Advancing the Teaching Profession

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).

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.

Teaching Ahead: The Teacher Evaluation System Students Deserve

The education world is abuzz about teacher evaluation reform. Over the last three years, 32 states and the District of Columbia have enacted policies that have changed how those who teach are assessed.

It seems like every day another inside-the-Beltway think tank offers its advice on which state is doing the most to make sure teachers are held accountable for their classroom practice. Most of these reports, like the recent one offered up by NCTQ (that is not us), provide a cursory overview through a very narrow lens. They provide little insight into the significant technical problems, like those experienced in Tennessee’s rushed “Race to the Top” implementation of its teacher evaluation system. Tennessee is struggling to accurately use value-added ratings and assess teachers on student growth measures in non-tested subjects. At the same time, it’s foisting unnecessary paperwork on classroom practitioners.

Commonly heard in NCTQ-esque circles is that "teacher-effectiveness measures don't have to be perfect to be useful.” I would agree in principle with this well-known reform adage—don’t let perfection get in the way of progress. However, as we’ve learned from teachers in Tennessee, a hastily implemented system can affect teachers’ perceptions of their careers. A job they used to “love” can easily become one they “hate.”

For an alternative view of how to make teacher evaluation work for students and the profession that serves them, policymakers might just want to listen to teachers—the people who must implement these new teaching accountability systems.

In our latest edition of Teaching Ahead: A Roundtable, you have the chance to consider how Teacher Leaders Network (TLN) members—a number of whom are now engaged in teacher evaluation reforms through our New Millennium Initiative—view evaluation reforms, and how to make them work: 

• Jessica Hahn suggests that her evaluators ask themselves how they can “develop her as a better teacher."
• Jessica Keigan is ready for evaluations that draw on the expertise of students (and teachers themselves). 
• Ryan Kinser imagines how his evaluation experience will look in 2021. 
• Patrick Ledesma points out that if standardized tests are to be part of evaluation, they must be better. 
• Renee Moore argues eloquently that as teaching morphs into a true profession, we need transformed, not just reformed, evaluation systems. 
• Michael Moran makes the case for how teaching context must be a factor in teacher evaluation. 
• Ryan Niman meets the education genie. One of his wishes for teacher evaluation is to communicate the complexity of his work (and his colleagues’ work) to policymakers, practitioners, and the public. 

For those who could use a scholarly lesson on policy implementation in education, you might want to return to the 1970s RAND change agent studies. Transforming teacher evaluation, like most complex teaching policies, will require what Milbrey McLaughlin called “mutual adaptation” from those who enact and those who implement.

Is it not time to pay more careful attention to the implementers? Is it not time to consider policies that not just remove constraints to more results-oriented teacher evaluation, but policies that enable teachers to teach more effectively and serve students as they intended to when they entered teaching?

Keeping Score: What the Teaching Profession Can Learn from Baseball

By Paul Goodland

Paul Goodland is a peer evaluator in the Empowering Effective Teachers (EET) program in Hillsborough County, Florida, and a member of the Hillsborough County New Millennium Initiative. The following post was originally published on the Impatient Optimists blog.

I evaluate teachers for a living. When I visit a classroom, I watch a lesson, discuss what I observed, share recommendations, and get additional feedback from the teacher. This visit—along with a principal’s evaluation—determines about 60 percent of the teacher’s “annual effectiveness rating.”

The remaining 40 percent is determined by a complex calculation of students’ progress on an annual test, as compared to the performance of students with similar characteristics.

This is a far better system than has ever been used before. But it is just a baby-step in gauging teacher effectiveness.

Baseball is a great analogy for teaching. Baseball works, in part, because the aim of the game is simple: to score more runs. Anything that improves the team's chances of scoring more runs is valuable. Anything that decreases it should be reduced or eliminated.

