Advancing the Teaching Profession

Merrow Loose with the Facts

John Merrow’s latest blog post on charter schools and teacher education is worth a read — especially if you are interested in how journalists can get real loose with the facts. I have always been a fan of the Merrow Report, where John has spent the time to dig deep into complex issues of teacher quality and school reform. But his latest blog entry ignores the research that shows charters, on average, are less effective in advancing student achievement than their more traditional school relatives. He goes on to opine — with no evidentiary basis whatsoever — that there are only 50 decent education schools (out of about 1200) across the nation. (He doesn’t name them but that would be an interesting list to see him publish.)
 
Yes, we should promote charter schools as incubators of new approaches in education and poor education schools should be closed down. But John’s sloppy analysis obscures the facts and fuels the kind of dysfunctional dualism that defines most of the school reform debate (charters staffed with non-unionized teachers vs. publics staffed with teachers who are protected by union work rules; teacher education the way its always been done vs. short-cut alternative certification that allows teachers to bypass pedagogical training, etc.) It's "war" journalism and it's not the kind of thing we expect from the nation's best broadcast education reporter.
 
I’m certain John knows which nation produces the highest student achievement worldwide — Finland. Guess what? Finland’s teachers are among the most highly unionized anywhere worldwide.
 
Teachers in charters are now unionizing because they are seeking the working conditions that will allow them to be successful with students (Read Claus von Zastrow’s comments on Merrow’s blog). Growing numbers of university-based teacher education programs are working with school districts to jointly prepare teachers for high needs schools (see Secretary Duncan’s recent Title II grantees). These programs are very much focused on the knowledge and skills teachers need to be effective AND on the working conditions that are critical to a teacher's success, however effective she or he may be.
 
PS: Will charters go to scale and save our public schools? Ask Tom Toch.
 

Reform Rhetoric Needs to Match Teaching Realities

A recent report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Center for American Progress identifies what it describes as “leaders and laggards” in efforts to reinvent our nation’s public schools. As a backdrop to the federal government’s $4 billion-plus Race to the Top competition for innovative state actions, the report calls for path-breaking approaches to school reform and teacher quality. However, the report seems to promote more status quo thinking than not — and ignores a number of key factors central to improving student learning and advancing teaching as a results-oriented profession.
 
For example, the report calls for more of the same short-cut alternative certification programs that do not prepare teachers for high-need schools or the demands of 21st century teaching. It also fails to consider the critical role of working conditions in ensuring teachers can teach effectively.
 
The report promotes much needed entrepreneurship in public education — and heaps much-deserved praise on school districts like Long Beach Unified in California. However, the report’s authors pay no heed to the fact that LBUSD neither relies on charter schools nor alternative certification programs like Teach for America or the New Teacher Project. In fact, the district works very closely with the education school at California State University–Long Beach to grow their own teaching talent and prepare a new generation of teachers who are well versed in innovative pedagogical approaches, including those needed to work effectively with second language learners and the district’s standards-based curriculum. In a district serving so many high-needs students, LBUSD leaders can’t afford to take chances with teacher effectiveness.
 
The report also disregards the role that teaching and learning conditions play in teacher effectiveness and retention — and therefore in student achievement. Teaching in a high-needs school is often a frenetic experience. Many teachers need to put in well over 60 hours a week to manage multiple interventions, meet the social and emotional needs of their students, mediate conflicts when out-of-school turmoil spills over into the classroom, cope with the complexity of teaching highly mobile students, and deal with the constant pressure to prepare for high-stakes tests. Many teachers in high-needs schools, especially those without extensive preparation, also struggle to find resources they can use to differentiate instruction for students with varying academic needs, including the growing number of students who are learning English as a second language.
 
The human price, all too often, is professional burn-out — well described by a former Teach For America recruit, Sarah Fine, who resigned from teaching because administrators “steadily expand(ed) the workload and workday” while “more and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported.”
 
At CTQ, our current studies of working conditions are revealing how poor school administrators mismanage the hiring of new teachers and how devastated school budgets force well-intended principals to hire cheap and less prepared novices and not the expert veterans they seek. We have also found how school mis-management can create unnecessary out-of-field teaching (e.g., biology teacher teaching math, early childhood teachers forced to teach 5th grade without any support in the transition) that keeps teachers from doing their jobs effectively.
 
