Advancing the Teaching Profession

6 Ways to Make the Most of RESPECT

Last week the U.S. Department of Education published President Obama’s Blueprint for RESPECT, a 36-page framework for the future of teaching in America. On the USDOE webpage you can find the report, as well as a tool “that allows teachers and leaders to evaluate how RESPECTful their school or district is,” as well as a video of educators sharing their perspectives about the initiative.

The report was based on conversations and input from “nearly 6,000 teachers from around the country.” This process alone represents an important step: involving teachers in the creation of a report is key to the development of any effective education policy. At CTQ, teachers regularly lead the way in the development of reports and multimedia projects about systemic education improvements.

As a former teacher (30+ years ago) who has spent decades studying (and now) advocating for the profession, I have to say kudos for the USDOE putting together this framework, which paints a positive picture for the profession. The key now is building off the blueprint, filling in some missing pieces, and turning ideas into action.

To fill in some of the gaps in the RESPECT framework I would suggest the following:

1. Though the blueprint includes a much-needed call for “top talent, prepared for success,” we need to make sure that all new recruits, no matter their pathway into the profession, meet the same high standards.
2. The report references the importance of novice teachers learning themselves and analyzing student learning outcomes. But there is much potential here to capitalize on the new teacher performance assessment enterprise led by researchers at Stanford University. As of now, more than 20 states, working with the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), are piloting the potentially powerful tool.
3. Regardless of the necessary push for salaries to “reflect quality of a teacher’s work” and for evaluation tools to gauge effectiveness of “helping students to grow academically,” we need to be realistic about the obstacles that exist in using value-added statistical tools (See latest piece from Goldhaber and Loeb). We also need to focus on how better-quality assessments can not just identify effective teachers but also promote the spread of teaching expertise.
4. Even with its reasonable discussion of a teacher’s “career continuum” and the need for competitive compensation, the blueprint can go even further. We must rethink teacher leadership on a larger scale. Instead of suggesting teacher leadership is needed to solely serve schools and districts, we need a bolder brand of teacher leader—teacherpreneurs—to incubate and execute their own bold ideas and spread them across their state, the nation, and the world.
5. Our country currently has more than 100,000 National Board Certified Teachers—imagine the great work they could do if they had opportunities to lead on a systems level. Think, for instance, how the USDOE report could have outlined the role NBCTs could play in leading PLCs, especially with their known expertise in analyzing student work to inform more effective pedagogical practices. (For a fabulous call to action on NBCT leadership, see this recent piece from CTQ teacher and NBCT Dan Brown.)
6. What about virtual networks? The report calls for “levera(ging) technology to further expand the reach of highly effective teachers,” which is key. But there are so many ways that teachers are already connecting and leading policy and pedagogical reforms in virtual networks, such as the CTQ Collaboratory. How can we take their work further, and encourage even more educators and supporters to get involved?

The USDOE report rightfully concludes with the “immediate hope and expectation….that America’s 4 million active teachers and principals will lead the effort to reshape their profession.” It is now time for the Obama Administration to help unleash the potential of many, many leaders from the classroom who have much bolder ideas—like those laid out by teachers in the book TEACHING 2030—about how to transform their profession.

It is time for the Obama Administration to cultivate teacherpreneurs who seek to teach for a career—as their students and school communities require—but also have the time, space, geography, and reward to transform the profession that makes all others possible.

Withering "Rhee-form"

Over the last week or so, there has been an unusual spate of news reports, research studies, and op-eds published suggesting that the current teaching quality reform—or perhaps better titled “Rhee-form”—agenda may be beginning to wither.

The narrow focus on judging teachers by student test-score gains is losing ground. No longer can we use value-added measures (VAM) on once-a-year, bubble-in, multiple-choice assessments, and then pay teachers with higher VAM ratings more and fire those with lower ratings. Perhaps the withering reform agenda, owned by both Republican and Democratic presidents, has something to do with the indictment of Beverly Hall, former superintendent in the Atlanta Public Schools, and the claims of the enormous pressure she put on principals and teachers to immediately raise test scores.

Or it could be the news broken by John Merrow about Michelle Rhee, the “poster child” for promoting high stakes accountability and blaming teachers for poor student test scores. A memo John uncovered reveals that Michelle is likely culpable for rampant cheating on standardized tests in the beleaguered inner-city schools of  Washington, DC.

 

We must evaluate teachers on more than just their students' high-stakes standardize tests.

Even well-meaning politicos and policy wonks struggle to admit that their favored teaching quality strategies are flawed. However, I am beginning to see a chink in their armor. For example, more than five years ago, the Aspen Institute, in efforts to overhaul teaching evaluation, recommended that states  be “required to put in place systems for measuring the learning gains of a teacher’s students through value-added methodology.” Moreover, “student achievement [could] count for no less than 50 percent” of the formula for identifying those who are effective or not.

 

Now, as reported in a New York Times op-ed piece, the Aspen Institute is claiming that “an obsessive focus on holding teachers accountable for test scores without an equal emphasis on actually improving classroom teaching—could fatally undermine the effort to create meaningful evaluation systems.” The Aspen Institute now is taking a page out of the teacher unions’ hymnal.  

Focusing on the right types of reforms 

At the same time, the New York Times, in a dramatic reversal of its typical opinion page promotions, suggests that charter school reforms and Teach for America-type shortcuts into teaching are distractions at best. Jal Mehta, following in the footsteps of Linda Darling-Hammond’s 1996 NCTAF report, reminds readers that “teaching is a complex activity that is hard to direct and improve from afar.” Jal asserts, much like Linda did, that it is time to professionalize teaching—which will no doubt require “money, political will and the audacity to imagine that teaching could be a profession on a par with fields like law and medicine.”

In the vacuum created by indicted reformers, and amid growing evidence of the limitations of their policy prescriptions (and the harm created by them), I suspect there will be another effort to professionalize teaching in America. 

Unlike in the past, when attempts to invest in the profession have routinely dissipated, this time America’s teachers will be more clearly heard and embraced by a public who has deep trust in those individuals who teach our nation's students. The Internet and online networks will help the public understand the complexity of teaching, the potential of professionalism to transform public education, and the wrong-headedness of narrow, top-down Rhee-forms that do not come close to serving students first.

Linda Darling-Hammond, a mentor and friend for 30 years, often reminds me (and so many others) that the “process of creating better schools is hard work” and is never “without struggle.” In light of all the efforts to de-professionalize teaching of late, from those on both sides of the political aisle, I can hear Linda echo one of my favorite poets, Langston Hughes (and the many who inspired him): “Keep your hand on the plow! Hold on!"

4 Lessons for Teacher Education Reform

Yesterday the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) released "The Changing Teacher Preparation Profession: A Report from AACTE’s Professional Education Data System (PEDS)" at a National Press Club briefing in Washington, D.C. The report offers “a current look at progress and challenges in higher-education-based teacher preparation.” A few highlights from the report:

• Contrary to many perceptions, teacher preparation programs are admitting academically competitive candidates into their programs.
• Extensive clinical experiences are being incorporated in higher-education-based teacher preparation programs.
• Most teacher preparation programs collect data on their graduates but do not have access to state data.
• Teacher preparation programs are rising to the challenge of infusing technology into coursework.

I encourage you to read carefully the recent research of Kirabo Jackson, an economist from Northwestern University, who found that teachers whose VAM ratings were high were not the ones responsible for ensuring positive student outcomes on noncognitive measures, and vice versa.

Yes, education schools as well as alternative certification programs need to be accountable for producing graduates who are ready to teach. Ironically, no other profession assembles this kind of evidence—primarily because they don’t see it as useful. But professions like medicine and nursing assemble more concrete and helpful evidence—like the edTPA, developed by AACTE and Stanford University—to inform which programs are getting the job done, or not.
 
Lesson 3: Learn from top-performing nations—invest in clinical prep!
I just returned from observing the deliberations of ministers of education and teacher union leaders at the third annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession. All top-performing nations invest in teacher education—and second-tier countries like Germany are committing to placing more emphasis on preservice preparation of new recruits before instituting the kinds of teaching evaluation systems proliferating in the United States.

But most importantly, the governments of top-performing nations not only recruit top candidates, but they also pay full freight for extensive clinical preparation of them before allowing them to teach independently. There is no such thing as Teach for Finland or Teach for Singapore. And yesterday I learned that Cuba is already doing what we should be doing: creating a seamless system of teacher development that begins in university programs and continues in the form of long-term professional development in their K-12 schools.
 
Lesson 4: Universities are already preparing 21st-century teachers; why promote those that train only for the 20th century?
The AACTE report offers powerful examples from a number of institutes of higher education, including the University of Central Florida, California State University-Fresno, and the University of Cincinnati, whose education schools are preparing teachers to teach digital natives and second language learners—and also focus on global competencies. This is the real stuff of teacher education for today and tomorrow.
 
At the press conference, I asked why policymakers, and so many Inside-the-Beltway policy wonks, are so fascinated with shortcut alternative certification programs. These programs at best give future teachers an opportunity to teach students to pass muster on 20th-century standardized tests that are built on 19th-century principles of teaching and learning. We need alternative pathways into teaching, but not more truncated training regimes that undermine solid preparation.
 
And teachers themselves—like my teaching colleagues in the CTQ Collaboratory revealed in a powerful Education Week series—are speaking up about how and why our nation needs to ante up on the right kind of teacher preparation.
 
Our nation, because of low salaries, limited preparation, and poor working conditions, has to hire about 250,000 new teachers a year. Our nation’s policy leaders must think differently about how to invest in teacher education—especially considering the $1 billion raised (and spent) by Teach for America over the last five years to place a few thousand Teach for America recruits annually into our highest-needs schools. I have several action steps in mind, for both teacher educators and policymakers, which I will share in a follow-up post tomorrow.

Talking About Global Education in Bangkok

Today, I'm slated to be speaking at EDUCA 2012: The Annual Congress for Teacher Professional Development, which is taking place in Bangkok, Thailand. I'm representing the United States in a global forum on "teachers as learners."  My presentation will be under way in a few hours, and I've just learned that it will be available to watch live.

If you're interested in watching the presentation, visit CTQ's USTREAM channel to watch live (at midnight EST or 9 p.m. PST), or to view the recording afterward.

In the meantime, below is the precis of my presentation:

Teaching—The Global Profession: Lessons Learned from the USA

The teaching profession is poised for a transformation—worldwide. Globalization is changing many industries and the professions that fuel them. And the right kind of teaching profession will be instrumental in helping young people meet the citizenship and economic challenges of the mid-21st century. The tools for transforming the teaching profession are at our disposal—and what needs to be done is already being done right now somewhere in the world.

I'm looking forward to learning from education leaders from around the world, and sharing their perspectives with our education communities back in the United States.

What the PDK/Gallup Poll Says About U.S. Education (And How It Compares to Finland)

I can’t help but consider my Finnish Lessons as I examine the latest PDK/Gallup poll about Americans’ attitudes toward education. Below I take on a few themes.

The Role of Curriculum in Teaching and Learning

There’s much to be encouraged about in the recent poll. The vast majority of Americans (75%), for example, think that the Common Core will provide more consistency in the quality of education.

The Common Core promises to frame more integrated and deeper learning opportunities for students. But I wonder if, in our implementation (or execution) of the Common Core, we will take a page out of the Finnish playbook. Finnish administrators and teachers embrace their national curriculum because it represents the nation’s educational values, rather than narrow prescriptions for learning. 

And, importantly, in Finland, teachers and principals are the ones who determine whether their students have met the standards.

Standardization vs. Professionalism

Most Americans say that a third of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on standardized tests. But when asked to list words that describe the teachers who had the most positive influence on them, Americans responded with words like “caring,” “encouraging,” and “attentive.” Those adjectives hardly coincide with the impersonal and stressful multiple-choice standardized tests students must take, regardless of background or ability level.

The Finns, primarily because they screen and prepare (not one or the other) each teacher so well, do not seem to care about teacher evaluation. They avoid the twisted contortions and gnashing of teeth over how to precisely use a value-added measure—based on one 20th-century standardized test—to determine 50 percent of a teacher’s effectiveness ratings.

After a couple of visits to Finnish schools, I can imagine how the Finns could leave every country behind in international measures of student achievement if they took professional development and evaluation more seriously—building on their trust of educators to make professional decisions about who is doing well and why.