In baseball, managers make decisions based on a huge amount of statistical analysis (now called sabermetrics), thanks to technological tools and ready access to data. In the past twenty years, in fact, baseball has been transformed: the impressions and conventional wisdom of tobacco-chewing, road-warrior baseball scouts has been replaced by the results-oriented, proven effectiveness of sabermetrics.

Sabermetrics only exists because baseball statistics are "open source." We all have access to them. For many years we didn't. In the 19th century, baseball aficionado Henry Chadwick made value judgments about which statistics mattered. He created a scorecard highlighting those few measures—and his system was used for about a hundred years. Then people started challenging his assumptions, like the idea that "walks" aren't important, and baseball statistics took a huge leap forward.

Do we have all the statistics of teaching? Is the profession transparent? Do we have access to the data? The answer to all of these questions is “no.”

How badly would baseball talent be misjudged if only five of the 180 games that a team plays between March and October were considered? What if the players knew that two of those games were formal evaluation days? Would they play differently?

It isn't enough to just read the box score, watch three to five games, and pick the all-star team. You need to consider the whole game, and the whole season.

So how do we collect more and better statistics?

Clearly, we must bring what happens in the classroom into the light of day. We must develop meaningful statistical processes that correlate to teacher effectiveness—and give us a comprehensive view of it.

At the same time, it is important to balance this with the imperative to treat teachers as professionals.

Teachers deserve autonomy and the ability to do their jobs unimpeded. When it comes to classroom visits, for example, there should be clear rules to ensure they occur in a limited and non-disruptive way.

In baseball, isolated measurements can be wrong. Umpires miss the call sometimes. Similarly, many teachers are concerned that a measurement or subjective assessment of their effectiveness will be inaccurate. There is good reason to question the way things are done and to improve the metrics.

Still, accurate pictures of teaching quality can be developed over time. A bad call eventually gets balanced by an equally unfair good call. A batting average (or more importantly, an on-base percentage) emerges.

For the sake of the many teachers who teach effectively every day, and for the sake of the kids in classrooms where teachers do their jobs effectively only a handful of days each year, I hope we get the rest of the statistics soon.

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!

Support, Mastery, Leadership

By Meredith Kohl

In this guest post, Meredith Kohl, a former teacher and current CTQ policy assistant, reflects on the new education documentary Mitchell 20, as well as her own teaching experience.

Capturing a profession in transition and highlighting the untapped collective power of teachers committed to their craft, the powerful Mitchell 20 documentary, and the leadership of Daniela Robles, reveals that teachers are a primary solution to the complex challenges that our schools and students face.

In the film, National Board Certified Teacher Daniela Robles encourages 20 of her colleagues to undergo the National Board certification process together, sparking a spirit of collaboration and improvement. Mitchell 20 resonated deeply with me because in five years of teaching, I never felt like I was part of the solution. I was a Teach For America recruit, and I had high aspirations for teaching as a career once I entered the classroom and saw the possibilities. But in my short tenure in an urban district, I felt isolated, unsupported, and confined to the bottom of a bureaucratic power pyramid.  

The top-down education system had something to do with it, sure. And a school climate characterized by frequent (but irrelevant and inadequate) professional development and the careless manipulation of teacher expertise definitely contributed to my feelings of helplessness. 

But it was more than these factors. As a teacher new to the profession, I did not see myself as part of the solution because my attempt to master my craft went largely unsupported. Once I was deemed “effective” by my administration, the resources and individualized support needed to further improve my practice were simply not there.

Over time, experience made many aspects of teaching easier, but I came to realize that weaknesses in my practice—for example, working with second-language learners and using effective techniques for teaching reading—were going unchecked and unaddressed by my school leadership. My concerns as a classroom instructor were unresolved, and time for meaningful inquiry and collaboration with my colleagues was not provided.

Without mastery, how could I articulate the learning occurring in my classroom or the complexities of my craft? How could I leverage expertise I did not possess to transform my school? How could I change the conversation? How could I change my teaching, and the teaching of my counterparts? How could I change outcomes for my students?

