scores are inflated, many of the most important conclusions people base on them will be wrong, and students -- and sometimes teachers -- will suffer as a result."

But well-documented observations by Koretz and others have not deterred zealous school reformers or journalists looking to make a splashy headline, such as Newsweek’s recent in-your-face cover story on “bad teachers” as the root cause of America’s failing public education system.

I don’t know any supporters of a positive approach to teaching quality and teacher evaluation who would question whether NYC or DC schools need to overhaul how they recruit, support, assess and pay teachers. That’s clearly what’s best for students. But I do wonder if the recent failings of Klein and Rhee’s heralded reform schemes — which grow out of a one-dimensional view of effectiveness — will raise more questions among the public about how we judge schools and the teachers who teach in them.

Maybe we’re moving toward a tipping point. I’m encouraged that Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post has opened up her blog The Answer Sheet to voices from many sides of the assessment issue — and especially to teacher voices. I wonder if there may be more of an interest now in how to elevate and spread the performance of effective teachers who do more than raise a test score a point or two — and ultimately less interest in firing a few teachers who do not always generate gains in lock-step ways from year to year.  

I’m feeling a bit optimistic: I'm sensing that more and more of us want to focus on effective teaching and how to cultivate, spread and sustain it — and not on a paradigm of punishment and recrimination.

Big Ideas from Some of Our Nation’s Most Effective (and potentially most influential) Teachers

This past weekend I had the pleasure of working closely with 19 extraordinary teachers from throughout the United States – a sample of delegates drawn from the hundreds of accomplished educators who participate in the many initiatives of our Teacher Leaders Network.

We worked hard and played hard as we gathered for a three-day retreat at CTQ headquarters in Hillsborough, North Carolina. We dug deeply into what it means to transform teaching into a 21st century profession fully prepared to help every student succeed in the decades to come, both in brick-and-mortar schools and in cyberspace.

I learned so much from Tom Bremer (Illinois), Isabel Campos-Woytek (Colorado), Ben Crosby (California), Julianna Dauble (Washington), Nina Davis (North Carolina), Susan Graham (Virginia), Sarah Henchey (North Carolina), John M. Holland (Virginia), Marguerite Izzo (New York), Kris Kohl (Nevada), Patrick Ledesma (Virginia), Lori Nazareno (Colorado), Ernie Rambo (Nevada), Marsha Ratzel (Kansas), Cindi Rigsbee (North Carolina), Zach Rupp (Colorado), Ariel Sacks (New York City), Bob Williams (Alaska), and Heather Wolpert-Gawron (California). (We really missed Renee Moore from Mississippi who could not attend at the last minute.)

Teachers in this amazing group fully represent the diversity of America’s teaching force – teaching a variety of subjects and fulfilling many leadership roles in urban, suburban and rural schools at every level of the PK-12 spectrum. They are involved in our Teacher Leaders Network Forum; our emerging network of state and national teachers of the year (thanks to CCSSO); our book-writing team which has been designing a powerful pathway toward Teaching 2030;  our TeacherSolutions group studying the kinds of conditions teachers need in order to teach effectively in high needs schools. Five of them are part of our New Millennium Initiatives in four states. Several are Teach for America alums, or other first- and second-career teachers who entered the profession through alternative certifications. Others graduated from traditional schools of education.

They are all committed to improving preparation before anyone teaches anyone’s child. They have strategies for identifying and spreading the expertise of effective teachers. They can show you how to assess students for 21st century knowledge and skills. They came up with big and break-through policy proposals for how to do so. They have passion and knowledge as well as pedagogical expertise that rarely exists inside the D.C. Beltway, where most education policy gets debated and crafted. They transcend traditional union and administrator policy positions as well as those of left-wing and right-wing think tanks. If policymakers want to know how to get to “and/both” teaching and education policy -- and leave “either/or” approaches in the dust — ask these teacher leaders.

Thanks to several foundations supporting projects these energized educators are engaged in — including Ford, Bill & Melinda Gates, Joyce, MetLife, Rose and Stuart — you will hear more from these extraordinary teachers in resounding and systematic ways. Since fleeing the classroom in 1981 to work on the transformation of teaching into the profession students deserve, I have never been any more inspired than I am by our work this past weekend. I have never been so hopeful for the possibilities that lie ahead. Stay tuned.

The Highest Paid Anybody

I have said for some time that I will continue to advocate for the teaching profession until the highest paid anybody in a school system is a practicing teacher. Think about the implications: For this idea to become a reality our education system would have to not only identify excellent teachers, but have a variety of venues to make them more visible to policymakers and the public as well as their fellow practitioners.

These top-paid educators would continue to teach part of the day, week, or year, but also spread their expertise in a variety of ways — perhaps as Teacherpreneurs (a concept outlined in Teaching 2030, a book I've penned with 12 of my teacher colleagues from the Teacher Leaders Network, with generous support from MetLife Foundation.)

While teachers and parents cheer when they hear me offer up this possibility, many of the D.C. policy pundits roll their eyes and quietly scoff at the idea. Well now a group of economists have confirmed that teachers are worth quite a bit — perhaps more than many of our top-paid urban superintendents.
 
Raj Chetty and colleagues found that even very young students who had more effective teachers and learned more in kindergarten were more likely to go college and earn more (and in doing so) produce more economic benefit to society. An effective kindergarten teacher, according to the economists, is worth $320,000. The researchers found that the effects of effective teachers were not found in year-to-year gains on standardized tests but in long-term adult outcomes. (They study drew upon a database of 12,000 children who were part of a well-designed scientific investigation in Tennessee in the 1980s and are now in their 30s.)

A recent New York Times article calls the findings “explosive.” I would suggest they are re-affirming our work at the Center for Teaching Quality — and should provoke a new narrative on how policymakers frame efforts to recruit and reward effective teachers.

