On Fence Designers and Citizen-Thinkers

August 31st, 2010 by Pam Moran View Comments »

Who are the learners today who learn in the moment because of their own interests or because they need to do so? The learners who don’t just learn on command when we want them to learn? Where are the citizen-thinkers who tinker to learn and who get their hands dirty, perhaps earning a callus or two along the way? Could the “culture” of creativity and innovation we so highly prize in America be an outcome of skills we developed within families and communities as we fought first to survive, then to subsist, and, finally, to expand from East to West? Is that culture still breathing? Are our schools on their own when it comes to educating America’s young people? Are we in what America’s top CEOs call a creativity crisis? Where are our fence designers today?

split rails on the Blue Ridge

When I reflect upon the ingenuity of early colonists homesteading in the Blue Ridge, it’s pretty obvious to me that despite a lack of “school” education, these families depended upon deep creative and critical problem-solving capabilities. Sometimes I wonder if schools were ever a source of this nation’s creative genius or whether our creativity passion for innovation emerged as a socio-cultural skill of survival that continued to be honed across generations until… today. Perhaps our capacity for creative genius is being dismantled not just by the longstanding reductionist, industrialized, one-size-fits all schools we have inhabited for generations but also by our current capacity to acquire the resources to buy, service or replace on a whim. Or, maybe despite our urge to still repair or fix things around us, our creativity’s being defeated by technology advances that lock us out of problem-solving possibilities. I suspect it’s a combination of all of these. As the digital divide fades away, will the next divide be between those who can create and respond in the moment with innovative solutions and those who cannot? How important are concrete experiences to honing creative and critical thought?

new teachers design and build together

It struck me as I chatted recently with a local plumber at work with his seventeen year-old son that his son was learning something that most of our children are not. They were working on an older neighborhood home with a mashup of pipes carrying water inside and outside, from well to drain field. I watched this young man work with his father to problem-solve the size and length of pipe needed, how to find underground pipes they needed to locate, and where to drill through an unanticipated concrete, not cinderblock, footing. I simply listened and watched as the two of them worked together, sorting through a series of multi-step problems that involved spatial relations, mathematical-analytical, verbal-linguistic, and kinesthetic intelligence; with a healthy dose of deductive reasoning on both their parts. They didn’t use any computer-based technologies, but rather a few old-fashioned technologies that most of our kids today can’t name, let alone use: the pick-axe, the shovel, the measuring tape,the level, the square, and the pipe-wrench. Many today disdain these tools as beneath them, but I was struck in watching these two at work that perhaps the lack of these tools in our children’s lives is one reason we as a culture appear to be losing our creative edge.

I think about my visits to schools in the first days of this school year. While I love seeing new learning technologies being used by young people, I also appreciated second graders measuring with unifix cubes and handmade rulers, middle schoolers playing stringed instruments, chemistry students in goggles analyzing mixtures in old-fashioned test tubes, and kindergartners with hands covered in blue finger paint. I loved the imagery created by the first grade teacher in her rocking chair reading from a picture book with children gathered on the floor, second graders chasing each other in a healthy game of tag, and high schoolers outdoors at lunch hanging around picnic tables and lounging on the ground. In reflection, what I most valued was the level of activity and engagement everywhere I looked from fifth graders using iPod touches to race hallways in an in-school scavenger hunt to third graders dancing with their music teacher. Isn’t it the movement of thought processes that defines how we connect with our creative genius? When I see minds in action, not passively contained in rows, I believe that the intellectual juice of this nation can still power deep learning through the vast array of tools at our disposal, inside and out of the places we call schools.

These tools represent the dichotomy of our struggle to teach this techno-generation: how we capitalize upon using new technology learning tools while making sure our young people don’t lose the capability to use old technology tools as well. When we power up our young people with the “high-tech” learning tools we make available in our schools today, we can’t lose sight of the fact that we must still power up our young people with musical instruments, paintbrushes, Legos, beakers, bones, pulleys, picture books, woodworking tools, kitchen stoves, blocks and more. Our youngest children need to have their hands on a variety of tools, but our eldest do as well. All of our children need time to socialize face to face, not just in text bytes. I want our young people to graduate with the skills to problem-solve how to fix a leaky faucet or rewire a lamp that stops functioning. I don’t want them to always feel compelled to search the Internet for an “Angie’s list” problem-solver for all their household conundrums. I want them to…

  • wander parks, fields, forests and their own yards, taking time to not just glance past a Viceroy butterfly or mantis but also to ask questions and seek answers about that which they don’t know
  • be inspired by music from a range of genres and time periods – to grow up savoring the natural world and the arts
  • understand scientific concepts that underpin how things work, what things are, and systems that explain and support life
  • engage in passionate dialogue about the rights of humankind through informed perspectives based on deep knowledge of history, politics, religion, and culture
  • speak a second, and maybe even a third language, but especially to understand the language of mathematics and,
  • see themselves as poets, narrators, conversationalists, and consumers of literature

I guess what I am really looking for is a nation committed to creating a learning renaissance with an infusion of enlightenment thrown in to extend and challenge the thinking of young people who represent the future. And, yes, I’d also like to see our young people use technology to connect, communicate, and collaborate with the world; to draw upon the experts, their peers, and the breadth of resources that together make pathways to deep learning universally accessible to all of our young people.

We now have the capability to turn on a faucet of learning opportunities unlike anything in the history of humankind. But, shouldn’t we make sure our kids don’t lose the capability to problem-solve as the best of plumbers and fence designers do while learning to produce and create in the clouds?

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Ranking Talent

August 29th, 2010 by Chad Ratliff View Comments »

Post originally published on Venture Pragmatist

Earlier this month, the L.A. Times rattled the education sector by publishing a value-added analysis of 6,000 elementary school teachers in Los Angeles—complete with names and pictures. The blogosphere blew up. (here’s an aggregate list but don’t miss this and this) Even the Secretary of Education weighed in.

But that’s not the topic of this post. This morning, The Times kicked it up another notch by actually ranking those teachers. Among many other things, this will certainly be framed up as yet another attempt to shove perceived business principles down the throats of public educators.

But is this an accepted business principle?

The article, “Why Comparing Workers to their Peers Can Often Backfire“, appeared last week over at Knowledge@Wharton. Here’s a quote (emphasis mine)…

It’s often assumed that employees who are benchmarked against each other work harder, to either hang onto a high ranking or raise a low ranking. However, Iwan Barankay, a management professor at Wharton [School of Business], calls that assumption into question in a new study titled, “Rankings and Social Tournaments: Evidence from a Field Experiment.”

“Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive — to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens,” says Barankay, whose previous research and teaching has focused on personnel and labor economics.

And further…

Barankay notes in his paper that future work needs to be done to test the effect of rankings in other work environments and “also to explore whether the underlying parameters can be recovered to pinpoint more detailed mechanisms in the data. Only then can we establish if targeted feedback that takes into account the underlying [differences among workers] can be established to generate a positive casual effect on performance.” At this stage, however, “the aggregate result is that feedback about rank is detrimental to performance,” he writes.

The article concludes with this paragraph…

The critical lesson for employers is to consider how each employee will respond to feedback and then decide whether sharing that information will be beneficial for everyone involved. “A good employer knows its employees very well and should have a good idea how they will respond to the prospect of being ranked,” he says. “The key is to devote more time to thinking about whether to give feedback, and how each individual will respond to it. If, as the employer, you think a worker will respond positively to a ranking and feel inspired to work harder, then by all means do it. But it’s imperative to think about it on an individual level.”