Reform reports like Leaders and Laggards can play an important role in educating the public about aspects of school reform. But our students will be better served if the reform rhetoric more closely matches the realities that teachers face every day.

Looking beyond the Big Broom

In many ways DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee has become the iconic leader of the current school reform movement. Who can forget the December 2008 Time Magazine cover depicting Rhee brandishing a broom and a stare — ready to sweep out the incompetent teachers in the beleaguered district and replace them with bright young talent who would raise student achievement test scores in a hurry.

There’s no doubt that a take-charge approach is needed in the DC Public Schools, where a focus on effective teaching and accountability were sorely lacking before Ms. Rhee’s tenure began in 2007.
 
But a bit more than two years into Rhee’s chancellorship, another side of the D.C. reform initiative is beginning to surface, suggesting that the current school reform team may not be enacting the changes that students most need and deserve.

The inexperienced and inexpensive itinerant teachers favored by Ms. Rhee’s human capital approach to school system management are not always the answer.  In fact, by drawing on the voices of several students, today’s Washington Post suggests that many of these recent hires may be doing more harm than good.

Dayna Downs, a middle school student, told this story: "We had a great science teacher who knew how to handle our class and make learning fun. Now he's been replaced with a less-experienced teacher, and the class is acting a lot differently. Some students don't listen anymore." Downs told city officials at a hearing Saturday that "We have a science test coming up, and I'm worried about failing because our new teacher doesn't know where we are in our work."

Ikechukwu Umez-Eronini, a high school senior, complained of the “complete lack of transparency about what’s going on in the school system.” Umez-Eronini, a leader in student protests over teacher firings, continued: "You can't get a straight answer about anything -- not about the firings, the school budget or the test scores.”

This Post article (by metro columnist Courtland Milloy) suggests that the Big Broom is simply too crude an instrument to improve schools in the long run and protect children’s interests in the here and now.

Radical change is required — but solutions need to match the problems. I believe a new narrative is beginning to emerge around how we can more accurately identify effective teachers and teaching practices, and how we can craft nuanced reform policies that don’t reduce the complex issues in our public schools to a single cause.

In the meantime we all need to listen more carefully to thoughtful students like Dayna and Ikechukwu, for whom misguided policy is no abstraction.

What Sarah Fine Is Trying to Tell Us

In her widely read Washington Post article of August 9, fourth-year teacher Sarah Fine makes a compelling case for researchers and reformers to include working conditions in estimating the effects of teachers on student achievement.

As Sarah relates in an essay titled "Schools Need Teachers Like Me; I Just Can't Stay," she recently resigned from her teaching post at Cesar Chavez Public Charter School in Washington DC — citing burnout as the primary factor. Why? She paints a poignant portrait of administrators “steadily expand(ing) the workload and workday” while “more and more major decisions were made behind closed doors, and more and more teachers felt micromanaged rather than supported.”

Teaching in a high-needs school is often a frenetic experience. Many teachers need to put in well over 60 hours a week to manage multiple interventions, meet the social and emotional needs of their students, mediate conflicts when out-of-school turmoil spills over into the classroom, cope with the complexity of teaching highly mobile students, and deal with the constant pressure to prepare for high-stakes tests.

In the large-scale reform experiments of the past decade, the potential power of policies that promote effective teaching as a major driver of school improvement has been mostly ignored. The focus instead has been on marginalizing teachers and/or “teacher-proofing” curriculum and instruction — rather than recognizing that teachers, with the right policy supports, are the ideal agents of meaningful and sustainable change.

At the federal level, teacher policy is now shifting rapidly toward well-funded initiatives that will link student achievement test scores to teachers in an effort to determine who is effective or not. Investing in research and pilot projects so that we can do a better job of identifying effective teachers makes sense — using rigorous measures and tools that keep a tight focus on the critical dimensions of student learning.

But judging teacher performance  without paying attention to the conditions under which qualified teachers can teach effectively will not give America the answers we need to create a New Millennium teaching force that will move all children ahead.

I've Said It Before...

Teaching working conditions are student learning conditions...

This past Monday, in his article As More Charter Schools Unionize, Educators Debate the Effect, Sam Dillon of the New York Times upped the ante in the predictable squabble among policy wonks over the role of teacher unions in charter school reform.