But one thing is certain: Any teacher evaluation reforms in Finland would have to take into account that no one teacher is rarely, if ever, solely responsible for the education of a group (or even a class of students). It would be wise for U.S. policy to do the same.

Rating the Schools

Once again, the American public rates public schools very favorably—if they know them.

• 77% give an A or B grade to the school their eldest child attends
• 48% give an A or B grade to the schools in their communities
• 19% give an A or B  grade to the nation’s public schools as a whole

Less than half of Americans without kids in public schools have visited one in the past year. So you have to wonder—where are they getting their information?

Perhaps it was from a Newsweek cover story of late titled “Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” or from reformers like Joel Klein who claim that our schools, uniformly, are failing. In Finland, there are teachers who are not teaching effectively, and there are schools that are not great. But no one—including the Finnish media reporting on student matriculation exams—classifies teachers or schools as “bad” or “failures.”

In the United States, policymakers and business leaders often point to standardized tests as the metric for judging school success and teacher effectiveness. Not in Finland. As Risto E.J. Penttila, Secretary General of the Chamber of Commerce, told us today: “The purpose of our education system is to make good citizens.”  I suspect those Americans who know the public schools can see the work they’re doing in making good citizens.  They are the same Americans who characterize effective teachers as “caring.”

The Role of the Media

Looking at the PDK/Gallup poll results, there seems to be a discrepancy between Americans’ local, individual experiences with education, and broader perceptions of the system as a whole. When it comes to thinking about education on a national scale, we rely less on our own experiences and more on what the media reports.

And when the media focuses on what’s wrong with education rather than what’s right with education, it can be easy to make assumptions that skew negative. Our media doesn’t portray educators as a group as being a “caring,” “attentive,” or “encouraging” group.

Which makes it incredibly easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our positive experiences at our schools and our children’s schools are the exception, not the rule.

Along the same lines, the PDK/Gallup shows an uptick in support for using public dollars to send kids to private schools (44 percent were in favor in 2012, compared to 34 percent in 2011). However, how much media coverage shows side-by-side comparisons of student achievement in public vs. private and charter schools? In many cases, public schools still do a better job educating students, while at the same time educating all students.

Just as educators have a responsibility to their students, the media has a responsibility to cover not just hot-button issues that attract readers by causing alarm. We need to celebrate our teachers' and students' successes—not failures—so they can serve as a model in our profession and in our communities.

Finland Travel Log: Teachers, Poverty, and Policy

Below is the second in a series of posts I'm writing from Finland, as part of a trip with a delegation of U.S. education leaders. For a week, we're immersing ourselves in Finland's top-performing education system. Read Part One here.

As I begin my weeklong dive into the Finnish education system, and the theory of change that guides it, I was struck by two New York Times pieces I read today—one on getting tough on teachers from Frank Bruni, and one from Paul Tough on hard questions about President Obama and his commitment to addressing the “deep poverty” in which one in ten school children live. 

I will learn a great deal over the next five days about Finland and its comprehensive approach to early learning, transitions to public school, and social safety nets (Monday); primary school and the role of afterschool and summer programs (Tuesday); secondary education and preparation for career and college (Wednesday); the teaching profession (Thursday); and building and sustaining public will for investments in children and public education (Friday). 

But what I do know now is that in Finland policymakers do not build false divisions between improving the teaching profession and addressing the human condition.  Granted, there are parts of what Frank Bruni writes in his piece, “Teachers on the Defensive,” that resonate with me — for instance, teachers’ unions being out of step with much-needed reforms (cases in point: seniority and quality-blind hiring and placements). But Mr. Bruni’s call to get tough on unions suggests that by getting better teachers, we don’t have many good ones now. And his analysis, centered on the release of the new film Won’t Back Down, suggests that if only tenure and seniority rules were jettisoned, and policymakers could hire smarter teachers who worked harder, our public schools could overcome the ravages of deep poverty.  

On the other hand, Paul Tough challenges this assertion ever so poignantly in his piece “What Does Obama Really Believe In?”  Mr. Tough’s 6,000-word essay paints a rich portrait of our nation’s failed social and economic policies that have yet to address the deep poverty that affects so many like Jasmine and Damien who live in the South Side of Chicago, where President Obama worked as a community organizer. Tough questions Secretary Duncan’s well-meaning belief that the “only way to end poverty is through education”—a belief that has put educators on the defensive.  

Tough points out that Jasmine and Damien attended Christian Fenger High School—the target of many reforms under both Duncan and his predecessor, but never improved. Tough reminds us how “early stress” in children’s lives—including a “paralyzing mix of unforgiving economic conditions” and “destructive social influences”—make it “almost impossible” for young people like Jasmine and Damien to “escape.” He points to the neuroscience that shows how those early stresses on children “disrupt the healthy growth of the prefrontal cortex” and how the “absence of strong and supportive relationships with stable adults inhibits a child’s development of a crucial set of cognitive skills called executive functions.”

Tough has written extensively on the power and potential of the Harlem’s Children Zone and its comprehensive approach that, in addition to high-quality education, encompasses parenting programs, preschools, a medical clinic, a farmers’ market, and family counseling.  He questions why President Obama promised to invest in a billion dollars in the HCZ model, but has only come up with a mere $40 million over the last three years.

Mr. Tough reminds us that President Obama once said that to overcome poverty, of which failing schools is only a symptom, we must “heal the entire community.” It is time for us to think about teacher quality reforms in light of a teaching- and learning-development system.

As Dan Leeds, president of the National Public Education Support Fund and a very successful international businessman, told us this evening, "I learned a long time ago that you learn more from other companies sometimes than your own."

It's time to learn from Finland.

Teacherpreneurs and the Common Core

 

Enjoying dinner with members of CTQ's Implementing Common Core Standards (ICCS) team at the International Symposium on Educational Reform.

Teacher leadership is the focus of many conversations these days, especially ones about the Common Core. With their emphasis on interdisciplinary curriculum, the standards will require teachers to collaborate with one another and spread their expertise in and out of cyberspace. There will be new assessments (PDF) that teachers need to design, score, interpret, and integrate into instructional plans. There will be demand for an array of instructional resources, which teachers must learn and adapt for the specific contexts they teach in.

The Common Core cannot be implemented in lock-step fashion, as current teach-to-test curricula demand today. The Common Core cannot be implemented if we continue to promote short-cut teacher preparation and one-shot, “spray and pray” professional development. As TLN member Patrick Ledesma recently wrote about the Common Core, “Time and again, top-down implementation stalls as teachers fail to hear workable plans that reflect the realities of their classrooms.” We need teachers to lead the way.

Granted, teacher leadership has become more popular of late as a means for administrators to position classroom practitioners as department or committee chairs, coaches, mentors, or even “professional learning team” facilitators. But most of these roles are typically defined by administrators in response to external dictates. They reflect how policy wonks, curriculum designers, and publishers imagine schools and teachers’ roles within them. 

This type of teacher leadership—the “anoint and appoint” variety defined by Mark Smylie (friend and school reform scholar)—is for yesterday’s schools. We must exceed their narrow confines, because even if all these leadership roles were combined into one, it still wouldn’t come close to what a teacherpreneur does. Because teacherpreneurs spend half the day teaching students, their perspectives on education reform are grounded in the everyday realities of teaching and learning.

In the keynote address I'll deliver at the eighth International Symposium on Educational Reform (ISER) this week, I'll describe the barriers that undermine the kind of teacherpreneurial action needed for implementing the Common Core. Such obstacles include policies that isolate teachers from one another, as well as administrators and policy wonks who are threatened by teachers who lead.

Too many administrators are still focused on “monitoring” teachers to make sure they teach “bell to bell.” We need to jettison the organizational structures that have existed in our schools since the 1920s. Many of our schools' designs were based on Frederick Taylor's theories of scientific management, which allowed classroom teachers to be treated much like assembly-line factory workers.

It’s about time we jettison the “boss-worker” mindset of administrators and self-proclaimed reformers who cannot tolerate the blurring of lines between those who teach in schools and those who lead them. Our focus should be on meeting the challenges of 21st-century teaching and learning. In our communities, there are growing numbers of students from impoverished homes--many of them second-language learners--who need more well-prepared teachers, working in teams, than ever before.

Here at CTQ, teacher leaders are working hard to lead Common Core implementation in their schools, districts, and states. And as our organization continues to evolve, we will focus more and more on making sure that teacher leaders and teacherpreneurs are leading the way. 

What You’re Not Supposed to Know about Teachers’ Unions

By Melissa Rasberry

Barnett Berry will be joining school chiefs, union officials, school board leaders, and teachers from 41 states and more than 100 school districts this week in Cincinnati as the Department of Education and various partner organizations convene the second Labor Management Conference. In this post, CTQ staff member Melissa Rasberry reflects on her experiences with successful district-union relations and their efforts of "Collaborating to Transform the Teaching Profession" (the theme of this year's conference).

“I want you to leave here dissatisfied today.”

Teachers, parents, administrators, and community leaders looked on with anxious faces, uncertain how to respond. This was the first keynote I’d seen that wished for participants’ unhappiness by conference end.

“… I want you to leave here dissatisfied with the status quo,” the speaker continued, “and angry about what we are doing to our children.”

Where might you predict this conversation transpired?

I overheard the dialogue at a National Education Association (NEA) convening for its Priority Schools Campaign. If you listen much to reports in the media, you probably wouldn’t guess that the keynote speaker was NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. In fact, some journalists and policy pundits would have you believe that the NEA is a strident defender of the status quo. They purport that many ills of our educational system can be blamed on teachers’ unions. Stories of late proclaim:

•    American schools have declined, while the “teachers' unions have become more and more powerful.”

•    Unions “prevent teachers from being dismissed for incompetence” and don’t want to be held accountable.

•    Getting rid of the teachers’ unions is the “only fight worth having.”

But yet, here I sat in a room full of educators and community members—convened by the NEA and ready to improve our nation’s most deserving schools. The conference participants did not back down from acknowledging that we have failed some of our children, but they also were not embroiled in the false dichotomies that pit unions against reformers.

Blowing Away the Myth: Success in Action

Most reformers today think that unions, which hold on to seniority hiring rights and quality-blind teacher evaluation systems, prevent schools from improving. Though unions need to change their ways in some respects, so do districts and school boards that diminish teacher leadership and exepertise. Unions can't be the only problem if the same ineffective teacher-hiring and -evaluation practices are found in both unionized and non-unionized districts.

Indeed, we find many examples of teachers’ unions across the country leading reform efforts. I’ve witnessed several of these trailblazing efforts firsthand, as part of my work here at CTQ.

•    The Hillsborough County Teachers Association and Hillsborough County Public Schools gather at the table with one mission in mind: to improve the educational experiences of their students. Through the Empowering Effective Teachers initiative, district and union leaders created a system in which excellent teachers are identified, rewarded, and encouraged to spread their knowledge and skills to their colleagues.
•    The district and union joined forces in Denver, Colorado, to create the first teacher-led school. The Math and Science Leadership Academy operates solely through the leadership of teachers. The district strongly encouraged the union to develop the initial plans for the school, and both organizations continue to support its success.
•    CTQ is partnering to support schools involved with the NEA’s Priority Schools Campaign. CTQ prepared National Board Certified Teachers and other accomplished teachers to serve as virtual coaches for teachers in these high-needs schools. The trained coaches will facilitate virtual learning communities (VLCs), so that educators across the country can share ideas and resources for student success in an online environment.
•    In December 2011, the Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching released Transformed Teaching: Connecting Professional Responsibility with Student Learning (PDF). This blue-ribbon panel of teachers and other educational leaders (including many from our own Teacher Leaders Network) outlines key imperatives for transforming the teaching profession, characterized by “collective accountability for student learning balanced with collaborative autonomy that allows educators to do what is best for students.”

These initiatives, as well as those highlighted at this week’s 2012 Labor Management Conference sponsored by the Department of Education, present excellent examples of how districts and unions can avoid letting “the perfect be the enemy of the good.” If we want our students to achieve in our highly competitive global economy, labor-management relationships must improve. Unions and districts alike must set aside their bickering and work on finding common ground. As Dennis Van Roekel instructed the crowd at the NEA convening, our students deserve nothing less.