• We need to think and act well beyond the narrow (and narrow-minded) strategy of focusing on ridding schools of a few ineffective teachers or paying teachers for short-term gains determined on 20th century standardized tests.

• We need to begin to blur the lines of distinction between those who lead schools and those who teach in them.

• We need to place a premium on those who produce long-term results and spread their expertise to others.

We need to really value excellent early childhood teachers, like my Teaching 2030 colleague and co-author John Holland. I will be the first to say that John — a 12-year veteran of teaching three and four-year-olds from Richmond’s toughest neighborhoods who is also an artist and innovator and thoughtful blogger for Inside Pre-K — is worth $320,000 a year.

"They will have to do what any good teacher does..."

Saturday’s New York Times brought us a fascinating article on robot technology and teaching. In their piece Benedict Carey and John Markoff describe the cutting-edge developments underway where “highly programmed machines” with motion tracking and speech recognition tools can engage humans and “rival” some teaching tasks. In one investigation, reported in the NYT article, a robot named “RUBI” was found to significantly improve the vocabulary of two handfuls of toddlers.

No doubt artificial intelligence can greatly enhance learning opportunities for the growing diversity of students entering our public schools. So many other industries and professions —whether in automobile manufacturing or in medicine —increasingly are investing in technology to enhance productivity and advance professional practice.

But as one executive of a company that makes a remotely controlled robot made perfectly clear: “The problem with autonomous machines is that people are so unpredictable, especially children” and “it’s impossible to anticipate everything that can happen” in a classroom. As Carey and Markoff note, “If robots are to be truly effective guides…they will have to do what any good teacher does: learn from students when a lesson is taking hold and when it is falling flat.”

If you do not quite get this point, just turn to another piece in the Saturday edition of the Times, pointing to the large growth in Teach for America — a high-profile effort to recruit recent young graduates of top-flight universities, who receive only a few weeks of basic training before they enter some of the nation’s highest needs schools. Here’s what reporter Michael Winerip writes about Lilianna Nguyen, a recent Stanford graduate, who is struggling to teach a sixth-grade math class about negative numbers.

(Liliana) prepared definitions to be copied down, but the projector was broken. She’d also created a fun math game, giving every student an index card with a number. They were supposed to silently line themselves up from lowest negative to highest positive, but one boy kept disrupting the class, blurting out, twirling his pen, complaining he wanted to play a fun game, not a math game. 



“Why is there talking?” Ms. Nguyen said. “There should be no talking.” 



“Do I have to play?” asked the boy. 



“Do you want to pass summer school?” Ms. Nguyen answered. 



The boy asked if it was O.K. to push people to get them in the right order. 



“This is your third warning,” Ms. Nguyen said. “Do not speak out in my class.”

This is where the nuance of knowing your students well as individuals and having a deep understanding of child development, sociological interactions in a classroom, and behavior management — as well as varied pedagogical techniques in math — makes the difference in what gets learned. And no robot can do it all. Nor can an ill-prepared and under-supported teacher.

We need Ms. Nguyen and thousands more like her, but we need them and those who support them to make a full commitment to the preparation, support and ongoing professional development it takes to become an excellent teacher.

Teaching Experience and Expert Teachers

I sure hope Jonathan Alter and Jay Mathews, popular journalists, read carefully last year's New York Times article by Elissa Gootman on the making of the $125,000 a year teacher for the Equity Project Charter School in Washington Heights, NY.

Alter and Mathews, who write regularly on education and teaching, are often found praising young teachers — whom they seem to believe need little formal preparation for teaching in high needs schools — at the expense of older, more experienced teachers who have been trained in education schools and thus “burdened” with pedagogical coursework. (In particular see this recent column by Alter in which he blithely offers the descriptor "older, incompetent teachers.")

So let's take a look at teacher recruitment at the Equity Project Charter School, which garnered national headlines by announcing it would pay its teachers $125,000 a year, plus performance bonuses. Who did Zeke Vanderhoek, founder of the innovative school, recruit to teach and earn the professional salaries offered? As Gootman's story documents, most of his choices are very experienced — dare we say older? — teachers, like Oscar Quintero, who has taught for over 30 years and is in his 60s. Or Judith LeFevre, 54, a science teacher from Arizona, "who spent three decades honing her craft at public, private, urban and rural schools."

While there are also several 30-somethings on the school faculty, they all have been well prepared over time for teaching in high needs schools. They have proof of their teaching expertise and a strong track record in engaging students in high quality instruction.

What is most striking is Gootman’s description of how the teachers Mr. Vanderhoek found in his nationwide search complement each other as a team. While each of the teachers had special training, skills, and experiences, what matters most is how they fit together as a cohesive unit, ready to serve  their students from Washington Heights. For LeFevre, making the move to NYC from distant Arizona was about “working with a team of master teachers.”

How is the Equity Project Charter School doing at the end of Year One? It's too soon for an academic progress report, but here's the NYC Dept. of Education Learning Environment Survey Report 2009-2010 for the school, which "provides a view of a school's learning environment based on responses from parents, teachers, and middle and high school students." The satisfaction scores are some of the highest in the city.

Skills and experience, collaboration, cultural competency, demonstrated expertise — these are the qualities that matter in today's teachers, whether they're 25 or 65. These should be the drivers of education policy and reform — not the notion that somehow, de facto, younger is better.

A Young Teacher Looks to the Future

Novice teacher Jess Lyons has been an enthusiastic member of our CTQ  New Millennium Initiative in Colorado, where she and other young colleagues have been considering the policies and practices that are most likely to help teaching evolve into the full-realized 21st century profession that all of our students deserve.