As TEACHING 2030 co-author Shannon C’de Baca recently pointed out, “Teacher voice should be secondary to craft. First, teachers must master their craft, then we need them to reform policy.”

The best teachers are continually improving, but what happens when they want to but can’t find meaningful and long-term avenues to do so? I regret that in my high-need school I never heard about the National Board process, that I was unaware of communities like the Teacher Leaders Network, that a colleague like Daniela never came and knocked on my classroom door to present a collaborative challenge for improvement. 

There are thousands of unsupported, early-career teachers in our highest-need schools unsure of where to turn in order to take their practice to the next level. Until they are able to do so, their voices will not be heard.

So how do we reach them?

We must spread stories like Mitchell. Not only to change the conversation, but also to change the behavior of thousands of dormant teachers who have yet to realize their leadership potential. Collectively, teachers must understand how they can take control of their practice when support is not available at their school. They must create cohorts like the Mitchell 20, dedicated to professional growth and learning. Teachers, especially newer ones, must have time and support for self-examination, reflection, and collaboration so that they can improve their practice. All of this is necessary for teachers to lead the transformation of learning communities across the country.

So license a screening, share the trailer, tell early-career teachers about the National Board process, and challenge them to be part of the solution by mastering their craft, finding their voice, spreading their expertise, and stepping forward to lead.

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. 

Building a Wall of Teacher Voices

By Mermuda Wilson

Mermuda Wilson, a policy assistant at CTQ, has been using her video-editing expertise to share teacher voices in an online video series. In this guest post, she describes her experience working with these teacher-submitted videos.

Relationships. AP scores. Graduation stoles. “Fast food” learners. Empowerment. Community partnerships. 

These are a few of the topics broached by teacher leaders highlighted in our CTQTube series. The series, which runs until mid-November, features Teacher Wall submissions from teachers in CTQ's Teacher Leaders Network (TLN).

The Teacher Wall Project is a virtual teacher town square where educators can share video clips and comments. It was built by Scholastic, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and DonorsChoose.org as a way to elevate teacher leaders' perspectives on their profession. The CTQTube series is a microcosm of the Teacher Wall, which has received hundreds of video responses.

The breadth of responses has been amazing. One aspect of the CTQTube submissions that has really stood out to me is that not a single teacher has listed a formal award as their “greatest succcess as a teacher” (a question the teachers were asked to respond to in their videos). These are Teachers of the Year, National Board Certified Teachers, Presidential Award recipients, and National Education Association Teachers of Excellence finalists.

Shannon C'de Baca talks about the value of student-teacher relationships.

Instead, they all chose student-centered measures as their shining moments. This reinforces what teacher Shannon C’de Baca says in her video: the relationships teachers have with students are more important than any specific program.

Building relationships is a common theme that arises in some form or another for all the teachers featured in our CTQTube series. A very clear example is Karen Van Duyn’s submission. In a creative twist on the assignment, Karen’s students put together their perspectives on why she teaches. It’s a fun video that sheds some light on her philosophy of student empowerment. The students seem to have really enjoyed the production process and looked critically at how their perspectives on their teachers shape how they learn. 

Putting this series together has reminded me that while every classroom and every educator is different, the top educators do share one commonality: the genuine desire to foster relationships that allow students to tap into their unknown potential.

Karen Van Duyn and her students share reasons why she teaches.

Our nation has so many of these accomplished classroom practitioners who have so much untapped potential to lead school improvement efforts. Now is the time to make these expert teachers more visible to policymakers and the public. They can and must lead the way. There are only 18 years, 2 months, and 12 days until 2030. We have a lot more work to do to "blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them." 

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.

How Teacher Turnover Harms Students

Finally reaching the bottom of one my reading stacks, I found myself fascinated and frustrated by the findings of a new study on the relationship between teacher turnover and student achievement.