Amid Evaluation Controversies, Florida Teachers Model Effective Reform

In the world of school reform, there is a lot of talk about teacher evaluation these days. Hardly anyone believes the systems in place are worth much, given that many districts report that administrators often rate almost all teachers “satisfactory” and pay little attention to student results. And most everyone knows the Race to the Top states are rocketing toward implementing new systems, replete with more intensive classroom observations, mechanical use of value-added ratings, and four-point rating scales.

However, the teacher-evaluation engines are already beginning to stall. Tennessee, for example, is struggling to find time for “micromanaged” principals to conduct effective and useful observations. And New York City is rolling out wildly inaccurate* value-added test scores results to judge (and then fire) teachers.

And now bright-eyed enthusiasts for R2T-esque teacher evaluations are raising hard questions about the rigid use of test scores to judge teachers. Many point out that if principals and teachers don’t trust one another, then these evaluation systems won’t do much to improve teaching and learning. Robin Lake, for example, of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington, recently wrote a guest post on Rick Hess's blog. There, she makes the good point that the system requires not just new “tools,” but serious “attention to organizational capacity and relationships.”

Making these relationships a priority will require not just more collaboration between administrators and union leaders, as Robin suggests, but developing new systems so teachers themselves can lead the way. This would allow more teachers like Ryan Kinser of Hillsborough County, Florida (and many of his 15,000 teaching colleagues in the Tampa-area school district), to drive reforms that will affect their classrooms. Ryan, in his powerful blog posts over at transformED, points to a number of huge issues with using value-added results to improve teaching and learning. He also suggests specific strategies for using VAM in ways that make sense for teachers and the students they serve.

Soon, Ryan and his CTQ-supported New Millennium Initiative team will release a powerful multimedia product that focuses on leveraging promising teacher evaluation reforms in their district to transform the teaching profession. In her blog post, Robin Lake cites the research of Tony Bryk on the importance of organizational trust and coherence in much-needed evaluation reforms. In Tampa, the school district and union—and now a growing group of solutions-oriented teachers—are showing just how it can be done.

* It has been shown that the use of “value-added assessments” in New York is grossly imprecise. For example, the margin of error spans 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English. Some teachers' evaluations were based on as few as 10 students.

A Good Laugh--A Sigh--And a Revolutionary Suggestion

The Good Laugh

Did you catch Matthew Di Carlo’s perfect April Fools’ Day piece on “Measuring Journalist Quality”? Observing that journalists have been leading the way in “outing” teachers based on unreliable value-added measures (VAMs), Di Carlo flips the picture. What if journalists were measured by similarly unstable “reader-added models” (RAMs)?

The Sigh

Like all fine satire, Di Carlo’s piece carries serious heft.  

Many VAM systems determine teaching quality on the basis of a one-time estimate of a gain score based on students’ performance on a single multiple-choice, standardized test. And researchers have pointed out that even the most sophisticated value-added calculations produce substantial errors: as many as one in four teachers is misidentified as effective or ineffective.

In a recent study of VAM, Heather Hill, Laura Kapitula, and Kristin Umland warned: “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.”

Sobering—especially when VAM systems are being used to make or break teachers’ reputations.

I’m cheered by the fact that the Measures of Effective Teaching project, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is assembling an array of measures that reflect the complexity of teaching. And Bill Gates, of late, has written his own eloquent plea for journalists to cease their “shameful” approach of using VAM rankings to identify which teachers are effective or not, irrespective of the rating’s accuracy.

Meanwhile, it’s important to note that teachers aren’t opposed to being held accountable. In fact, many teacher leaders we work with are eager for their profession to be more results-oriented.

Teachers are even open to VAM as an element of a comprehensive teacher development and evaluation system. What disturbs them is the idea of VAM as a predominant, automatic marker of their effectiveness—especially if today’s inadequate assessments are its basis.

The Revolutionary Suggestion

Our nation’s schools could cling to the limitations of VAMs, passing swift judgments based on questionable data. Or—prepare yourself for the revolutionary—we could invest in teacher leadership to develop a comprehensive teacher development and evaluation system. (A recent paper, commissioned by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, makes this argument.)

We could draw on the expertise of accomplished teachers to craft better student assessments, additional evaluation measures (like peer observation), and systems that support the professional growth of all teachers (whether in their first year or their twentieth).  

Teachers are well-suited to inform teacher development and evaluation. They understand the nuances of the work they do each day—and can help create equally nuanced systems for gauging and supporting teaching effectiveness. They grasp the complexity of their profession.

Do we get a Day-After-April-Fools’-Day wish? If so, here’s mine: that more journalists grasp the complexity of teaching (and the potential of teacher leadership, too).

International Inspiration for Building Teacher Leadership

By Megan Allen

Megan Allen is a National Board Certified Teacher, 2010 Department of Education/Macy’s Teacher of the Year, and finalist for 2010 National Teacher of the Year. She is a member of the Hillsborough County New Millennium Initiative.

Last week, the best-of-the-best countries from around the world gathered in the Big Apple to discuss education at the Second International Summit on the Teaching Profession. One of the most intriguing topics of discussion there was teacher leadership.

In a thoughtful Education Week essay published in January, Marc Tucker pointed out that top-performing nations do “everything necessary” to recruit, prepare, and develop their teachers, while here in the U.S. we put all our policy emphasis on “accountability systems.” Top-performing nations take teacher leaders seriously—as leaders of assessment reform, partners in research, and teacher education faculty who prepare the next generation of recruits.

I attended the summit virtually, following along with streaming videos and Twitter. One of my favorite tweets came from the USDOE and speaks to the power of teacher leaders:

So let’s dive right in: What are some of those pathways and roles for teacher leadership?

More Than Administrators

Teacher leadership encompasses far more than moving into administration. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s too narrow a definition. There is an enormous spectrum of teacher leadership, some roles defined, some forming, and some yet unknown. But we must have open minds to these new ideas and be solutions-focused in developing ways to make them happen. We must change the culture and climate of teaching as the definition of what a teacher is evolves.

Many teacher leaders—myself included—want to be involved outside the classroom walls in areas that affect students. But at the same time, we want to keep one foot in the door with the people we love most: students. This calls for out-of-the-box thinking and the development of new hybrid roles. In the book TEACHING 2030, a group of amazing educators dreamed about what these roles could look like. And it’s slowly happening.

Teacher Leaders in Action

I am going to take a moment to brag about some of my favorite teacher leaders who are blazing the path as we speak:

• Sarah B. Wessling is a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT) who works with the Teaching Channel to record her classroom daily in Iowa, allowing a deep look at highly effective teaching.
• Jessica Keigan spends half her day poring over literature with her high school students in Colorado, and the other half as a CTQ teacherpreneur, advocating for positive change in education policy.
• Two of my colleagues currently sit on school boards: Michael Flynn, an amazing Massachusetts elementary school teacher, sits on his local school board, speaking for children in his district. And Holly Boffy, an NBCT from Louisiana, sits on her state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. 

International Role Models

We can also look to the lessons learned from other countries. They see teacher leadership roles as ways to effectively recruit candidates and build respect in the profession. In the Netherlands, the prime minister still teachers a half day a week.  Denmark offers a “taster course” for aspiring leaders to see the range of available leadership pathways. Singapore prides itself in never leaving its teaching talent to chance, continually assessing its teachers for leadership potential and providing opportunities for teachers to develop and use it.

So here is my charge: We must reshape the way we think about teacher leadership. Teachers must be at the helm of effective reform if we are to get it right. Teachers are the experts. We must realize that new roles may not fit neatly into the little cubbies that we’ve had for decades, but we must be flexible with finding ways to make them work. And we must recruit and cultivate leadership, finding that hidden talent that may be hiding behind each and every classroom door. It’s time to start knocking...

More Reasons to Expand Teacher Leadership and Transform the Profession

Eighty years ago, American scholar Willard Walter Waller (1899–1945) published his landmark book, The Sociology of Teaching (1932). The book describes a number of underlying conditions affecting teachers and their profession, including the despotic school organizations in which they work.

Waller claimed that "the reformation of the schools must begin with the teachers”—a proclamation still not heeded today by most policymakers and self-proclaimed reformers. As a nation we have not learned much from the erudite insights of sociologists like Waller. 

My teaching colleague Renee Moore describes how the “frazzled teachers” working in underperforming schools are beset by duplicative as well as conflicting reform programs layered on top of one another. Renee writes of today’s “big grant” reform agenda always coming with “its own curriculum materials, pacing guides, seemingly endless reporting requirements, and a troop of expert consultants.” 

Is it not time, as Renee suggests, to elevate teachers, working with parents and students, to lead the transformation (not just the reform) of the education system? Doing so will require a whole new way of organizing schools and developing and supporting teacher leaders (and teacherpreneurs), some of whom will teach students regularly while also having time, space, and reward to analyze evidence, figure out which poorly designed programs to abandon, and create their own TeacherSolutions.

What American Policymakers Can Learn From Finland

At last year’s International Summit on the Teaching Profession, I watched and listened to a serious dialogue among the ministers of education and union chiefs from many of the world’s top-performing nations. I was enthralled with the nuances of the convening, who sat where, who talked, and who delivered what messages. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was there. So was Henna Virkkunen, his Finnish counterpart.

The differences in how these two nations approach child development and student assessment as well as the teaching profession are legion. Let’s begin with student results. On the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), Finland’s students consistently outperformed ours in reading, math, and science. In reading, Finnish students were ranked third; we were fourteenth. In math, they were third; we were thirty-first. And in science, they were first; we were thirty-seventh.

Here are a few more stark clashes in teaching and learning policies, which Pasi Sahlberg has helped bring attention to lately through his book Finnish Lessons:

Policy Clash #1: Finnish Teachers Are Very Well Prepared. The Finns not only recruit top students into teaching, but they also insist that every teacher have a master’s degree in education, fully paid for by the government, before they enter the profession. There is no such thing as Teach for Finland.

Policy Clash #2: Finnish Teachers Teach Less and Learn More from One Another. In 2007, Finland's teachers taught just under 600 hours, while their American counterparts taught more than 1,000 hours. Finnish teachers spend approximately 10 to 20 hours a week on joint professional development focused on understanding why students are learning or not.

Policy Clash #3: Finnish Teachers Are Responsible; They Are Not Held Accountable. Unlike in the United States, where teachers are held accountable to externally developed, high-stakes tests, well-prepared Finnish teachers use their own assessments to gauge their students' progress. The Finnish public trusts its teachers to assemble evidence and report to them on who is learning or not, and why.

Why are these Finnish lessons so difficult for America’s top-level policymakers to learn? I have some ideas, most of which have more to do with politics and less with substance. No surprise. But perhaps our policymakers have not been taught by some of our nation’s best teachers how to apply these powerful lessons in the American context.

This year, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has invited CTQ to work with 16 state teachers of the year, who will attend the summit (March 14-15 in NYC) and weigh in later with their own TeacherSolutions. I hope you join me in looking forward to hearing how our teachers learn from the Finnish lessons and their own pedagogical experiences to help us reshape our teaching policies.

Transforming Teaching in California

By Anna Martin & Barnett Berry

Education reform typically follows an unfortunate pattern. Politicians and pundits drive the agendas, while students and teachers live out the consequences.

To better address our schools’ needs, reform efforts must be led by those who work with students every day. At an event in Sacramento last month, teachers like Anna Martin offered practical recommendations for improving teaching quality in California.

Anna entered the profession eight years ago as a Teach For America recruit—and she’s still teaching at the same high-needs school. She’s a member of the  New Millennium Initiative (NMI), a national network of forward-thinking teachers supported by the Center for Teaching Quality.

At the event in Sacramento, Anna and her NMI colleagues shared findings from their new report, “Many Ways Up, No Reason to Move Out.”

What follows is a chat between Anna and Barnett Berry.

Barnett:  Anna, you’ve seen many early-career teachers leave the profession. In high-needs schools, 50 percent depart within three years. Why?

Anna: Our NMI team cares deeply about such statistics—we’ve all seen it happen. Some teachers are overwhelmed: they haven’t been prepared or supported adequately for the challenges they face. Others are frustrated by the one-track nature of the profession.

Barnett: What do you mean by “one-track”? 

Anna: In most cases, the only options are to remain a classroom teacher—or leave the classroom for an administrative role. Many teachers, like myself, want to be challenged, show leadership, and have an impact beyond one classroom. But we are also passionate about teaching. We don’t want to leave the classroom entirely.