Sound familiar? Admittedly, the caveat here is Barankay’s position is based on peer ranking as a motivational tool independent of pay, but that actually makes the analysis comparable to the L.A. story—at least for now. However, with regard to financial rewards (albeit outside the scope of this post), the following is noteworthy…

Barankay’s interest in rankings as a motivational tool intensified during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which “showed us that offering employees financial incentives based on their performance can have unintended consequences,” he notes, referring to the sky-high bonuses earned on Wall Street in the run-up to the downturn.

But, to me, the bigger idea is the imperative of individualism. Doesn’t it always seem to land there? In fact, I’m willing to bet that notion, by way of instructional differentiation inside classrooms, is partially responsible for lofting certain teachers to the top side of the rankings in the first place.

Unfortunately, though, this is where armchair pundits often miss the mark—but it’s not their fault. The public education sector is collectively larger than the GDP of many developed countries and it’s not easy to think about change at the micro-level. But that’s exactly what we must do. If policy is to be grounded in believing every child can learn, should we also assume every teacher can learn—to teach? If not, what’s the distinction?

Whether ranking talent is effective performance management—in education or business—remains unclear at best. However, the ethics of publicly ranking teachers is far less so.

And, finally, I again find the worlds of business and education aren’t as far apart as we sometimes think.

-Chad Ratliff

Update: Richard Lee Colvin makes one heck of a point via Twitter.

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Problems with the use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers

August 28th, 2010 by teacherken View Comments »

originally posted at Daily Kos

If new laws or policies specifically require that teachers be fired if their students’ test scores do not rise by a certain amount, then more teachers might well be terminated than is now the case. But there is not strong evidence to indicate either that the departing teachers would actually be the weakest teachers, or that the departing teachers would be replaced by more effective ones. There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains.

That is a quote from the Executive Summary of one of the most important policy briefs about education in recent years. At a time when the Dept. of Education is pushing to tie teacher evaluation and compensation to student test scores, this Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper (whose title is the same as this diary, and which is a pdf), pulls together the extensive relevant research that demonstrates the dangers of pursuing such a path. Please continue reading as I explore this important document, released at 12:01 AM today, August 30.

First, let me clarify several things.

This is a very long diary. That is because I am trying to reasonably thoroughly cover the contents of an extremely important document. My purpose in doing so is to convince people of the document’s importance. Thus I will be perfectly happy should you decide you do not need to further read what I have written below. You can follow the link for the brief (which I have provided you again), download the pdf, and begin reading. The executive summary is only four pages. The brief itself, without the critical apparatus of footnotes and sources, another 17. So if you want, one more time follow this link.

This document has been in the works for several months, and was NOT hurriedly put together as a response to the recent series by the Los Angeles Times which used value-added assessment to label teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Second, the ten scholars whose names are on the document are some of the most eminent in educational circles, including among their midst former Presidents of the American Educational Research Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education, two of the three professional organizations most involved with psychological measurement, of which school-related testing is a subset. One of the scholars, Robert Linn, has not only presided over both of those organizations, he has also serve as chair of the National Research Council’s Board on Testing and Assessment. The group also includes the immediate past president of the National Academy of Education, Lorrie Shepard, Dean of the School of Education at Colorado. A brief and applicable curricula vitae of each of the ten authors can be found at the end of the document, and briefer descriptions at the beginning, where each author is listed, along with the following statement:

Authors, each of whom is responsible for this brief as a whole, are listed alphabetically.

An email address is provided for further contact.

The ten authors, alphabetically, are as follows:
Eva L. Baker
Paul E. Barton
Linda Darling-Hammond
Edward Haertel
Helen F. Ladd
Robert E. Linn
Diane Ravitch
Richard Rothstein
Richard J. Shavelson
Lorrie A. Shepard

Let me be blunt. I do not know how anyone who knows the work of these scholars and who reads this brief can accept the idea of placing any stakes as to firing or awarding of merit pay based on the current status of Value-Added Assessment methodologies. The document is thorough. It reviews all the relevant studies, including one not yet in print. Those includes studies by Mathematica for the US Department of Education: by Rand: by the Educational Testing Service; done for the National Center for Education Statistics of the Institute of Education Sciences of the U. S. Dept. of Education; issued by the Board of Testing and Assessment of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Academy of Sciences, and so on. There are citations from books, from peer reviewed journals.

I am not a scholar. I am a high school social studies teacher. During now abandoned doctoral studies in educational policy I got interested in value-added assessment and devoured what studies there were in the educational literature. I also talked extensively with the technical person for one organization that offered a value-added methodology who cautioned me that the approach was not stable enough for it to be used as the basis for decisions with any kind of meaningful stakes. That was about a decade ago. What I had read since, and what I have absorbed from this study convinces me that the situation is not significantly better now.

But you do not have to take my word for it. Let me offer a few key examples from the study. Those who follow me on Daily Kos already have seen in the study by Mathematica the high rate of error in determining superior and inferior teachers beyond the broad middle. In this diary, written on August 27, I noted that the error rate with 2 years of data was 36%, with 3 years 26%, and even with 10 years of data still 12%.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg of the technical problems with using such an approach.

Without recapitulating the entire brief, let me offer a couple of other key points.

1. Results for individual teachers are not stable:

One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year.

2. One key question is whether one is really accounting for teacher effects and excluding other influences in the results one gets from value-added assessment. Jesse Rothstein reported something interesting, about which I quote from the Executive Summary:

A study designed to test this question used VAM methods to assign effects to teachers after controlling for other factors, but applied the model backwards to see if credible results were obtained. Surprisingly, it found that students’ fifth grade teachers were good predictors of their fourth grade test scores. Inasmuch as a student’s later fifth grade teacher cannot possibly have influenced that student’s fourth grade performance, this curious result can only mean that VAM results are based on factors other than teachers’ actual effectiveness.

3. The brief notes that arguments that the private sector evaluates professional employees using quantitative measures that are parallel. The authors of the brief point out that rarely are such quantitative measures the sole or even the primary factor, noting that management experts warning against using such measures for making salary or bonus decisions. They remind us that some of the distortion on Wall Street was the result of emphasizing short term gains that could be easily measured. They also touch on medicine:

In both the United States and Great Britain, governments have attempted to rank cardiac surgeons by their patients’ survival rates, only to find that they had created incentives for surgeons to turn away the sickest patients.

4. Students are not randomly assigned to teachers. While some control for school effects is possible, scholars are reluctant to place any weight on comparisons for teachers in different schools even within the same system. And even within a school, teachers may have varying numbers of students who are learning English or have learning disabilities or are homeless or who move multiple times, each of which is a factor that can affect learning.

5. Sample sizes are often too small. Even if the class makeup stays stable during the year, and all the students show up regularly, the N=30 of a large elementary class is too small a sample to provide a result that can allow strong inferences to be drawn. Often the makeup of the class changes during the year. If you exclude students who were not there all year, or whose absences exceed some designated level, the N decreases, providing a result of even less reliability.

6. Some argue that statewide data banks can address the question of student mobility. But if you derive results on a year or two years of data where the student has moved, how much of the improvement can properly be assigned to any one teacher? Even in elementary school, do we account for pull-out instruction, or possible tutoring (that could in some cases be counterproductive) as a possible influence on the test results upon which we base our analysis?

7. Even with value-added analysis, to date scholars have not been able to isolate the impact of outside learning experiences, home and school supports, and differences in student characteristics and starting points when trying to measure their growth.

8. A proper system of value-added assessment would have vertically scaled tests. Most states do not currently have such tests, for example, neither New York nor California does. That is, the tests in one grade are not necessarily congruent with those of the next along a continuum from year to year – we are not testing the same thing each year. As testing expert Dan Koretz of Harvard is quoted as noting,

“because of the need for vertically scaled tests, value-added systems may be even more incomplete than some status or cohort-to-cohort systems”

Here it is worth noting that cohort to cohort is comparing this year’s fourth graders to last years, which is how Adequate Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind has been calculated.