Charter schools are supposedly the bastion of all things reform because they are free of “onerous” union rules that get in the way of mandating longer school days/years and firing poor teachers.

But let’s face it – there’s a difference between rules that inhibit better opportunities for kids and having a free license to ignore basic teacher working conditions that influence health, staying power and effectiveness.

As Mr. Dillon’s even-handed reporting indicates: Charter school teachers are unionizing because their voices are not heard on matters of sound instructional practice — like reasonable student loads (not 160) and sensible numbers of different subjects taught a day (not 6). These negative teacher working conditions can quickly become negative student learning conditions.

Researchers have shown that improving instructional quality and student achievement, especially in high-needs schools, requires an intensive focus on working conditions such as making sure that (a) teachers teach in the fields in which they are prepared; (b) have adequate time to work with colleagues improving instructional practice; (c) have access to content-specific information, materials and technology; and (d) receive helpful feedback on teaching.

Without a union looking over their shoulders, charter school administrators often fail to honor this research and these conditions – which are not about teacher convenience but about capacity to help students learn.

Jennifer Gilley, a charter school teacher in Chicago, sought unionization because she became frustrated with all the turnover among staff, the lack of teacher input, “with working longer and harder than teachers at other schools and earning less.”

Here’s something I wonder about. When firefighters and policemen call for better working conditions, they are not immediately condemned for not caring about the community members they are serving. But it seems that when teachers speak out and say “I can’t do my best job under these conditions,” they are castigated for not caring about their students. Why is that, do you think?

The good news is that Mr. Dillon’s piece helps get beyond the usual either-or thinking when it comes to unions and reform. Underneath the current squabbling is a problem looking for a better solution. I’ve written in the past about the potential for a collective of expert teachers and talented newcomers to work together in ways that support optimum working conditions and maximize student achievement.

It’s an idea that could grow legs, I believe, if we can get a group of our nation’s most accomplished teachers to take action together. More soon about that.

---------
On the matter of working conditions research, see: Little, J. W. (1996, April). Organizing schools for teacher learning. New York: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.

Listen Closely: Working Conditions Matter in High-Needs Schools

I know I can sound like an iPod in repeat mode. I admit to an obsession about the connections between teacher effectiveness and the conditions under which teachers work. But somebody has to crank up the noise around this issue and play it again and again for the policymakers and pundits who are hard of hearing.

We will be releasing a CTQ paper soon that pinpoints these connections and describes how we can staff high-needs schools by providing dedicated teachers the supports they need to be effective.

Meanwhile a new study from Chicago, just released, adds more volume to what I hope will one day become a crescendo of concern about the relationship between working conditions and teacher turnover and effectiveness. The study, conducted by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, found that:

On average, teacher stability rates in Chicago are not substantially different than the rates seen nationally; about 80 percent of CPS teachers remain teaching in their school from one year to the next. This is only slightly lower than the national average of 84 percent.

However, these one-year stability rates hide a sobering statistic—within five years, the typical CPS school loses over half of its teachers. Many schools turn over half of their teaching staff every three years. A focus on one-year stability rates obscures the enormous challenge that exists for many schools as they implement school improvement initiatives and professional development programs, and as they try to sustain program continuity. (emphasis added)

About 100 schools, the CCSR researchers tell us, “suffer from chronically high rates of teacher turnover,” losing more than 25 percent of their teaching staff yearly.

Collaboration increases retention

We found in our own research that for teachers one of the most potent working conditions for teaching in high-needs schools is the collective experience of a small group of like-trained colleagues who work well together and pool their skills to effectively serve students. The Chicago research uncovered similar findings:

Schools that retain their teachers at high rates are those with a strong sense of collaboration among teachers and the principal. Teachers are likely to stay in schools where they view their colleagues as partners with them in the work of improving the whole school. They are likely to leave schools where colleagues are resistant to school-wide initiatives and where teachers’ efforts stop at their own classroom door. Teachers stay in schools with inclusive leadership, where they feel they have influence over their work environment and they trust their principal as an instructional leader.

Lead CCSR researcher Elaine Allensworth lamented the study’s findings in a Sun-Times interview: "I find (this) really disturbing; I just see no way they can improve if they can't maintain a stable work force.'' With high turnover, investments in professional development are wasted and the critical role of teacher leadership in advancing student achievement is undermined.

