Being a Great Teacher is Risky

Many observers wonder if the reformers know what they are doing.

Politicians and politicians' appointees regularly propose improving teacher quality by linking teacher compensation to student performance on standardized tests. Teachers may greatly influence, but they do not control, student performance. The test may actually measure lots of other variables, most of which go unidentified.

I remember a seventh grade boy taking both math and science from me. In the spring, when he took the Stanford 9, he dropped from 4.7 grade equivalency to 4.3 grade equivalency. The next year he was assigned to both of my classes again as an eighth grader. His Stanford 9 results that year put him at 7.2 grade equivalency for a one year improvement of 2.5 grade levels. Wow! Was I lousy teacher the first year and a great one the second? What about all his other teachers? Maybe it was simply the fact that his alcoholic uncle finally moved out of the house.

But for the sake of argument, let's suppose I get to take the credit for my student's splendid improvement. After all, I am the one who stayed after school with him every day. If I am a great teacher, what should the school do with me? If I were the parent of a struggling student, I would want my kid to get me. If I have more than a few struggling students, and my status as great, as well as my compensation, hangs on ever-increasing test scores, it would not be in my interest to teach struggling students. In fact, there are schools which routinely assign the most difficult students to the most novice teachers. Older teachers believe they have paid their dues and deserve less challenging students even as their competence presumably improves with experience.

Furthermore, research has consistently shown that students do not sustain higher levels of achievement motivated solely by extrinsic rewards. They need intrinsic rewards. Why would teachers, being human after all, be any different? The best teachers do not teach for the money. They teach for the joy of watching understanding spread over the faces of students, the light in the eyes, and the satisfaction of training the next generation well. Money is how society demonstrates it esteems and appreciates the work that great teachers do. Society likes its movie stars and sports heroes way more than its teachers.

So what should be on the table? Diane Ravitch says the Nicholas Kristof says (how's that for an attribution?) we should scrap certification, education degrees and SAT scores.

Since teachers uniformly diss their education degrees as worthless, since certification certifies state indoctrination more than quality, and since statistics from the colleges of education show that their students have lower SAT scores than the general college population, maybe we should rethink teacher quality. Meaningful reform means that nothing is off the table. It is a huge job, but as George Lakoff reminded us, values need to trump programs, and more importantly, values need to trump ideology. We need to talk and listen to everyone.

Are You Stuck in the Rut of Education Preconceptions?

The biggest obstacle to education reform is preconceptions. As President Obama said in his inaugural address, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” Same goes for education. The adversarial frame of public school versus everything else must also give way to what works. The shackles of preconceptions prevent creative thinking. We need people who have seen it all. We need people who are willing to be heretics, for whom the conventional wisdom may be foolishness. Maybe small classes are not that important. Neither “voucher” nor “lecture” are necessarily dirty seven-letter words. What is genuine self-esteem anyway? How about those unions? Certification does not guarantee quality. And maybe technology is not all it's cracked up to be.

We need people who have thirty years of experience, not one year thirty times. We need people who can ask the right questions. I read about an education initiative for underserved students. The organizers did not ask, ”How should we publicize the program?” as much as they asked, “Where are the people we want to reach?” Instead of sending out press releases and building a beautiful webpage, they put up flyers in laundromats.

We need people who understand the both the importance and the dilemma of opportunity. For example, I know a middle schooler who caught the attention of a university tennis coach. For many months, the youngster, along with other promising middle-schoolers, gratefully received the benefits of coaching. But his budding tennis ambitions were cut off when his single mom could not afford the expenses of his first tournament. Maybe the coach thought she should sacrifice more, but the $300 tennis racket had already overstretched her means. An opportunity was lost.

The importance of social economic status (SES) is opportunity. Children who grow up in higher SES homes simply have greater exposure to opportunity and savvy parents who can help their children leverage that opportunity. Children who grow up in lower SES homes cannot afford to take advantage of what few opportunities come their way.

The keys to creating a world class education system begin with the umbrella concepts of relational trust and access to opportunity. During my first year of teaching, I was able to inspire high levels of relational trust among my students in an inner city school. They worked very hard for the hope of future opportunity that no one could anticipate. But some students were pessimistic. One boy said, “My father was a janitor all his life and that's all I'll ever get to be. So what do I need with school?” We came to an understanding. No one knows the future, and although I could understand his outlook, he agreed not to disrupt class. He cared deeply about his classmates, so he was willing to cooperate with my program on what he considered the slim chance it might pay off for him or any of his classmates.

