At Eduwonk, Andy Rotherham catches up to Russ Whitehurst’s paper, Don’t Forget Curriculum. But he misses the boat when he writes, “I’m not sure when curriculum and reforms like choice, teacher quality, etc…became either/or.” I’m not sure where Andy’s getting that message, but it’s not from Russ Whitehurst, who went out of his way NOT to say that. Here’s the relevant quote from his paper:
This is not to say that curriculum reforms should be pursued instead of efforts to create more choice and competition through charters, or to reconstitute the teacher workforce towards higher levels of effectiveness, or to establish high quality, intensive, and targeted preschool programs, all of which have evidence of effectiveness. It is to say that leaving curriculum reform off the table or giving it a very small place makes no sense.
Over at the American Enterprise Institute’s blog, Charles Murray adds his voice to the curriculum choir.
Guest blogging at Eduwonk, Curt Johnson is the latest to wonder aloud about how carelessly we throw around the word “innovation” at present. (See also the redoubtable Claus Von Zastrow on the unfortunate tendency to value ”novelty over quality.”). “For Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, innovation seems to mean grabbing the lessons from schools with records of high performance and grafting them on to problem schools,” Johnson notes. That’s not innovation, but replication.
Replication is a worthy effort. But ‘new, here’ is not the same as ‘new, anywhere’. There needs to be room for real innovation. Which means: Letting schools and teachers try things. Which means, in turn, that we will all have to get comfortable with not-knowing, ahead, what the innovators will come up with.
More to the point, we have to get comfortable with failure, which comes with the territory when you innovate. But in an era where accountability is the coin of the realm, risk-taking is not a career move for the feint of heart. “Do something,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously commented. “If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else.” Alas, we seem to be headed down a different path: “Do something. If it doesn’t work, we’ll fire you and find someone new to do something else.”
Innovators, line up to the right….Hello?? Hey, where’s everybody going?
Teach for America got Page One treatment from the Washington Post on Saturday. Competition for slots in the program is way up, in part because of the economy. Nearly 40,000 applications are expected for about 5,000 teaching slots.
In part because of the dearth of other job prospects in the sagging economy but mostly because the program has captured the imagination of a generation of student leaders bent on doing good, some graduates of the nation’s elite universities are fighting for low-paying teaching positions the way they once sought jobs on Wall Street.
The bad economy angle notwithstanding, the Post story mostly covers familiar territory and reports “research into Teach for America’s effectiveness has been inconclusive, but at least three major studies in the past several years indicate that students taught by its teachers score significantly lower on standardized tests than do their peers.” That’s enough to set Eduwonk’s teeth on edge.
In fact, while there has been a lot of “research” into TFA the methodologically most solid studies have shown that TFA teachers are as good or better than other teachers, including veteran and traditionally trained teachers. Mathematica (pdf) and Urban Institute/CALDER are the two best examples — and those are independent analyses not TFA studies.
One angle not discussed in the Post piece, or anywhere else that I’ve noticed. If the recession is driving more recruits into TFA, might it also mean that a lot of teachers who might have left for greener pastures in flush times are staying put?
Eduwonk Andy Rotherham gives voice today to something that has been irritating me for a while now–the careless and self-indulgent tossing about of the phrase “21st Century Skills” to describe the simple outcome of a sound, basic education. Problem solving, critical thinking and cooperative learning have been with us in this country since we hunted in groups using spears with Clovis points. As Andy puts it:
We’re not the first society where those skills have been needed or valued. What’s changed is the need — for both equity and economic reasons — to give many more students a high quality education that allows them to develop these skills. In other words it’s about broadening access to a good education rather than a radically different conception of what a good education is. If dressing that up as 21st Century Skills helps sell an equity agenda, that’s great, otherwise we are flattering ourselves some about just how revolutionary the world we live in really is.
Amen. The sooner we stop nattering on about “21st Century” skills the better, especially since the phrase tends to be code for devaluing the content-rich curriculum that makes critical thinking possible.
Fascinating idea from Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk today, who blogs about creating a mechanism to open schools to part-time teachers, especially retired teachers:
There are some national service ideas floating around on this but they tend to focus on full time teaching. Another way to approach it would be to create more adjunct teachers, especially at the high school level. While teaching full-time may be more intense and more of a time commitment than some people want as a post-retirement option, capturing some of their time is one way to help address the various human capital challenges education faces….There are other part-timers out there, too, for instance mothers with young children, who could be tapped.
I’d add corporations in science and technology to the list of talent sources. If turning out qualified students is their concern, might as well help out. “Facilitating all this would be an attractive niche for a non-profit, too,” Andy notes.
NYC’s best education reporter, Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun, has a big piece this morning about anonymous blogger Eduwonkette, whose blog has become “a thorn in the side” of the New York City Department of Education.
DOE communications chief David Cantor and Eduwonk Andy Rotherham are among those who take shots at EW, alleging that her anonymity keeps readers from evaluating her bias. Having spent decades in the news business before becoming a teacher, I should be predisposed to agree. So why doesn’t her anonymity bug me? Perhaps it’s the nature of her blog. By focusing on research, EW on her best days functions as a first-rate BS detector, saying in essence “here’s the data. You decide.” The fact that she’s got deep pocketed institutions and major players in the edusphere taking shots at her is a testament to her impact. Indeed, you can probably divide edubloggers into two camps: those who admit they are envious of EW’s impact…and liars.
But that’s her second most significant accomplishment. Her first is that she makes education research entertaining. Her anonymity may be frustrating to her critics, but her blog is indispensible.
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