Could the link between working conditions and teacher success in high-needs schools be any plainer? How loud will the wake-up call need to be for policymakers and reformers to stop pressing the snooze button?

In the current ed policy environment, it seems that all teachers teaching in high-needs schools are assumed to be incompetent, and extrinsic punishments (e.g., demotions and firing) and rewards (merit pay) are needed to improve student achievement. The only way to hang on to this assumption, quite frankly, is to stay out of high-needs schools. Otherwise, you will encounter a significant number of skillful, committed teachers who are (depending on conditions) either making a difference for kids or struggling mightily against the odds until they exhaust themselves and move on. And that might get you to thinking. . . .

Where do the brightest dream of teaching?

In other nations whose students outperform ours on the same international tests often lauded by teacher critics in the U.S., teachers are treated with honor — not bashed by the media for failing to work hard enough. In Finland, one of the top-scoring nations, high-stakes testing and performance pay for teachers take a policy backseat.

As Timo Lankinen, the director general of the Finnish National Board of Education, noted recently, the key to student achievement is "how to maintain good working conditions in schools." In Finland and other nations with whom we compete, optimum working conditions are considered an essential prerequisite to recruiting and retaining talented individuals to teaching.

There are no short-cuts to teacher education either — and no tolerance for poorly run education schools. In Finland, investments are made in deeply preparing teachers who are then given “broad authority to shape lessons and use strategies they believe will help students meet (academic) standards.” Teachers are valued and their growing expertise is the cornerstone of reform. As a result, Lankinen says, in Finland “people dream to be teachers.” Not cannon fodder.

Brooklyn teacher Ariel Sacks, one of the new-millennium educators in our Teacher Leaders Network, has written that in high-needs schools too many teachers are viewed as “expendable.” She poignantly points to the fact that “if policy-makers care about the lives of all students in public schools, then they need to think about the lives of their teachers — and invest aggressively” in them.

In Finland, the best and the brightest seek out teaching as a principled and intellectually satisfying profession. So why not here?

Altered Perceptions of Evaluation and Tenure

In a recent Newsweek op-ed column, Jonathan Alter, one of our nation’s most respected journalists, blames the poor state of public education on teacher unions that use tenure to prevent administrators from “figuring out who can teach and who can't.”

Dan Brown, a Teacher Leaders Network member, takes Alter to task with a sharp rebuttal at The Huffington Post — calling on the columnist and other policy pundits to “stop scapegoating teachers and their right to have a collective voice, and to start stepping into living classrooms.” Dan, who teaches at a high-needs charter school in the District of Columbia, combines both research evidence and the grounded reality of everyday classroom practice to challenge Alter's tabloid-style opinion piece.

If Alter would like to begin preparing for a front-lines journalism adventure, he might add to his summer reading list the recent report on teacher evaluation and tenure from the Center for American Progress (CAP), an organization not known for treading lightly on ineffective teaching.

Writing for CAP, Joan Baratz-Snowden’s analysis points out the ills of the archaic tenure system. She also explains that under the protocols current in most school districts, teacher evaluation is the responsibility of administrators who are often not competent to assess teacher performance or to provide advice and support when teachers need to improve. In such circumstances, why should we be surprised when even our best teachers are reluctant to abandon tenure rights?

Snowden goes on to challenge the either-or thinking about teacher effectiveness (you’re great or you’re terrible) that so dominates education politics. This thumbs-up/thumbs-down outlook is ludicrous, of course, but it continues to be perpetuated by ill-informed observers of America’s teaching profession, including — I’m a bit surprised to learn — Jonathan Alter.

 Joan Snowden’s analysis is refreshing, and it’s encouraging to see the Center for American Progress beginning to take teacher professionalism seriously by calling for progressive evaluation and tenure systems that “reflect the complexity of teaching and learning.” The well-positioned DC think tank proposes assessments that draw on multiple data sources, not just standardized test scores. CAP and several other influential policy shops are also drawing overdue attention to research from the nation’s most respected measurement experts, explaining how and when standardized tests can be valid and reliable in assessing student learning and teacher effectiveness — and when they cannot.