I care nothing for ideological positions. I welcome the opportunity to confront my own preconceptions when they break through to awareness. Clearly entrenched interests within education benefit from perpetuating the dysfunction. We need to identify those interests and overcome them. Is is possible to institutionalize relational trust as the Japanese have done? Maybe, but we need to know much more about Japan than we do. We need people with true international education experience.

School an Unhappy Place

Students Unhappy at School. Not exactly a breaking headline, but California takes it seriously with their Healthy Kids Survey.

The California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) is an anonymous, confidential student and school staff report of attitudes, health risk behaviors, and protective factors...Used by California schools since 1997, the CHKS consists of age-appropriate survey instruments for students in grades five, seven, nine, and eleven and is designed in a flexible, modular format that can be customized to meet local district needs.

The survey consistently finds that students feel alienated at school at all age levels. Some of the factors included in the survey, especially harassment, depression and connectedness, can perhaps be considered proxies for relational trust. Relational trust is emerging as a useful umbrella concept for predicting academic achievement. Relational trust subsumes other popular variables such as teacher quality, parental involvement and socio-economic status.

Relational trust is not just some warm and fuzzy psychobabble. Relational trust does not mean that everybody likes each other. Relational trust means students, parents and administrators respect and esteem the knowledge and ability of teachers. Relational trust means that teachers believe that parents and administrators support them, especially in discipline matters. For example, Japanese teachers have no reputation for being warm and fuzzy, but relational trust so characterizes the relationships between teachers, students, parents and society as to be a presumptive, defining feature of Japanese education.

Statewide in California, whether urban, suburban or rural schools, middle school students report 42-54% moderate or low levels of school caring and connectedness. High school is worse, with 59-71% of students reporting lack of connectedness and caring.

Interestingly, middle school and high school students often put forth a facade of indifference. Being “cool” often masks a desperate desire to experience relational trust. Middle school students form especially strong bonds with their teachers, and their loyalty can be magnificent. Yet school authorities may mistakenly believe that students do not care. Students are diligently searching for adults to trust. Frequently, student misbehavior is a test of the adults. If the adult caves in the face of a student's nonsense, how can that adult be trusted in times of real trouble? Once students become convinced of the reliability and steadfastness of a teacher, they will work incredibly hard for that teacher.

Money Makes No Difference

Money does not buy happiness; money also does not buy academic achievement. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) compared education attainment of fifteen-year olds every three years for 57 countries, 30 of which belong to OECD. Over the last fifteen years average spending on primary and secondary schooling has risen more than 40% without much return on investment.

Furthermore, in terms of teaching hours, American primary school teachers work harder, teaching about 1000 hours per year, compared to Japanese primary school teachers who teach an average of 650 hours per year. The OECD average was 803 hours per year.

Over the years, the US falls further behind and currently trades eleventh and twelfth places with Mexico in reading, math and science performance. Poland posted the most improvement. Poland achieved its improvement without increasing spending. The Economist attributes Poland's improvement to the dramatic education reforms undertaken in 1999, especially the elimination of tracking. The Economist concludes Poland's results demonstrate that tracking harms the academic achievement of weak students without boosting academic achievement for strong students.

Of course, it can also be argued that tracking in Japan works. Japan ranks sixth in reading and math, fifth in science. Japan also shows between-school variance roughly equal to within-school variance. Early education and middle school in Japan is comprehensive,but high school students are definitely tracked. The ablest students take the entrance exam for the college prep high schools. Less able students,(usually boys), take the entrance exam for the vocational high schools. The less able girls take the entrance exam for the business high schools. The funny thing is the students take the exact same entrance exam no matter which type of high school to which they have applied. The between-school variance may well indicate “hidden” tracking, given the intentional uniformity of Japanese schools.

The United States showed fairly low between-school variance, but close to 100% within-school variance. The achievement gap is wide, even within a single school. Some people thought that stimulating interest in science would motivate students to become good at science. The problem is implementation. Too often cool activities substitute for the development of scientific thinking skills. Students grow to love what passes for science, without actually learning to love or maybe even experiencing real science.