The study, led by Matthew Ronfeldt and his education economist colleagues, used sophisticated methods to uncover empirical evidence on how teacher attrition, especially in high-need schools, seriously harms low-income and black students. They point out that previous researchers assumed that turnover rates negatively affected high-need students because high quality teachers were the ones leaving.

But this is not the case.

Teacher attrition has a detrimental effect on student achievement “even after controlling for different indicators of teacher quality” — including value-added ratings for teachers who leave and the ones who replace them. The researchers claim that teacher turnover “negatively affects collegiality or relational trust among faculty” or “results in loss of institutional knowledge among faculty that is critical for supporting all student learning.”

Other research has revealed complementary findings. Tony Bryk’s path-breaking analyses, for example, link trust and collegiality among teachers with higher student achievement. 

It’s time for policymakers to seriously consider who is recruited into teaching, for how long, and how they are placed in schools. Thoughtfulness in these areas will ensure that teachers contribute to, not undermine, faculty cohesiveness and long-term instructional strategies. It’s time to confront policymakers’ embrace of recruiting underprepared teachers to high-need schools without adequate training, supervision, and support.

At the same time, we need to question their dismissiveness of the positive effects working conditions can have on teaching and learning. It's time to build 21st-century school organizations that support teacher teams that have staying power and that are rewarded for working effectively with their students, families, and communities over time.

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. 

 

  

 

Confronting the 15,000-Hour Problem

This commentary by Barnett Berry originally appeared as a guest post on Getting Smart's blog on September 1, 2011.

Imagine a new teaching profession — the one that students of today and tomorrow deserve. Here’s how “schools” and “teaching” could look:

• In transformed learning environments, digital tools enable students to learn 24/7 and use skills demanded by local and global economies. Meanwhile, similar technologies allow teachers to learn from each other anywhere, at any time.

• Expert teachers create seamless connections in and out of cyberspace. They bridge students’ virtual learning with what goes on in brick-and-mortar schools (including afterschool programs to deepen and extend learning for our most vulnerable students).

• Students learn from collaborative teams of teachers with varied strengths and roles.This is made possible by a career matrix (as opposed to the traditional career ladder) that includes differentiated pathways. The system places a premium on the spreading of teacher expertise—and is structured to encourage our best teachers to remain in the profession.

More than 600,000 “teacherpreneurs” are making a difference in our schools. These are effective teachers who continue to teach students regularly, but also work part-time on results-oriented efforts to improve student learning. They might design new instructional programs, orchestrate community partnerships, develop digital learning tools, and advance new policies and practices. Teacherpreneurs will be the “highest-paid anybodies” in a school district—and their roles will finally blur the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead.

These four possibilities, described more fully in TEACHING 2030, a new book I penned with 12 expert teachers, can help us imagine what teaching could look like. Here’s the catch: we have to move past the tired 20th century struggles over how we recruit, train, and pay teachers. Yes, some serious politics are involved, as described vividly, if not always accurately, in Steven Brill’s new book, Class Warfare.

But we must also contend with the 15,000-hour problem. Most Americans have attended schools for 13 years—and have watched teachers teach for more than 15,000 hours, usually in the company of 25 or 30 other students (40 or 50 in hard times). And while most Americans may want improved schools and better teaching, they do not want teaching and learning to look all that different from when they were in school themselves. The public’s familiarity with teaching reifies expectations. It may even breed contempt for the specialized skills that effective teachers and administrators need to develop—after all, an expert teacher can make the job look easy.

But the 15,000-hour problem besets teachers and administrators as well. Almost four decades ago, Dan Lortie, the well-known education sociologist, described the 15,000 problem as the “apprenticeship of observation” — when teachers and administrators come into the profession thinking they already know how to teach and lead. In fact, since many educators have had the experience of “liking school” as K-12 students, they often resist major transformative changes. They may not want to think differently about teachers’ roles, teaching methods, and how and when students are expected to learn.

