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Teacher turnover hurts achievement

March 23, 2012 By

Teacher turnover hurts student achievement, concludes a study presented at a Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research conference, reports Teacher Beat.

Less-effective teachers are more likely to leave troubled schools, an earlier analysis found. But any benefits from losing the least-effective teachers are outweighed by having a staff in constant flux, the new research suggests.

• For each analysis, students taught by teachers in the same grade-level team in the same school did worse in years where turnover rates were higher, compared with years in which there was less teacher turnover.

• An increase in teacher turnover by 1 standard deviation corresponded with a decrease in math achievement of 2 percent of a standard deviation; students in grade levels with 100 percent turnover were especially affected, with lower test scores by anywhere from 6 percent to 10 percent of a standard deviation based on the content area.

The turnover effect was greater in schools with more low-achieving and black students, the study found.

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More nonfiction?

March 23, 2012 By

Should students read more nonfiction in school? Teachers discuss the issue in an Ed Week forum.

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Steel City blues

March 20, 2012 By

Pittsburgh recruited teachers who promised to stay for five years in exchange for training leading to a master’s degree.  Weeks before the start of school, the residency program was cancelled, writes Ed Sector’s Susan Headden in Steel City Blues.  Pittsburgh was laying off experienced teachers and couldn’t justify bringing in new teachers.

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Teaching reading: Who’s an expert?

March 19, 2012 By

Dive right into reading without much “pre-reading” prep. Ask students questions about the text, not about their personal experiences or feelings.  Education consultant David Coleman, architect of Common Core reading standards, wants instruction to stress close reading of complex texts, writes Kathleen Porter-Magee on Fordham’s Common Core Watch.

Reading strategies should not be taught as “an end unto themselves,” Coleman believes.

Reading strategies should work in the service of reading comprehension . . . and assist students in building knowledge and insight from specific texts. . . . Additionally, care should be taken that introducing broad themes and questions in advance of reading does not prompt overly general conversations rather than focusing reading on the specific ideas and details, drawing evidence from the text, and gleaning meaning and knowledge from it.

Coleman also advocates re-reading complex texts for deeper understanding.

To that end, Coleman suggests spending three days on the Gettysburg Address—a three paragraph speech. And he thinks Letter from a Birmingham Jail should take six days.

Frankly, that sounds boring.

Teachers reject Coleman’s ideas because he has no classroom teaching experience, notes Porter-Magee.  But perhaps an outsider is needed.

In fact, research suggests that a fresh perspective is exactly what’s needed to solve seemingly impossible problems. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlights growing evidence that “big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders,” not the conventional wisdom of the best and brightest in the field.

Did classroom teachers develop the current method of teaching reading? Or did it come from an earlier generation of experts?

Even more important, is Coleman right?

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Video on demand for teachers

March 14, 2012 By

TED, a nonprofit known for its annual ideas conference, will provide free video lessons of 10 minutes or less on TED-Ed, reports the Washington Post.

Imagine you’re a high school biology teacher searching for the most vivid way to explain electrical activity in the brain. How about inserting metal wires into a cockroach’s severed leg and making that leg dance to music?

Starting Monday, that eye-popping lesson, performed in a six-minute video by neuroscientist and engineer Greg Gage, is available free online.

“Right now there’s a teacher somewhere out there delivering a mind-altering lesson and the frustrating thing is, it only reaches the students in that class,” said TED-Ed project director Logan Smal­ley. “We’re trying to figure out how to capture that lesson and pair it with professional animators to make that lesson more vivid and put it in a place where teachers all over the world can share it.”

In contrast with many of the free lessons now available online, TED-Ed uses “sophisticated animation, professional editing and high-quality production values,” according to the Post.

Teachers also can find free lessons on YouTube Teachers, a new channel whose slogan is “spend more time teaching, less time searching.”

Here’s a clip of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

 

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Discipline stats: What’s fair?

March 12, 2012 By

Black students are suspended, expelled and arrested at higher rates than whites, concludes a new report by the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. ”The everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.

What About the Kids Who Behave? asks Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal. Though Duncan said the discipline statistics don’t prove discrimination, inevitably schools will be pressured to ease up on black kids who act up. That will be hard on their classmates, most of whom will be “students of color,” and their teachers.

The Obama administration’s sympathies are with the knuckleheads who are disrupting class, not with the kids who are trying to get an education. But is racial parity in disciplinary outcomes more important than school safety?

The report also found that high-minority high schools are half as likely to teach calculus as low-minority schools. That probably reflects fewer students who are prepared to take college-level math.

In addition, teachers in high-minority schools have less experience and therefore earn less. If these schools have more first- and second-year teachers — which I’d bet they do — that’s a real problem.

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Study: Some ‘alternate’ teachers do well

March 10, 2012 By

Florida’s alternatively certified teachers have better qualifications but vary in classroom effectiveness, concludes a study in Education Research reported by Ed Week‘s Teacher Beat.