Barnett: It sounds like you’d advocate for more teacherpreneurs who split their time between teaching students and leading efforts to improve schools.

Anna: Absolutely. Our NMI team’s new report proposes radical changes in how we prepare, promote, and retain teachers. That includes developing more hybrid positions that make the most of teachers’ expertise. We hope talented teachers will stay in the profession longer and become the leaders of our education system.

Barnett:  You mentioned that some early-career teachers leave because they weren’t adequately prepared. What needs to change?

Anna: We ask too much of our newest teachers and too little of our veterans. Our team proposes a three-year apprenticeship model. Novice teachers would be paired with master mentor teachers. Over time, the novice teachers would take on more responsibility—similar to the medical residency model. 

Such a system would help prevent early career burnout. Novice teachers would gain practical experience and develop critical teaching skills before taking charge of their own classroom. And veteran teachers would have opportunities for leadership and influence. Most important, students would benefit from these changes. 

Barnett: In other top-performing nations, most administrators teach something, sharing leadership. And in Singapore, some accomplished teachers’ salaries are higher than their principals’.   

Anna: Right now in California, teachers earn more primarily by staying on the job longer. We’re proposing a model that ties salary increases to increases in demonstrated skill, responsibilities, and impact. This new career ladder will allow teachers to specialize and follow different leadership, mentoring, and specialization tracks. So they’ll continue to teach—but also can take on different kinds of roles that help schools better serve students. 

Barnett: Blurring the distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them!

Anna: Yes. And improving what we can provide to students. Better using our schools’ human capital would help us to attract and retain the talented professionals our students need and deserve.

Barnett: I think Californians are ready for these transformative changes. In a recent statewide poll, most Californians (77 percent) rated teachers favorably. And 64 percent said they were willing to pay more in taxes to increase school funding.

Anna: Yes, Californians realize today’s students will be the workers and leaders of our state tomorrow. They also know that teachers—not politicians, administrators, or reformers—are the people most likely to help their children succeed. They should expect and demand that California attract, prepare, support, and retain talented teachers.

Barnett: So, as a teacher, you’re saying it’s time for big, bold changes?

Anna: Absolutely. We can’t be satisfied with isolated reforms. It’s time to transform California’s schools by transforming the teaching profession.   

Want to Improve Teaching and Learning? Read This Now

If you’re interested in serious school reform, ramped-up student learning, a transformed teaching profession—and if you have time to read only 1,190 words in 2012, go to Education Week and read Art Wise’s incisive commentary, “End the Tyranny of the Self-Contained Classroom.” Art hired me at RAND some 27 years ago and now is CTQ’s board chair. I still learn a great deal from him.

As Art notes in the piece, even the most ambitious, well-designed, and carefully implemented reforms to improve teaching effectiveness will only go so far if policymakers don’t jettison the “one teacher to 25 students” school model. Tougher evaluation systems will never be implemented if few administrators have to assess many teachers. Expanded learning opportunities for students won’t happen if every teacher has to know everything about the Common Core, working in isolation from one another.

Performance pay won’t mean anything for student achievement until teachers have much more time to team-teach and spread their expertise to colleagues. And according to Art, the “tyranny” of the egg-crate classroom undermines teachers’ capacity to draw on one another’s strengths and solve problems collectively. We are well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, and our teaching profession is still organized as if it were the 1920s.

So what to do?

Let’s begin with a new Race to the Top framework that awards states and districts for breaking down classroom walls, places a premium on teacher teams (and assesses them as a collective), and, looking toward the vision of TEACHING 2030, “blurs the line of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them.”

Then let's focus on using a new organizational structure to capitalize on the skills of 100,000 National Board Certified Teachers—teachers whom Art duly notes are “all dressed up with no place to go.” (Keep your eyes peeled for the development of CTQ's small band of innovative NBCTs from several states who have a lot to offer in implementing the Common Core.)

Isn’t it time to read this piece and think differently about serious school reform, ramped-up student learning, and a transformed teaching profession? I say it is. 

How Teachers Will Rock the News in 2012

I may not always agree with Rick Hess—but there’s no doubt that his blog posts are worthy of attention. In “Ten Edu-Stories We’ll Be Reading in 2012,” Rick predicts headlines for the coming year. He foresees increased skepticism of Race To The Top reforms and Khan Academy’s video-based model of education. He anticipates GOP presidential nominees abandoning attacks on public education in a “push for moderates.”

While Rick claims to be a lousy prognosticator, his list is intriguing.

But what’s absent in his list is any mention of teachers. None. Zero. Nada.

This is surprising because teachers have been the coin of the education policy realm for fifteen years or so. Few researchers (or reformers, for that matter) dispute the impact that improved teaching can have on student outcomes. Home and family factors are powerful influences on student achievement, but teachers matter.

So I’m offering my own version of Rick’s list. Sure, it may be optimistic—but we can hope, right?

5] Presidential Candidates Talk Up Teachers. President Obama and GOP presidential hopefuls realize that one in 100 Americans are teachers. Candidates focus less on “getting rid of bad teachers” and more on the positive: preparing and supporting teachers to do their best work.

4] USDOE Spreads Teaching Expertise. Acknowledging the uneven implementation of Race To The Top efforts, the USDOE adjusts its strategies. Rather than merely identifying effective teachers, officials promote strategies to elevate those teachers as leaders and spread their expertise to peers.

3] Policymakers Ask Accomplished Teachers for ESEA Help. Policymakers realize ESEA reauthorization is not in the cards for 2012. They turn to accomplished teachers, including former state and national teachers of the year, to help build public demand for improving the law. The teachers emphasize that the law must build capacity in high-need schools and districts—not just punish them.

2] Reformers Improve Bricks-and-Clicks Model. The Khan Academy’s “flipped” classroom model fails to yield the results reformers have been expecting—especially for at-risk students. In response, reformers invest more in innovative roles for teachers as community organizers, virtual mentors, and connectors to social services.

1] Obama Elevates National Board Certified Teachers. While GOP nominee Mitt Romney highlights TFA recruits who teach for two-year stints, President Obama points to National Board Certified Teachers as committed, accomplished standard bearers for school reform.

Now, I'd rather bet on my favorite college football team (Go Gamecocks!) than wager for the accuracy of this list.

But if we want to get serious about college and career readiness for all kids, the education conversation must shift. We must talk about what it takes to recruit, prepare, and support effective teachers. And I fervently hope that the “we” who are talking are not just the same old chatterers: policymakers, reformers, pundits. I hope that “we” also includes our nation’s most accomplished teachers—whose untapped expertise could transform our public schools.  

When Teachers Speak Up—And Policymakers Listen

By Jessica Keigan 

Jessica Keigan is a teacherpreneur who spends part of her week teaching English at Horizon High School in Denver and part of her time working to improve public schools through her work with the Denver New Millennium Initiative. This post was orginially published on the Impatient Optimists blog.

Last year, Colorado passed a landmark piece of legislation (SB 10-191, the EQUITEE Act) that created a new system of evaluation for students, teachers, and schools in the state. This new law promises to shake up the status quo, inspiring innovation in how we teach students and how we prepare and support teachers.

This month, the Colorado State Board of Education adopted regulations to implement the legislation—with some key revisions.

The revisions reflect the informed voices of classroom teachers and represent a unique breakthrough in my career. I have had many successes in my nine years of teaching, but this was the first time I’ve ever seen my efforts have such a long-reaching and concrete impact on the policies that shape my job.

I hope that it will prove to be a strong foundation for continued work of this kind, both personally and for my state.

The basic premise of the law is that all teachers will be evaluated yearly on a variety of measures to determine whether their non-probationary status will be maintained.

As a member of the New Millennium Initiative, a team of teachers working to transform our schools and the teaching profession, I have spent the past year working with a team of Denver-area teachers to research the implications of the EQUITEE Act on classroom practice.

In May, our team of teachers released a formal brief ("Making Teacher Evaluation Work for Students: Voices From the Classroom") sharing our ideas about how this law should be implemented.

I consider myself to be a teacher leader and, unfortunately, have sat on numerous committees that seemed to have little influence. But my work with the Denver New Millennium Initiative this summer and fall was an incredibly empowering experience.

During my public testimony, I spoke about how my unique expertise as a teacher helps me to determine how and when my students are growing. I recommend that the voices of classroom teachers should be heard and honored when creating standards that evaluate teacher effectivenes. 

No one is more qualified to comment on a student’s achievement than the person who works with that student every day.

Standardized tests have their purpose as norm setters, but a teacher who knows her students’ unique back stories and learning styles can provide a wealth of information about each student. This information should be included among the data used to measure the success of both teachers and students.

Specifically, we advocated for three important things:

• A clearer definition of the multiple measures that comprise 50 percent of teachers’ evaluation
• A strong representation of teachers in the process of implementation
• An ongoing evaluation process rather than an “event” that happens once or twice a year

The State Board of Education adopted the implementation rules this month. Upon reviewing the final draft of the evaluation standards, I was overwhelmed by how much of the language reflected the recommendations that my team made, in some cases almost verbatim.

I am genuinely excited about the potential for positive change that SB 191 brings to Colorado. In an often sluggish system that balks at overhaul and reform, this is a true game changer.

I am also grateful that policymakers were open to hearing my voice as a teacher. They honored and incorporated the experience and expertise that our Denver New Millennium Initiative teachers brought to the conversation.

I now have new hope that my profession can change—that I (and my colleagues) can be valued professionals.

Teacher Whisperers Wanted

By Alaina Adams

Alaina Adams is a National Board Certified teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to teaching high school English, she serves as a cognitive coach and professional development coordinator at the Phoenix Union High School District and the Arizona K12 Center. You can read her blog at Stories from School AZ.

In my endeavors to elevate the teaching profession, I am fortunate enough to be part of the work that the Arizona K12 Center crafts around vision, leadership, learning, and technology in education. Recently, I was chosen as one of 20 teachers across the state to work as part of a TeacherSolutions team designed to improve teaching and learning in Arizona. This work will be based on the framework outlined in TEACHING 2030. On November 16th and 17th, I spent some time with Barnett Berry and CTQ staff to dream, play, and plan.

As my group explored teacherpreneurism and a future of innovation, phrases like "a league of extraordinary educators" and "teacher whisperers" playfully came up in conversations. At the end of my last day with the team, I found myself returning to an Outlook mailbox full of the current realities of teaching that I "have to" deal with. I'm frustrated that I don't have more cognitive coaches available to help advance my practice. I'm also frustrated that TV shows and movies (like Jersey Shore and The Horse Whisperer) will earn more money in one shot than I'll ever make in my entire career as an educator. To clarify my thoughts, I ended my day by posting this comparison between "horse whisperers" and "teacher whisperers."

***

Horse Whisperer: Horses that have suffered abuse from people or been traumatized through an accident may develop changed behavior that their owners find difficult to deal with, or may even result in the horse being labeled dangerous.

Teacher Whisperer: Teachers that have been traumatized by things like excessive testing, narrow teacher evaluation, misuse of national curriculum, data-driven instruction, stifling teacher accountability, elimination of tenure, competition for funding, punitive school labels, "education reform," and misguided philanthropists may develop changed behavior that some may find difficult to deal with, or may even result in the teacher being labeled dangerous.

***

Horse Whisperers spend years studying the horse and its behavior in natural surroundings. They learn to read the silent but incredibly powerful communication we call body language.

Teacher whisperers, given appropriate release time, can study the behavior of teachers in their classrooms. There, they can study body language like the elevation of voice, eye-rolling, head flopping on the desk, and sporadic tears to understand a teacher’s entire language of communication to best gauge their needs.

***

Horse Whisperer: Young horses that had received little handling but were destined to be riding horses, for example, were once trained to work using quiet, brutal methods of coercion. This system was called ‘breaking.’ ‘Making’ a horse is preferable to breaking one.

Teacher Whisperer: Probationary teachers that received little mentoring but were destined to be classroom teachers, for example, might have been ones hustled through subpar certification programs. This system is called ‘fast tracking.’ ‘Making’ a quality teacher is preferable to rushing one.

