Pa. Teachers Agree to Work for Free

This from Teaching Now:

Teachers in Pennsylvania's Chester Upland School District have agreed to continue working even though the district can no longer afford to pay them, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Chester Upland has been in turmoil for some time. Last summer, the state passed massive budget cuts that forced the district to decrease its operating budget by $18 million, according to the Delaware County Daily Times. The district laid off 40 percent of its professional staff and half of its unionized support staff, states the Inquirer, and in some schools, class sizes now average more than 40 students. The acting superintendent, Levi Wingard, was laid off as well on Dec. 31. In a letter posted on the district's website, Wingard writes:

We now face a very challenging financial crisis. We are currently unable to fund the district's payroll expenses after January 4, 2012. However, I assure you that the members of the school board and the district administration are doing everything possible to identify a solution. We are working cooperatively with the labor unions, the Delaware County Superintendents, the Delaware County Intermediate Unit and the Pennsylvania Department of Education...

Do Teachers Really Come From The "Bottom Third" Of College Graduates?

This from the Shanker Blog:

The conventional wisdom among many education commentators is that U.S. public school teachers “come from the bottom third” of their classes. Most recently, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg took this talking point a step further, and asserted at a press conference last week that teachers are drawn from the bottom 20 percent of graduates.

All of this is supposed to imply that the U.S. has a serious problem with the “quality” of applicants to the profession.

Despite the ubiquity of the “bottom third” and similar arguments (which are sometimes phrased as massive generalizations, with no reference to actual proportions), it’s unclear how many of those who offer them know what specifically they refer to (e.g., GPA, SAT/ACT, college rank, etc.). This is especially important since so many of these measurable characteristics are not associated with future test-based effectiveness in the classroom, while those that are are only modestly so.

Still, given how often it is used, as well as the fact that it is always useful to understand and examine the characteristics of the teacher labor supply, it’s worth taking a quick look at where the “bottom third” claim comes from and what it might or might not mean.

Most people who put forth this assertion cite one of two sources, both from the McKinsey & Company consulting organization. The first is an influential 2007 report, (based on Condition of Education” (CoE) report, (2002 edition) which simply notes that “we are now recruiting our teachers from the bottom third of high school students going to college.” The authors fail to specify how “bottom third” is defined, or whether their data refer to graduates who planned to teach versus those who actually got a job (the latter method is, of course, far preferable)...

The second standard source for the “bottom third” claims is more clear and well-documented. It is a subsequent McKinsey report (2010), one which doesn’t rely on questionable interpretations from indirect sources, but rather its own analysis (based on SAT/ACT scores, specifically those of 1999 graduates whose first job was teaching). That report claims, “The U.S. attracts most of its teachers from the bottom two-thirds of college classes, with nearly half coming from the bottom third.” ...

Why the differences? Because these studies are looking at different groups of teachers. In the CoE data, it’s 1993 graduates who had taught by 1997 (four years later), while the data used in the second McKinsey include 1999 graduates who, in 2001 (two years later), said their first job was (or is) teaching. In other words, each set of results is based on two different cohorts of college graduates, who are also identified in different ways, at different points after graduation.

Neither sample is necessarily representative of the teacher workforce as a whole, or of prior and subsequent cohorts.

Overall, then, the blanket assertion that teachers are coming from the “bottom third” of graduates is, at best, an incomplete picture. It’s certainly true that, when the terciles are defined in terms of SAT/ACT scores, there is consistent evidence that new teachers are disproportionately represented in this group (see here and here for examples from the academic literature). But the differences are not always as large as is sometimes suggested. They vary by year and sample identification, as well as by other variables, such as school-level characteristics (e.g., poorer schools) and teacher characteristics such as race and gender. (And, by the way, their relative standing as graduates is based on tests that most took in high school.)

Finally, it’s very important to note that the “bottom-“ and “top third” may not be a particularly good conceptualization of either the problem or the solution. The connection between SAT/ACT scores and future (test-based) effectiveness, though it’s among the only associations strong enough to be discerned statistically, is still a highly imprecise predictor of “quality.” There’s some useful information there, but it’s unclear whether it merits the high-profile attention it receives.**

There’s no question that we should try and get as many highly-qualified applicants as possible into the classroom (though, again, how to do so is an open question). But we should also be very careful about oversimplifying the issue of aggregate teacher quality – and making sweeping statements about their qualifications based on a limited body of evidence – for the sake of intuitive, easy-to-understand talking points.

Obama: Bad teachers must be taken out of classroom

This from Google News:

WASHINGTON (AP) — If the nation's schools are going to see improvement, President Barack Obama says there has to be a way to ease bad teachers out of the classroom.

