The answer Is in the room not in witch hunts

During this past school year, great teaching took place in every school, in every district in the country, says Alan Blankstein. And it wasn’t the result of top-down, punitive education “reform” measures.

“Too much of the reform discussion has been a witch-hunt,” Blankstein says. “The dialogue in the country right now is horrific. You would think our public schools have ceased to function, but good work is being done across the country.”

The challenge, as Blankstein sees it, is not a lack of ideas or great educators. It’s about “scaling” the success – reaching a much wider body of students and ensuring that the structural and cultural transformation has occurred district-wide that is necessary to sustain success. “There is no shortage of great ideas about what works in the classroom,” Blankstein says.

“We’re wasting too much time searching for bad people in education! This will not produce results. It will just leave us further and further behind other countries in student achievement.”

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Illinois' New Teacher Law: Model for Other States, or Outlier?

A good article on the collaboration that led to a near unanimous acceptance of sweeping education reforms in Illinois

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn today signed into law a sweeping measure that has the potential to significantly reshape the teaching profession in his state by linking educators' tenure, hiring, and job security to performance, rather than to seniority.

Educators and advocates have spent months debating the importance of Senate Bill 7. Does it go far enough? Will it drive improvements in teacher quality and classroom instruction?

This much is clear: The process used to approve the measure in Illinois, a state dominated by Democrats, stands in sharp contrast to the harder-edged approach taken in Republican-dominated states, such as Wisconsin, Ohio, and Idaho by leaders who have waged public battles with teachers' unions.

That contrast could prove a defining issue in coming state and national elections. Democrats—most notably two Illinois natives, President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—have called for cooperation between unions and policymakers. Republicans like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio Gov. John Kasich have battled labor groups in supporting laws they argued were necessary to bring down costs for school districts and taxpayers.

Which approach will prove more successful? We may not know for some time. Several aspects of Illinois' new law, and a separate teacher-evaluation measure approved by the state last year, will prove tricky to implement.

In Wisconsin, a measure approved by Gov. Walker and GOP lawmakers, which restricts the collective bargaining rights of teachers and many other public workers, is now being challenged in court.

In Ohio, Gov. Kasich and fellow Republicans backed a law that curbed collective bargaining powers of teachers and changed how they are paid, drawing a hostile reaction from unions. Opponents of Ohio's measure are now pushing to overturn that law through a referendum. And let's not forget Idaho, where a package of laws that phase out tenure and restrict bargaining powers also face a ballot challenge.

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Collaborations Between Union and District Leadership in Four School Systems

The Center for American Progress just published a report titled "Partnering for Compensation Reform - Collaborations between Union and District Leadership in Four School Systems". Whether you support merit pay for teaching or believe it is an effective way to compensate teachers and improve student outcomes, one thing is increasingly clear. Collaboration is essential. This is why SB5 and the SB5 provisions that were included in the state budget were such terrible ideas, doomed to failure.

Here's a brief snippet from the report. Please note that CAP is funded in part by the Eli Broad Foundation, a Corporate education reform booster, but here at JTF we like to bring a depth and breadth of research for you to consider. One of the school systems studied was Toledo.

Through our four case studies of these TIF grantees, the author has identified six common elements at work in these performance-pay partnerships between districts and unions:

• There is a history of trust—the belief that the other party genuinely wants what is best for you—between teachers’ unions and school district leaders.
• Leaders identify key challenges together and focus on joint problem solving and learning.
• Teacher input is encouraged and valued in the design of pay programs.
• Pay programs embrace a comprehensive approach focused on building teacher capacity, including a focus on new professional development systems and teacher evaluation systems.
• Teacher participation in pay programs is voluntary.
• Districts allow for flexibility in program design.

Some critics have raised questions about whether performance pay in particular has an impact on student achievement. A study released in the fall of 2010 by researchers at Vanderbilt University raised questions about the effectiveness of one performance-pay program involving 300 middle-school math teachers in Nashville, TN, suggesting it had little impact on student performance. Notably, however, the Vanderbilt program was narrow in scope, limited largely to a bonus tied solely to test scores, and lacking additional program components or supports for teachers. Unlike the programs we studied, however, the Nashville program did not take a comprehensive approach that tied performance pay to improvements in professional development or to changes in how teachers are evaluated.

More comprehensive and collaborative approaches, such as the partnerships we examined in the four districts receiving TIF funds, are more likely to be successful. There is little reason to expect that a simple bonus by itself can have a profound impact if it is not paired with substantive changes in professional development, teacher evaluation, teacher working conditions, and a significant role for teacher leadership and input in schoolwide reform efforts, among other elements. Many of these more comprehensive approaches are just beginning to be put into practice, so little evidence exists yet of their relative effectiveness on student achievement. More research in this area will be helpful in determining the impact of these reforms over the long term.