9. If measuring end of year to end of year, even if there are vertically scaled tests, there is still the well-documented issue of summer learning loss, which falls disproportionally upon those of lesser economic means, which also means it falls disproportionally upon those of color, who are more heavily represented at the lower end of the economic scale. IF we do not control for summer learning loss, our results are skewed. Allow me to quote a relevant portion of the study:

researchers have found that three-fourths of schools identified as being in the bottom 20% of all schools, based on the scores of students during the school year, would not be so identified if differences in learning outside of school were taken into account. Similar conclusions apply to the bottom 5% of all schools.

The authors also cite a study that shows “two-thirds of the difference between the ninth grade test scores of high and low socioeconomic status students can be traced to summer learning differences over the elementary years.”

There is more, but this should give a real sense of how much there is in this paper, how thoroughly the authors examine relevant material to demonstrate that value-added assessment, the supposed magic bullet to allow us to tie student learning back to the effectiveness of teachers, cannot properly fulfill the task some wish to give to it.

The authors acknowledge that value-added approaches are superior to some of the alternatives methods of using test scores to evaluate teachers. These are

status test-score comparisons – compare average scores of students of one teacher to those of another

over change measures – compare the average test results of a single teacher from one year to the next – remember, these are different students

over growth measures – a comparison of the scores of the students of the teacher this year to the scores of those same students the previous year when they had different teachers.

Each of these approaches has serious problems with it. One can read the detailed explanation on p. 9. Value-added assessments may be an improvement, but

the claim that they can “level the playing field” and provide reliable, valid, and fair comparisons of individual teachers is overstated. Even when student demographic characteristics are taken into account, the value-added measures are too unstable (i.e., vary widely) across time, across the classes that teachers teach, and across tests that are used to evaluate instruction, to be used for the high-stakes purposes of evaluating teachers.

Let me offer a few of the quotes about value-added assessment that the authors of the brief offer from scholars who have examined the approach over the years, and then I will offer a few observations of my own.

in 2003, a research team at Rand concluded

The research base is currently insufficient to support the use of VAM for high-stakes decisions about individual teachers or schools.

In 2004, Donald Rubin opined

We do not think that their analyses are estimating causal quantities, except under extreme and unrealistic assumptions.

Henry Braun, then at ETS, offered this in 2005:

VAM results should not serve as the sole or principal basis for making consequential decisions about teachers. There are many pitfalls to making causal attributions of teacher effectiveness on the basis of the kinds of data available from typical school districts. We still lack sufficient understanding of how seriously the different technical problems threaten the validity of such interpretations.

Last year the Board on Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences wrote to the Department of Education saying

…VAM estimates of teacher effectiveness should not be used to make operational decisions because such estimates are far too unstable to be considered fair or reliable.

Finally, this year, a report of a workshop run jointly by The National Research Council and the National Academy of Education offered this:

Value-added methods involve complex statistical models applied to test data of varying quality. Accordingly, there are many technical challenges to ascertaining the degree to which the output of these models provides the desired estimates. Despite a substantial amount of research over the last decade and a half, overcoming these challenges has proven to be very difficult, and many questions remain unanswered…

Let me repeat that last sentence, written this year: Despite a substantial amount of research over the last decade and a half, overcoming these challenges has proven to be very difficult, and many questions remain unanswered…

And yet this administration wants to move ahead with using student test scores, perhaps analyzed through value-added assessment methodologies, as a significant component of teacher evaluation. It is including this as part of the criteria to win Race to the Top Funds. In fairness, the Department does not specify using value-added (although anything else is far worse) nor does it specify what percentage of the evaluation is to depend upon the test scores – both of these decisions are still left to the states, some of which have left themselves wiggle room in their applications, using terms like “significant” to indicate the proportion of the evaluation that will depend upon student test scores.

The original Bush proposal for No Child Left Behind, as it went up on the White House website shortly after the inauguration of the 43rd president, proposed giving a 1% bonus of Title I money to schools that would give parents the value-added scores of the teachers of their students. That, fortunately, did not make it into the final legislation. Now we have the Los Angeles Times action, about which the Secretary of Education has offered a somewhat mixed and confusing response, even as he seems to support the idea of using such evaluations in assessing of teachers. Since the Times story broke we have seen some who write or advocate about education who have praised what the paper did, while others have condemned it. While mine might not be a major voice on education, I find myself very much in the latter camp.

One problem is that too many who write about education are close to ignorant about the limits of the information one can get from various kinds of assessment. We tend to what hard numbers as a society, we are obsessed with comparisons and rankings. In the process we often give far more credence to quantitative measures than they warrant.

I do not dispute that tests, including tests external to the school, have some utility. I also recognize that value-added assessment is beginning to offer some useful additional information. By itself that information is not sufficiently reliable that people’s livelihoods should be either solely or heavily determined by the information they provide. They MAY indicate a teacher outside the norm – either well above or well below – but as the various studies you will encounter in this brief demonstrate, that is not necessarily the case, the results are not yet stable for individual teachers from year to year, we do not yet know how to properly control for non-instructional factors that can influence the scores upon which the analysis is based, nor can we properly distribute responsibility for student learning among the different adults who interact with a child at school.

I am a high school teacher. Let me offer a hypothetical – if I do more work in a social studies class on a particular kind of writing and that is what is assessed on the English exam, does the English teacher properly deserve the credit or blame for how students do on that part of the test? Those of us who teach in high school are aware that students often learn about our content either in other classes or from interactions outside of our classroom. Sometimes what they learn is correct and increases their performance in our class, sometimes it is incorrect and undercuts what we are instructing. To date, even value-added assessment is insufficient to control for such influences and allow proper inferences to be drawn about the actual impact of the teacher upon the learning of the students.

I have only explored a small portion of the material in the brief. You can download it without paying. If you are worried about whether you will be able to understand the contents, don’t. You can start with the executive summary, in which you will find most of the key takeaways, written in language and presented in a style that is easily accessible. It is a bit less than four pages. The brief itself runs from pages 5-21, followed by three columns (over a page and a half) of footnotes, and 5 columns (over three and half pages) of sources. You can read through the brief without having to check the footnotes, or you can if you want glance at the back to see who is being cited if that is not clear in the text.

Let me clear. The authors are not opposed to value-added assessment. They are not even opposed to it being included in the process of teacher evaluation, although they offer some serious cautions that policy makers would be well advised to consider.

The title is accurate – there are still serious problems with using test scores to evaluate teachers. These problems are not solved by resorting to a value-added methodology.

We need to be careful not to denigrate nor discourage our teaching corps. We will not improve education if the end result of our efforts is to drive away the very teachers who most connect with students, who are able to inspire those students to persist when they are struggling, who are willing to take on the harder to teach. We have other methods of ascertaining whether teachers are in fact effective. We should not be abandoning them in favor of quantitative measures that cannot, as yet, fully carry the load.

The authors of this study have enough prestige that one can hope our media will give some attention to it. Those responsible for educational policy at local, state and national levels are not doing their jobs if they are unwilling to read and be sure they understand the implications of this brief.

That said, and adding that I will try to bring to the attention of as many policy makers as I can, I do not have high hopes that our wrongheaded headlong pursuit of quantitative measures of teacher effectiveness can even be slowed. I will add what voice I have to the efforts of these scholars. Perhaps after you read the brief, you will add yours?

Thanks.