When Jess let us know that she's decided to take a break from the classroom and consider her future career options, I asked her to write about her decision. It's clear in what she has to say that Jess is still emotionally attached to teaching and her kids, but as she considers her likely career path in today's profession, she's not finding all the intellectual satisfaction she craves. Would the promise of hybrid roles that allow teachers to blend teaching, leadership and policy work be an answer for Jess? That's the question I'm pondering as I read her words here, written just before the end of the school term in Denver. — Barnett Berry

Teaching With All You Have

By Jess Lyons

I love kids. As each day draws closer to my end of year, there’s usually one moment where my heart stops. Just for a second. Then an intense feeling of dread — “What am I doing?! Why would I leave this?” — washes over me and sets my heart racing.

My fifth graders will be moving on in eight days, and so will I. Michael won’t be there to give me an elbow shake to start my day. In eight days, Miriam won’t pop her hip and tell me “Miss Jess, I’m unique.” Girl, don’t I know it. I won’t get to read with Kristen every day, moving her from a level 6 in September to an 18, and pushing for more.

All of this, of course, leads to the obvious question: Why are you leaving teaching?

I spent all of last summer and most of the fall, while completing my Masters’ in Education, trying to figure out what was the right decision. In January, after I turned in my resignation letter, when my principal asked about my reasons for leaving I told her that I felt as if the four walls were closing in on me. I don’t learn in the environment that I am currently teaching in, so how can I expect my students to do so?

As I try to coherently explain why I feel the need to leave teaching, or why teaching has “lost me,” I have to be honest and say it’s not teaching. Sure, there are a number of things that I don’t like. I love planning, but I hate that really good planning takes so many hours. I usually do it out of guilt that my kids won’t get as good an education without it. I hate learning in four walls. MY best learning never happened there, and honestly, neither will theirs.

I hate the professional development that is useless. I dislike the scripted curriculum that I have to teach with “fidelity” when I know that it might not be best for my students. I don’t like that everyone wants to tell me how to do it better, and that so much is based on numbers and data, when it’s people (my very individual students) that walk into my room.

Let me clarify that I don’t feel like society’s image of an older jaded teacher. I’m leaving at this juncture because I love children. I carry the belief that you can only be around that type of glowing energy, filled with possibility, if you yourself carry those same feelings. So far, I still do, and I don’t want to risk losing them.

Three things that might have made a difference

I believe there are three very important criteria that would have strengthened and lengthened my time in the education field.

First, great leadership in a school setting is absolutely necessary for beginning teachers to be successful. My first year, my principal and vice principal were new at their job, and it was apparent. Not to a first year teacher, of course. For me, I thought it was normal that 15-year veteran teachers cried on a daily basis, just like me, and it just wasn’t going to get better. The staff was not supported and the demands were high without clear expectations of what needed to be done. Those pressures add up, when the staff, the students, and the community are asking challenging questions and left hanging without the answers.

I really didn’t know how I was going to make it through my second year. When it came, the leadership changed. My current principal took the position and she’s incredible. She’s extremely organized. She’s fair and just in her dissemination of consequences and rewards for students and staff. This woman is a do-er, in every sense of the word. I view her as an unbreakable umbrella. She protects the teachers from as many mandates as possible, so that we can do our job effectively, and she trusts our professional ability to do our job right. It feels like a true team, working together for our students. But the experiences of that first year when the leadership was lacking are hard to forget.

Second, professional development is USELESS unless a teacher can make what he or she has learned applicable to their classroom and students. This takes time. During my first and second year, I was required to take a number of classes — provided by the district, by Teach for America, or for my Masters degree — that did not improve my day-to-day teaching. In some cases, it was because the PD was lackluster and I could have read the manual myself. In other cases, it was because I was forced to take particular sessions that were either irrelevant (and so I couldn’t infuse the content into my teaching), or there wasn’t time to absorb what I was learning and infiltrate it into my planning. Imagining a situation where I could have selected professional development that I thought would best suit me and expand my teaching practice excites and motivates me even now.

In the end, it was the restrictions of the setting where I worked that metaphorically choked me out of teaching. Working in a school district as large as Denver Public Schools means that there are more mandates than you can count on your fingers and toes. Following a scripted curriculum leaves little room for expansion and creativity. Having to have a scripted curriculum for every subject meant that I couldn’t be as creative as I wanted or needed to be around units of study.

Trying to prepare for standardized testing in a bilingual school is frustrating and scary. Spending too much time showing students how to properly fill out the tests takes away from what I should be teaching. Learning how to learn, what you like to learn, and how to show others what you have learned does not happen during bubble-test prep.

Imagining hybrid roles

Outside of the restrictions around my profession responsibilities, I felt stifled intellectually. I need intellectual discourse throughout the day. This might be found in teaching another grade level or another subject area. This could also happen if hybrid teaching roles were to be effectively established. My skin tingles when I imagine what my day MIGHT have looked like in a hybrid role where I was able to both teach students and spend time impacting education beyond the four walls of the classroom through collaboration, research and policy work.

I’m not sure yet that I am done with teaching. I only know that right now, I don’t have the same passion as others. When I walk into a room of members of the Denver New Millennium Think Tank, the air crackles. It’s alive with spirit, enthusiasm, ideas that are tangible and pushback that is building new structures on top of solid foundations. There is some life force being exuded by these individuals, and when they come together, I can almost physically see the changes happening, as we speak.

When I’m there, I feed off of that energy. It livens me, drives me, pushes my thinking and my questions. I want to solve the problems and push out the solutions. When I leave, I can’t figure out where my energy has gone. That’s when I know I’m not doing the right thing at the right time. Teaching, as I’m doing it now, is not my passion. It doesn’t make me tick. It doesn’t excite me in the way that — for example — creating American Policy around stopping Joseph Kony from abducting child soldiers in Uganda and Congo has the power to do.

