Tag Archive for 'teacher quality'

Does Good Teaching Equal Good Test Scores?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 24, 2009 in Education News. 13 Comments

In his New York  Times column praising the Obama administration’s “quiet revolution” on education, David Brooks writes ”there is clear evidence that good teachers produce consistently better student test scores.”   I ask this question not rhetorically, but in earnest: what is the “clear evidence” to which Brooks refers?   Is there a study that defines good teaching, identifies good teachers and THEN looks at the impact of those teachers on test scores?

If we define good teaching as the ability to raise tests scores, Brooks’ assertion is merely a tautology.

Hold On, Mr. President

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 22, 2009 in Education News and Research and Reports. 2 Comments

“From the moment students enter a school, the most important factor in their success is not the color of their skin or the income of their parents. It’s the person standing at the front of the classroom,” said President Obama in a recent speech.  Linda Perlstein, off to a strong start on her new ed blog, talks to researchers who explain why the President is wrong.

Getting Engaged

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 2, 2009 in Teaching. 10 Comments

Claus Von Zastrow, calm and steady as always, looks at “the dark side of student engagement” at Public School Insights.  Like “high expectations” it’s one of those standard education homilies that deserves a closer look.  For starters, the question of whether or not a teacher is effectively engaging students tends to drown out important discussions about school discipline.  “We should also be careful not to confuse engagement with mere entertainment,” he observes.   ”Like all work, school work does not always offer instant rewards. The ability to delay gratification is an important life skill. There is way more to motivation than engagement.”

Claus cites a recent Teacher Magazine interview with Rafe Esquith, who gets to the heart of the matter:

I think the absolute key is that learning, the education of a child, is a long process, and we are now in the middle of a fast food society. We want instant everything. We even have books now like Algebra Made Easy and Shakespeare Made Easy. But I want teachers and parents to remember that it’s not easy! To be good at anything—anything!—takes thousands and thousands of hours of patient study.

This is of a piece with our ongoing debate over choice vs. challenge in literature class and the readers workshop model, which I believe swings the pendulum too far in the direction of engagement over discernment.    Lincoln didn’t say it, so I will:  You can engage some of the children all of the time, and all of the children some of the time, but you can not engage all of the children all of the time.

At least not without making education impossibly thin and superficial.

Observations on Observations

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 27, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy, Teaching and accountability. 32 Comments

If you’re a teacher, would you rather be judged by a 200-page list of indicators of highly skilled teaching, or by a principal who shares your philosophy of teaching and learning, supports your approach and pretty much leaves you alone–but has the power to fire you at will? 

This question occurred to me after reading a long and excellent post by John Merrow over at Learning Matters on teacher observations. He concludes that the observation process is “changing for the better in some places, but that, unfortunately, it’s still mostly useless.”

In the old days, teachers closed their doors and did their thing, for better or for worse. As long as things were quiet, administrators [rarely] bothered to open the door to see what was going on, and teachers never watched each other at work. That’s changing, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. In some schools today, teachers are actually expected to watch their peers teach, after which they share their analysis. In other schools, however, principals armed with lists sit in the back of the class checking off ‘behaviors’ and later give the teacher a ‘scorecard’ with her ‘batting average.’

“Whether these observations are diagnostic in nature and therefore designed to help teachers improve or a ‘gotcha’ game is the essential question,” Merrow perceptively observes.  Teacher observations, like test scores, will undoubtedly loom ever larger as the issue of teacher quality bubbles to the top of the nation’s education agenda.  Like test scores, there’s a lot to learn from observations.  And like test scores, we’re equally likely to learn the wrong lessons.

Of all the “best practices” that have migrated to education from the business world, the one that didn’t make the trip is the idea that good managers hire excellent people, empower them with real decision-making authority, then get out of their way.  The closest thing to that in education is “close your door and do your thing,” as Merrow puts it.  That goes against the grain in the Age of Accountability, but it is undeniable that for many excellent and experienced teachers and their students, it works perfectly.   And while that approach is endangered, it has not disappeared.  Nor should it.  The point of any accountability system should be to help bad schools and teachers look and act like good schools and teachers, not the opposite.  Our schools still have plenty of brilliant iconoclasts who do things their own way to great effect. 