***

In some public demonstrations, a horse whisperer will stand in an enclosure, which a young untrained horse is released into. The horse’s natural instinct is to fight or flight. The whisperer becomes the herd, the safe place to be, by his use of body language. First, he sends the horse away; he has not yet invited it to join his herd! He drives the horse forward and keeps him away.

In some school districts, only one teacher whisperer stands per campus, of unreasonable sizes, in which un-mentored teachers are released into. The teacher’s natural instinct is to sink or swim. Though the teacher whisperer becomes the safe place to be, he or she is often busy corralling other un-mentored teachers, and the un-mentored teacher-in-immediate-need is often driven away.

***

Horse Whisperer: During this training period, the horse's body language is clearly visible to people watching. The horse whisperer approaches as if he or she has all day to stand there. The result is a clear understanding that can be successfully built on. No shouting, no fear, no pain. A calm and positive mutual understanding provides a sound basis for true partnership between man and horse.

Teacher Whisperer: Given ample exposure to teacher whispering methods, teachers can change their body language and perform better on evaluations. This process can take several weeks or years. It is always approached as if the teacher whisperer has all the time in the world to stand there. No shouting, no fear, no pain. A calm and positive mutual understanding provides a sound basis for true partnership between teacher and whisperer.

Summary:

The horse whisperer does not perform tricks. He, or she, uses the oldest language in the world in order to read the horse and communicate with the horse, combined with equine psychology, to achieve partnership.

The teacher whisperer does not perform tricks. He, or she, uses the oldest language in the world in order to read the teacher and communicate with the teacher, combined with human psychology and compassion, to achieve partnership.

Preparing Teachers for Schools We Want

By Kristoffer Kohl 

Kristoffer Kohl is a former classroom teacher working currently as a policy associate at CTQ to further the vision of TEACHING 2030. He previously collaborated with a team of accomplished teachers to produce the report “Transforming School Conditions: Building Bridges to the Education System that Students and Teachers Deserve.” 

During recent visits to a few schools known for their innovative practices, I was struck by one school leader who lamented, “We are not preparing teachers for the schools that we want; we are preparing teachers for the same schools we’ve had for years.”

By the time teachers have gone through the traditional channels to become instructional experts, they are indeed experts when it comes to school—old school.

Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as the 10,000-hour rule. We prefer to call it the 15,000-hour problem. Regardless of how you identify it, there are some strong forces tugging against innovation in our classrooms.

In his book Outliers, Gladwell posits that expertise in any field comes after 10,000 hours spent working at it. From Bill Gates writing code at his high school’s computer to the Beatles playing marathon gigs in Hamburg, Germany, before taking the world by storm, Gladwell presents an entertaining argument for those hours you spent practicing piano.

Unfortunately, this equation works in both directions. As Seth Godin points out, there are plenty of bands playing 10,000 hours of subpar music. Long hours may help you become an expert, but they won’t ensure that you’ll make it to the top of the charts.

Such is the rub for educators.

The average high school graduate attends public school for 13 years, amounting to nearly 15,000 hours. Tacking on another five years for undergraduate education and credentialing before becoming licensed leaves incoming teachers with nearly 20,000 hours spent in a classroom.

Each year’s newest class of teachers is freshly minted in the ways of yesterday’s schools. They are experts two times over in the way they view their instruction, classroom, school, and most important, their position in the education hierarchy. While preservice programs endeavor mightily to equip teachers with the latest research-based strategies, it is difficult to fight what has been ingrained so deeply.

I visited another school renowned for its blended learning structure. There, students in the learning lab were completing digital versions of multiple-choice tests. A worksheet with lipstick is still just a worksheet. Despite the wave of complex, educational gaming software sweeping across our digital devices and making Oregon Trail look like the Model T, even some of the more “advanced” school models struggle to internalize that learning is as much about the process as it is about the content.

Fortunately, there is a growing number of educators breaking from the moorings of the past and logging smarter hours with students. As in any field, innovation comes from craftsmen who experiment with their practices on a regular basis. The flipped classroom gained recognition for reconceiving our notion of instructional time, but I’m also thinking of teachers like Bill Ferriter and Marsha Ratzel who have explicitly built novel learning experiences into their instruction.

What elements of your 20,000 hours have you left in the past?

Modeling Teacher Leadership

By Ali Kliegman

Ali Kliegman, a policy associate at CTQ, has been working with teacher leaders on a new website called Teacher Leader Model Standards. The site, which launched last week, is a collaborative resource for teacher leaders to share and learn about teacher leadership in the 21st century.

Infographic designed by sunnibrown.com for the Teacher Leader Model Standards site.

“Within every school there is a sleeping giant of teacher leadership, which can be a strong catalyst for making change.” (Katzenmeyer and Moller, 2001)

Teacher leadership is not a new concept. Yet until we begin to cultivate, support, and spread the knowledge and expertise of those who have mastered this craft, we will continue to miss the mark on achieving great gains with students.

So while the newly released Teacher Leader Model Standards may surprise some as an innovative tool for improving the profession, teacher leaders themselves have been living them for years. These standards describe the skills, knowledge, and competencies that teachers need to perform well in leadership roles, including:

Domain I: Fostering a Collaborative Culture to Support Educator Development and Student Learning

Domain II: Accessing and Using Research to Improve Practice and Student Learning

Domain III: Promoting Professional Learning for Continuous Improvement

Domain IV: Facilitating Improvements in Instruction and Student Learning

Domain V: Promoting the Use of Assessments and Data for School and District Improvement

Domain VI: Improving Outreach and Collaboration with Families and Community

Domain VII: Advocating for Student Learning and the Profession

What might be the most useful aspect of these standards are actual exemplars of what teacher leaders have been doing for decades. These exemplars, along with additional information about the development and research behind the standards themselves, will all be made available via their new virtual home: www.teacherleaderstandards.org. The first featured exemplar is the Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-led school in Denver, Colorado, that embodies all seven of these domains.

Thanks to generous funding from the University of Phoenix, ETS, NEA, and ECS, CTQ has been working closely with an outstanding group of five teacher leaders who are researching and posting best practices for each of the seven domains of teacher leadership.

Suggestions for more? Send them our way. In fact, we’ll be convening a virtual community of teacher leaders for this very purpose, and we hope you’ll join the conversation!

USDOE Sends Mixed Messages on Teacher Education

Just recently, the U.S. Department of Education released its plan for teacher-education reform, pointing out that too many university-based programs “do not provide teachers with a rigorous, clinical experience that prepares them for the schools in which they will work.”

In an ironic twist, however, the Department’s Race to the Top guidelines have promoted the proliferation of alternative certification programs that shortcut pre-service training for new recruits. These programs give recruits limited or non-existent opportunities for “rigorous, clinical” preparation prior to teaching independently. Not only must university-based teacher education be improved, but we also need to think about what supports teachers are given while they're teaching. There is no reason to believe that school districts are sufficiently suited to prepare teachers for the schools of today — or tomorrow, for that matter.

A recent study has shown that few teachers receive the “intensive, sustained, and content-focused professional development” that matters for student achievement. For example, as reported in the same study, over the course of a year only 9 percent of elementary math teachers had more than 24 hours of content-specific professional development in math. Many school-district officials just don’t value the kind of high-quality professional development that teachers (and their students) deserve. Instead, as seen in this stark display below (from a local news report on how school districts view teacher learning), archaic district-driven professional development prevails.

From the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 17, 2011

I wonder why USDOE officials, in pushing for much-needed changes in teacher education, don’t push school districts to transform their systems of professional development. The plan does indeed call for all teachers — including veteran teachers and recent graduates of preparation programs — to “receive professional development and career advancement opportunities that are aligned with their identified strengths and needs.”

However, USDOE does not call for scrutiny of school districts’ professional development programs. Maybe districts should be held accountable for the quality of support they provide to recently minted teacher-education graduates. Maybe if the USDOE called for such scrutiny, our nation would get a bit closer to creating the kind of comprehensive teacher-development system needed for the schools of today and tomorrow. 

The Difference Between a Teacherpreneur and an Education Entrepreneur

By Kristoffer Kohl 

Kristoffer Kohl is a former classroom teacher working currently as a policy associate at CTQ to further the vision of TEACHING 2030. He previously collaborated with a team of accomplished teachers to produce the report “Transforming School Conditions: Building Bridges to the Education System that Students and Teachers Deserve.” 

How do you create space for innovation when a system is already in motion? In education especially, it often feels like we're trying to build the plane as we’re flying.

What would our schools look like if we solicited the expertise of teachers and recognized classroom problems as opportunities for innovation? How might learning outcomes be transformed if teachers were equipped to investigate and design solutions?

Given that most teachers aren’t afforded such opportunities, the education-reform world has been captivated in recent years by other another model of innovation: the incredible efforts of education entrepreneurs. Their accomplishments engage and inspire the public with seemingly endless possibilities for our schools. New Tech Network, Harlem Children's Zone, School of One, and Khan Academy have rocked the foundations of the education establishment by transforming the identities of school and classroom.

Though these schools have been successful, their ideas have proven difficult to scale and sustain in a way that benefits all communities. Fortunately, there is an untapped reservoir of expertise that can generate even more profound change in our nation's schools. 

Enter the teacherpreneur.

As defined by the authors of TEACHING 2030, a teacherpreneur is a teacher leader of proven accomplishment possessing a deep knowledge of how to teach, a clear understanding of what strategies must be in play to keep schools highly successful, and the skills and commitment necessary to spread their expertise to others — all while keeping at least one foot firmly in the classroom. 

Entrepreneurs may have brilliant ideas that often require venture capital and years of planning, but teacherpreneurs’ innovation is grounded in their daily experience in schools and classrooms. While education entrepreneurs experiment with novel theories for student learning, teacherpreneurs serve as action researchers by hypothesizing, implementing, troubleshooting, and learning from their daily interactions in the classroom. 

Prioritizing their responsibilities to students, teacherpreneurs are making a name for themselves by creatively packaging and delivering instruction. Some are 'flipping' their classrooms by allowing students to watch lessons online and using class time to complete work traditionally reserved for home. Others are using social media tools to develop a more modern take on classroom discussion, effective writing, and community action. 

The prevailing form of teacherpreneurship occurring regularly in schools across the nation is teacher leadership. Running everything from their departments and grade levels to professional learning communities, teachers are cropping up as managers, directors, mentors, and guides. Outside their buildings, teacher leaders are transforming unions, community organizations, after-school programs, and online professional-development communities.

CTQ works directly with three teacherpreneurs: Jessica Keigan and Dana Nardello in Denver, and Noah Zeichner in Seattle. In addition to their primary roles as teachers, all three are involved with education policy work for the New Millennium Initiative. Jessica and Dana also work alongside the Colorado Legacy Foundation, and Noah collaborates with Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Education Association to increase teacher leadership opportunities. These teacherpreneurs will ideally serve as models for other organizations and districts that want to support similar hybrid positions.

Both teacherpreneurs and entrepreneurs play valuable roles in advancing the development of a 21^st-century school system. While entrepreneurs inspire a vision of what schools can become, teacherpreneurs demonstrate the caliber of individuals we need in schools to realize that vision. Teacherpreneurs elevate the entire profession by ensuring that colleagues, policymakers, and the public know what works best for students.  

To participate in a discussion about teacher career paths and hybrid teaching positions, join our Twitter chat on Thursday, October 20, from 8:30-9:30 p.m. ET, hashtag #teaching2030.

Using Teacher Expertise to Improve Policy

By Bill Farmer

The Illinois New Millennium Initiative has been doing some terrific work in response to the state’s recent efforts to reform its teacher evaluation systems. I’ve asked Bill Farmer, an Illinois NMI member and high school science teacher in Evanston, Illinois, to share his thoughts about the team’s recent report and interactions with state policymakers.
–-Barnett Berry

Like many other financially strained states, Illinois is engaged in significant educational policy reform propelled by the carrot of Race to the Top federal funds. One of the primary products of this reform is Senate Bill 315, passed in January 2010. SB 315, more commonly known as the Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), provides the framework for a major overhaul of teacher and principal evaluation systems, using student growth as a significant component of evaluations. 

Illinois teachers have long recognized the flaws in current evaluation systems and have been advocating for an improved model that provides useful, timely feedback and professional support that can enhance classroom practice. In fact, in 1984 Art Wise and Linda Darling-Hammond, both then at the RAND Corporation, identified many of the same evaluation problems reformers and teachers are concerned about today.* Almost 30 years ago Wise and Darling-Hammond pointed out that we need clearly defined standards of professional excellence, well-trained and pre-qualified evaluators, and more frequent feedback. And today PERA is calling for similar guidelines for a teacher evaluation system.