So if money does not buy achievement, what factors are associated with improved performance. “Relational trust” is a foundational characteristic, but the OECD did not examine relational trust directly. It may turn out that relational trust is an umbrella for a number of sub-factors. In any case, OECD found two predictors of increased performance.

Internationally, the number one predictor is high-quality teachers, especially teachers drawn from the top ranks of graduates. No Child Left Behind requirements not withstanding, it has been well-documented that education students are decidedly do not come from the top ranks of graduates. Every school of education knows their students rank lower on admission criteria than non-teacher aspirants.

Internationally, the number two predictor is local management. School principals who control their budgets and hire their own teachers post high or improving performance. I submit that relational trust underlie both predictors because top scholars as teachers and local management promote competence, one of the four elements of relational trust, the other three being respect, personal regard for others and integrity.

We must confront all our beliefs about education in an effort to systemically rethink education. Money, all by itself, does not buy educational achievement. In 1987, Federal Judge Russell Clark asked how much money Kansas City needed to provide a quality education for inner city black students and opened the wallets of taxpayers to pay for it.

Judge Clark adopted a wide-ranging "magnet" school plan proposed by the school board. The plan's goal was to make the school system comparable to the surrounding districts by infusing it with hundreds of millions of dollars, improving the physical plant and creating numerous special programs.

The judge said the state should pay 75 percent of the cost and the district should pay the rest. Finding that the district had "exhausted all available means of raising additional revenue," Judge Clark nearly doubled the local property tax, from $2.05 to $4 per $100 of assessed valuation.

It did not work. John Taylor Gatto reports the outcome:

"They had as much money as any school district will ever get," said Gary Orfield, a Harvard investigator who directed a postmortem analysis, "It didn’t do very much." Orfield was wrong. The Windfall produced striking results:
Average daily attendance went down, the dropout rate went up, the black-white achievement gap remained stationary, and the district was as segregated after ten years of well-funded reform as it had been at the beginning. A former school board president whose children had been plaintiffs in the original suit leading to Judge Clark’s takeover said she had "truly believed if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed, that would make a huge difference. I knew it would take time, but I did believe by five years into this program we would see dramatic results educationally."

The experiment lasted ten years, until 1997, when Judge Clark took himself off the case. John Taylor Gatto believes the judge “just doesn't get it.”

(Judge Clark) just doesn’t get it. The (education) system isn’t broken. It works as intended, turning out incomplete people. No repair can fix it, nor is the education kids need in any catalogue to buy. As Kansas City proves, giving schools more money only encourages them to intensify the destructive operations they already perform.

No amount of money can obliterate education obstructionism or create relational trust.

Look Who Else is Obstructing Education.

Would you believe education researchers are? Grover Whitehurst, had intended a sort of “Consumer Reports” model when he founded the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) for evaluating all sorts of new-fangled education ideas. He probably should have talked to Consumer Reports first. They would have told him that companies do not like it when Consumer Reports give their products a bad rating. Apparently neither do education researchers, education program publishers and their lobbyists.

The WWC wanted to be the go-to “central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education.” But obstacles arose.

Launched by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences in 2002, the What Works Clearinghouse was originally intended to be a Consumer Reports-style Web resource where educators could find reliable information on “what works” in schools. But early on, it developed a reputation as the “nothing works” clearinghouse because few reviews were posted on its Web site and even fewer pointed to promising strategies for improving schools.

“You can’t spend $30 million of the public purse and have something that is referred to repeatedly in the media as ‘nothing works,’ ” said Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, who is widely credited with having spearheaded the clearinghouse’s launch during his term as the IES director, which ended last month.

What were the main problems?

...Mr. Whitehurst said project delays resulted in part from disagreements over procedures for screening studies, legal threats from program developers whose work got low ratings from the clearinghouse, congressional lobbying that was critical of the clearinghouse, and a dearth of well-executed studies on which to base its reviews.

Fortunately, the WWC has cleared many of its earlier hurdles.

Over the last two years, the clearinghouse has picked up the pace of its work, publishing increasing numbers of reviews with “positive” findings, and producing new products, such as practice guides, that are targeted to practitioners. According to Jill Constantine, the deputy director of the clearinghouse, its Web site now gets 50,000 to 60,000 “hits” a month and offers 100 research reports, seven practice guides, and a series of new quick reviews, which vet studies that have been spotlighted in the news media.

Mark R. Dynarski, the clearinghouse director, noted that the seven practice guides have been downloaded “more times than the entire 100 reports.”