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The Teaching Story: August 2010

August 22nd, 2010 by Pam Moran View Comments »

We educators teach learners that stories have a beginning, middle and end. We also know that each annual cycle of our career takes the form of a story, too. Many of us look forward to writing a new story each year-creating fresh learning plans, developing new relationships, redesigning our learning spaces to gain different perspective upon learning. On the flip side, some of us change so little over the course of our careers that we seem to simply repeat the same story over and over; almost as if stuck in the movie Groundhog Day. What leads teachers to choose one or the other of these two career pathways? Years ago, I worked on a little writing project to ask and answer the question: what motivates some teachers to continue evolving practice over the course of their career? After hours of listening to and transcribing audio tapes, a few specific themes emerged from these teachers’ reflections on their practice- or artwork- as one teacher labeled it.

2 generations of teachers; Ashley's retiree mom helping her set up kindergarten

Each year, just before school refreshes its cycle, I hear those teachers’ voices reminding me of their perspectives on the importance of the first day of school. These teachers, all recognized master teachers with years of teaching under their belts and with no intention of ever doing anything else, believed that the power of their successes was grounded in the relationships they began to build with young people in the first moment of the first day. One teacher said to me something akin to this, “When I began teaching, one of the old-timers advised me to not smile ‘til December.. I ignored that advice and think it was one of the best decisions of my career. How can you begin a positive relationship without smiling?” Another said in thinking about a mentor who helped her survive her very first day of school, “A teacher in the math department stepped in to help me with discipline early on. She became a mentor and critical friend for life. Every time I was failing to reach a student, we would talk. She would ask questions. I would think about different approaches. Eventually, I began to realize I owned the change that’s needed, not the learner. Sometime it’s about the relationship. Other times it’s about their needing a different learning strategy from me. Sometimes, they just need more time and – more of my time.”

These teachers engaged in professional careers grounded in efficacy. They believed they were capable of making a difference in every learner’s life and they never gave up on a young person, especially those who challenged them the most. Importantly, they all shared a professional power gained from finding and connecting to one or more critical friends with whom they bonded because of a commonly held belief in their own self-efficacy. They supported each other, listened to each other, pushed each other, and shared with each other. Often, they considered themselves to be part of an underground group of educators who stayed out of the fray of others’ criticizing conversations; not because there isn’t always something to criticize in a school but because they saw those discussions as debilitating to their work with young people. They held a viewpoint about their students and their work that could be labeled as “glass almost always full.”

Paragons of teaching? I don’t think so. Teachers aren’t perfect but I believe teachers who care and work hard are more the norm than the exception. As I walk schools and chat with teachers, step into their rooms, listen to their dreams for the first day and every day afterward with the learners they serve, I think the media, the politicians, and our communities often sell short the many professionals who teach their heart out, day in and out; living their careers inside and outside of work. These teachers know what’s worthy to learn and they put their energy into realizing that work to the greatest degree possible, even if means being a bit of a Neil Postman-like“subversive activity” teacher. They understand the importance of staying current and working to learn new skills. Despite being beleaguered professionally by back-to-school stories such as the recent teacher evaluation coverage of the LA Times, they work on new ideas for learning projects while on unpaid summer leave, rearrange their learning spaces over and over again before pre-service week, put a smile on their faces, and reach out to find the good in each learner who crosses the threshold into class on that first day of school. Our schools, our learners, and our teachers represent a different century of learning than the one Norman Rockwell captured when he painted Happy Birthday, Miss Jones, an image of what once was America’s quintessential teacher. However, today’s teachers still represent the best of what teachers have always been and always will be; educators who make a difference in the lives of the young people they serve.

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Posted in 21st century skills, Pam Moran, Sphere of Influence, Teacher Efficacy, narrative, teaching, voice

The Web Will Never Be in “Full Blooms” Without Us

August 14th, 2010 by billsterrett View Comments »

Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates set the Twitter world abuzz with his comments last weekend at the Techonomy Conference in Lake Tahoe.  Gates’ remarks on the changing scope of education soon made headlines that “in five years, the best education will come from the web.”  While he qualified his remarks by strongly advocating for K-12 education and the work that schools are doing, discussion soon ensued on blogs and social media sites regarding the important role that living educators play.

Gates is right, however, in this regard: schools and universities do need to adjust to the realities of access and demand.  There must be increased access, by use of technology, to meet the growing demand for a global education. Of course, it should also be emphasized that only people- with expertise, knowledge, relationships, and wisdom- can deliver the goods and empower the next generation.

Much of this should be looked at through the lens of Benjamin Bloom, who in the 1950’s advocated for engaging students in “higher order” learning (Creating, Evaluating, and Synthesizing) rather than lower level “recall” learning (Knowledge and Comprehension).  And though this recent conversation was never truly a “Man vs. Computer” debate, we should continue to emphasize the vital role that we can play, that we should play, to engage students while using the latest innovative tools and strategies.  Only humans are capable of pushing each other to higher Bloom’s learning. Yet, the advent of technology makes this effort more possible then ever before, and we must capitalize on this growth explosion as educators in order to stay relevant and accessible.  Recently, a UVa Professor who works with STEM Ph.D. students noted that the newest versions, learned content and innovations are quickly outdated; thus there is a need for today’s students to “possess competence and the ability to innovate” in order to adapt and succeed in a changing world.  Technology, collaboration, and innovation must be intertwined and the educator is the catalyst in infusing those variables for effective student outcomes.

I have been fortunate to work for and with people and institutions that value technology.  As a middle school science teacher, I was able to use interactive websites to highlight updated satellite images of the moons of Jupiter miles away, or explain the intricate bonds of molecules in a tangible manner- unthought-of of when I was learning science from textbooks as a youngster.  Later, as a principal, I was able to highlight great instructional practices from colleagues by use of a Flip Camera in faculty meetings, showcasing 30-second clips of effective teaching throughout the building. We were able to instantly e-mail teachers feedback on lessons with a handheld PDA seconds after observing their math class.  And we were able to quickly alert the entire school community through a web-based communications system in rare, unforeseen times of crisis even though I might be out of state on a weekend trip.  Now, as a professor of education, I can engage students in a rigorous course on evaluation despite not working within the same zip code or even during the same time.  By carefully crafting a course to meet the needs of the learner and maintaining rigorous alignment with the objectives of the course, I can maintain a robust, diverse roster and also effectively recognize the fact that many of my students are juggling teaching jobs, family commitments and other time constraints, and yet empower them to be leaders in their schools and communities in this 21st century.

However, as educators, we have to take the initiative in each of these cases to make the web work for us… and for the students.  We continually must have the support of our schools, our leaders, and our colleagues.  And we have to synthesize information, evaluate its relevance, and create effective lessons that are relevant. And then we are able to move beyond “low Bloom’s” learning by seizing upon technological advances.  I would not have been as effective a teacher without the web, but the web wouldn’t have reached the students… without me.

Gates is right.  The web will reach the students in greater ways than ever before.  And we must realize that the web user- the student- is of utmost importance, and how we reach and engage that student is up to us as educators.  Computers and the web will not alone enable students to reach “full Blooms” without expert educators emphasizing engaging students… whomever and wherever they are.

William Sterrett is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.  He can be reached at sterrettw@uncw.edu

The views expressed are the author’s and do not represent any institution or organization.

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Staying Relevant as Leader and Learner

July 30th, 2010 by Pam Moran View Comments »

Of recent I have come to appreciate the iPhone camera as much as my first Canon 35 mm SLR camera.  That Canon was a precious possession because of the investment of some of my first year teacher’s salary in a tool I had coveted throughout college. I still have trays of slides secreted in the attic from my early teaching days – a sampler of “herptiles” from the Everglades, middle schoolers scrambling up Seneca Rocks, scenes from canoeing the Rapidan River, and hawk migration along the Blue Ridge. My preferred camera tool changed dramatically a year ago, but my viewfinder still aims towards the immature black rat snake near Humpback Rocks, the tiger swallowtail perched on thistle, and the learners at work and play in the schools I visit as superintendent.