The Complex Task of Measuring Student Growth

In the political and public realms, linking evaluations to student growth seems like common sense. Research consistently indicates that teachers are the most important school-based variable in a student’s educational growth. But somehow the school-based segment of that conclusion is frequently omitted. In reality, innumerable factors both inside and outside schools affect student growth.

And although many of us educators are already frequently monitoring student growth in our individual classrooms, systematizing such a complex measurement is an infinitely challenging task. This is particularly the case when trying to quantify an individual teacher’s contribution to student learning. Teachers often teach multiple grade levels and courses, spend varying amounts of time with students, and are aided by specialist teachers. Team teaching, which is much needed, can confound efforts to identify which teacher is responsible for student learning gains.

Involving Teachers in the Implementation Process

Implementing PERA is the responsibility of a joint committee called the Performance Evaluation Advisory Council (PEAC). Of this group of roughly 30 education stakeholders, only one is a current K-12 teacher. 

Around the same time PEAC was organizing, the Illinois New Millennium Initiative was assembling a dynamic group of early-career and veteran teachers to do the exact same thing. With such a huge transformation under way in Illinois, our goal was – and is – to bring teacher voice to the forefront of the conversation around the implementation of PERA.

Our NMI team’s virtual community provided a way for teachers to share research on teacher evaluation systems, helping us better understand the complicated matrix of educational policy in Illinois and around the country.

We then combined this knowledge with our own teaching experiences to write our report, “Measuring Learning, Supporting Teaching: Classroom Experts’ Recommendations for an Effective Educator Evaluation System.” 

Making Our Teacher Voices Heard

Since the report's release, key stakeholders and educators have taken notice.  

The NMI team has hosted webinars with members of PEAC to share our recommendations and provide feedback on PEAC’s work. NMI teachers have also attended monthly PEAC meetings to make connections and share perspectives from the classroom. These experiences have made us feel like our teacher voices are being heard and considered.

This month, we plan to attend regional teacher forums PEAC is sponsoring to present its progress and solicit teacher feedback. We’re eager to engage in (and maybe even help initiate) the next layers of policy reform that will strengthen our professional practice and produce better student outcomes. Evaluation reforms of 30 years ago never bore much fruit because teachers weren’t involved in implementing them. NMI teachers are ready to help lead the way.

*Wise, A. E., Darling-Hammond, L., McLaughlin, M. W. & Bernstein, H. T. (1984). Teacher Evaluation: A study of effective practices. Santa Monica, CA. RAND.

Six Ways to Improve Teacher Prep Programs

Below is a blog post I wrote as part of an online discussion for Learning Matters, a nonprofit media production company that has produced many education-focused reports and documentaries for PBS. Along with several experts in the education field, I was asked to write about teacher quality and teacher training. I encourage you to read the other participants' responses and leave comments on the full Learning Matters discussion — it's absolutely worth the read.

 

Recently, I collaborated with twelve expert teachers to write TEACHING 2030: What We Must Do For Our Students and Our Public Schools … Now and in the Future. We argue that universities’ teacher education programs — and highly-touted alternative certification programs like Teach for America — perpetuate out-of-date models of teaching and learning.

Teacher recruits need a very different kind of preparation to teach the diverse, tech-savvy learners of today and to ready those learners for the 21st-century global marketplace. To make this happen, we must move far beyond reform rhetoric — and we must do so quickly. Here are six big strategies that can help teacher preparation programs break the mold:

1. Ensure that recruits are being prepared for the roles that are most needed in area schools: School districts should develop “labor market” reports, allowing universities to carefully consider how many recruits should be prepared and for what.

2. Jettison traditional three-hour course credits in favor of performance-based pedagogical modules and assessments: This nimble, practical approach will help recruits to develop specific teaching skills and will better identify who is ready to teach, when, and under what conditions.

3. Split the time: Work with school districts to create hybrid roles for the most effective teachers to spend half their time teaching and half their time as lead teacher educators.

4. Understand the community: Require recruits to complete a substantial internship in a community-based organization, developing deep knowledge of how and where students and their families live.

5. Embrace online: Engage recruits in a virtual network of teachers, preparing them to teach effectively online and to collaborate virtually with teaching colleagues.

6. Emergent Tech: Work with school districts to expose recruits to live and digitally recorded “lesson studies,” in which teams of candidates learn to critique teaching and assess student learning using emerging technologies.

Reimagining School As We Know It

Over the past several years, we at CTQ have been documenting how school conditions and designs affect the way teachers teach and students learn. Research has demonstrated that curriculum, instructional resources, preparedness and stability of faculty, and connections to after-school and summer-school programs have strong impacts on student achievement. Teachers say the same.

Furman Brown’s Generation Schools are promising models of re-envisioned school conditions. Nearly 90% of the full-time professional staff teach classes. Students get more instructional time (up to 200 days), and class sizes can be as low as 16. Teachers have many opportunities to plan together and learn from one another. Currently, several districts in Colorado are piloting the Generation Schools model, which has found a “better way to organize and distribute work” for both students and teachers. (See this terrific report from Ed Sector on improving teacher quality through school design.)

Another innovative approach is also taking root in Colorado: the teacher-led school without a principal. With support from the Ford Foundation (which has made significant investments in extended learning opportunities for students and their teachers), we have been able to document the emergence of the Math and Science Leadership Academy (MSLA). There, strong teacher leaders, most National Board Certified, have forged deep connections to the communities they serve and are backed by a reform-minded union.

Watch the video to learn more about MSLA, and take a look at our case study about the school’s creation. MSLA is doing great things, and we need to make sure that the school, its teachers, and its stories become better known to policymakers, practitioners, and the public. We need find ways to take these good ideas to scale. 

 

  

 

Expertise to Action in Denver

By Jessica Keigan and Dana Nardello

One of the most exciting parts about working with expert teacher leaders is seeing their hard work and expertise appreciated. The Denver NMI team’s positive contribution to shaping and implementing teaching policies in Colorado attests to the importance of teacher voice in the policymaking process. I’ve asked two members of the Denver NMI team, Jessica Keigan and Dana Nardello, to share some of their recent involvement with the state legislation process. Jessica also spoke about her involvement during a special Rocky Mountain PBS roundtable held last Friday, where she represented her team with solutions-focused comments and compelling stories. --Barnett Berry

Here in the Mile High City, there has been a lot of buzz about Senate Bill 191, a law that calls for the creation and implementation of a new evaluation system for principals and teachers.

Among other things, the bill requires that half of a teacher’s evaluation be determined by student growth measures and that the other half -- loosely labeled as “multiple measures” -- include classroom observations by peers or administrators, goal attainment processes, or other similar tools.

But the tools used to assess teachers’ effectiveness on the basis of gains on a once-a-year standardized test are still pretty raw. As noted in a recent Congressional briefing, the grade-level standardized tests do not capture “teacher effects” when students are way below or above where they are supposed to be.  Some teachers teach a disproportionate share of second language learners or special needs students. Some teachers are part of teaching teams and it is difficult to determine who is most responsible. Some teachers work with students who get all kinds of help from afterschool and summer programs, but others do not.

As members of the Denver New Millennium Initiative, we knew it was important to be part of the conversation about the bill’s implementation. Since the release of our report “Making Teacher Evaluation Work: Voices from the Classroom,” various stakeholders have solicited our suggestions for specific and concrete suggestions. And last week, we had the fantastic opportunity to share our expertise at a state board public hearing.

The Process

This past May, the State Council on Educator Effectiveness (SCEE) began working to define what makes an educator effective, and since then it has made several recommendations to the Colorado Department of Education (CDE). The council has drafted and revised rules and has encouraged general feedback through public hearings – an opportunity we decided to take advantage of.

After releasing our report, our team spent the summer months researching teacher effectiveness and various topics introduced in the drafted rules (e.g., comparability, assessment tools, state vs. local control). Deciding to focus on what we thought the state’s definition of “multiple measures” should be, we submitted a list of recommendations to the board. At the public hearing, NMI team members supplemented the list by sharing our classroom realities, e.g., how highly mobile students or a large number of second language learners who just entered our classes, could influence the accuracy of the test score evidence. We described how teachers can assemble a wide array of data on their students so we can figure out how to improve our teaching.

Why Do We Care?

As teachers, we want stronger teaching accountability systems. We want to reach beyond our classroom walls and influence the policies that drive the work we do each day. Conversations about education reform need to include perspectives of people who know what happens inside the classroom.  We have solutions, we have ideas, and we want to share them.

Our day-to-day experience allows us to anticipate pitfalls and envision successes in a way that wouldn’t be possible for most lawmakers. Because we believe we have the responsibility to be involved in education policy, we are continually searching for entry points, conversations, meetings, and committees that we can contribute our expertise to.

What We Learned

Classroom teachers often think they don’t know enough about policy, politics, or the legislative process. But the truth is that teachers hold the critical piece of the puzzle. Our stories from the classroom can corroborate expert suggestions or productively challenge them.

The great news is that we aren’t the only ones who think this.

Our team and two other teachers were the only teacher voices heard during the hearing, and we could tell that our input made an impact on the audience. After giving our testimony last week, a member of the SCEE cited our evidence specifically when discussing next steps with the board. We knew we were being listened to, and it was an exhilarating experience.

Each new encounter with policymaking is showing us that people want to hear what teachers have to say. They respect our contributions as experts in our field –especially when they are solutions oriented.

Next Steps

Last week we received tangible indication that our teacher voices are having a positive effect on policy. Witnessing such respect for teacher expertise makes us excited to continue contributing to this process.

The Denver NMI team will continue to review the commentary and drafts that stakeholders are submitting. The next public hearing is scheduled for October 5, and on that day we hope even more Denver NMI teachers will share personal evidence that will support our recommendations.

As always, we will continue to seek out opportunities to share our voices, in hopes that we can improve our profession and best serve our students, inside and outside the classroom. 

 

Reshaping the Teacher Preparation Debate

A few days ago, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a shout-out to the University of Michigan for serving as a national model for “reinventing” education schools. Indeed, the UM education school, led by Dean Deborah Ball, has done much to recalibrate university-based preparation programs by focusing on the practical how-tos of teaching specific curricular content and drawing on new research about how students learn. And though Secretary Duncan has often called for more student teaching, not less, his Race to the Top policies continue to embrace shortcut alternative-certification programs. Such routes, like Teach for America, can’t come close to offering new recruits the kind of preparation provided by UM’s education school (or by the many other university preparation programs that have also overhauled their approaches).

Secretary Duncan’s contradictory stances on teacher training are difficult to reconcile.

I keep thinking back to a terrific conversation captured by Education Next a few years ago. Arthur Wise, a champion for professionalizing teaching, and Julie Mikuta, a TFA alum and partner in the NewSchools Venture Fund, discussed the merits of university-based and alternative-certification approaches to teacher preparation. The three-year-old piece brings to light a number of issues surrounding TFA and whether it’s a “valuable strategy for recruiting the best and brightest into education and energizing school improvement, or a distraction and a device for sending ill-prepared neophytes to serve some of the nation’s neediest students.”

Federal policymakers have much to learn from the Education Next conversation – especially from Dr. Wise, who points to the false dichotomies often promoted in the current policy debates over teacher education. Rather than demonizing TFA or claiming teacher education programs have it all figured out, he calls for a strategy that scaffolds learning for all novices, whether they are TFA members or university-based recruits. He envisions a “teaching team strategy” in which experienced teachers are ultimately responsible for students, “but in multiple classrooms and with the assistance of the novices.”

Both TFA and traditional recruits have much to contribute to the process of improving teaching and learning. No teacher, however, should teach independently until he or she has passed muster on performance metrics, including teaching diverse learners (such as ELL students) and using sophisticated assessment tools to determine student progress toward 21st-century academic standards. It’s time that our nation’s education leaders learn that teacher education and licensing is not about dichotomous choices, but inventive approaches that can support student learning today and tomorrow.

 

Ensuring Teachers are Real Participants and Partners in Reform

Recently, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pointed out, "Teachers need and deserve more autonomy and respect--and they must become real participants and partners in reform if outcomes for children are to dramatically improve."