Still some searching to do

There’s no simple answer for why I am leaving, at this juncture. I still have some searching to do as I consider the next step in my life and career. This summer, I will be volunteering with the international group Mercy Corps in Portland, OR. I have applied for a teaching fellowship with Orbis Institute in India for the coming Spring, but that will not be determined until late summer. Ideally, I am looking to go back to school for NGO management and policy study around international conflict and peace negotiations.

Maybe I’ll take this year off and discover just how much I miss the students, the lifestyle, and the discussions. Maybe I just need to try teaching in a different context; a different district, a different school, a different population. The beauty of teaching is that it happens all over, in so many environments.

For now, I’m comforted by the fact that if and when I do come back to teaching, I know that it will be with all my heart.
 
___

Jessica Lyons graduated from the University of Delaware with Bachelor of Arts in International Relations, specializations in Development and Africa, and minors in History, Economics and French Studies. She was accepted into Teacher for America’s Denver 2007 Corps. She taught fifth grade for three years at a DPS elementary school.

In a recent note to us, she wrote: "I do think I am looking for another field that brings out my passion.  However, being away for just a few weeks, I'm still incredibly drawn to teaching."

Matching Teachers and Schools

Over at the Public School Insights blog Claus von Zastrow hammers on a policy issue that few teaching effectiveness reformers seem to get. He raises the question, “Are good teachers always good, no matter where they go?”

Ironically, some of the same analysts who lament that teachers are treated as “widgets” promote the misdirected policy bromide that teachers have the “same value” no matter where they teach. A new generation of labor economists studying human capital issues in education (who have yet to be recognized by mainstream media) are pointing out that the “match” between teacher and school matter a great deal for student achievement. I highlighted Kirabo Jackson’s research on “match quality” in my last blog post, but it is worth repeating.

Jackson set out to: (1) determine the extent to which teacher's effectiveness, as measured by ability to improve their students' test scores, changes depending on the schooling environment, (2) quantify the importance of the match between a teacher and a school in determining student achievement, (3) document the relationship between match quality and teacher mobility, and (4) present evidence on what teacher and school characteristics are associated with high match quality.
 
He found that teachers who are effective in one school will not necessarily be effective in another—and that varying school conditions may account for 25 percent of teacher effects on student learning. Jackson used a longitudinal database to estimate teachers’ value-added to student test scores before and after a move between schools. The quality of the teacher-school match explains about 7% of school effects in math, and 30% in reading. Match strength is also highly predictive of teacher retention, a finding that is also robust to inclusion of teacher and school fixed effects.
 
Thinking about the importance of good matches, my Teacher Leaders Network colleague David Cohen (in a response to Claus’ blog) suggests that we “Consider as an analogy sports where coaches win league championships with one team and then move to the next job and struggle.”

I wonder why it is so difficult for some reformers to acknowledge this extraordinarily important teaching effectiveness policy issue. Could it be that they might have to own up to the fact that teachers are not always the problem — that it’s the dysfunctional system of teacher development we need to be fixing?

Time for a Cleansing Breath and a Serious Look at Teaching Effectiveness Data

Reading the mass media accounts of the current teaching effectiveness debates leaves me wondering how much of the debate is over substantive policy and how much is plain hard-nosed politics.

There is no question that teachers should be assessed on how well their students learn. But a simple use of student achievement data (and value-added or growth models) may lead to capricious conclusions as to who is effective or not. There are three major studies, undertaken by economists over the last six months, concluding that it is VERY difficult, if not impossible, to simply claim an individual teacher is effective or not, even when using so-called sophisticated value-added tools. For example:

• Teachers have greater value-added gains when they are in schools with others who generate high value-added gains. This means there is a large peer effect and some teachers who are deemed ineffective would be effective if they teach in schools with other high value-added teachers. [1]
 
• Teachers have greater value-added gains when they teach the same subjects and grade levels consistently—especially in their first 5 years of teaching. Using 12 years of valued-added data, Ost found that a teacher who teaches the same grade for each of her first five years helps students perform 0.137 standard deviations better than students with a novice teacher.  This means that some novice teachers who are deemed ineffective would be effective if they taught the same stuff year after year.[2]

• Teachers who are effective in one school will not necessarily be effective in another—pointing to the fact that varying school conditions may account for 25 percent of teacher effects on student learning. The researchers used a longitudinal database to estimate teachers’ value-added to student test scores before and after a move between schools and determined there was a “good” match in terms of improved value-added and the different school. Match quality explains about 7% of school effects in math, and 30% in reading. Match strength is also highly predictive of teacher retention, a finding that is also robust to inclusion of teacher and school fixed effects.[3]

Even Rick Hess, a long-time fan of the concept of value-added methodologies, has raised cautions about assuming that VAM, in its current state, is a policy panacea. In a recent Education Week blog post, Hess writes that “advocates who are waging an admirable fight to end or dramatically scale back hyper-rigid, industrial-era state policies governing teacher tenure and compensation display a worrisome tendency to mandate that, henceforth, teachers will be evaluated in large part on (thus far) largely nonexistent, hyper-rigid, value-added metrics.” Current policy initiatives that rely heavily on these statistical metrics, he adds, represent “crudely drawn, sketchily considered, and potentially self-destructive efforts."

So, as the disputes between labor and management as well as between thoughtful scholars and high-pitched policy wonks continue, it might be prudent for policymakers to take a cleansing breath and look carefully at the pros and cons of using standardized student achievement data to assess who is an effective teacher and who is not.
 