When I contrast the two image-capturing tools that define the range of cameras in my life, I think about the ease with which I now can post an image in the virtual world; no wait time to share either video or still photos with family, friends or colleagues. There’s no sense of anticipating the return of snail-mail envelopes laden with photos, either (Yes, millennials -we used to send film away to get it developed.) Instead, I experience the instant gratification of photo-shopping right on the iPhone and sharing images almost real-time. The world changes around me. The tools change in my hands. My preferred camera today is a phone, not my Canon SLR. But, interestingly, the images of classrooms today in many ways mirror those of the past.

I’m convinced that we administrative leaders have an obligation to initiate new learning, become skillful in the use of new tools that accelerate and advance our learning work, and share with others what we are learning. It has not been that long ago since I wandered with some fear into the social media world, a parallel universe to the natural environment that I love.  I’ve come to realize that I don’t need to choose between these two worlds since the mobile device in my pocket untethers me from the computer on my desk or the laptop I used to lug around. My phone lets me take photos, make notes, email, take and make phone calls, check the weather, obtain driving directions, monitor school-level data, listen to recorded books, record classroom learning walks, text- message, micro-blog, and make reservations. I can, within reason, access and even produce information anywhere, at any time.  Our young people have figured all this out, but we adults in some cases are choosing to be left behind. Mobile devices may be the most powerful learning tool that we educators have the potential to develop and use to sustain engagement, move students to high levels of Bloom’s, keep kids connected with learning when they are away from school, and communicate with them in multiple ways. Currently, such devices are the least used in our teaching and learning tool belt.

This year, we are taking a page from @colonelb, superintendent of Godfrey-Lee Public Schools in Michigan. We are going one step further into the 21st century by opening our local network to students with personal devices just as Godfrey-Lee has done. We will be challenged. Our kids and adults may make some mistakes. We will need to invest more time in educating our educators, parents and community about the why, what, and how of opening up access. Some of our educators will want to continue a position of technology avoidance, minimizing the uncertainty of problems that might emerge as we bring more technology on line for learning. However, I am convinced if we don’t learn to lead and work from a position of amplified uncertainty (Wortham), the hyper-changes of the second decade of the 21st century will outpace our capability to educate our young people with the skills they need for community life, the workforce, or college.

We educators need to develop integrated expertise in content, pedagogy, and technology applications. The intersection of these knowledge domains, TPCK, illustrates the difference between a 20th century-style teacher who doesn’t use web 2.0 and other tech tools and a 21st century, tech-competent teacher who does. We need to look for those differences when we visit classrooms. The ISTE mobile app is available at any time as a reference for what we should expect administrators, teachers and students to know, understand and do to use technology in powerful ways as learning tools. All administrative leaders are issued iPhones in the district where I work. In August, they’ll all load the ISTE app during a back-to-school modified version of an “ed-camp” and work with teacher leaders and colleagues to deepen understanding about technology accelerators of learning and communication.

Becoming an educator with the contemporary knowledge and skills to influence and teach others is as essential an expectation of administrative leaders as it is for teachers. Our kids don’t wait around on someone to tell them to learn a new technology and neither should we. It’s why I push myself to use tools that are alien in my hands today. With time, these tools become more comfortable and accessible to me just as English becomes natural to our English language learners.  In taking on the use of technology for learning purposes, I allow myself the privilege of expecting the same from educators with whom I work, including baby-boomers of my generation

We mostly all began our careers as teachers. As administrative leaders we should “keep our feet in the trenches” and demonstrate that we are first lifelong learners, second teachers, and third administrators.  After all, why would we expect more from teacher-colleagues and young learners than from ourselves?



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An incredibly important speech on education by Diane Ravitch

July 8th, 2010 by teacherken View Comments »

That is a brief clip of Diane Ravitch addressing the Representative Assembly of the National Education Association on July 6, where she was receiving an award as the 2010 “Friend of Education.”

Please keep reading.

The complete text of Diane’s speech can be read here. She has given me permission to quote as much as I deem appropriate, including the whole speech if necessary.

I won’t do that. You can follow the link to read the entire text if so inclined.

Let me offer some selections to at least whet your appetite, as well as offer a bit of commentary of my own.

… in all of this time, aside from the right-wing think tanks, I haven’t seen met a single teacher who likes what’s happening? I haven’t met a single teacher who thinks that No Child Left Behind has been a success. I haven’t met a single teacher who thinks that Race to the Top is a good idea.

I remind readers that the Representative Assembly passed a resolution of no confidence in Race to the Top.

And as I talk to teachers, by the end of my talk, I hear the same questions again and again: What can we do? How can we stop the attacks on teachers and on the teaching profession? Why is the media demonizing unions? Why does the media constantly criticize public schools? And why does it lionize charter schools? Why is Arne Duncan campaigning with Newt Gingrich? Why has the Obama Administration built its education agenda on the punitive failed strategies of No Child Left Behind?

Newt Gingrich -- now there’s a great ally for a supposedly progressive administration, eh? And during the campaign, Obama railed against NCLB, yet too much of the administration policy continues to rely on the failed policies of that approach.

I will continue to speak out against high-stakes testing. It undermines education. High-stakes testing promotes cheating, gaming the system, teaching to bad tests, narrowing the curriculum. High-stakes testing means less time for the arts, less time for history or geography or civics or foreign languages or science.

We see schools across America dropping physical education. We see them dropping music. We see them dropping their arts programs, their science programs, all in pursuit of higher test scores. This is not good education.

I have been told by some people in the Obama Administration that the way to stop the narrowing of the curriculum is to test everything. In fact, the chancellor in Washington, D.C., the other day announced she plans to do exactly that. That means less time for instruction, more time for testing, and a worse education for everyone.

Some of us have worried about this trend for years -- I remember a group of elementary school art teachers asking their state for a test on art so their classes would not be eliminated. As it happens, my course is one in which there is a test that has high stakes -- students in theory must not only pass a government course but also a state test in government in order to graduate from high school (although the latter requirement has some loopholes). Let me say that for too many students their course in government gets reduced, especially in the Spring as the test approaches, to drill and kill, practice for the test. For a subject that should excite them, because it has direct affect on their lives, they get bored and frustrated.

In speaking out, I have consistently warned about the riskiness of school choice. Its benefits are vastly overstated. It undercuts public education by enabling charter schools to skim the best students in poor communities. As our society pursues these policies, we will develop a bifurcated system, one for the haves, another for the have-nots, and politicians have the nerve to boast about such an outcome.

Public schools, as I said before, are a cornerstone of our democratic society. If we chip away at support for them, we erode communal responsibility for a vital public institution.

Bifurcated -- even worse than what we have by geography, where wealthy communities have excellent public schools rich in resources and the students have access to all kinds of elective courses, and poor communities, whether in inner cities, inner rings of suburbs or the hinterlands, lacking equipment, with decaying buildings, and overwhelmed with students arriving st school with less background and current problems.

democratic society -- if we really believe in it, economics would not be the sole basis on which we make arguments about our schools.

Last year, a major evaluation showed that one out of every six charters will get better results, five out of six charters will get no different results or worse results than the regular public schools. A report released just a couple of weeks ago by Mathematica Policy Research once again shows charter middle schools do not get better results than regular public middle schools.