Instead of pitting teachers against principals — or unions against school districts — the CAP report points out that “too often systems of evaluation and dismissal are imposed on teachers rather than developed with them.” That's a quote worthy of celebration by teacher leaders everywhere. Fireworks and flag-waving — and not just for the Fourth of July.

Paying attention to teacher working conditions

Fueled by our own research and the insights of educators in the CTQ-sponsored Teacher Leaders Network, we've been calling for any and all education enterprises that measure teacher and teaching effectiveness to pay attention to working conditions as well as student outcomes. There's a close relationship between the two. The new CAP report raises this same issue, stating that while it is “absolutely essential that teachers present evidence of student learning” to be tenured, any credible system of evaluation must also take into account evidence of the teaching and learning environment.

Snowden points out the accountability mechanism involved:

Effective teaching and learning is a product not only of individual behavior, effort, knowledge and skill, but also of the learning conditions where teaching and learning takes place. Requiring such information when considering promotion and dismissal provides incentives for school administrators to assure that necessary tools and conditions support teachers’ efforts to educate children.

This recent report from the Center for American Progress is a must read. Jonathan Alter should peruse it this summer, as he prepares to take Dan Brown’s advice and spend some actual reporting time in the institutions of which he writes. He might even visit Dan himself. Or some of the thousands of other quality-minded teachers in the greater DC metro area. We’d be happy to provide a contact list to get him started.

I’m guessing that if Alter does opt for a substantive school outing, his future writing on the teaching profession will pass muster. A little evidence can go a long way.

Three Bullets for EduWonk

Over at EduWonk, teacher-tenure and teacher-union bashing continues. Much needs to be changed about teacher tenure, but many policy pundits ignore (for whatever reason) that union leaders do not solely construct nor are they in charge of a school district’s employment contract. Every contract is  negotiated between administrators and unions.

With this in mind, the folks at EduWonk might want to ask some additional questions:

• Are ineffective teachers in DC (and elsewhere) not fired because of archaic tenure rules, or because of incompetent or ill-trained or overloaded administrators who do not have the skill or time to evaluate teachers effectively? And if it's some of both, how much of each?

• How many ineffective teachers teach poorly because they were ill-prepared in the first place (think lousy teacher education or short-cut alternative certification programs) or forced to teach out of field?

• How often do we give our best teachers the opportunity to assess their colleagues? Evidence suggests that in school districts with peer review programs, far more teachers are removed than in locales where only administrators are in charge of teacher evaluation.

Considering these questions and issues can get us out of the either-or thinking and impulsive action that so beset education politics and reform.

Getting Real About Teacher Experience and Its Effects on Student Achievement

The debates continue to rage over the merits of school districts recruiting younger, less experienced (and cheaper and potentially more compliant) teachers, versus those who are older, more experienced (and more expensive and empowered).

Policy pundits and journalists have few qualms about calling for any seasoned teaching veteran to be put out to pasture. They aren't really interested in whether the teacher is effective, ineffective or "we don't know." These pontificators, single-minded as donkeys, tend to rely on research showing that teacher experience beyond three years does not matter much for standardized test scores. However, their interpretation of the teacher-experience data sets is rather limited, perhaps reflecting more about their ideology than any substantive understanding about teaching and learning in complex school environments.

NYC blogger Aaron Pallas recently noted how researchers miss the mark on the experience issue by ignoring the difference between a teacher’s total years of experience versus how much time she has taught a particular grade or subject. Aaron shows how NYC’s teacher workforce is not as seasoned as one might think.

Our case study research into teacher working conditions (funded by the Ford Foundation) is helping surface even more nuanced issues around teaching experience and student achievement. For example, in the more high-achieving schools we are finding what matters most is the collective experience of relatively small teacher teams who have learned how to work together and embrace doing so.

As we consider and design research, we need to pay attention not only to an individual teacher’s aggregate years of experience but how groups of teachers have used their combined knowledge over time to change the working culture of their team (or department or grade level), share teaching expertise among themselves and with others, and connect more closely with their students and their families.

Meredith, my wife and a seasoned special education teacher with over 25 years of experience, has taught me a lot about this issue. For the past nine years she has learned a great deal from a close-knit group of teachers on her EC (exceptional children) team. After so many years of close collaboration, their individual expertise has been magnified in powerful ways. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the data. For the last several years, over 80 percent of their EC students have routinely met state standards on North Carolina’s End-of-Grade tests — compared to about 33 percent of EC students in their district and 21 percent statewide.