Obama was responding Thursday to a question from a Philadelphia-area schoolteacher. The woman looked away and refused to answer when Obama asked if she'd seen any teachers whose work was so bad she wouldn't want her own children in that class.

Obama said some people just aren't meant to be teachers.

He also said there needs to be other ways to evaluate teachers besides standardized tests. He said those tests can't measure progress in a struggling school, and that they represent the biggest flaw in the No Child Left Behind program.

Obama said that if teachers are forced to teach based solely on a test, fewer students will be inspired to learn.

Duncan Talks Teachers

This from Stephen Sawchuck at Teacher Beat:

A group of Ed Week reporters and editors met with U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan yesterday, including Politics K-12 divas Alyson Klein and Michele McNeil. Not about to be out-diva-ed, yours truly talked his way into this powwow and hit up the new Ed Sec with a bunch of teacher-policy questions.

As there's been so much chatter about performance pay, I decided to focus my questions on other issues that have been raised of late. One was to follow up on President Obama's recent speech and on language in the FY 2010 budget request that suggest the new administration will take a tougher stance on identifying and removing teachers who don't improve, even after given intense support.

Duncan gave a bit of a circuitous answer, as you can see from this video...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Ineffective Teachers from Education Week on Vimeo.

Competition Yields Unequal and Disappointing Charter Results

Substantial research strongly suggests that teachers may be the most important element of an effective school. But does that mean that K-12 improvement must wait on the ability of schools or systems to recruit, nurture, and retain outstanding teachers?

Such a strategy implies that widespread excellence hinges on the ability of publicly funded school systems to attract more than 3.3 million superstars—or more than 200,000 such hires a year. The challenge of recruiting our way to excellence is a daunting proposition.

Education Sector senior fellow Steven Wilson, is skeptical that it is a feasible one. In an American Enterprise Institute working paper, he notes that today’s successful charter schools have succeeded by creating a “No Excuses” culture reliant on their ability to attract talented and passionate recruits. He doubts, however, that these models are capable of working at the scale that the nation requires.

Indeed, given the limited talent pool of promising hires and the exhausting demands these schools make of faculty, Wilson considers whether such models can ever effectively serve more than a handful of the nation’s students.

Internationally, the top performing education systems (Finland and Singapore) draw their teachers from the top third of college graduates. In America, urban school systems typically draw their teachers primarily from the bottom third.

However, the SAT scores of prospective teachers passing teacher licensing tests has risen in the last ten years in the United States, as have their college grades.

At least since President Lyndon Johnson announced his plan to move the nation “toward the Great Society,” policymakers and philanthropists have sought a remedy to persistent academic underachievement in America’s cities.

While the charter school movement as a whole has disappointed, a small number of the new schools have posted arresting results, with their low-income students, primarily African-American and Hispanic, outperforming students statewide—and in some cases, their white peers from affluent suburban districts.

Among this smattering of “gap-closing” schools, one broad approach, frequently called “No Excuses” schooling, appears to dominate.

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) network of schools is the exemplar, but the approach is proliferating in other networks, including Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and in stand-alone schools, many of which aspire to replicate themselves in the coming years. The growing attention these organizations are receiving is richly deserved.

If scholarly research (addressing complexities like selection effects) confirms their apparent achievements, they will have demonstrated a schooling model that, with some consistency, turns around the academic trajectory of their students. That possibility has already created understandable excitement, attracted substantial philanthropic support for existing or aspiring No Excuses school networks, and drawn thousands of exceptional young people to work in urban education as classroom teachers, school leaders, and managers in No Excuses networks.

The critical question is now one of scale: If the No Excuses formula is behind most high performing urban charter schools, is the approach sustainable, and can it be widely reproduced?

The new bargain that charter legislation extended—authority and autonomy in exchange for accountability—sparked thousands of education entrepreneurs to create new schools. Despite the energy and commitment of their founders, most charter schools have failed to decisively outperform their district competitors.

Seventeen years after Minnesota became the first state to pass charter legislation, the number of charter schools that are truly “gap-closers”—where urban or rural students, despite their economic disadvantage, are performing on par with their more affluent, typically suburban peers—is small. There are perhaps as few as 200 nationwide...

Teachers should be part of school reform process

This from Brad Olsen (UC Santa Cruz) in the San Francisco Chronicle:

There's been a lot of squabbling on the education playground these days.

New York City has begun experimenting with evaluating teachers via student achievement scores. Many states have renewed debates around merit pay for teachers. California school districts are preparing for budget cuts by considering teacher hiring freezes and layoffs.

On the political front, critics of the No Child Left Behind Act have cast education conservatives as inept, draconian bogeyman hell-bent on dismantling public education. Meanwhile, education conservatives pummel liberals for everything from lax teacher education to "soft" academic standards and instructional methods.