Unfortunately, the general media coverage of the Mathematica report was badly flawed, focused on the schools that did ‘better’ while not including any of the caveats about even these schools. Charters COULD be used to offer alternative ways of teaching/learning to specific groups of students. Diane’s next two paragraphs are very important:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, on whose board I served for seven years, has tested charter schools since 2003. In 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009, charter schools were compared to regular public schools and have never shown an advantage over regular public schools. Charter schools, contrary to Bill Gates, are not more innovative than regular public schools. The business model and methods of charter schools is this — longer school days, longer hours, longer weeks, and about 95 percent of charter schools are non-union.

Teachers are hired and fired at will. Teachers work 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They are expected to burn out after two or three years when they can be replaced. No pension worries, no high salaries. This is not a template for American education.

NAEP is the national report card on education. It is considered the gold standard of educational evaluation. It does not show that charters do better. One reason why some “reformers” like charters is that in many states they are a way around unions, and their teachers can be fired at will.

Let me skip down a bit:

And perhaps we should begin demanding that school districts be held accountable for providing the resources that schools need. Just like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top requires and pressures districts to close low-performing schools. The overwhelming majority of low-performing schools enroll students in poverty and students who don’t speak English and students who are homeless and transient. Very often, these schools have heroic staffs who are working with society’s neediest children. These teachers deserve praise, not pink slips. Closing schools weakens communities. It’s not a good idea to weaken communities. No school was ever improved by closing it.

Reread that please. Yes, you will read stories that supposedly focus on “high-performing” schools dealing with such students. In some cases the claims for high performance are based on selective use of data. In most cases the schools on which such focus is made get more resources (as do many charters), have longer days, etc. The “success” is claimed on the basis of test scores. What is not yet offered is any evidence that there are long-term gains in learning: that the students are developing skills and knowledge that they can apply outside of the test environment. Meanwhile we reconstitute schools. We use one of the four models approved by this administration, even though NONE has any research to demonstrate that they improve education.

There are passages about the right to unionize, which Diane supports, but which “reformers” oppose. Read this paragraph, and perhaps you will understand two things, (1) why teachers are reacting so positively towards Diane; and (2) why we feel unfairly besieged, that the playing field is tilted:

I have spoken out repeatedly to defend the right of teachers to join unions for their protection and the protection of the teaching profession. Teachers have a right to a collective voice in the political process. It’s the American way. I don’t see the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post or the pundits complaining about the charter school lobby. I don’t see them complaining about the investment bankers lobby, or any other group that speaks on behalf of its members. Only teachers’ unions are demonized these days.

Teachers, and those who support them, ARE being demonized. By constrast, Hedge Fund managers (who are making major investments in things like charter schools for tax benefits) and Wall Street Firms (who came close to destroying the economy of this nation and the international community) get bailed out with our tax dollars, continue to pay bonuses, and spend millions to prevent appropriate oversight and regulation. Then they want to have a voice telling us how we should teach, how our schools should be run.

There is so much of value in the speech. By now I hope I have at least convinced you to take the time to read the entire thing.

Let me offer only a few more snippets, skipping over some very important material:

Around the world, those nations that are successful recognize that the best way to improve school is to improve the education profession. We need expert teachers, not a steady influx of novices.

One argument against Teach for America, for example. Now if those in that program actually stayed in teaching, people like Ravitch and me would have far fewer objections. The constant turnover in the schools in which they serve is unfair to those kids. The program benefits many in the TFA corps, and it certainly benefits TFA. It is not clear that the students are getting all that much benefit, and the model is not something that can really address the needs of the millions of students in inner city and rural schools.

The current so-called reform movement is pushing bad ideas. No high-performing nation in the world is privatizing its schools, closing its schools, and inflicting high-stakes testing on every subject on its children. The current reform movement wants to end tenure and seniority, to weaken the teaching profession, to silence teachers’ unions, to privatize large sectors of public education. Don’t let it happen.

The consequences of letting these “reforms” go forward unchallenged will be great damages far beyond the arena of public education. It will be further destruction of what is left of the union movement in this country. It will be increased privatization of what is left of the commons in this country/ It will be a narrowing of opportunity for too many of our young people. It will diminish us as a people as our young people receive narrower and narrower educations.

Diane urges those listening to her to be politically active, to remind people that there are millions of teachers, we vote, and so do our families, to not support anyone who is an opponent of public education.

Stand up to the attacks on public education. Don’t give them half a loaf, because they will be back the next day for another slice, and the day after that for another slice.

Don’t compromise. Stand up for teachers. Stand up public education, and say “No mas, no mas.” Thank you.

Diane Ravitch received a rousing ovation for this speech. As a teacher, as a UNIONIZED teacher in a public school, I understand why.

I thought it important that as many people as possible encounter HER words, not just cursory news accounts. I think it important that voices that speak for teachers and for public schools be given as much of an audience as those who have described themselves as ‘reformers’ and seek to suppress or denigrate any opposing point of view.

That is why I asked Diane, a friend, if I could quote extensively. That is why Diane told me “You are free to cite or quote whatever you wish.”

Thanks for reading.

Please pass on the link for her speech.

Peace.

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July 5 2010: Edu-Retrospective on Independence Day

July 6th, 2010 by Pam Moran View Comments »

July 5. 2010. It is the day after Independence Day.  I am reminded of the film starring Will Smith in which aliens fly monster spaceships over major cities to colonize Earth. I would not have even thought of the movie if I hadn’t been thinking that our nation’s notion of Independence Day seems to be more about what we do to entertain rather than educate ourselves.

July 4. 2010. 6:00 p.m. I go to a hometown celebration of Independence Day with the simple goal of connecting with family and community members from a long time past.  Some might say this annual celebration has the makings of the best of current day America’s annual birthday party – country music, beach music, gospel music, civic booths with every 4th of  July “fast food” delicacy that a heart can desire or ill afford, and spontaneous line dancing by friends, relatives and acquaintances from all sides of the tracks. The crowd on the baseball field settles into lawn chairs, bracing their backs with umbrellas against the languor of a Deep South settling sun.  A toddler in her sundress of red, white, and blue twirls in front of the stage, mirroring what appeared to be requisite clothing of the senior citizens, tee-shirted, capped, and swathed in red, white, and blue.  Nearby, folks of different hues stand and chat about the weather, the gosh-awful oil mess in the Gulf, and the cost of fireworks that are expected to last longer than ever before- despite the tough economy of one of the poorest counties in the state.

July 4. 2010. 9:15 p.m. I wait with this former community of mine, along with Americans across the country, in big cities and small towns, farm fields and parklands. Twilight slips into night, and we all anticipate the first burst of flaring color to wrap us in a patriotic moment in time. The explosives begin to the accompaniment of America’s music-  “1812 Overture”, “the Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “America the Beautiful”, “This Land is Your Land”, “God Bless the USA”,  “Rockin’ in the Free World.”  Generations gather together to honor an assembly of radical thinkers who believed it was the colonies’ time to declare for freedom from tyranny, from unjust rule, from a king who believed he ruled because of divine power, rather than rule derived from the will of the people.  But, there’s one problem. The boom of fireworks and the cheers that accompany each spray of color drown out the words of the Declaration, the words of the music.

I sit in my lounge chair and watch the faces and cameras upturned to capture the fireworks moment. I wonder about the question I asked my son two years ago as part of a July 4 post, “After all the years of learning U.S. history-the textbooks you’ve read, the lectures you’ve heard, the six state-required multiple choice tests on Virginia history, U.S, History I and II, Civics, AP History, and U.S. Government, what’s freedom really mean to you?”  His reply? “Actually, it became most real last semester in Spain-you know, you can’t even publish a cartoon critical of the monarchy there.  Insulting the king is illegal.”