Other scholars are discovering how teachers' professional interactions within learning communities over time can best explain whether school reforms take hold. Policy pundits might have a different take on the role of teacher experience in improving student achievement if they:

(1) examined more than a simple R-squared from a simple-minded study;

(2) stepped out of their quiet, climate-controlled offices inside the Beltway; and

(3) looked carefully inside of America’s public schools where a wide range of teachers are working together to make a difference in the lives of students.

And I challenge any of the DC pundits to convince Meredith (or any other highly successful teacher) that teaching experience beyond three years does not matter for student achievement. They would receive a higher-order lesson in “get real.”

Photo: Teacher Meredith Berry with Walter and Henry, who have not yet attained pundit status.

Growing NBCTs in High Needs Schools

While shortages of qualified and effective teachers persist in high-needs schools, there is no shortage of rhetoric about the proper remedy.

It’s a rare week when a think tank or research center does not produce a report on what ails the teaching profession. For example just recently, the Center for American Progress released two reports — one on attracting and retaining effective teachers for high needs schools and the other on pay for performance programs as a primary tool to do so. Both reports from the influential think tank are informative, but like many others before them, they do not address a number of critical issues. One very important missing piece: quality teacher preparation and good working conditions are critical in supplying effective, stick-with-it teachers to high needs schools. Another missing element in the discussion: The important role of growing expertise from within.

Our own research at the Center for Teaching Quality has taught us how powerful the certification process can be as a strategy in developing successful teachers in high-needs schools. We have also learned from National Board Certified Teachers, who describe the huge payoffs that come when teams of teachers sitting for the National Boards use their intensified focus on high standards to consider many teacher effectiveness issues that policy pundits overlook or do not fully understand.

One of the best examples can be found in a crime-riddled, impoverished neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona, where 20 of Mitchell Elementary School’s 34 teachers are either National Board Certified or in the process of earning the performance-based credential. Mitchell serves a community where less than 25 percent of the adults have a high school education. Over 50 percent of the students are second language learners; 96 percent are on free/reduced lunch, and 96 percent are Latino. The school was once in NCLB corrective action. Now Mitchell meets all its AYP goals each year.

The district did not recruit expert teachers to high needs school; they grew them from within. In addition, most of their home-grown NBCTs have roots in the community. Most are minorities, like the students they teach.

Most importantly, Mitchell teachers claim the process has transformed their teaching and given them newfound opportunities to take more control over their professional development. With support from the Arizona K-12 Center and its director, Kathy Wiebke, teachers are using the National Board process to better understand their teaching and how it directly impacts student achievement — as a collective. In particular, together these teachers are learning more about how to teach students with special needs and work more closely with parents.

As the district’s associate superintendent, Suzanne Zentner, noted, “We believe in the NBC process" as an “alternative approach to improving student performance” and closing the achievement gaps.  Teacher turnover is no problem at Mitchell Elementary School in inner-city Phoenix.

We all agree that we must pursue fresh approaches to recruiting and retaining effective teachers for high needs schools. The strategy of growing NBCTs from within is showing promising results where it has been tried. It's the best of all worlds -- combining rigorous professional standards, teacher collaboration, and bottom-up leadership. We need to give this promising strategy every chance to succeed.

How Teacher Education (and Master’s Degrees) Make a Difference for Student Achievement

 I must say I am little weary of policy pundits who say that schools of education and master’s degree programs make no difference in the lives of teachers and the students they serve. Certainly there are some that do not. As Linda Darling-Hammond said in a recent interview, “probably a quarter of the teacher-education enterprise” is of very high quality. Other programs are “pretty good,” she said, “but they could be a lot better if there were incentives and supports to get them there. And there are some that need to be put out of business.”

One of the high quality programs is at the University of Florida — where a group of teacher educators, non-profit leaders, and children’s advocates have created a Ready Schools Strategy that connects teacher preparation and professional development with health and social services in Florida’s high-needs school communities.