The need to explore these issues more deeply is why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a $335 million investment in teacher effectiveness, with major grants to three large school districts and two public charter school networks to transform their systems of professional development, tenure, evaluation, and compensation. Working collaboratively with both administrators and unions—not just one or the other—the Gates-fueled approach to teacher effectiveness will rest not only on standardized test score data but other metrics derived from new tools to gauge student engagement and analyze teaching practices in depth.

It is also time, as our work supported by the Ford Foundation underscores, to pay more attention to the right working conditions that make a difference for student achievement. These include conditions such as teaching in-field (the subjects a teacher knows well); opportunities to share and critique lessons with colleagues, and resources to work closely with students and families outside of the traditional school day.

We have found that these conditions can determine who will be effective or not. I wonder when policymakers and the mass media that informs them will begin to grasp this critical point. Examining conditions is not an excuse, it is a reality of teaching. The optimum conditions for student learning must be addressed if effective teachers are to maximize their teaching effectiveness.

[1] Jackson, C. K. & Bruegmann, E. (2009). Teaching students and teaching each other: The importance of peer learning for teachers (NBER Working Paper 15202). Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research.

[2] Ost, B. (2009). How Do Teachers Improve? The Relative Importance of Specific and General Human Capital. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Retrieved on February 1, 2010.

[3] Jackson, C. K. (2010). Match quality, worker productivity, and worker mobility: Direct evidence from teachers. (NBER Working Paper 15990). Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research. Download PDF of full report

Bringing Star Teachers to High Needs Schools

So here's the good news. State policymakers in Massachusetts are seeking to entice “amazing” teachers, who have proven to be effective, to pick up and teach in 35 of the state’s lowest performing schools. Hard to argue with putting great teachers with the students who need the most.

Indeed, the “hunt for star teachers” seems to have some of the markings of potent policymaking. For example, according to a recent Boston Globe report, teachers are promised “such things as additional pay or opportunities for leadership roles in overhauling curriculum.” But I have to wonder to what extent the state’s policymakers are creating an incentive plan that will really matter for the long haul.

Mounds of evidence, including our own Ford Foundation-funded research, suggests that expert teachers are willing to move to high needs schools — but ONLY if a number of working conditions are in place. These include:

1. Effective principals who value teacher leaders and discourage teaching to the test;

2. Expert colleagues with whom to work -- because effective teaching, especially in high needs schools, requires collaboration, not individual teachers who teach as if they are the lonely but determined Caped Crusader;

3. Access to high-quality curriculum resources (e.g., classroom libraries for elementary teachers and lab equipment for science teachers);

4. Specialized preparation for teaching in high needs schools, since substantial evidence has proven that effective teachers in one setting are not necessarily effective in another; and

5. Resources and strategies in place that assure what is taught in the “8 a.m. to 3 p.m.” curriculum is connected to critical “outside-of-the-school” support providers.

These working conditions are rarely considered by policy mavens who are promoting incentives to entice effective teachers to high needs schools. It’s not just “show them the money and they will come.”

I wonder if Massachusetts policymakers remember the “heralded rise” and the “neglected fall” of the state’s signing bonus program of a decade ago that earned a big red F as a strategy to entice talented teachers to high needs schools. [They can read a detailed dissection of the effort here for $4.95.]

I hope Bay State leaders have an institutional memory that stretches back that far. If so, perhaps the state’s turnaround school reform efforts will yield amazing results for students.

GadFly “Gotcha” over Stanford Charter School Misses the Mark

And Ignores the Facts In Order to Advance Ideology Over Students and Families

Last week news was created when a charter school launched and supported by Stanford University’s School of Education was denied a 5-year renewal of its proposed charter by the Ravenswood, California school board. The board later approved an extension of the charter with modifications. The Ravenswood board members cited low test scores in the school’s new elementary grades as the rationale for denying the initial charter request, and cited the successes of the longer-standing high school division as the reason for extending a modified charter which focused on continuing the upper elementary and high school grades.

A report by the New York Times on the school board’s initial decision played up the idea that a respected university’s education program was unable to produce a quality learning experience for the diverse group of students who attend Stanford New School (SNS). The Times failed to report many of the facts that led up to the controversial board decision and has thus far not followed up with a more complete story or to recount subsequent events.

The NYT did not report that Stanford New School began as a high school charter, launched at the Ravenswood Elementary School District’s request to provide the first public high school in over 25 years in the low-income East Palo Alto community. The then all-Black community had lost its high school due to desegregation back in 1976, and students were bused out to districts from which most failed to graduate. The high school charter quickly turned this situation around, and has routinely graduated over 85% of its students and sent more than 90% of graduates to college – with an increasing share (now 53%) admitted to 4-year colleges, a rate double the state average.

The East Palo Alto Academy High School has also improved test scores for its students (now Latino, African American, and Pacific Islander from households that are among the lowest-income in the state), raising the Academic Progress Index, the state’s achievement measure, by 180 points and sharply increasing exit exam pass rates. 

With nearly 2/3 of its students limited English proficient, and most entering 9th grade reading below the 5th grade level, the school has a heavy lift, but it has developed intensive support systems to allow students to catch up while pursuing a college preparatory program. Through its Early College Program, students also take college courses while in high school. Last year 125 of them took 550 college credits, and 40% earned “A’s” in their college courses.

It was only three years ago that Stanford New School launched the elementary division — a slow expansion plan that would add a grade each year. While parents were deeply committed to the school, and turned out by the hundreds to support it at the initial board meeting earlier this month, the elementary portion of the school was still establishing itself. It had only 2 years of performance data from a few grades when the charter renewal came up last week. These scores were higher than those of some now-successful schools when they were first founded, but lower than those of more established elementary schools in the district – a source of concern to the Ravenswood board.

