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New standards require new ways to train teachers

February 5, 2012 By 4 Comments

Teachers aren’t prepared to teach the new Common Core Standards, writes Stephanie Hirsch of Leaning Forward in Ed Week.

Because the common core focuses on the application of knowledge in authentic situations, teachers will need to employ instructional strategies that integrate critical and creative thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, research and inquiry, and presentation and demonstration skills. They will need subject-area expertise well beyond basic content knowledge and pedagogy to create dynamic, engaging, high-level learning experiences for students. They will need greater data literacy as we shift from current accountability systems to more granular ways of assessing student learning. And, their leaders will need to champion professional learning in their buildings and back the teachers who coach and support each other.

The traditional “spray and pray” method of professional development doesn’t work, Hirsch writes. What would?

Why not let teachers teach teachers?, asks Nancy Flanagan of Teacher in a Strange Land. “Professional Development assumes that someone knows better than a teacher” what teachers need to know.

. . .  teachers aren’t considered true professionals–and policy is leading us further away from a professional work model. We’re still talking about “training” teachers, rather than drawing on their wisdom.

Finally–probably the most significant reason–professional development is an education market. What would happen if teacher development happened internally, entirely site-based and tailored to particular schools and populations? It would require demonstrated, deep teacher expertise in instruction and curricular issues. Which could shift the balance of power. And it would cost very little.

The GE Foundation is giving $18 million to Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit which is working with teachers to develop an online library of resources for teaching the new standards at achievethecore.org.

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Teachers Matter

January 31, 2012 By 5 Comments

Teachers Matter: Rethinking How Public Schools Identify, Reward and Retain Great Educators is a new book by Marcus Winters.

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Duncan: Pay great teachers $150,000

January 27, 2012 By 13 Comments

A “great teacher” should make up to $150,000 a year, said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show.

“I think young teachers — we should double salaries. A starting teacher should make $60-$65,000 [a year]. A great teacher should be able to make $130, $140-$150,000 [a year]. Pick a number. We have beaten down educators. We have to elevate the profession. We have to strengthen the profession. We have to reward excellence. Great teachers, great principals make a huge difference in our nation’s children. We have to invest in them and yes, need to reward excellence, particularly when great teachers are taking on tough assignments and inner-city schools in rural or remote areas, areas that of critical need like math and science — we have to get much more creative than we have in the past.”

Duncan wants higher base pay and performance pay.

“We” doesn’t include the U.S. Education Department, by the way.  State and local taxpayers foot the bill for teacher salaries.

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Movin’ and improvin’

January 25, 2012 By

Teacher-effectiveness data should be used to help teachers improve, not just to fire incompetents, argues Movin’ It and Improvin’ It! by Craig Jerald, an education policy consultant, on the the Center for American Progress site.

. . . districts are missing an opportunity to … help leverage their highest performers and help teachers with strong potential grow into solid contributors.

The  “movin’ it” strategy uses “selective recruitment, retention, and ‘deselection’ to attract and keep teachers with higher effectiveness while removing teachers with lower effectiveness.

In contrast, “improvin’ it” policies treat teachers’ effectiveness as a mutable trait that can be improved with time. When reformers talk about providing all teachers with useful feedback following classroom observations or using the results of evaluation to individualize professional development for teachers, they are referring to “improvin’ it” strategies. If enough teachers improved their effectiveness, then the accumulated gains would boost the average effectiveness in the workforce.

Smart districts will do both, Jerald argues.

Professional development rarely improves teaching effectiveness and student learning, research shows. “The nation’s school systems spend billions of dollars annually on wasteful and ineffective professional development,” Jerald writes. Yet some forms of training have shown “substantial improvements in teaching and learning” in the last two years.

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Brown: New teachers need apprenticeship

January 24, 2012 By

Ed Week‘s Teaching Ahead asks young teachers how teacher preparation should be changed. Several teachers who started after a crash course in teaching over the summer say they needed much more time to learn the job, though a graduate of teachers’ education also says she wasn’t prepared for classroom realities.

Time to Practice Is a Need, Not a Luxury, writes Dan Brown, who taught fourth grade for a chaotic year in the Bronx with alternative certification and eventually earned a master’s degree in education.

Looking back, my ignorance was staggering. I had bought—with the help of my alternative-certification program designed to plug chronic staffing shortages—the most insidious myth about teaching: anybody smart and dedicated can swoop in and rock it.

. . . The most important baseline that preparation programs must provide incoming teachers is substantial time in a variety of classrooms before those rookies assume the reins. An entire school year of structured observation and apprentice-teaching must be standard.

Brown’s book on his first year of teaching, The Great Expectations School, provides a vivid picture of the challenging students, colleagues and administrators. Brown provides a lot of specifics on his teaching. I’d have loved more on how the school was staffed:  The school seemed to have more administrators and other staffers than classroom teachers. Brown got more feedback on the quality of the classroom bulletin board than he did on how to manage students or teach.

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Bloomberg’s $20,000 teacher bonus

January 23, 2012 By

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposes a $20,000 salary increase for teachers rated highly effective two years in a row, reports the New York Post.

If they ever get to vote, city teachers would approve merit pay even if their union opposes it, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

“Will the teachers union stand in the way of their most effective members being rewarded for all of their work?” Bloomberg asked during his speech before the US Conference of Mayors in Washington.

Washington, D.C. teachers rated “highly effective” are eligible for annual bonuses of $2,400 to $25,000 a year.

Merit pay doesn’t work, responded Mike Mulgrew, president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers.

Arthur Goldstein, who teaches English to immigrant students at Francis Lewis High School, says no to Bloomberg’s bonus in the New York Daily News.