Georgia State researcher Tim R.Sass compared the growth in test scores by students taught by teachers certified by community colleges’ Education Preparation Institute (EPI) option, by district-run alt-cert and by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE).  Then he added traditionally certified teachers.

Compared to graduates of Florida’s teacher colleges, alt-cert teachers “graduated on average from more competitive colleges, tended to pass the licensing tests on the first time, and had higher SAT scores.” They also had taken two additional science courses in college.

. . . The EPI completers tended to do worse than traditionally prepared teachers, or about 3 to 4 percent of a standard deviation lower. By contrast, the ABCTE teachers boosted math achievement on average by 6 to 11 percent of a standard deviation more than traditionally prepared teachers. They were only slightly better in reading, however.

District-certified teachers did about the same as traditionally trained teachers.

in a a 2009 study, ABCTE teachers performed worse in math, notes Teacher Beat, who adds that the sample sizes are small.

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Teachers are less satisfied

March 7, 2012 By

Teachers are less satisfied with their jobs, but parents are more engaged with their children’s schools, according to the new MetLife Survey of the American Teacher.

Teacher job satisfaction has fallen by 15 percentage points since 2009, the last time the MetLife survey queried teachers on this topic, from 59 percent to 44 percent responding they are very satisfied. This rapid decline in job satisfaction is coupled with a large increase in the number of teachers reporting that they are likely to leave teaching for another occupation (17 percent in 2009 vs. 29 percent today).

 

Not surprisingly, more teachers say their job is not secure. Two-thirds of teachers reported layoffs in their schools; three-quarters said there were budget cuts in the last year. Sixty-three percent said average class size has increased in their school.

Parent involvement has increased since it was first surveyed.  Sixty-four percent of students say they talk about things that happen at school with their parents every day, compared to 40 percent in 1988.

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Good teachers, low value-added scores

March 5, 2012 By

At a very high-achieving Brooklyn elementary school, the fifth-grade teachers posted low value-added scores, writes Michael Winerip in the New York Times. They’re a talented, hard-working group, says the principal. So what happened?

Though 89 percent of P.S. 146 fifth graders were rated proficient in math in 2009, the year before, as fourth graders, 97 percent were rated as proficient. This resulted in the worst thing that can happen to a teacher in America today: negative value was added.

The difference between 89 percent and 97 percent proficiency at P.S. 146 is the result of three children scoring a 2 out of 4 instead of a 3 out of 4.

. . . In New York City, fourth-grade test results can determine where a child will go to middle school. Fifth-grade scores have never mattered much, so teachers have been free to focus on project-based learning.

If Winerip’s theory is correct, all of New York City’s fifth-grade teachers should have low value-added scores. Or perhaps there’d be an effect only in schools with students who care about getting into a good middle school.

Update: Winerip provides an example of creative teaching:

Using the new curriculum, children work in groups to solve real-life problems. On Friday, each group spent an hour developing a system to calculate who ate more — eight students sharing seven submarine sandwiches; five students sharing four; or four sharing three. Each child developed his own solution, and the group decided which way was best.

. . . This week, students will advance from dividing sandwiches to comparing fractions with different denominators, to calculating least common denominators.

In another fifth-grade class, students have spent weeks writing research papers on the Mayans. Students might score higher, Winerip suggests, if they drilled on writing essays for tests: Write a topic sentence, three sentences that support the thesis with examples from literature, current events and personal experience and a concluding sentence.

I spent my entire high school career writing topic sentences supported by subtopic sentences supported by three “concrete and specific” details. And I wrote a report on the Mayans in sixth grade. Writing research papers and learning to support a thesis with examples are not incompatible.

If Winerip is correct about the numbers — if it’s possible for 89 percent of students to score proficient and the teachers to look like losers — then the value-added system is not reliable.

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LA union contract hinders abuse investigation

March 1, 2012 By

Investigating misconduct charges against Los Angeles teachers is complicated by a teachers’ union contract rule that purges allegations that don’t result in discipline from personnel files after four years, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The most explosive allegations involved former Miramonte Elementary School teacher Mark Berndt, who has pleaded not guilty to 23 counts of lewd conduct for allegedly photographing students blindfolded, gagged and being spoon-fed his semen. Several earlier investigations and complaints about his conduct — none of which ever resulted in criminal charges or discipline — were not in his record.

The contract states that after four years, “pre-disciplinary” documents filed about teachers are either destroyed or placed in an “expired file” at the campus. These can include an unproven allegation of serious misconduct, a warning or reprimand, a principal’s private notes about a potential problem or a memo that resulted from a meeting with a teacher over an issue.

Superintendent John Deasy has ordered school district staff to go back four years to look for teacher misconduct that should be reported to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

Deasy also wants principals to review all employee files — even the expired ones — going back decades, if necessary, to flag potential issues. Administrators are to alert law enforcement authorities of any past case that wasn’t reported. And if the response to a past allegation now appears questionable, principals are supposed to note that as well

However, much of the documentation has vanished. ”If there are separate, expired files at a school, as leadership changes, the knowledge of those files is going to disappear,” Randy Delling, the principal at North Hollywood High, told the Times.

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