Although you’d be hard pressed to pick this fact out of the Times’ sensationalized account, the Ravenswood school board actually indicated its strong support for the secondary component of the Stanford New School even as it denied the initial charter request based on its concerns about the elementary test scores. Instead, the board voted to modify the charter to assure the high school would continue.

Pundits who oppose the far-reaching, student-centered school reforms of Stanford scholars like Linda Darling Hammond were quick to wave the Times story about as evidence of the failure of those ideas. The most vitriolic pundits, in fact, singled Darling-Hammond out, even though her association with SNS was limited to advising on the high school’s development, a role she relinquished in spring of 2008 while working on the Obama campaign and transition.

When Darling Hammond offered a fuller account of the situation than that reported in the Times, long-time critics like Chester “Checker” Finn Jr. simply ignored it – choosing to continue their harangues against her, going so far as to suggest that the opponents of performance assessment (an issue Darling-Hammond has championed) had some how been “outed” by performance data.

The real dispute, of course, is not about whether performance should be measured (of course it should), but over how comprehensive those measurements should be, using what tools, and for what variety of purposes. But that's a debate for another time. 

 
Having visited East Palo Alto Academy High, I can attest to the fact that students do, indeed, have to engage in performance assessments, as well as study for the state standardized tests. They must present research papers each year in exhibitions to panels of judges, who evaluate their work and require revisions when the work does not yet meet high standards. Graduates attest that this practice was one of the most important in preparing them to succeed when they arrived in college.

No doubt the SNS charter school, especially the elementary school, has faced challenges. Creating a school for high-need students in a low-income community where 2/3 of parents have less than a high school education is hard work. And Checker Finn should know. His own foundation “parachuted down” from its snarky, policy wonk world and helped support several charter schools in Dayton, Ohio, first through a Fordham funded organization called KIDS (Keys to Improving Dayton Schools). KIDS provided grants to two schools, Omega and East End Community, in 2002. When the schools floundered, Fordham took over direct sponsorship in late 2005. 

In 2006, Mr. Finn’s co-worker Terry Ryan owned up to the “tremendous challenge of educating disadvantaged students in urban communities” and even went so far to offer his “respect for traditional educators” who have to teach children who bring to school “painful stories.”

As things turned out, Mr. Finn and his collaborators fell flat on their faces. The Omega school never could attract enough students, and the East End Community School could not make AYP with their proficiency rates on standardized tests far, far below the state average. The schools closed in 2008.

What’s the admonition about throwing stones in glass houses?

______________

Snapshot
East Palo Alto Academy High students have participated in Sojourn to the Past, a 10-day educational trip through the South, for a number of years. Students traveled to key civil rights communities, from Atlanta to Selma and Memphis, met civil rights activists, and visited historic sites. They raised a portion of the cost themselves (writing 20 fundraising letters to family members, friends and other potential donors), attended 10 preparatory seminar sessions, and recorded reflections throughout the trip.

Is the quality teacher-prep message finally getting through?

In the recent round of federal Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grants, several urban teacher residencies won major awards. Awardees included the Boston Teacher Residency, the Denver Teacher Residency, and University of Chicago's Urban Teacher Education Program.

The Boston residency program, with $15 million TQP dollars, will now recruit and prepare more than 540 teachers, who will train for more than a year and emerge with expertise in either working with second language learners or special needs students.

The Denver Teacher Residency, in partnership with the University of Denver (DU), also won a substantial award to focus on “growing” teachers from its own community – individuals who have the cultural competence to teach the district’s diverse students and are willing to teach more than a couple of years (unlike many other alternative certification recruits that have been hired recently). While policy pundits dismiss the need for teachers to earn advanced degrees (and higher pay), DTR promotes an 18-month Master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction, coupled with a two-year induction program.

In the last round of TQP funding, UCLA and its highly touted Center X, in partnership with LAUSD Local District 4 and the Los Angeles Small Schools Center, are developing a powerful model for teacher education for high needs schools. The UCLA effort will pay very close attention to preparing teachers to work with second language learners (with a focus on theories of language structure, acquisition, and development) and on the resources necessary to provide low-cost housing to teacher recruits within the communities they serve. UCLA-trained residents are expected to conduct research into their practice to inform their own development and to assist the program in evaluating its effectiveness.

Could residencies — urban and rural — serve as harbingers of the teacher leaders needed for 21st century schools? Is it possible there may be a movement afoot to take teacher education seriously? Will our nation get over its dysfunctional infatuation with short-cut training? Stay tuned.

No doubt too many traditional education schools are not getting the job done, but neither are alternatives that offer miniscule training for teachers who teach for a short time, while lulling many policymakers into a sense of false security about the quality of the teacher supply lines.

Many Teachers Eager for Hybrid Roles

The MetLife Foundation has released its third and final set of important results from its 2009 annual survey of our nation’s teachers — those dedicated individuals who represent the profession that makes all others possible.

The most recent MetLife installment, Teaching as a Career, captures teachers' thinking about their profession at a critical moment in the history of public education in America, as hundreds of thousands of Baby Boomers approach retirement and a new, very different generation of teachers and potential teachers enters the New Millennium workforce.

One intriguing finding – among many – is that hybrid teaching roles are particularly appealing to new teachers and those who are less than “very satisfied” with their teaching careers today. This concept of hybrid teaching roles is discussed in the recent CTQ monograph The Teachers of 2030 and in even more depth in an upcoming book from Teachers College Press by a team of teachers in the Teacher Leaders Network. 

This TeacherSolutions 2030 book project, supported by the MetLife Foundation, involves a dozen of the nation’s most accomplished teachers – young and not-so-young – who agree on the critical importance of creating hybrid roles that allow classroom experts to both teach students and lead outside their schools, in and out of cyberspace.