So what do we do? We shouldn’t simply seek more recruits from alternative routes. Plenty of evidence suggests that even teachers and administrators from “alternative routes” reify the current system of teaching and learning.

Instead, we should consider how teachers’ and administrators’ preparation can set the stage for a new expectations about what schools and learning look like.

And now is the time for public engagement campaign that informs and inspires, helping Americans shift their own beliefs about what schools and teachers can accomplish — and how they should go about it.

Selling a bold new vision of teaching and learning is far from impossible.

The American people have the capacity to let go of old patterns of thinking when the evidence is compelling and well-presented. Consider how our nation’s adult population changed its collective mind about cigarette smoking. In the early 1960s, cigarette smoking was common. In ads, the Marlboro Man (portrayed as a rugged cowboy) gave cigarettes a free-spirited, back-to-basics, all-American image. Then studies began to identify empirical links between smoking and cancer. Early anti-smoking commercials, starring “Johnny Smoke,” showed cowboys keeling over with poisonous fumes in their lungs, parodying the Marlboro Man. Public awareness grew and behavior began to change, as TV ads for cigarettes were banned and the Surgeon General’s warnings on cigarette packages became more stark and visible. Within 40 years, the percentage of American adults smoking cigarettes decreased from 45% to 20%.

An inefficient public education system mired in 20th-century debates may not be blackening our lungs. But the status quo is doing something just as serious: failing our students, our communities, and our democracy. We must help the public understand what is possible. We must get past the 15,000-hour conundrum. We must work together to create the transformed system of teaching and learning that 21st-century students deserve.

Implementing Common Core Standards

By Susan Graham

Susan Graham, a National Board Certified Teacher and Teacher Leaders Network member, retired in spring 2011 after 28 years in the classroom. However, she continues to encourage innovative reforms in teaching and learning, and is currently serving as a Virtual Community Organizer for CTQ’s new Implementing Common Core Standards project. 

Overheard this weekend at the Center for Teaching Quality’s headquarters in Carrboro, NC: “This is such incredibly complicated work…” (one-second pause) “…but I am so exhilarated by the process!”

That’s the sort of energy generated when exemplary teachers combine their expertise to tackle tough issues in teaching and learning—which happens all the time on CTQ’s virtual Teacher Leaders Network. But this energy is powerful face-to-face, too, as I witnessed this weekend when CTQ assembled 21 National Board Certified Teachers from NC and KY to work on the Implementing Common Core Standards (ICCS) project. 

Here’s how the Common Core State Standards website describes the standards:

The Common Core Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

But what does that look like in the classroom? How will students demonstrate mastery of the standards of literacy and mathematical functionality? And how do these efforts square with the pressures of standardized test performance (currently the centerpiece of many states’ assessment and evaluation systems)?

Over the next year, the accomplished teachers I met at CTQ will face down these tough questions. They will design—and test-drive in their own classrooms, with their own students—lessons and assessments linked to the Common Core State Standards.

ICCS teachers will pilot formative assessment templates created by the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) and Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The teachers met with Eleanor Dougherty (LDC) and Ann Shannon (MDC) to get a better sense of how to implement these new tools.

The teachers aren’t just test-driving—they’re documenting every curve of the road. As they fine-tune, deliver, and evaluate LDC and MDC modules, they’ll be compiling video clips of instruction and assembling evidence of student work, and reflecting on how the modules affect student learning and their own practice.  

In spring 2012, the ICCS teachers will begin to share the toolkits they’re creating—influencing student achievement in classrooms across the country. And their field-test critiques of the Design Collaborative concepts will inform the process of integrating Common Core Standards and state course standards.   

How will the pieces fit together? What will the results be? Which questions will be answered—in full or in part—and which will remain? We don’t know yet—but it is exciting to know that 21 highly accomplished teachers are already hard at work on a potentially transformative project for advancing student learning.  

 

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. 

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. 

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. 