July 5.2010.9:15 p.m. Despite our teaching generations about how “We the People” came to be, I wonder the degree to which we suffer from the phenomenon of “I taught it, but they didn’t learn it.”  How many of the people sitting here tonight actually understand why the Boston Tea Party occurred and how that first Tea Party differs from the tea party movement in the news today?  Why did Texas legislators miss the intense and brilliant philosophical debates of our founding fathers that set the stage for Thomas Jefferson to craft the Declaration of Independence and espouse religious liberty as one of many freedoms? Why did Jefferson espouse freedom from “kings, nobles, and priests”? (Jefferson, 1786, August 13 to George Wythe) Why can’t generations of citizens identify Great Britain (Curriculum Matters, EdWeek) as the nation from whom we declared our independence?  How did we become disconnected from the idea that the United States of America was created by immigrants and the children of immigrants; many of whom came here voluntarily as well as some who did not? Why did knowledge that successive waves of people from all walks of life journeyed to our shores, seeking freedom and fortune, get lost in the resentments of nativists such as those who once resented nineteenth century Irish immigrants (NYC Tenement Museum)?

Jefferson understood the power of an educated populace. I suspect he would welcome our young women and children of color into our schools today despite his unfortunate and limiting prejudices of the time. I imagine he would advocate for new learning technologies while asserting the importance of knowledge in all disciplines, including languages, science, history, mathematics, literature and the arts. I believe he would be appalled to think that the general populace could not describe the basic tenets of freedom outlined by the founding fathers who received the main credit for conceiving our independence in conjunction with a few founding mothers who did not.

Images of the dancing toddler and friends and neighbors chatting capture the best of communities gathered to celebrate with each other; a ritual that began with the earliest of tribes.  However, I also am left with a sense that the occasion of this nation’s birthday gets lost amidst beach vacations, July 4th sales events, and our beloved fireworks displays. How many of us take the time each year to read or listen to our Declaration of Independence – and reflect deeply upon the self evident truths and ‘unalienable’ rights which we oft take for granted.

I have learned in life that that to go to school is not the same as to be educated.  Mr. Jefferson knew that a foundation of public education was essential to our continued independence and freedom. Freedom is an expression of the concept of ‘unalienable’ rights and Independence Day is not a movie full of aliens.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

T. Jefferson to Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816.

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Lives well lived, as well as facts well learned

June 28th, 2010 by chadsansing View Comments »

Submitted here on Monday, June 28th, 2010, in response to this and this.

Dear Governor McDonnell,

I write to urge you to spend an equal amount of political capital on establishing new charter schools in Virginia as you do on attracting national charter operators to the state. Organizations like KIPP offer college-prep curriculums augmented by extra time and stringent expectations of student compliance with rules. However, they do not in and of themselves offer models of project-based learning and student-centered pedagogies that better develop students’ collaborative and problem-solving skills – skills students will need to lead their own communities, businesses, and service organizations.

Consider Microsoft’s Educational Competencies, or compare the Top 10 Reasons to Work at Google with KIPP’s Five Pillars. We have schools like KIPP that reflect strict adherence to traditional instruction; do we have school’s that reflect the cultures of our world’s information-age pioneers? How do we develop those schools?

We develop them by taking advantage of Virginia’s relative inexperience with the national charter movement to innovate truly new types of schools. As state and local school boards partner with national charter operators that focus on replicating traditional notions of college preparedness, we should develop in parallel charter schools that research, develop, and share-out innovative cultures, communities, and practices – practices that allow students to discover new learning while still enrolled in public schools. Imagine schools that allow students to contribute to their communities, not just to graduate from them. Imagine schools that empower students to teach adults, not just to follow them. Imagine schools that inspire students to create and discover, not just to accept and cover.

As you search for viable models of charter education in Virginia, please look to programs like the Maine Farm Enterprise School, the New Country School and our own Blue Ridge Virtual Governor’s School for models of assessment, community, curriculum, and instruction that take students’ learning outside the classroom.

Virginia communities have wants and needs addressed by programs like KIPP. Be certain, though, that our children need more than academic preparedness to lead joyful, fulfilling lives of service to their communities, state, nation, and world. To serve others students must feel strong enough themselves to seek out new solutions to the problems with which we’ll leave them. We need schools that help students realize their potentials as artists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, leaders, volunteers, and visionaries – schools that don’t accept the limits of a college-prep curriculum – however effectively delivered – as the limits of teaching and learning. We need schools that look for the results of lives well lived, as well as the results of facts well learned.

Please use your political capital to lift up children and new models of education that serve them and their communities through innovative, project- and community-based learning and new assessment measures that accurately capture the results of this work. Please help Secretary Robinson to continue his efforts to do the same. It was wonderful to visit with him at my school, the Community Public Charter School, in Albemarle County. I enthusiastically invite you both to visit my classroom and to join with me in talking with Virginia’s students, parents, and educators about why we educate our children, as well as about how we can educate our children better.

Sincerely,

Chad Sansing, NBCT

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Learning On Other People’s Kids – an important book on Teach for America

June 19th, 2010 by teacherken View Comments »

I wondered, “Whose America is Teach For America really teaching for? Why is it tolerable for education to be less-thanfor other people’s kids? And, what are we, as a nation, really prepared to do about it?

Those are the concluding words of Barbara Torre Veltri in her book Learning on Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher

In just over two two decades since Wendy Kopp founded Teach For America as a result of her senior thesis at Princeton, the organization has become an influential player in education and politics in the United States. According to its website, for the past school year it had 7,300 corps members teaching 450,000 students. It regularly gets glowing press coverage from general media. Admission to its corps from selective colleges has become increasingly competitive. Yet what Teach For America is and does has been poorly understood.

Barbara Torre Veltri provides what may be the single most important examination of TFA I have encountered, and I hope you will continue reading as I explore the book and explain why I make that statement.

Veltri is herself a long-term educator, now a university-based educator of teachers. She began her own teaching career under emergency certification: like the members of TFA corps, that means she was NOT a fully certified teacher at the time she entered her classroom. Further, in her capacity as a university based trainer of teachers, she had a multiple year association with Teach For America: she was associated with one of the universities that serves as a site for the 5 week Institutes that represent the entirety of the training of Corp members before they get their own classroom, and she served as a resource for Corps members and TFA staff as the participants continued to learn how to teach even as they were already class-room based. The book is thus enriched not only with her insight into the experiences with which she was associated, but she had access to a large number of current and former Corps members and the people in school districts in which she was placed. Veltri is also a thorough researcher, having examined and absorbed much of the relevant literature.

As should be clear from how I began, Veltri now raises serious questions about our reliance upon Teach For America. That does not mean she is necessarily opposed to alternative programs to recruit and train teachers for hard to staff schools in inner cities and rural areas: in her Acknowledgments she refers to Jumpstart of Manhattanville College, whose model “includes 6 months of coursework, practicum, and mentoring, prior to placement of career-changers into New York Schools.” By comparison, TFA Corp members get a 5 week institute. The difference can perhaps be reflected best in retention statistics – as of the writing of the book, 85% of those who completed Jumpstart remained in the classroom (these are 9 year figures(, whereas the vast majority of TFA leave the classroom upon completion of their two year commitments, taking advantage of the benefits offered by graduate and professional schools towards former TFAers, and includes a stipend from AmeriCorps equal to $5,000/year for use against any past or future educational expense. Remember (1) this is paid for by our taxes, and (2) TFAers qualify for this regardless of any financial need.

And while I am on the financial aspects about which you will learn in this book, let me also note the following. TFA requires that their Corp members be paid the same as would certified teachers in the same positions EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE NOT THEMSELVES CERTIFIED. Further, the contracts with school districts require a payment to TFA of several thousand dollars additional for each Corps Members, thus effectively making a TFA placement MORE EXPENSIVE than hiring others to teach, whether fully certified or – like TFAers – provisionally certified.