Last week I was fortunate to work with Don Pemberton of the UF Lastinger Center for Learning, Dave Lawrence and Ana Sejeck of the Early Childhood Initiative Foundation, and Dorene Ross of the College of Education as well as several terrific teachers. During my visit I learned a great deal about their Teacher Leadership and School Improvement Initiative in Miami-Dade and its powerful impact on Redondo Elementary, located in Homestead, Florida. Redondo serves a beautiful multi-ethnic group of Pre-K through third grade students (of which almost 50 percent are English Language Learners and over 90 percent receive free or reduced price meals).

Let’s start with what matters for the kids: In 2005 less than 50% of the Redondo’s students were proficient in reading or math. Since the launch of the Ready Schools Strategy, including a specialized master’s program for a core group of teachers, the student achievement has escalated. In 2008, over 67% of the school’s third graders were proficient in reading; over 92% in math. Rene Baly, the school’s principal, credits hard-working teachers who have learned to teach differently. He also credits working conditions, which give teachers more time to learn from each other and to work closely with health care, social work, and community outreach professionals who help connect the work of teaching to the lives of students and their families.

The school’s health practitioners see 60 students a week – treating a variety of illnesses and eye and ear problems – to ensure students are ready to learn as well as feel safe and loved. Family engagement efforts bring the school to the neighborhood, but also offer tailored training in English and parenting skills to the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles of Redondo’s children. On a weekly basis at least 25 of the school’s parents attend sessions.

Teacher preparation and support are critical components as well. Don Pemberton’s vision and entrepreneurial skills have brought a fully-paid, job-embedded advanced degree program to the school’s teachers. The UF education school has orchestrated a set of research-focused learning experiences that cultivate new teacher skills related to differentiated instruction, data driven decision-making, culturally responsive teaching, classroom management, and leadership — while giving individual teachers opportunities to specialize in literacy or second language learners. What's most striking is that the education school program is highly adaptive. It's equally helpful to a recently minted novice who had little training in how to teach in a high needs school; an alternative certification recruit who knows her content but has few pedagogical skills that enable her to teach it to diverse learners; or a veteran teacher who needs to develop new research-based skills in literacy and assessment.

During my visit I met several outstanding teachers. They were not graduates of elite colleges or individuals enticed with bonuses and performance pay to teach in high needs schools. Instead, most were from the community and represent a new vision for “growing your own” effective teachers for challenging schools. In return for being able to earn a “no-cost” master’s degree, the teachers agree to teach at Redondo for at least 5 years.

Zolia Esteve, an 11-year veteran, says that as a result of the program she is now much more effective at teaching reading. She described a second grader “Julia” who was reading less than 20 words a minute now being able to not just read but comprehend 120 words a minute. She also has the “confidence to challenge” the administration on how to better deliver services to students. Principal Rene Baly is grateful for Esteve's newly developed leadership skills and the new ideas she brings to table.

I also met Melissa LaRosa, a finalist for Reading Coach of the Year in Florida, who spends countless hours team teaching and providing support and advice to her colleagues, who view her as a “teacher’s teacher.” For Melissa, who proudly wore her Edugator t-shirt during our visit, the University of Florida master’s degree program and its focused inquiry approach made her a better coach, providing her much needed skills in using data and understanding why students were learning or not.

Finally, I was proud to meet Cathleen Caves, another teacher in the program, who actually went to Redondo when she was in elementary school. She began her career as a teaching assistant and is now one of the school’s experts in the use of a variety of formative assessments to drive instruction. Cathleen told me that the UF graduate program "is fantastic.” Pointing to Zolia and Melissa, who were in room with us, she added: “We are more like a family than ever before.” Perhaps most importantly, she asserted, “With my salary I sure could not pay for this degree myself — and now I want to teach here for my whole career.”

The Teacher Leadership and School Improvement Initiative has just graduated its first class. Next year the University of Florida expects to serve 400 graduate students (pending funding). Don Pemberton, at the helm of Lastinger Center's Ready Schools master teacher strategy, envisions preparing and supporting – and networking – 10,000 Florida educators who are all dedicated to teaching effectively in high needs schools.

Smart teacher preparation and support may just be the solution we've been searching for to end the current maldistribution of effective teachers. If so, the University of Florida is blazing a trail that other education schools and master’s degree programs can follow if they really want to make a difference.