“Educators are voting with their feet­—or clicks,” he said.

The WWC has help.

Susan Bodilly, the education director for the RAND Corp. of Santa Monica, Calif., described her research group’s Promising Practices Network, which examines the evidence on programs and policies aimed at improving children’s lives.

Ms. Bodilly notes the missing ingredient.

Yet where most such efforts fall short, said Ms. Bodilly, is in providing advice for practitioners on how to put programs in place and sustain them over time. “That’s the missing ingredient in this approach,” she added.

Just bringing answers to the educators is not enough to bring about changes in practice, added James H. “Torch” Lytle, a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and a former Trenton, N.J., school superintendent.

“We know hand washing reduces infections in hospitals,” he told the group. “Yet infection control continues to be a problem in hospitals.”

“If we can’t get hospital staff to do something as simple as washing hands,” he asked, how can teachers be expected to enact far more sophisticated changes in their own practice?

About twenty years ago, a researcher presented the Johns Hopkins CIRC literacy program at our educator day. We were given an elementary basal reader and we practiced customizing the approach to passages from the reader. The idea was that teachers should go back to their schools and customize their own materials. I did exactly that with my middle school science texts even though the program targets primary and elementary students. I instantly perceived the usefulness of the program for my students, 49 percent of whom were not native speakers of English. Every single one of my bilingual students dramatically improved and the achievement of native speakers of English skyrocketed.

I guess I was not the only teacher to recognize the program's advantages for bilingual education. The beauty of the program was its adaptability to any text.

The problem was that most teachers did not go back and “do likewise.” They were too busy or it was too difficult or something. So Johns Hopkins reformulated the program and in its new incarnation, district superintendents love to purchase it and teachers love to villify it. Today educators know CIRC as Success for All. As CIRC, it was nearly free. As Success for All it costs a small fortune.

Are You an Education Obstructionist?

Carl Wieman, 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics winner, wants to fix science education in America.

We are now at a watershed in higher education. We are faced with the need for great change, and we have the yet unrealized opportunities for achieving great change. The full use of the research on teaching and learning, particularly as implemented via modern IT, can transform higher education, and allow it to do a far better job of meeting the higher education needs of a modern society.

We already know how to teach.

While there has never been a shortage of strongly held opinions throughout history regarding "better" educational approaches, there is now a large and growing body of good research, particularly at the college level in science and engineering, as to what pedagogical approaches work and do not work and with which students and why. There are also empirically established principles about learning emerging from research in educational psychology, cognitive science, and education that provide good theoretical guidance for designing and evaluating educational outcomes and methods. These principles are completely consistent with those pedagogical practices that have been measured to be most effective.

But “the bulk” of American society does not benefit from science education research. Prominent among education writers is John Taylor Gatto, who counts no less than twenty-two education obstructionists (also known as "stakeholders") with entrenched interests in the maintaining the status quo.

At the most fundamental level “Indeed, it isn’t hard to see that in strictly economic terms this edifice of competing and conflicting interests is better served by badly performing schools than by successful ones. On economic grounds alone a disincentiveexists to improve schools. When schools are bad, demands for increased funding and personnel, and professional control removed from public oversight, can be pressed by simply pointing to the perilous state of the enterprise. But when things go well, getting an extra buck is like pulling teeth (emphasis in original).”

Mr. Gatto goes on to name a whole crowd of obstructionists, but there may well many more than twenty-two. What are the entrenched interests that make an education stakeholder an obstructionist?