The timeliness of their perspective is apparent when we look at this finding from the MetLife survey: Hybrid teaching roles are particularly appealing to new teachers (46%) and those who are less than ‘very satisfied’ with their current teaching career (42%).

The survey report offers several quotes from teachers about the potential of hybrid roles:

“Provides a career trajectory for folks that enables them to keep one foot in the classroom while also stretching themselves or sharing their expertise as a professional.”

“Gives teachers more flexibility; greater opportunity to exercise or explore leadership roles or other roles outside the classroom without having to leave the classroom.”

“Allows schools to take maximum advantage of teacher expertise without weakening the classroom presence of quality teachers.”

The expansive vision of hybrid teaching put forth by my TeacherSolutions 2030 co-authors reaches beyond the thinking of most public school educators today. For example, Ariel Sacks, a 30-year old Brooklyn middle grades teacher, imagines growing numbers of teacherpreneurs who teach part of the day or week and spend the other half of their worklife in diverse roles that support student success. Those roles might include teaching future teachers, working as community organizers with local education funds, serving as peer reviewers to maintain high professional standards, collaborating with researchers to investigate the effects of teaching policies on student achievement, and/or selling their skills and knowledge virtually in the global education marketplace.

More on teacherpreneurism in our forthcoming book. In the meantime, check out the third and final report from this year’s MetLife survey — certainly the nation’s most comprehensive source of facts and opinions about teaching gathered directly from classroom teachers themselves.

In closing, let me share what I believe is the most disturbing finding across the entire survey: Over 70 percent of America’s teachers do NOT believe they are heard when it comes to the current debates on education. Do our policymakers and pundits really believe change is possible without teacher ownership?

Today’s Education News: Rife with Contradictions

Higher expectations for student achievement are a must — but today’s education news is rife with contradictions about setting and reaching them.  

The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have just offered their draft of much-needed college and career readiness curriculum standards for students, reflecting the demands of the 21st century world in which students will live as adults. Thus far, however, the Common Core State Standards Initiative is paying too little attention to the context in which these standards will be firmed up. And while the group led by NGA and CCSSO acknowledges the need for new investments in higher quality performance assessments and the spread of teacher expertise, we do not hear how sorely these investments are needed.

Next we look to the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, which reveals that fewer teachers in schools with high proportions of low-income students strongly agree that their schools uphold high standards for all students. Teachers in these schools are also less likely to be confident that they have the necessary knowledge and skills to help their students succeed academically. That shouldn’t surprise us: More and more of the teachers who enter high-needs schools have less and less high-quality teacher preparation. Too many are flying solo in classrooms with only a few weeks of training — mostly tips on how to manage classrooms — when they need serious preparation to help our most challenged students master the 21st century skills called for by the Common Core student standards.

And then there's the recession. As the need to make deeper investments in students and teachers becomes ever clearer, we are now learning the extent to which the current economic crisis is forcing districts to lay off teachers and cut back on the number of days students attend school. Yesterday, the Kansas City Board of Education voted to close almost half of its schools and cut 700 of 3,000 jobs directly related to student achievement, including almost 300 classroom teachers. When a school district like Kansas City with many high-need students has to cut $50 million from its budget, one wonders how our nation will muster the extra resources to help millions of American children on the wrong side of the achievement gap reach new global standards of achievement.

And then there’s the media hysteria.

Newsweek blares a cover page story claiming that the key to saving America’s “failing public schools” is to fire all of the bad teachers protected by their unions. Yes, there are unfit teachers and we shouldn’t let them teach anybody’s children. But few experts would suggest that the number is very high — and certainly not so high that by removing them we will instantly solve the complex problems that plague high-needs schools and communities. Newsweek’s editors never once reflect on root causes — like the large numbers of ill-prepared teachers who enter and exit teaching quickly, or the many high-needs schools led by a revolving door of ill-trained principals who botch teacher evaluation and undermine the potential for effective teachers to work together to solve the problems in their own schools. Most blatantly, the article fails to consider just how our present mechanisms for teacher recruitment and preparation will replace teachers lost in wholesale firing frenzies. With laid-off journalists, perhaps?

If we expect all students to jump the bar of higher expectations now being raised by the Common Core Initiative, we will first have to own up to the contradictions that are impeding progress in our most challenged schools. Serious investments. Teacher preparation and support. Better leadership development. These are the things that will strengthen our schools. Not a teacher witch hunt.

No principal? No problem, if teachers lead.

A guest blog from CTQ staffer Ali Kliegman

Imagine a school without a principal. Not the kind of school whose principal is gone for the day, resulting in mad chaos, children roaming the halls and little instruction taking place. Instead, imagine the opposite: high achieving students who are hungry to learn, and steadfast, accomplished teachers who are eager to teach, and, well that’s it.

 
This is exactly the kind of school that teachers in Los Angeles are hoping to create at Hillcrest Drive Elementary, reported NPR’s Marketplace recently. “When we win,” LAUSD President, AJ Duffy declared, “then the world will say that we can do a far better job than a private school or a charter school or an education management company.” It’s no surprise, though, that many are threatened by this prospect and somehow suggest outside charter organizations as a superior alternative. Too bad for students, the debate is cast over whether or not to hire union teachers at these schools, rather than how to place the best teachers—those who will lead the way toward an effective 21st century teaching profession—in the highest needs schools.
 
Not only are Hillcrest’s teacher leaders ready to assume the responsibilities of their administrators, but they are moving full speed ahead to transform their school. These teachers champion a number of reforms requiring changes in their union contract, including longer school days, after school activities, and individual learning plans for every student in the building. What’s more, these teachers are offering suggestions for their own evaluation (in this case, through the peer evaluation model, which has proven successful).
 