We couldn't agree more. 

In a new CTQ report, "Teaching Effectiveness for the New Millennium," 23 expert teachers describe how policymakers can more accurately define student learning and advance teaching effectiveness reforms. They emphasized that policymakers must capitalize on the untapped potential of classroom leaders.

The teachers' insights--informed by research and their classroom experience--were inspired by online conversations with a group of key USDOE staff and with Secretary Duncan. The teachers began by unpacking the Department’s ESEA “blueprint” — but soon honed in on the significance of hybrid teaching roles in implementing new reforms with veracity and fidelity.  

All co-authors are members of CTQ's Teacher Leaders Network, and several participate in our New Millennium Initiative. Drawing upon research and their teaching expertise, they highlight promising steps by the USDOE and also call for specific teaching effectiveness reforms, including:

• Involve teacher leaders in creating and scoring assessments aligned with Common Core standards throughout the school year. These assessments could help teachers fine-tune instruction and could inform results-oriented teaching evaluations.  
• Draw upon and spread the expertise of National Board Certified Teachers, who have met rigorous standards and demonstrated skill in analyzing student evidence to improve instruction.
• Promote and support hybrid roles that allow teacher leaders to continue building upon their classroom skills while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, community organizers, and trustees of their profession. Our nation needs more teacherpreneurs if we are to take innovative steps to improve our schools. 
• Develop new forms of shared school leadership to support teaching effectiveness, like tapping expert teachers to serve as peer reviewers in implementing high-quality, rigorous classroom evaluations.

Just yesterday, I was reading a newly released study that examines the effectiveness of high-quality peer review programs, such as California's Poway and San Juan districts. The researchers found that, when compared to principals, teachers are far more thorough and tough-minded in evaluating their colleagues. Expert teachers "get" the job of teaching--and what it takes to do that job well.

Kudos to Secretary Duncan and his staff for engaging in an authentic conversation with some of the nation’s best teachers. Now let’s find ways--including more robust peer review programs--for teacher leaders to become the “real participants and partners” in reform.

Teachers Call for Better Evaluation Systems

“We want an evaluation system that helps us define our strengths so we can share those strengths with other teachers. We want an evaluation that defines areas where we need to grow, so we can be the best we can be…”

That’s what Julianna Dauble, an accomplished fifth-grade teacher from Renton in Washington State, thinks a teacher evaluation system should do. Julianna was one of ten expert teachers in the Washington New Millennium Initiative (NMI) who co-authored a new report entitled “How Better Teacher & Student Assessment Can Power Up Learning.”

Unlike other professionals, teachers aren’t routinely consulted when changes in their profession’s policy are being made. Yet teachers have unique and important insights based on their expertise with students, content, and teaching methods. Key policy decisions—and the details of implementation—should be informed by teachers’ perspectives. With this in mind, NMI brings together groups of accomplished and effective teachers in targeted locations to discuss education policy, with the goal of cultivating and elevating teachers’ voices in discussions about policy reform.

The Washington NMI team’s report comes in the wake of the passage of SB 6696, legislation that has the potential to move the state closer to establishing a set of fair and accurate teaching evaluation standards. Moving the state from a system in which teachers were deemed simply “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory,” the bill requires ratings to occur on a more nuanced four-level scale. It also calls for implementing additional methods for measuring teaching effectiveness that include but also go beyond value-added scores.

The law is currently in a two-year pilot phase, with statewide implementation due in the 2013-14 school year. That means districts have a unique opportunity to garner perspectives of expert teachers—like those of the Washington NMI team—about whether the new changes meet the needs of their districts and schools and how they can be implemented well at the school level.

The Washington NMI teachers have responded to the law with a set of guidelines based on a year-long study of best practices in evaluation policy, integrated with their own experience of what works to promote effective teaching and learning.

We are working with NMI teams in Colorado and Illinois—two states that passed similar laws.  The Washington teacher evaluation law is more like the one in Illinois: local educators have some leeway in figuring out how to implement it.

The Washington NMI team makes the case that:

1.     Teacher evaluation systems should be based on valid, accurate, and reliable measures of student learning. While standardized test scores provide some information, other measures should be used, too, such as teacher self-evaluations, self-chosen artifacts of lessons and student work, peer evaluations, and videotaped observations. These other data points can give educators, parents, policymakers, and community leaders a better idea of what students have learned, and can provide additional context for understanding standardized test scores.

2.     An improved evaluation system should equip teachers to design and use a variety of assessment tools that capture information about students' progress. School-based, curriculum-embedded assessments throughout the school year can give teachers more information about student learning, and  technology can support these methods). States should also invite teachers to take part in creating state standardized tests as well. Writes Katie Davis, one of the report’s teacher-authors, “I’m envisioning state testing to not be an end-of-year big event, but a regular set of smaller assessments that relate to pacing guides set by districts and aligned to state standards.”

3.     Teacher evaluation systems should also provide opportunities for classroom practitioners to spread their teaching expertise—and consider such leadership in individuals’ evaluations. Smart school systems must identify the “best” teachers—and place a premium on the spread of effective practices from one classroom to the next, as well as across schools, and districts. Technology—including online tools and smartphones—already offers many useful ways to spread teachers’ expertise.

4.     Teacher evaluation systems should include results-oriented professional learning communities (PLCs) in every school. These PLCs can provide space for teachers to collaborate (in and out of cyberspace) on formative assessments, share expertise, and be guided by master teachers, who could take on increased roles in areas such as peer evaluations. Jessica Conte, a first-grade teacher from Monroe, writes about her own PLC, “We have become a team of experts available to support and guide one another to best meet the needs of our entire group of students.”

Teacher and report co-author Ryan Niman from Edmonds emphasized the most important thing for policymakers to keep in mind: “Regardless of how teacher evaluation systems change, the most critical part of the entire process is that the system must be developed by those who really know teaching and learning.”

My hope is that other teachers around the country will hear this clarion call from their colleagues and advocate for changes they believe in. In Washington, the NMI team will begin to go “deep” in one of the state’s school districts — helping both district administrators and union leaders get above the usual fray and implement the new law. Meanwhile, CTQ’s New Millennium Initiative will continue to expand our virtual network of classroom experts who can identify TeacherSolutions to complex problems facing our public schools today — and tomorrow.

Steven Brill Does a 180: Teachers and Unions Can Save Our Schools

This guest post is by Kristoffer Kohl, a former classroom teacher who recently joined the Center for Teaching Quality as a policy associate working toward the vision of TEACHING 2030. He previously worked with a team of accomplished teachers from across the country to produce “Transforming School Conditions: Building Bridges to the Education System that Students and Teachers Deserve.”

The clamor for education reform continues on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, but not in the manner you might think. Rather than calling for vouchers, charter schools, and an end to collective bargaining, guest columnist Steven Brill suggests that the solution for saving our schools will be found in the skill and leadership of so-called ordinary teachers and the unions who represent them.

In an essay that appeared in Saturday’s print edition, Brill, author of Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools, dispels some of the myths that have informed faulty proposals for fixing public education. With 50 million students in 95,000 public schools, we cannot charter-school our way to meaningful reform, nor can we rely on the unsustainable model of super-teachers working endless hours at a tireless pace. In a profession numbering over three million, it is the “rank and file” that must be mobilized for actual reform to take root. Brill nods to the profound role that organized labor will play in the process by adding, “The unions are the organizational link that will enable school improvement to expand beyond the ability of extraordinary people to work extraordinary hours.”

I could not agree more. Teaching is the nation’s largest college-educated occupation, and we need millions of teachers to work together over time in their communities (and in and out of cyberspace) to serve students and families well. As Gary Sykes and Dick Elmore suggested decades ago, it is time to build a school system in which ordinary people can do the extraordinary work of education.

As a Teach for America alum who taught in Las Vegas for almost five years, I can attest to the need to focus on the working conditions that allow teachers to teach effectively.

As the Center for Teaching Quality continues to evolve, we are working with teachers to rethink what it means to “organize” as a profession. We encourage unions to set aside their past rules and tools (which won them much-needed concessions from reluctant administrators) to become professional guilds. Transformed in this way, unions could enforce teaching standards among the ranks and broker the kind of teacherpreneurial efforts needed for 21^st-century schools.

In the post-industrial age, teachers need professional organizations that defend not only their rights but their profession’s commitment to high standards, the interests of children, and a public education system that protects American democracy and spreads the expertise of its most effective practitioners.

Imagine if teachers were to earn differentiated membership into their unions based on the quality of their teaching. Imagine union leaders selected for their classroom expertise as well as their leadership skills and organizational prowess. How might such a leadership structure dramatically alter the voice that unions have in the reform debate?

As recent survey results from the Gallup/PDK Poll on public education demonstrate, the American public trusts teachers and believes they should have the flexibility to teach in the ways they think best without being tied to a prescribed curriculum. Likewise, we should trust the perspective of teachers and demand a meaningful role for them when big decisions are being made about education in this country. Too often, education policy is crafted by those who have never taught in a classroom. With the nation’s best teachers informing policy decisions, legislative mandates would be driven by the realities and challenges of our schools.

Our New Millennium Initiative teachers in Colorado (part of a larger network that includes communities in Washington, Illinois, Florida, and California) are promoting a series of innovative solutions related to implementation of the state’s teacher evaluation legislation, SB 191, also known as the Ensuring Quality Instruction Through Educator Effectiveness Act.  In his new book, Brill describes the Colorado law as landmark legislation. However, SB 191 and similar laws will fail unless we use new technologies and organizational structures that equip expert teachers to implement high quality teaching evaluation systems.

It is reassuring to hear that Steven Brill has opened up the conversation a bit more for teachers to lead the way.

New Way to Share TEACHING 2030 Ideas

The word is getting out about TEACHING 2030 and our big ideas about the future of teaching and learning. Many of you have likely seen our 4-minute animated video. 

Now there's a new resource to share: a free, printable visual summary of the book's ideas. We hope you will share 2030 Illustrated with those in your life who care about the future of our children and public schools.

Our TEACHING 2030 team has been hitting the lecture halls and conference ballrooms this summer. Last week, I spoke to the National Council of State Legislators, introducing the 2030 ideas to policymakers from across the nation. A couple days later, I spent time talking about the TEACHING 2030 vision with a group of teachers and professors at Oakland University, which is working with local school districts to redesign its teacher education program on the basis of our book. Meanwhile, my coauthor Laurie Wasserman and colleague Melissa Rasberry led a discussion of the book at a meeting of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Our audiences are responding eagerly to the bold, practical vision that twelve accomplished teachers helped me develop.  People are attracted to TEACHING 2030's farsightedness, optimism, and specificity about what's needed to create the teaching profession that our students deserve.We must keep spreading the word. We must reach more teachers, more administrators, more policymakers, more community leaders, more of the parents whose children's future is at stake.

To accomplish that, we need your help as ambassadors.

We hope you'll…
…follow @teachingquality on Twitter & like CTQ on Facebook.
…retweet and share content and multimedia tools (like 2030 Illustrated and the four-minute video) with your networks.
…let us know if you'd like to involve a member of the TEACHING 2030 team in an upcoming event.

Most of all, we hope you'll continue to find ways to get above the constant clutter of today's reform talk and work with with your colleagues, friends, and neighbors to ensure every child has qualified, caring, effective, and well-supported teachers who are well-prepared for 21st century teaching and learning.

TEACHING 2030 is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Teachers College Press. 

A Public Education Success Story Silenced

Well, it’s happened again. Shortsighted policymakers have axed a research-based program that has proven effective in preparing high-quality teachers.

Parents and schools in North Carolina should mourn the loss of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows.  The program, in place for almost 25 years, recruits top high school students into teaching, pays for their high quality preparation (with extensive student teaching), and supports them in their initial years so they remain in the classroom for a career, not just for a couple of years.

According to yesterday's News & Observer, the NC Teaching Fellows program costs the state a modest $13.5 million a year. It produces more than 500 top-flight new teachers annually, well-prepared in both content and pedagogy, who commit to teaching in the state for at least four years. Some 17 campuses participate in the program.