PLAYERS IN THE SCHOOL GAME
FIRST CATEGORY: Government Agencies
1) State legislatures, particularly those politicians known in-house to specialize in educational matters
2) Ambitious politicians with high public visibility
3) Big-city school boards controlling lucrative contracts
4) The courts
5) Big-city departments of education
6) State departments of education
7) Federal Department of Education
8) Other government agencies (National Science Foundation, National Training Laboratories, Defense Department, HUD, Labor Department, Health and Human Services, and many more)
SECOND CATEGORY: Active Special Interests
1) Key private foundations.2 About a dozen of these curious entities have been the most important shapers of national education policy in this century, particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller.
2) Giant corporations, acting through a private association called the Business Roundtable (BR), latest manifestation of a series of such associations dating back to the turn of the century. Some evidence of the centrality of business in the school mix was the composition of the New American Schools Development Corporation. Its makeup of eighteen members (which the uninitiated might assume would be drawn from a representative cross-section of parties interested in the shape of American schooling) was heavily weighted as follows: CEO, RJR Nabisco; CEO, Boeing; President, Exxon; CEO, AT&T; CEO, Ashland Oil; CEO, Martin Marietta; CEO, AMEX; CEO, Eastman Kodak; CEO, WARNACO; CEO, Honeywell; CEO, Ralston; CEO, Arvin; Chairman, BF Goodrich; two ex-governors, two publishers, a TV producer.
3) The United Nations through UNESCO, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, etc.
4) Other private associations, National Association of Manufacturers, Council on Economic Development, the Advertising Council, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Policy Association, etc.
5) Professional unions, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Council of Supervisory Associations, etc.
6) Private educational interest groups, Council on Basic Education, Progressive Education Association, etc.
7) Single-interest groups: abortion activists, pro and con; other advocates for
specific interests.
THIRD CATEGORY: The "Knowledge" Industry
1) Colleges and universities
2) Teacher training colleges
3) Researchers
4) Testing organizations
5) Materials producers (other than print)
6) Text publishers
7) "Knowledge" brokers, subsystem designers

Here are some more stakeholder/obstructionists: parents, students, teachers, school administrators, real estate agents, real estate industry, law enforcement, construction, contractors, computer vendors, bus companies, local planning commissions, (more?). Think not? Think again. Each one of these groups has an interest in maintaining the status quo, even to the overall detriment of society. That is precisely why our society has the education system it wants, even though it may actually be opposed to the best interests of that society.

How to Redeem the Time

Let's take inventory:
1. Education system locked in the past
2. Lack of competitive edge
3. Financial turmoil
4. Retirements at risk
5. Energy dependence
6. Crumbling infrastructure.
7. An ad hoc tax system
8. The money pit of war
9. Global warming
10, Loss of international prestige.
11. etc.

Everywhere you look, America is clearly in crisis. If we believe all the self-help books, a problem is nothing but an opportunity in disguise. If so, then America has a huge opportunity to rethink its very social foundations. Paramount among social foundations and joined at the hip are education and the economy.

Society is like a complicated tapestry. Pull one thread and it all begins to unravel. America is facing the unprecedented opportunity to reweave the tapestry into a sustainable pattern. Surely as the grass is green and the sky is blue, the warp and woof is education and the economy. We have ignored so many warnings and squandered so many past opportunities. We delayed taking one stitch and now we have a tear requiring at least nine stitches. We did not weigh the ounce of prevention, and now the pain of a pound of cure awaits us.

We must waste no more time reinventing America. We must to reshape our institutions, starting with education if America want to retain its position. The constant short-term approach to our collective national headaches must be abandoned. We can no longer take an aspirin (or require testing, or pass a bailout, or drill baby drill) and expect that everything will be fine in the morning. We must create a healthy America instead of constantly medicating a sick one. We need to stop looking for the next technological miracle. First things first. Technology cannot save us. Technology is the servant of education. Education, though not as sexy as some other issues, is the bedrock of all our institutions, including the economy

Henry Petroski, writing about engineering, said that failures appear to be inevitable in the wake of prolonged success.1 He joins the many others in a wide variety of fields who know that failures contribute more than success to sustainable design. I have written before that relational trust seems to be the one trait that best predicts academic achievement. Relational trust has been long lost. How can America begin to heal itself and rebuild relational trust? It is not by bemoaning and dwelling on the problems or waiting for the government. Each one of us must collaborate in becoming part of a societal tidal wave of demand. America's future depends on it.

Step 1: We must commit to making education the buzzword of the day. Each one of us must become a lobbyist (they are not all bad) pushing education to the raw edge of the American national conscience. We all have a stake in education whether we have children or not because we all have a stake in our future. We need to demand that the public media talk as much about education as they do the economy. We must not allow the media to sidetrack the issue with entertaining distractions like lipstick.

Step 2: Polya's problem solving plan starts with understanding the problem. We only think we understand the problem. But for the most part we have been addressing only superficial symptoms. The real problem with American education is systemic. We absolutely must examine education systemically.