And there are the costs associated with the constant turnover of teaching faculty. On p. 168 Veltri cites a study that says the costs of teachers leaving the classroom range from $4,366 and $17,872 for each teacher leaving this classroom. There is further non-financial impact in the negative effect upon learning that is clearly documented across the professional literature in schools lacking a constant teaching faculty.

The real value of the book comes less from the statistics and studies which Veltri cites, but from the words and experiences of those who themselves were participants in TFA, with whom Veltri built a sufficient relationship of trust that they were willing to be quite candid with her. While most had little intention of staying the classroom permanently, they were drawn to this service because they wanted to make a difference, even if they were also drawn by the long-term benefits they believed would accrue to them after completing their two years. Many felt unprepared for what they were encountering in the classroom. They desperately needed experienced mentors, but TFA’s support was largely limited to former TFAers, and they were on their own in finding support within their schools. They acknowledged their lack of relevant background on which to draw, and how overburdened they felt. Let me offer a few examples to illustrate this:

I tend to go over my lesson plan time. How do you fix that? (Cortina)

“My students need experienced teachers who know what works and can implement it effectively. Instead, they have me, and though I am learning quickly, I am still learning on them, experimenting on them, working on their time.” (Marguerite)

I mean, in a lot of was, how I am teaching right now is what I remember doing in high school. It’s what makes sense to me. It’s a kind of … prior knowledge. I guess it is just that. (Ali)

… And, part of the problem is, I just never know exactly if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing and that creates a lot of stress. (Kyle)

That stress is increased by the requirement of completing 15 credit hours during their rookie year, because of their emergency certification status:

What does TFA want me to do? Attend UPenn classes four nights in a row, grade my student papers, and prepare for teaching, or listen to them? I’m done with it! (Curtis)

Let me comment briefly on the requirement for 15 credit hours. When I began my doctoral studies while in my 2nd year at my current school, I needed special permission to take 9 credit hours, because our system believes taking on anything more than 6 credit hours at time jeopardizes one’ effectiveness as a teacher. I already had 4 years of teaching experience, one of which was in the school with the same preps as I would have while attending graduate school. I have seen beginning teachers with emergency or provisional credentials struggle to balance the demands of the classes they teach and those they attend, even with 6 hours and MORE PREPARATION than the 5 weeks offered in TFA institutes.

Another key value of the Veltri book is that she explores serious questions. If I may quote from her website, the book is organized around key questions:

Previously unanswered questions are addressed: Why do intelligent college graduates apply to Teach For America? How are they recruited, trained, and hired? How do they learn the culture(s) of the community, schools, grade level, and curriculum? Is there a “culture” of the TFA organization? Do TFAers see themselves as effective teachers? What recommendations do corps members offer to TFA, its’ donors, policy-makers, future corps members and the public?

It has three main parts, of which the final, as Veltri puts it,

presents TFAers’ views on their corps teaching experience, analyzes the “master narrative” as it relates to the education of poor children, and raises questions for readers to contemplate.

One real issue for many beginning teachers is managing the classroom, for if students are not on task learning is less likely to occur. Allow me to quote what Veltri says on this topic, on p. 111:

Classroom management proved to be one of the top three needs of first year TFAers over seven consecutive cohorts whose classrooms I visited in both the middle Atlantic and Sothwest regions.

One question some often ask is if the TFA approach is effective. The organization likes to claim that its members are more effective teachers (as measured by test scores) than others in the same setting. Perhaps in this regard it is worth noting a new policy brief, Teach For America: A False Promise, produced by the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy
Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University with funding from the
Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. The subtitle is Alternative teacher training program yields costly turnover while doing little to improve student achievement. Allow me to quote two paragraphs to illustrate why the TFA claims, while somewhat accurate, are deceptive:

Studies show that TFA teachers perform fairly well when compared with one segment of the teaching population: other teachers in the same hard-to-staff schools, who are less likely to be certified or traditionally prepared. Compared with that specific group of teachers, TFA teachers “perform comparably in raising reading scores and a bit better in raising math scores,” the brief’s authors write.

Conversely, studies which compare TFA teachers with credentialed non-TFA
teachers find that “the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of credentialed beginning teachers,” Heilig and Jez write. And in a large-scale Houston study, in which the researchers controlled for experience and teachers’ certification status, standard certified teachers consistently outperformed uncertified TFA teachers of comparable experience levels in similar settings.

The study goes on to note that the majority of TFAers leave at the end of two years, with over 80% being out of the classroom after three. Some of the claims for evidence of better performance are based on the less than 1 in five who stay, who have become fully certified.

I entered teaching through a traditional Master of Arts in Teaching program. I had 16 weeks of practice teaching under the supervision of experienced teachers, 8 each in middle and high school. I had received formal training in pedagogy, both general and related to my content area (social studies). Before my student teaching I had multiple occasions in which I observed experienced teachers in a variety of settings. I was trained in the legal requirements of special education students. I was given training and education in teaching students whose culture and background might be very different than my own. I was an honors graduate of an elite college (Haverford), in other words, the kind of candidate sought by Teach For America. I had previous teaching experience to adults in business, and years before in a private secondary school. And when I got my own classroom in 1995 I was 49 years old. Still, it was not an easy task, although now having completed my 15th year I am generally considered an excellent and effective teacher.

I have a certain antipathy towards the TFA approach, because I believe it is unfair to the students and schools in which TFAers serve. I refuse to accept the framing that implies a TFA teacher is better than currently available alternatives. The correct answer to the need is to provide properly trained teachers who are committed to students and the profession. I do not think we do our students justice when they are viewed as a part of getting one’s ticket stamped for something else in life, and the opportunity to have claimed to have been of service.

I also think the resources dedicated to Teach for America might be better spent on preparing regular teachers. Veltri provides a table using data from TFA, showing that in 2006-06 the 4,700 corps members were served with an operating budget of $39,500,000, while for 2009-10 the projected figures were 7,300 corps members with an operating budget of $160,000,000. Let’s put those numbers on a per capita basis. In 2005-06 the cost per corps member was 8,400, while in 2009-10 it had ballooned to $21,917, or more than half what most teachers in this country make in their first year. I question whether that is money well spent.

Veltri raises other pertinent questions as well. She notes that to be a cosmetologist requires 9 months of training for licensure in her state, and wonders why those to whom we entrust the education of our young people should have only a 5 week institute that does not connect with the real world of the classrooms to which the TFAers will go. As Veltri writes on p. 196

When teacher training is compressed like a microwaveable meal and field experience is deemed unnecessary or a waste of time by those in public policy positions, a message is sent that “other people’s kids” are able to withstand someone learning how to teach on them.

Teach For America and its alumni are highly visible. It serves as a 501c3 organization favored by corporations. Its graduates are highly sought after in business and law schools. It garners glowing media coverage. It is now expanding its reach to other nations around the world.

And yet, the question should remain: does Teach For America truly serve the needs of those it claims it is helping? Does it even fairly serve the needs of its Corp members while they participate in TFA? I would argue that it does not. And had I any doubt before, what I read in Veltri’s book would have convinced me.

If you care about education policy, I strongly urge you to read and digest this book. It will provide you with information relevant to those who are considering associating with TFA as a source of obtaining teaching staff.

Please note – I fully understand the desire to be of service, even if only temporarily. After all, that is the motivation for the many who have entered the Peace Corps, an organization I admire in many ways and for which I was selected but was unable to accept the offer. I am not necessarily criticizing those who apply, although I think they are misguided.

Perhaps you are not yet convinced. I suggest that if you read Veltri you will be.

Which is why I again urge you to read her book.

Peace.

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