For such  teachers nothing could be worse than “observation by checklist,” where the adminstration wants to see what it wants to see: aim and standard on the board?  Check.  Students sitting in groups?  Check.  Updated work on the bulletin board?  Check. A “print rich” environment in “kid-friendly language?” Check.   Ask why these items are important and you’ll invariably hear that it’s what the principal’s supervisor expects to see.  What they are indicative of is lost.  The consummate irony is this kind of evaluation seems rigorous, but it is more likely — much more likely — to create a civil service mentality than to foster excellence.  It’s another variation of the Cargo Cult Education phenomenon.   Teachers and administrators spend all their energy manufacturing the visible markers of learning, often not knowing (and after a while no longer caring) what the “indicators” indicate. 

Indeed, this is the thing the every teacher knows, that every armchair expert does not: it is simple (but time-consuming) to create an environment that gives all the appearances of being a high-functioning classroom and still be a lousy teacher.  Among the very first survival skills a new teacher learns, either through the advice of a kindly colleague or through a series of administrative reprimands, is the art of the dog and pony show.   In some schools, it’s the quid pro quo that earns you the right to close your door and practice your craft.  In more punitive environments, it’s the tail that wags the dog.   But the aim of observation-by-checklist is not great teaching, it’s plausible deniability–and it’s the enemy of accountability, for both teachers and administrators.  Miss Jones’ classroom demonstrates a high degree of student engagement and all of the indicators of high quality teaching, but her students are still not making progress.  Why? Miss Jones’ energy is misdirected.  She’s learning to play the game, not become a great teacher.  After a few years, she gets tired of it and quits.  Mediocrity wins again. 

The bottom line is that great teaching is like Potter Stewart’s definition of hard-core pornography.  It’s hard to define but you know it when you see it.  Unfortunately, that’s never going to cut it in our data-mad, accountability-obsessed age. 

So which would you rather?  Find a school and work with a principal who shares your philosophy and approach, trusts you and supports you, but has the power to fire you at will?  Or a school where your duties are codified to the letter, where you know what’s on the checklist and spend all of your time ‘working to rule‘ and playing “gotcha.”  Where are you going to be happiest and most productive?

Am I the only one who thinks this is what the teacher quality debate is really all about?

Voted Off the Island

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 5, 2009 in Parents, Students, Teaching and accountability. 5 Comments

Would teacher quality improve if every year the worst teacher in the building was voted off the island, a la Survivor?  That’s the suggestion of Dangerously Irrelevant’s Scott McLeod.  His “modest proposal” for improving teacher quality suggests first doing everything possible to create a positive working climate.  But since students, parents, administrators and other teachers know who is just going through the motions, he argues, every year they should all get a vote, with the worst underperformer sent off.

If you don’t have a robust teacher evaluation system (or if you’re worried about administrator bias), do it like they do on Survivor: everyone gets a vote and the one with the most votes leaves the island. Administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents – everyone involved with the school gets a vote. Dismissal by consensus. The more that are involved, (hopefully) the less likelihood of a witch hunt. If necessary, modify the master contract to make this happen.

I appreciate the intent of McLeod’s proposal.  He’s absolutely right that the larger school community has excellent radar for who is breaking rocks and who is merely going through the motions.  That said, his specific proposal would incentivize office politics as surely as test-driven accountability incentivizes test prep and curriculum narrowing.  Plus there’s the problem of that long line of great teachers, which is still not forming outside struggling schools. 

I once worked in a large corporation where the informal motto was “it’s better to be popular than competent.”  It’s not a formula for long-term excellence.  Still McLeod’s idea reminds us that there is something to be said for the wisdom of crowds, and that test scores are not the alpha and omega of great teaching.

Teaching Quality “Inadequate” in Most 1st Grade Classrooms

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 23, 2009 in Research and Reports. 10 Comments

A mere 23% of U.S. first-grade classrooms can be described as “high overall quality” based on a study of teacher observations in over 800 classrooms. 

Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, led a study of data collected from direct observations of first-grade classrooms in nearly 700 private and public schools in 32 states.  Based upon those observations, classrooms were divided into four major categories. Teachers who worked to both create a positive social climate and strong instructional support–23 percent of classrooms–were given the score of “high overall quality.” Twenty-eight percent of classrooms were labeled “mediocre.” Seventeen percent of the classrooms were “low overall quality.” The largest category, “positive emotional climate, low academic demand,” accounted for 31% of all first-grade classrooms in the study.  The study found class size and teacher credentials had little influence on classroom quality.

“We found that quality, particularly instructional features of teacher behavior, was rather low across the sample,” said Pianta, whose system for evaluating student-teacher interactions was prominently featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s much-discussed recent piece about teacher quality in the New Yorker. 

“Most American first-grade classrooms are pretty happy places to be,” A news release about the study notes.  “But that doesn’t mean that all of the students are getting the academic content they need.”

Stringulus Package

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 10, 2009 in Education News. 0 Comments

You had to wait until the very last seconds of President Obama’s news conference to get to his most substantial comments on education spending.  When he got there, in response to Mara Liasson’s question about the difficulties of forging a bipartisan compromise, Obama made it clear he favors using the stimulus package to create incentives for reform and used education as an example of one area where both Republicans and Democrats need to change their approach. 

Both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to think differently in order to come together and solve that problem. I think there are areas like education where some in my party have been too resistant to reform, and have argued only money makes a difference.   And there have been others on the Republican side or the conservative side who said no matter how much money you spend, nothing makes a difference, so let’s just blow up the public school systems. And I think that both sides are going to have to acknowledge we’re going to need more money for new science labs, to pay teachers more effectively, but we’re also going to need more reform, which means that we’ve got to train teachers more effectively, bad teachers need to be fired after being given the opportunity to train effectively, that we should experiment with things like charter schools that are innovating in the classroom, that we should have high standards.

“It does seem to signal that the president isn’t planning to boost education spending without asking for something in return from the nation’s school system,” Alyson Klein of Politics K-12 sums up.  The full transcript of the press conference is here.

The Obama Effect Sounds Good, However…

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 30, 2009 in Education Leadership and Education Practice. 2 Comments

The “Obama Effect” sounds good in theory, but it’s going to take a lot more than inspiration to close the achievement gap, says Richard Whitmire.  Writing on U.S. News’ blog, the edublogger and president of the National Education Writers Association notes that he’d like nothing more than to jump on the Obama Effect bandwagon.

But as a veteran education reporter who spends a lot of time in classrooms, I see events that indicate the Obama education halo could tarnish early. And if that happens, the letdown will be a lot less fun than the buildup. Inspiration is great, but inspiration needs pathways to success. What I see developing for lower income and minority students are pathways closing up.

Whitmire lists some of the factors needed to make the Obama Effect more than a short-term, feel-good story: enhanced college access, dramatically improved high schools, higher teacher quality and way higher literacy rates.   “I want to apologize for being the picnic skunk. Really, I want to believe,” Whitmire concludes.  “In the real world, inspirations need well-lit pathways. And I’m just not seeing those pathways opening up for the Obama effect children. I wish I saw this differently, really I do.”

No apologies needed, Richard.  If it sounds too good to be true…

Michelle Rhee Turns Down Her Bonus, However…

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 30, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Education Practice and Teaching. 2 Comments

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee had the good sense to turn down an “earned bonus” of up to 10 percent of her $275,000 base salary, the Washington Post’s D.C. Wire blog reports, thus avoiding the kind of PR nightmare afflicting various erstwhile Masters of the Universe on Wall Street.  But the Post’s blog item lets slide a curious thing. According to the terms of her contract Rhee’s bonus is based on…

 …effectiveness in ‘Student Academic Achievement and Improvement; Financial Systems and Management; School Facilities Maintenance, Improvement and New Construction; Student and Staff Safety and Security; Staff Improvement; Communications with Community and Families; and Technology.’”

Given the single-minded focus on student achievement associated with her tenure, and her oft-stated desire to tie teacher pay to test scores, why is Rhee’s bonus triggered by so many different factors other than academic achievement and improvement?