Tackling the Tough To-Dos

How can we improve teaching effectiveness in America? Policy pundits have given us a list of to-dos: Evaluate teachers on test scores. Jettison teacher tenure. Scrap last-in-first-out policies.

Yes, we need results-oriented teacher evaluation systems that draw on evidence of student learning. Yes, it makes sense to streamline personnel procedures for teachers and administrators. Sure, let’s abandon quality-blind placements.

But if what we want is genuine, sustained improvement of our public schools, we can’t just remove these arcane policies and pretend the job is done. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

Here's the real to-do list for those who want to improve our public schools:

• Take part in nuanced, solutions-focused conversations with diverse stakeholders.
• Examine empirical evidence of what works for students.
• Tap into the wisdom of thousands of accomplished teachers in our nation’s classrooms.

These to-dos drive all of our work at the Center for Teaching Quality—including our New Millennium Initiative (NMI), which assembles diverse groups of talented, early-career educators who are committed to improving teaching and learning at the local and national level.

Currently at work in Denver, Washington state, Illinois, the Bay Area, and Hillsborough County (FL), our NMI teachers are digging into some of education’s toughest issues. These committed teachers are studying evidence of what works for students, asking tough questions of researchers and policymakers, and examining the policies that govern their profession. They’re identifying specific recommendations for improving teaching and learning. And they’re speaking out. 

Each of our NMI sites will be releasing papers and multimedia products to spread their findings to others who care about teaching and learning.

This month, the Denver NMI teachers released a report pointing out how their state’s new teacher evaluation law can be effectively implemented.  Their report is concise, practical, and well-informed. It offers powerful evidence for why we should encourage teacher leaders to take an increasingly active role in today’s education policy debates. 

On May 18, Denver NMI teachers presented their findings to a diverse audience including state board of education members, superintendents, union leaders, and other key stakeholders. (Thanks to the Colorado Legacy Foundation and Rose Community Foundation for co-sponsoring this gathering with CTQ.) The crowd was impressed by—indeed, hungry for—bold, practical perspectives from classroom teachers.

Since then, team members have been invited to take part in a variety of meaningful activities to advance effective implementation of the new law. Their work, funded by Rose Community Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is only just beginning.

Stay tuned—teachers in our other NMI sites are also tackling the tough to-dos and will be releasing additional reports in the months to come. Rather than being caught up in tired debates over arcane policies, they’re looking back at what has (and hasn’t) worked for students—and looking forward to what is possible. 

(Above) The Denver NMI team presented their findings to a group of education stakeholders at an event co-sponsored by Rose Community Foundation, Colorado Legacy Foundation, & CTQ. 

  
(Above) NMI teacher Katie Micek introduces the New Millennium Initiative's short- and long-term goals.

  (Above) The Denver NMI team at work...

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.

Questing for Better Teacher Evaluation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Teacher Myths That Distract Policymakers

Reposted from the Washington Post Answer Sheet blog ---

By Valerie Strauss

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

___________________________

By Barnett Berry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America supports teachers. Now let's move forward.

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

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

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

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

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

Unions and districts both need
to advance the agenda

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

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

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

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

Bold indicators - for the 20th century

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

Problem is — they left out some of the essentials.

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

Here are a five examples of inadequate indicators.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in August I noted that:

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

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

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

The Top 10 Teaching Policy Issues NCTQ Somehow Forgot

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

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

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

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

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

A new vision of teacher tenure

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

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

Teachers and Nanny Cams: Compliance vs. Trust

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

by Jon Eckert

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about Jon Eckert here.

Edging toward Professionalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Brooks Can’t Have It Both Ways

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

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

Will a new Congress make smarter teaching policy decisions?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McKinsey’s convention-busting conclusions include:


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


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

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


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

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

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

Superman, Meet Teacher Dan Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

VAM and The Law of Unintended Consequences

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Report: Use VAM Data Carefully to Assess Teachers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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?