Where Teachers Are Central to Improving Schools

This morning North Carolina’s leading daily newspaper, the News & Observer, published a front page story, capturing much of the focus of the Center for Teaching Quality, where teachers are central to improving schools. The article, Durham Learns Why Teachers Quit, portrays the importance of understanding the conditions of teachers’ work as the fundamental issue in ensuring they are able to teach effectively. With all the talk (necessary by the way) of teachers being "highly qualified," if the right working conditions are not in place then the student achievement gap will not be closed.

The front page story highlighted how our web-based, population survey in North Carolina (that we conduct and analyze for the Governor’s Office and in collaboration with the North Carolina Association of Educators) is being used in one of the state’s most complex school districts. Over the last several years the Durham Public Schools suffered from horrendous teacher turnover. Today’s news article revealed how teachers have felt “disrespected by their principals” and that district leaders “did not treat them as professionals.” The survey has helped elevate their voice. The article, I am pleased to note, expressed how the district, under new Superintendent Carl Harris, is using these data to make necessary changes in teacher working conditions.

In North Carolina, over 75,000 teachers (a 65% response rate) completed answers to key questions about their use of time, professional development, school leadership, empowerment, and facilities and resources. We link these data to indicators of student achievement and teacher attrition rates, and then also offer tools so that administrators, teachers, and community leaders can work together in ensuring that teachers are not just highly qualified but well supported. We suspect more front page stories like today’s will continue to surface and fuel the kind of thinking and action critical to the future of the teaching profession and the students it serves.

I am proud to report the Center I founded some eight years ago is now also working on working conditions in Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and Ohio, with a number of states in the cue. In these states we partner with all the groups needed to pull together to solve the problems -- governors, business leaders, administrtors, teacher education leaders, and the National Education Association. Fortunately policymakers are beginning to understand that teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.

Gadfly Gets Something Right

For those of you who know me - and my experiences as an under-prepared high school teacher (who fled the urban classroom after 3 years), a think tank analyst, and an education professor who has a passion for advancing the teaching profession in America - you may find it ironic that my first blog posting praises a "piece" from Checker Finn's Education Gadfly. (For those of you unfamiliar with the Gadfly, it is an electronic newsletter of the Fordham Foundation - a group that consistently supports private school vouchers as a means to improve public schools and short-cut routes into teaching as a means to ease the teacher shortage.)

In the September 29th edition of the Gadfly, Jim Williams, a real teacher, gets to write about the "culture shock" of his transition from his 30 years in business to a special education teacher in the public schools.

Jim's well-written editorial makes the compelling case that what ails the public schools is the lack of respect and authority teachers have in designing solutions to the problems they face. He points out that "to build high performing schools, (policy makers and administrators) need the ability to shift focus away from process and procedure and toward empowering teachers and relentlessly emphasizing student achievement." I could not agree more with Jim when he calls for our society to begin truly treating teachers as the "scarce, valuable resources" that they are. And, I am pleased to see Finn's rag recognize that point of view, and not their usual tiresome "highly qualified" teacher rants. Finn's  Fordham Foundation has been on record consistently in defining good teachers solely as those who have "a solid general education, who possesses deep subject area knowledge, and who ha(ve) no record of misbehavior" and those who "add academic value" to their pupils."

Of course good teachers help students learn (and add value to students' academic learning - and growth as active citizens of our democratic society).  But as Jim points out, teachers cannot do so if policy makers and administrators continue to "treat (them) more like hourly industrial workers from a bygone era than high-value professionals" and force them to "implement standardized curricula" driven by much of the current No Child Left Behind mandates. Indeed our own research into teacher working conditions at the Center for Teaching Quality - now growing all across the nation - is showing very strong relationships between teacher empowerment and student achievement.

Jim's erudite musings on improving teacher quality send a strong message that much more needs to be done than just implementing private school vouchers and short-cut routes into teaching.  Instead, we need to focus on stronger teacher education  and professional development to ensure that teachers know what and how to teach - and then ensure that these highly skilled professionals are able to work in redesigned schools that allow them to make the best decisions in their students' best interests.  This means teaching children, not teaching to the test. This means teaching for understanding, not for compliance. Thank you Jim Williams for your work as a professional teacher who advocates so eloquently for the teaching profession in America.

Note: The Gadfly notes that Jim Williams, a mid-career switcher, is a high school special education teacher in Virginia. Jim entered teaching through a high quality alternative route program, the George Washington University Fairfax Partnership Project.  (Surely another topic for us to explore.)