Solution to Ed Policy Skirmishes “Bafflingly Obvious”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 13, 2009 in Educational Policy, Opinion and accountability. 4 Comments

Fix schools or fix communities?  “From an outsider’s perspective, one of the most frustrating aspects of the education policy debate is that both sides are right,” notes The Atlantic Monthly’s Clay Risen.  “It seems bafflingly obvious that change must come both inside and outside the classroom,” he writes on the Democrats for Education Reform blog.  It’s a must-read.

A backstory is required.  Risen wrote a major profile of Washington, DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee in last November’s Atlantic Monthly. In the new issue, there’s a letter from the University of Michigan’s Susan Neuman, a former Bush administration education official, arguing that Risen’s piece “left readers with the mistaken impression that [Rhee and other school leaders] must make a false choice between quality teachers and ‘extras.”   She also writes ”there is only so much a quality teacher, adequate classroom supplies, and caring administrators can accomplish.” 

The Atlantic typically allows its writers to respond to letters and Risen replied in print that Neuman is “undoubtedly correct that improving teacher quality and improving a student’s social milieu are not mutually exclusive, and are both important means to improve student outcomes. However, education policy is not made in a vacuum, and cannot be. This is where so much of education policy breaks down: there is, sadly, a broadening gulf between teacher-quality advocates and those aligned with ‘A Broader, Bolder Approach.’ Arguably, the answer lies in a mixture of the two. Whether we can find that answer depends much more on improving our education politics than on improving our edu­cation policy.” (ital mine)

Risen’s reply caught the attention of former newspaperman Joe Williams, now head honcho of Democrats for Education Reform.  Knowing that space is at a premium in print, Joe asked Risen to expand on his reply in the Atlantic’s letters section.  Risen notes that the “Broader, Bolder” group and the Joel Klein and Al Sharpton led Education Equality Project are both working toward the same goal and with policies that should be mutually compatible, yet find themselves at odds politically. Says Risen:

Rhee and Co. are, in my view, too eager to reject policies that addresses anything other than teacher quality and too hostile toward anything that smacks of establishment thinking, from unions to teacher colleges. And they’re not entirely wrong–I fear that while many of the signatories to EPI’s “A Broader, Bolder Approach” manifesto are well-intentioned (the list, after all, includes Education Secretary Arne Duncan), too often this wing of the education sector falls into the role of stalking horse for those who prefer the status quo to the disruptive changes that true reform would bring.

Thus a painful paradox: At a moment when education policy is making real strides, our education politics is stuck in a narrow, short-sighted, antagonistic framework in which each side would rather paint the other as anti-student than admit that it might actually have something to contribute. That’s the irony of Michelle Rhee: As a policy thinker and a force for change she is precisely what Washington needs, but she is so politically untuned, so antagonistic toward unions and teacher colleges and the City Council and anything else that might require negotiation and compromise, that she is preventing her policy vision from being realized.

Sound familiar?  In selecting Arne Duncan, who signed on to both ed manifestos as his Education Secretary, President-Elect Obama “understands the need to bring all sides to the table,” Risen believes, “not to minimize dissent but because everyone has something to contribute.”  But each side, he says will have to “concede certain policy principles.”

While teacher accountability is a vital element of reform, for example, it is vital to recognize that teachers are also workers, parents, and taxpayers, not automatons who can be expected to sacrifice everything to student achievement. Nor should we expect them to build lasting relationships with their students if they are spending all their time worried about their job security. While some aspects of teacher tenure and job protections should be relaxed, making them at-will employees is asking too much.  On the flip side, teachers need to recognize that they are not just another class of workers, and that they cannot always make the same demands that, say, teamsters do. Districts need the flexibility to demand a little extra from them, even if it means longer hours.

It’s a political truism that conservatives seek out converts, while progressives hunt down heretics.  The party labels notwithstanding, it sometimes seems the same is true in education debates–too much concern with heresy, not enough with efficacy.  Risen’s “bafflingly obvious” perspective deserves a hearing.  And kudos to Joe Williams and DFER for giving Risen the space to say what needed to be said.