Partnering for Compensation Reform

Is Gifted Education a Bright Idea?

I keep getting struck wondering wether it's the measurements that are the problem, rather than the measured outcomes. Maybe it's harder to measure progress than looking at some test results. Either way, this interesting report adds another question mark to the idea of using high stakes testing to make high stakes decisions with teaching careers. If we can't adequately measure progress with the brightest students, taught by the best teachers, that doesn't say a lot about the whole ill-concieved enterprise.

A new working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, in Cambridge, Mass., evaluated the effectiveness of both in-class gifted programs and magnet schools for more than 8,000 middle school students in an unnamed Southwestern school district of more than 200,000 students.

The University of Houston researchers who conducted the study found that students in these programs were more likely than other students to do in-depth coursework with top teachers and high-performing peers. Yet students who barely met the 5th grade cutoff criteria to enter the gifted programs fared no better academically in 7th grade, after a year and a half in the program, than did similarly high-potential students who just missed qualifying for gifted identification.

"You're getting these better teachers; you're getting these higher-achieving students paired up with you," said Scott A. Imberman, an economics professor and a study coauthor. "To our surprise, what happened was very little."

Here's the paper.

Is Gifted Education a Bright Idea?

The Dispatch should read its own paper

In an Op-ed today titled "Don't miss the chance" - the Disptach doesn't miss a chance to take yet another swipe at teachers. As usual, it is deeply uninformed and filled with the common corporate reform message

Kasich and the House have proposed merit-based systems for evaluating and rewarding teachers, but the Senate declined to include any merit-based system. A system that evaluates teacher effectiveness and uses such evaluations to determine staffing, layoffs and pay is vital reform. The current system rewards teachers for seniority, tying administrators' hands when it comes to staffing and pay decisions. The recent example of the Pickerington Local School District shows the problem with this: Of the 14 "teacher of the year" winners for 2010-11 in the district, five are losing their jobs in a round of layoffs that will hit 120 teachers. This is a system that punishes outstanding teachers and the students who will be deprived of their services. Development of merit-based systems already is part of Ohio's federally sponsored Race to the Top education-reform program, which includes 300 Ohio school districts. It should be made the policy of the entire state.

Perhaps the editors and publisher of the Dispatch should read their own paper, just once in a while, because yesterday was one of the best pieces written on this merit pay subject in a long, long time.

First, very few teachers have tenure, where they may be fired only for cause. Most teachers serve on a yearly basis, and for those, it is as simple as the superintendent not recommending a teacher for renewal by April 30. Voila, that teacher is gone. No cause needed. For teachers who have continuing contracts, it is within management's authority and control to determine whether the teacher is performing adequately. No union contract prohibits a teacher from being fired for cause. Among other things, principals can observe teachers and make recommendations, but it is generally easier to ignore problem teachers.

From a human-resources perspective, there are T's to cross and I's to dot and paperwork to process to get rid of a teacher. Then there's the process to interview and hire a new teacher. Those are bureaucratic problems, not teacher problems. The so-called bad teachers often continue to teach because management does not want to make the effort to get rid of them.

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

There is so much rich depth and thought provoking information in this NCEE paper, it would be hard to digest it in a single sitting. EdWeek:

The NCEE report is the latest salvo in a flurry of national interest in what can be gleaned from education systems in top-performing or rapidly improving countries. It pushes further than other recent reports on the topic by laying out an ambitious agenda for the United States it says reflects the education practices in countries that are among the highest-performing on international assessments.

Among other measures, the report outlines a less-frequent system of standardized student testing; a statewide funding-equity model that prioritizes the neediest students, rather than local distribution of resources; and greater emphasis on the professionalization of teaching that would overhaul most elements of the current model of training, professional development, and compensation.

To whet your appetite, and encourage you to read it, here's some snippets. Nothing in the current reforms even hints that this is the direction we are going in. Indeed, it would be easy to argue we are going in the opposite direction with ill-thought out corporate reforms

Three things directly affect the quality of the pool from which a nation recruits its teachers: 1) the status of teaching in the eyes of the potential recruit, relative to the status of other occupations to which he or she aspires, 2) the compensation offered, relative to other possible choices, and 3) the conditions of work, meaning the degree to which the way the work is organized makes it look more like professional work than blue-collar work.

The results of these corporate reforms are becoming increasingly evident, as large numbers of prospective teachers instead choose alternative career paths

Furthermore, analysts are now noticing a large falloff in applications for admission to teachers colleges all over the country, a result of the financial crisis. Potential candidates, who used to view teaching as almost immune from the business cycle and therefore one of the most secure of all occupations, are noticing that teachers are being laid off in very large numbers and now see teaching as a very risky bet.

NCEE - Standing on the Shoulders of Giants