The bonuses will reward teachers who teach to the test and never challenge their principals, Goldstein argues.

Whatever happens, teachers like me — who advocate for kids, who have no qualms about making the odd phone call to an education reporter, who care about honest education more than test prep — are never going to get merit pay.

. . . We are role models. We inspire kids. We teach them to speak out, stand up, to express themselves. That will be particularly tough if we’re all placing knives in one another’s backs chasing bonuses.

We are not wait staff, and I know of not one teacher who got into this to work for tips. More importantly, I refuse to believe that teachers who don’t get merit pay are without merit. If, in fact, we do not have merit, we should never have been hired in the first place.

Margaret Coppolo, a middle school teacher in Manhattan, thinks the $20,000 offer is “worth seriously considering,” if the city can work out a fair way to evaluate teachers’ effectiveness.

We need to keep our best teachers in our most struggling schools and compensate them for their dedication.

The merit pay “efforts that have failed either didn’t offer a compelling enough incentive or linked bonuses to school-wide results and not individual performance,” writes Coppolo.

In Washington, on the other hand, where significant raises are tied to an individual teacher’s effectiveness, early results show improvement in teacher retention and achievement.

In my newspaper days, I was a member of the union, the Newspaper Guild. We received higher pay for up to six year of experience. After that, experience didn’t matter. We got small bonuses for working a swing or night shift and for certain jobs, such as copy editing or editorial writing. Beyond that, an individual could try to negotiate merit pay, known as overscale, with his or her boss. I never thought of merit pay as a tip. It was a recognition of the value I added to the newspaper.

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Parents should pick their kids’ teachers

January 23, 2012 By

Parents should be allowed to pick their kids’ teachers, writes Andrew Rotherham in Time. It’s not enough to pick a high-scoring school, he writes.

Other parents are usually quick to share their perspectives and experiences. Pay close attention to what families with older siblings do with their younger ones — what teachers do they insist on or avoid? You can also ask to drop in and observe a lesson or two. You don’t need to be an expert to get a sense of whether a classroom is a place where there is learning going on and where you’d want your child to spend a lot of time. If you’re not crazy about your kid’s teacher, ask to observe another.

Don’t be shy about telling school officials well in advance of class assignments if you have a strong preference or concerns — there’s no guarantee they will accommodate you, but at the same time, they won’t even think about reassigning your kid to a different teacher unless you push for it. And squeaky wheels do get the grease.

Of course, if all parents investigate teachers’ reputations and request whoever’s considered best, this doesn’t work.

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Teachers matter — now what?

January 22, 2012 By

Teachers Matter. Now What?, writes Dana Goldstein in The Nation, citing the Chetty study on the long-term effects of high value-added teachers.

Given the widespread, non-ideological worries about the reliability of standardized test scores when they are used in high-stakes ways, it makes good sense for reform-minded teachers’ unions to embrace value-added as one measure of teacher effectiveness, while simultaneously pushing for teachers’ rights to a fair-minded appeals process.

What’s more, just because we know that teachers with high value-added ratings are better for children, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we should pay such teachers more for good evaluation scores alone. Why not use value-added to help identify the most effective teachers, but then require these professionals to mentor their peers in order to earn higher pay?

That’s the sort of teacher “career ladder” that has been so successful in high-performing nations like South Korea and Finland, and that would guarantee that excellent teachers aren’t just reaching twenty-five students per year but are truly sharing their expertise in a way that transforms entire schools and districts.

Reformers have been advocating teacher career ladders for a long time. Why aren’t they used more widely?

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Pay teachers more — and less

January 19, 2012 By

Pay some teachers more and others less, writes Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic.

Not all teaching jobs are alike. In fact, one could say there’s no such thing as “a teacher” at all. There are math teachers and English teachers. There are fourth grade teachers and high school teachers. There are gym teachers and…well you get my point. But while it might seem obvious, it’s also important. Because as two new studies out this week highlight, some kinds of teachers may simply be more influential on students’ educations and lives than others. The way we evaluate and pay them should reflect that.

The first study, an NBER working paper on The Long Term Impacts of Teachers, concluded that students assigned to a high value-added teacher any time between third and eighth grade were “more likely to go to college, were less likely to have children as teens, and made more money as adults” than their peers.

Good English teachers actually had a greater long-term impact on their students’ lives than talented math teachers. But they were also rarer. On the whole, math teachers were just more capable of raising their students’ test scores.

A second study, also an NBER working paper,  Do High-School Teachers Really Matter? concluded “only sometimes.”

Looking at data from schools in North Carolina, Northwestern Professor C. Kirabo Jackson found clear evidence that high school algebra teachers were able to regularly lift their students’ test scores. When it came to English teachers, though, the proof wasn’t there. Meanwhile, good high school teachers’ saw the amount of improvement in their students’ test scores vary much more from year to year than top elementary school teachers.When I spoke with Jackson, he said there were any number of explanations for his findings. Perhaps chief among them: English is considered a harder topic to “move the needle on,” especially in high school. Students learn language inside and outside the classroom.

“Performance bonuses might be more effective for math teachers, who are more likely to see results from their teaching, than English teachers, who might be facing an impossible task,” Weissmann writes. Or perhaps good English teachers should be paid more, because their job is so difficult.

Performance-pay schemes designed for elementary teachers, who have a decent chance at improving their students’ scores, may not be a fair way to evaluate high school English teachers, he adds.

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The value-added debate

January 17, 2012 By

Can a few years’ data reveal bad teachers? The New York Times‘ Room for Debate takes on value-added analysis.

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