Society has the education system it wants. Some elements of society are clearly benefiting from perpetuation of the status quo. Sociologists and psychologists tell us that dysfunction and negativity serve some purpose. We must identify those players who drag down the system and bring their motivations and activities into the light of day. For example, I have heard parents suspect that the reason some of their children never transition out of special education is because schools do not want to lose the extra federal funding they get for each special education child. I only bring this up as an example; I do not want to get sidetracked into defenses

Step 3: We must lead from our strengths. Every single strength can positively impact the societal tidal wave of demand to give every child access to a world class education.

Step 4: Using the catalog of America's strengths, we, each according to our individual gifts, can together brainstorm strategies to capitalize on those strengths.

Step 5: Then we can design tactics to implement those strategies. We already know how to provide high quality education. There are teachers succeeding every day.

Step 6: Design methods for evaluating our progress toward our goals, concentrating on methods that avoid unjustly burdening and punishing those with the smallest voice, the children.

Step 7: Then do it.

World-Class Education A Moral Obligation

That's what Obama said and he is right. America's economy depends on it.

America, now is not the time for small plans. Now is the time to finally meet our moral obligation to provide every child a world-class education, because it will take nothing less to compete in the global economy.

Roy Romer of Strong American Schools said that providing a world-class education for all our children required “political will.” All Americans, whether they have children or not, need to invest in the education of ALL of America's children, if only for self-interested economic reasons. It seems that it should be common knowledge that education and economy are not just linked, but alloyed.


I wrote about Gov. Romer's roundtable discussion earlier this week.

{Gov. Romer} continued, “If we put as much into education as we do athletics, we would be first in the world.” I agree. It is not money. It is commitment. The money will follow commitment.

Moral Obligation. Political Will. Commitment. Surveys routinely report that Americans are committed to education. Americans need more than an intellectual commitment. We need a deep sense of moral obligation translated into political will. When America, the richest country in the world, decides it really wants a world-class system, nothing will stop America.


Senator Ted Kennedy recalled JFK's challenge to put a man on the moon.

We are told that Barack Obama believes too much in an America of high principle and bold endeavor, but when John Kennedy called of going to the moon, he didn't say it's too far to get there. We shouldn't even try.
Our people answered his call and rose to the challenge, and today an American flag still marks the surface of the moon.
Yes, we are all Americans. This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I've seen it. I've lived it. And we can do it again.

Maybe education for all children is not as sexy as the moon, but it is certainly a more important challenge. The moon challenge appealed to nationalistic pride. Somehow the education challenge needs to take hold in the American psyche. But as long as survey results continue to report self-satisfaction with schools at the local level, I fear that the chance of a world-class education for all will continue to play second fiddle to faddism.

Another Educational Fad Bites the Dust

Funds to continue the once popular “Reading First” are shriveling up.

Timothy Shanahan, a reading researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has worked as a consultant to the Reading First program in several states, called the program “politically toxic.”

“Reading First is dead,” he writes on his blog, www.shanahanonliteracy.com. “It could have withstood the corruption described in the inspector general’s report or the interim impact study—but not both!”

So what went wrong?

Reading First “has been plagued with mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and cronyism, as documented by the inspector general,” Rep. Obey said, referring to a series of reports released by the Department of Education’s inspector general in 2006 and 2007 that suggested some federal officials and contractors involved in implementing the program had conflicts of interest and appeared to favor some commercial products over others.

“Moreover, a scientifically rigorous study released by the Department of Education found that the program has no discernible impact on student reading performance,” Rep. Obey, who is also the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that handles education funding, said in a reference to the evaluation released May 1 by the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the department. ("‘Reading First’ Research Offers No Definitive Answers," June 4, 2008.)

Reading First went the way of most fads. What usually happens is something that may have started as a good idea when first implemented by enthusiastic early adopters gets watered down by mediocre professional development training by independent contractors hired to digest and then spit out the training. I know how this works; I have sometimes been one of the independent contractors hired to present someone else’s ideas. I do not do well at this. I usually cannot refrain from incorporating my own ideas, normally because the canned presentations do not respect the intelligence and feelings of the intended audience. Once the special interests get involved, it is generally all over. Besides, later implementations have difficulty replicating the results of the enthusiastic early adopters.

What the most skillful teachers usually do is incorporate the best, or at least the most workable, ideas from any fad into their eclectic bag of tricks. Even without special funding, some aspects of every fad usually survive in some form in the teaching repertoire of some teachers where it becomes impossible to isolate from everything else the most effective teachers do.