Not Feelng the Love?

This from Morning Education (via email):

Teachers around the world report strong satisfaction with their jobs, but when it comes to feeling valued - well, that's a different story.

Fewer than one-third of U.S. teachers responding to the OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey said they felt society appreciated their contributions. By comparison, nearly 70 percent of teachers in Singapore and nearly 60 percent in Finland said society valued their work. (On the other end of the scale, just 5 percent of French teachers felt that way.) The TALIS survey was conducted in 2013; results were discussed at a recent webinar sponsored by the American Institutes for Research.

Among the other findings

Asian countries such as Japan and Korea put a strong emphasis on making time for teachers to observe other classes. In the U.S., by contrast, half of the middle- and high-school teachers surveyed said they never conducted such observations. The survey also found that U.S. educators spend more time actually teaching - about 55 percent of their work week - than most global peers.

Much closer to home, the 2015 TELL Survey underway in Kentucky.

This from KDE:

“We saw significant change in our schools, districts and at the state level as the result of the first two surveys,” said Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday. “As one example, our teachers said they didn’t have adequate or reliable Internet service to support their teaching. So we went to the legislature and asked for funding to support an upgrade in technology, which was included in the last budget. There’s power in the voices of nearly 50,000 teachers.”

Kentucky had an 87 percent response rate to the TELL Kentucky Survey in 2013;  state and local leaders are hoping for an even better response rate this year. The survey takes approximately 30 minutes to complete.

To encourage greater participation, the Kentucky Education Association, Kentucky Association of School Administrators, Kentucky School Boards Association, the Hope Street Group and the Fund for Transforming Education in Kentucky are contributing prize money for weekly drawings. Every school that reaches a 50 percent response rate will be entered into a drawing for a $1,000 cash award for the school. Schools that reach a 100 percent response rate will be entered into a drawing for a $1,000 cash award that will go to an individual educator. School-and district-completion rates are posted on the www.tellkentucky.org website in real time.

No public monies are being used in the drawings.

The TELL Kentucky Survey is administered by the New Teacher Center (NTC), a national non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the development of a high-quality teaching force. NTC has conducted similar surveys in other states.

Survey data collected from across the country since 2002 demonstrates three primary findings:

• Teacher working conditions are critical for increasing student achievement

• improving working conditions creates a more stable teaching force

• Considerable gaps exist between the perceptions of teachers and administrators regarding the presence of key working conditions.

NTC will aggregate and report results from the 2015 TELL Kentucky survey no later than June 1. These reports will be a compilation of educator responses to all questions and will be presented as bar charts and in Excel format for the school (if at least 50 percent of educators respond), district and state.

TELL Kentucky is conducted under the leadership of the Kentucky Department of Education and supported by a coalition of education organizations, all of whom believe that it is critically important to listen to educators' views when shaping school improvement strategies.