Cynics of this alternative brand of leadership should visit the Math and Science Leadership Academy in Denver, Colorado. As a teacher-led school, MSLA has no principal. Instead, two lead teachers work on instruction, discipline and any other area typically managed from the top down.  As a 1st grade teacher, Julie Variot says, MSLA decision-making fits within a “round circular structure where everyone has a voice.” Though hundreds of teachers applied this year to become a part of MSLA, only 10 were selected. Watch this video to learn more about how strategies like teachers evaluating as well as helping each other have allowed its students to flourish. All too often charters, staffed with non-unionized teachers, are pitted against public schools, staffed with those who are. It does not have to be such a stark either/or. For proof that it does not, listen carefully to the principal of the neighboring KIPP school (non-unionized) endorse the work of MSLA (unionized).

The point is, effective leadership matters. In my own experiences as a Teach for America corps member in New York City, my colleagues (both TFA and non-TFA) were far more instrumental in my growth than my principal. My former principal (also a former corps member) was the first to admit she never learned to teach effectively in her first years of teaching. When I asked her to model lessons, though she was expected to be the instructional leader, she politely recommended our literacy coach instead. It’s no wonder then, why MSLA’s model works. Who better to learn from than those confident and experienced enough to lead, while wise enough to continue bettering their practice in a room full of students?
 

Last week, the L.A. school board, following the recommendations of Superintendent Ray Cortines, denied many of the charter requests and gave priority to teacher-led initiatives like Hillcrest. The concept of a teacher-led school isn’t new, nor is it naïve. Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves what we are waiting for.

Ali Kliegman taught seventh grade Humanities in the Bronx for two years as a Teach for America corps member. She holds an M.S. in Teaching from Pace University and worked previously in education policy for the legal reform coalition Common Good.

Latest MetLife Survey Confirms the Power of Teacher Collaboration

Policy pundits and journalists who weigh in on the teaching effectiveness debate should take note of the latest MetLife Survey of the American Teacher — whose theme Collaborating for Student Success  speaks volumes to the issue of how to identify effective teachers.

While researchers continue the search for methods to isolate individual teacher effects, the MetLife survey reveals that over 90% of the nation’s teachers believe their colleagues contribute to their own teaching effectiveness. New teachers, in particular, were more likely to strongly agree that their success in the classroom hinged on the effectiveness of others.  
 
For me, this finding calls to mind the 2009 study by Jackson and Bruegmann highlighting the importance of peer learning for teachers. Using 11 years of matched teacher and student achievement data in North Carolina, these scholars (from Cornell and Harvard, respectively) were able to isolate and quantify the added value brought about by teachers’ collective expertise — finding that most value-added gains are attributable to teachers who are more experienced (and qualified) and stay together as teams.*
 
The results reported in Part 1 (Effective Teaching and Leadership) of MetLife's new survey offer additional insights. Teachers in schools that report more collaboration are more likely to point out that:

• other teachers contribute to their classroom success

• there are higher levels of trust among teachers and principals,

• there are more opportunities to watch each other teach, and

• they are more satisfied with their careers.
 
The MetLife data confirms the powerful effects of deep teacher collaboration. Policymakers who seek to improve student performance should pay attention to the international PISA research, which found that teachers in nations with high-performing schools have somewhere between 10 and 20 hours a week to work with their colleagues — critiquing lessons, examining student work products, and developing and adapting curriculum. Strikingly, the MetLife survey also reveals that the average American teacher spends less than 3 hours a week working with his or her fellow teachers — and almost one in 5 teachers has less than one hour per week of “structured collaboration.”
 
Want to improve teaching effectiveness? Listen to teachers — and make it possible for teachers to spend substantive time listening to each other. Kudos to Metlife for providing important new evidence to support this much-needed reform strategy.

* Jackson, C. K. & Bruegmann, E. (2009, August).  Teaching students and teaching each other: The importance of peer learning for teachers.  NBER Working Paper 15202.  Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research.

CAP's tenure report is curiously incomplete

The Center for American Progress just released an interesting paper on teacher tenure reform — suggesting that tying job security to student test scores is the linchpin to improving teaching effectiveness. It’s interesting but oddly incomplete.

No doubt, as the CAP report noted, “Legislated and bargained contractual protections make the process of dismissing an ineffective teacher with tenure prohibitively lengthy and expensive in most states, and teacher tenure evaluation processes remain largely disconnected from teachers’ performance in the classroom or student achievement.”

And there is no question that something is askew when “virtually every single tenured teacher” in a recent study was “rated satisfactory (or higher), and less than 1 percent received a negative evaluation.” This does not make sense.But here is what I believe to be curiously absent in the CAP report.

1. Many ineffective teachers remain in their tenured positions not because of tenure but because of poor evaluation systems managed by either overworked administrators or those who are not very effective at rating teachers.

2. Many tenured teachers are not teaching effectively not because of archaic tenure laws but because administrators have forced them to teach out of field. Almost 50 percent of the nation’s math teachers are teaching out of field.

3. Our own studies of high performing, high poverty schools reveal a number of conditions undermine teachers opportunities to teach effectively. They include:

• principals who do not cultivate and embrace teacher leadership;

• the lack of time and tools for teachers to learn from each other;

• the lack of high quality, specialized teacher education for the highest needs schools, subjects, and students;

• the lack of preparation in working with second language and special needs learners, and

• increasing student mobility as families, due to economic distresses, move in and out of school communities.

The CAP report on tenure reform raises important issues, but by choosing to concentrate only on the behaviors and actions of teachers and not the system as a whole, the CAP analysis is of limited use in shaping better teacher policies. Without a comprehensive assessment, we surely cannot find the best solutions to teacher evaluation, tenure, and effectiveness.