Remember former U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige infamously describing the National Education Association (one of our country's two teacher unions) as a "terrorist organization" to a group of governors in 2004? Or columnist George Will writing in 2006: "The surest, quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be addition by subtraction: Close all the schools of education."

Of course, the issues and disagreements in education are not nearly this simplistic.

But what interests me is what role teachers get to play in all this high-stakes hand-wringing and school reforming. We hear from politicians and school boards, professors and journalists, community advocates and district superintendents. We watch top-down accountability measures and student exit exams blanket our schools. We read self-righteous op-ed pieces by researchers like me. Yet we don't much hear from, or about, teachers' experiences in - and perspectives on - what's happening in schools these days.

We should.

We should understand that teachers are not passive, empty, interchangeable automatons in education but are instead active, unique individuals, often well prepared, with great influence over how student learning unfolds. Research demonstrates, for example, that teachers are always adjusting and altering school reforms as they implement them in practice.

Yet studies highlight troubling contradictions. New teachers prepared to design, enact and assess their own lessons are often required to deliver scripted, off-the-shelf curricula in lock-step fashion. Teacher effectiveness is increasingly measured by misaligned diagnostic student tests masquerading as whole-school performance indicators. There is also growing evidence that the current policy culture in education is pushing good teachers out of the classroom and leaving behind those primed for conformity, decreased decision making, and passive acceptance.

If the restrictive climate in schools doesn't sustain creative, iconoclastic teachers (whom I believe education should covet), many of the refugees are finding that they can make more of a difference in other roles in education. Leaving classroom teaching for jobs in administration, academia or community activism has become an increasingly attractive way for energetic, idealistic educators - especially in high poverty urban communities - to work to improve things for our nation's youth. Education, writ large, and other social service fields may be gaining committed professionals, but our classrooms are losing them.

Teachers matter. We know that. We therefore need to find better ways of inviting them into large-scale conversations about how to improve education. Soliciting teachers' active participation in reform benefits both the teachers and the school reform process.

I'd like to see more schools, districts and states establish official, authentic teacher committees to work with policy makers on school reform. I'd also like to see university schools of education partner more effectively with local teachers, on equal terms, to learn from each other - something my colleagues and I at UC Santa Cruz have been pursuing.

And, finally, I hope we can seriously re-evaluate how we as a society appreciate, learn from and treat the important work our 3.9 million teachers are doing. Our teachers educated us when we were young; we should allow them to educate us - and our children - still.

Study gives teachers low grade in classroom

USA Today reports:

The typical child in the USA stands only a one-in-14 chance of having a consistently rich, supportive elementary school experience, say researchers who looked at what happens daily in thousands of classrooms.

The findings, published today in the weekly magazine Science, take teachers to task for spending too much time on basic reading and math skills and not enough on problem-solving, reasoning, science and social studies. They also suggest that U.S. education focuses too much on teacher qualifications and not enough on teachers being engaging and supportive.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, educational researchers spent thousands of hours in more than 2,500 first-, third- and fifth-grade classrooms, tracking kids through elementary school. It is among the largest studies done of U.S. classrooms, producing a detailed look at the typical kid's day.

The researchers found a few bright spots — kids use time well, for one. But they found just as many signs that classrooms can be dull, bleak places where kids don't get a lot of teacher feedback or face time.

Among the findings on what teachers and students did and how they interacted:

• Fifth-graders spent 91.2% of class time in their seats listening to a teacher or working alone, and only 7% working in small groups, which foster social skills and critical thinking. Findings were similar in first and third grades.

• In fifth grade, 62% of instructional time was in literacy or math; only 24% was devoted to social studies or science.

• About one in seven (14%) kids had a consistently high-quality "instructional climate" all three years studied. Most classrooms had a fairly healthy "emotional climate," but only 7% of students consistently had classrooms high in both. There was no difference between public and private schools.

Although all teachers surveyed had bachelor's degrees — and 44% had a master's — it didn't mean that their classrooms were productive. The typical teacher scored only 3.6 out of seven points for "richness of instructional methods," and 3.4 for providing "evaluative feedback" to students on their work.

Whether a teacher was highly qualified, had many years of experience or earned more mattered little, says lead researcher Robert Pianta of the University of Virginia.

Of the standard measures studied, "none of them makes a noticeable difference," he said.
Prior research has shown that highly skilled, engaging teachers can eliminate achievement gaps between rich and poor kids. Pianta says his new findings support that conclusion and suggest policymakers should focus more on how individual teachers can improve on these measures.
Kathy Schultz, director of teacher education at the University of Pennsylvania's graduate school of education, says studying how teachers teach is helpful, but ignores the reality of larger mandates such as the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Teachers, she says, are under enormous pressure to increase basic skills.