Who are these Teaching Fellows? The typical recruit has a SAT score over 1100, a high school GPA of 4.0 or higher on a weighted scale, and is in the top 10% of his or her high school graduating class. Each year approximately 20% of the program's recipients are minority, while 30% are male.  As reported in the news article, Jason Sinquefield, a 26-year-old math teacher, noted that he “never thought of education as a career choice” until he discovered the NC Teaching Fellows. He credited the program with defining “a way of becoming the best teacher you could be.”

The program’s results are impressive. A recent study by a researcher at the University of North Carolina found that Teaching Fellows are more likely to produce gains on student achievement tests, particularly in elementary and middle grades math, and in high school. The Teaching Fellows are far more likely than other teachers (especially those from alternative certification programs) to remain in the classroom for five years.

And these positive results are longstanding. Over 15 years ago I had the opportunity to assess the impact of the NC Teaching Fellows Program. At the time, tools were not available to examine student achievement effects. However, I found that administrators highly valued these well-prepared, university-trained recruits, who quickly became change agents for long-term school improvement. Today, almost 4,000 Teaching Fellows are teaching in 99 of the state’s 100 counties. Nearly one in four have earned National Board Certification.

They are effective teachers — and specialized recruitment and training made a difference. So why’d this program get cut? Times are tight, of course. But some of the North Carolina state legislators who took the budget ax to the program seem to be influenced by rhetoric that devalues investments in teacher education and professional development.

Ironically, the death of the NC Teaching Fellows program comes as many of our nation’s business and community leaders are calling for our nation to invest more in teachers. The North Carolina Teaching Fellows program employs many of the same strategies that help top-ranked nations to ensure the quality of their teaching workforces. As Linda Darling-Hammond described recently, nations like Singapore and Finland have built a high-performing teaching profession by enabling all of their teachers to enter high-quality preparation programs, generally at the masters’ degree level, where they receive a salary while they prepare. There they learn research-based teaching strategies and train with experts in model schools attached to their universities. They enter a well-paid profession – in Singapore earning as much as beginning doctors -- where they are supported by mentor teachers and have 15 or more hours a week to work and learn together, engaging in shared planning, action research, lesson study, and observations in each other’s classrooms. And they work in schools that are equitably funded and well-resourced with the latest technology and materials.

Obviously, all of these elements are not yet in place in American schools. But in North Carolina, a small state program has managed to take some significant steps to ensure a truly qualified cadre of public school teachers. Over the course of more than two decades, the North Carolina Teaching Fellows program has fine-tuned its strategies and demonstrated its effectiveness. Shame on North Carolina policymakers for bringing this all-too-rare success story to an untimely end.

Accountability Gone Amok and Pay Policies Gone Awry

So it turns out that high-stakes tests—and the accountability systems based on them—aren’t working out so well.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported on a new study showing that the NYC district’s $56 million merit pay system has had no payoff for student achievement. The investigation, conducted by the RAND Corporation, concluded that “the bonus program had no effect on students’ test scores, on grades on the city’s controversial A to F school report cards, or on the way teachers did their jobs.”

The RAND study lines up with the myth-busting report of the National Research Council which concluded earlier this year that test-based incentive programs “often use assessments too narrow to measure progress….(and) have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.

Despite the evidence, district officials seem bent on finding a merit pay program that works. If NYC administrators are serious about finding a teacher compensation model that students deserve, then they should take a look at our inaugural TeacherSolutions report or a recent report by Florida teachers on pay-for-performance. A smart approach would value the spread of teaching expertise, not just reward high-performing teachers.

Meanwhile, in other high-stakes testing news, the Atlanta story just keeps getting uglier.

According to The New York Times, district administrators “humiliated principals who didn’t reach their (test score) targets,” who in turn, “demean(ed) teachers with whom they worked.”

One Atlanta principal “had teachers with low test scores crawl under a table.” He may have been following the example of his district’s superintendent, who “gathered the entire district staff at the Georgia Dome,” seating “those from schools with top scores” on the Dome floor while staffers from schools with low scores were sent to the stands.  

How do these shenanigans help children succeed? They don’t. Such actions only intensify the pressure that teachers feel. Should we be surprised that cheating occurred in such a climate?

Decades ago, eminent social scientist Donald Campbell observed, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

As noted in a just released report by the U.S. Department of Education, top-performing nations do not draw on the same kinds of high-stakes standardized tests and top-down accountability systems used here in the United States. Instead, these nations (e.g., Finland, Singapore, etc.) invest in teachers, who are deeply prepared to serve as experts in assessing their students. 

We have options. We can stick with high-stakes test scores (and the accountability systems that hang on them). Or we can create the results-oriented profession that students deserve. We can invite teacher leaders to help create robust accountability systems that draw on varied assessments, many of which are designed and scored by classroom experts themselves. We can compensate teachers in ways that encourage them to spread their expertise.

These options are within reach, as described in a paper I wrote with three master teachers. We argue that policymakers should look to expert teachers to develop meaningful assessments and ensure the conditions necessary to implement high standards with fidelity and rigor.

And real-world evidence of teacher leaders’ contributions to better teaching and assessments is in the works. This fall, CTQ will launch, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a virtual network of National Board Certified teachers who will be part of an effort to implement and assess new approaches to teaching and learning. Their work will demonstrate the value of formative, authentic assessments as an integrated part of effective instruction. They will help refine just-in-time ways to determine whether students are meeting the high academic standards represented by the Common Core not just at the end of the year, but every single school day.

Our students deserve assessment and accountability systems that are sophisticated enough to prepare them to meet the demands of a global economy. Accomplished teachers can help make it happen. 

Moving Past Excuses: What Excellence & Equity Require

As summer temperatures rise, tough talk about silver-bullet solutions is wilting:

• In Atlanta,revelations of rampant cheating on high-stakes tests have rocked the reputation of the city’s schools and administrators. At the center of the scandal is a superintendent previously championed by reformers who emphasize high-stakes accountability and assessment. As reported in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, top administrators “ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.”

• In Washington, D.C.—where concerns about possible widespread cheating during the Michelle Rhee era remain unresolved—standardized test scores for 2011 showed little movement. 

• Then there’s the mounting evidence that highly acclaimed charters are unlikely to serve the most disadvantaged students. In yesterday’s New York Times, Michael Winerip explored ways in which some of the city’s charter schools pressure students to “thrive or transfer,” noting the relative scarcity of students with disabilities at such schools.  

• At the Aspen Ideas Fest, a well-known reformer revealed his relish in attacking teacher unions. Upon being blasted by bloggers, the reformer apologized for the “arrogance in my tone.” However, video footage of his talk (which was not a brief sound bite) presents disturbing evidence of the divisive rhetoric and tactics that get in the way of meeting children’s needs.

Of course, accountability is an important tool for reform. Charter schools can help to incubate good ideas and practices outside the confines of district bureaucracies. Teacher unions do need to change. But none of these silver bullet solutions—high-stakes tests, charter schools, dismantling unions—is enough to meet the challenge of providing 21^st-century students with the schools they deserve.  

Given all the recent evidence of off-kilter priorities, Paul Tough’s recent New York Times piece on the “no excuses” reform crowd is well-timed. Tough notes that the same reformers who insisted high expectations (and high-stakes tests) would cure what ailed low-income urban schools are now pointing to excuses. They’re discovering that high-stakes tests and tenure reform cannot (by themselves) help students overcome the conditions of poverty.  

Significantly, Tough notes that the situation isn’t hopeless—just more complicated than some have been willing to admit. He points out that dichotomous debate (charters versus traditional public schools, teacher unions versus administrators, etc.) simply cannot address the quandary in which America finds itself. Instead, improving our public schools requires nuanced conversation and comprehensive solutions.

Tough argues that if we are to educate all children to achieve high academic standards, we must tackle the challenges of poverty head-on. He highlights tactics that have repeatedly been proven effective on a small scale: “supplementing classroom strategies with targeted, evidence-based interventions outside the classroom; working intensively with the most disadvantaged families to improve home environments for young children; providing high-quality early-childhood education to children from the neediest families; and, once school begins, providing low-income students with a robust system of emotional and psychological support, as well as academic support.”

Clearly, such a shift in strategy will require creativity, investment, and partnerships. But it will also require us to unleash the power of the abundance of teaching talent we have in every school in this nation.

Who better to help ensure educational equity than our most accomplished teachers? Why not structure their work (and workdays) to strategically deploy their expertise? Our best teachers could provide targeted intervention for the children and families who would most benefit from their experience and knowledge. They could help develop, staff, and assess high-quality early childhood programs. They could work with community partners to ensure all children have access to the academic, emotional, and psychological support they need to succeed.

Too often, we shuffle our best teachers into full-time administrative roles, pulling them away from the children who need them most. Too often, we pile “reforms” on teachers without inviting them (and supporting them) to take on meaningful roles in solutions. And too often, America’s schools fail our least advantaged students and families.

Let’s drop the excuses. Let’s not kid ourselves about silver-bullet solutions. Let’s do the difficult work. And let’s welcome teacher leaders as partners in making it happen.    

Tapping Teacher Expertise (What We Haven’t Tried)

Below: Graphic facilitator Sunni Brown captured our TEACHING 2030 team's brainstorming session about the potential roles of teacherpreneurs...

Sometimes it seems like America has tried everything. Various flavors of school reform have come and gone, often without securing real or lasting improvements for students. But there’s one thing we haven’t tried (not on a widespread basis, anyway): fully tapping the expertise of our nation’s accomplished teachers.

Our most effective teachers possess a wealth of knowledge and experience could be applied to the pressing problems faced by our schools. And students do not have to “lose” their best teachers (as is so often the case now when teachers are promoted into full-time administrative roles).  Instead, we can design roles that allow teachers to advance their careers by spending part of their time working with students—and part of their time on innovative efforts to improve teaching and learning.     

Our public schools need more of these teacherpreneurs, expert teachers who keep one foot in the classroom while also pursuing results-oriented projects:

1.     Leading peer review processes for their schools to ensure that teaching evaluations are valid and drive improvement;

2.     Developing tools and strategies for teaching the Googled learner who has grown up experiencing virtual reality;

3.     Taking part in assessment reforms such as those linked to the new Common Core standards, and using technology to better capture, analyze, and publicize data about schools’ effectiveness;

4.     Identifying effective strategies for teaching students who are increasingly diverse — by 2030, 40% or more will be second-language learners;

5.     Organizing school-neighborhood partnerships that can support student learning through cradle-to-college solutions; and

6.     Transforming unions so that they become self-policing professional guilds that help ensure the quality of teaching that students deserve.

This list is not comprehensive. It’s just a sneak peek of the important work that “teacherpreneurs” could perform—while continuing to teach students for at least part of their day, week, or year. (For more on the teacherpreneur concept, see chapter 6 of TEACHING 2030, a book I coauthored with twelve talented classroom teachers.)

Investing in Teacherpreneurs

Unfortunately, teachers’ salaries remain too low to attract and retain enough talented, well-prepared professionals to fill our nation’s high-needs classrooms — much less to cultivate the 600,000 teacherpreneurs we call for in TEACHING 2030. Unlike in other top performing nations, teachers in the U.S. are considerably underpaid, compared to other professionals with similar training and responsibility. American teachers are paid, on average, 60 percent less than other comparable college graduates.

But investing in expert teachers isn’t just about salaries—it’s about how the work and the school day are structured. Other top-performing nations invest in teachers by expecting more administrators to teach so teachers can lead. U.S. teachers teach students about 80% of their total working time—while their international counterparts spend about 60% of their time teaching, with the remainder of the time spend planning lessons and fulfilling leadership responsibilities.

America’s top-down model of managing schools has led us to allocate resources less effectively than we otherwise could. Of the 70,000 employees of the Los Angeles Unified School District, only 50% are practicing teachers. Embracing teacher leadership—creating roles that enable teachers to guide and add value to their schools—could help us put our education dollars to better use.

Finally, we must take a good long look at how our investment in expert teachers compares to what we spend on other efforts. Consider the war the United States is waging in Afghanistan, which is expected to cost $113 billion this next fiscal year, according to The Washington Post. As Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, noted, “It is fundamentally unsustainable to continue spending $10 billion a month on a massive military operation with no end in sight.”

Could the costs of war be applied to lowering the federal deficit? Could we apply a small fraction of the savings to funding our public schools in ways that meet children’s needs? Creating and funding roles for expert teachers is a wise investment—and one that is critical to safeguarding America’s future. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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* 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?

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.

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?

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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.