Wanted: Teachers in Kansas

No kidding! Kansas, like everywhere else, has suddenly come alive to the fact that their teachers are retiring* and there are no replacements on the horizon.

Superintendent Jerry Burch, who heads USD 309 Nickerson-South Hutchinson, was in Colorado last month trying his luck at a recruitment fair.

In his district, 45 percent of the teachers are eligible to retire within the next three to five years, he said.

The San Luis Obispo California Coastal Unified School District (slcusd.org) realized about a year and half ago that one-third of their veteran teachers were retiring in the next three to five years, and worse, because of the common policy of rejecting experienced applicants in favor of cheaper new graduates, they realized there was a looming gap in mid-career cadre. The district had plenty of novices, few mid career teachers, and disappearing veterans.

The shortage of math and science teachers is especially severe, but should not have been unexpected. I have an article I clipped from Newsweek in 1985 predicting a future severe shortage of math and science teachers in twenty years. The future is now, and America responded by ignoring the warning.

Kansas legislators have come up with a list of suggestions for alleviating the shortage.

the development of alternative licensure programs, including Internet-based, off-campus and weekend programs; teacher preparation programs; scholarships for students pursuing teaching in math, science and special education; financial incentives to attract teachers; and promoting teaching in Kansas.

It is a typical list, but notice what this list, and most such lists, omit. The powers that be never think to attract the proven, mid-career teachers back to the classroom, by, for example, granting year-for-year credit for experience on the salary scale instead of the usual measly five to seven years. Schools insult teachers by paying teachers with fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years experience a wage corresponding to at most five years. Still, many teachers love teaching so much they would have accepted such stingy pay. These are teachers whose only mistake was to move from one school district to another for whatever reason (often to follow a husband's job opportunities), many never realizing that their proven experience had little value next to the cheap wages of novices. Schools could have had highly experienced teachers at the bargain price of just a little more than a newly minted teacher, but no. Schools all over America are facing the consequences of their shortsightedness.

*Link has expired. I could not find an alternative source.

The Ubiquitous 50 Percent

50 Percent. That number comes up again and again and again. Tonight I heard it yet again on The Newshour with Jim Lerher . Principals say it.

Some principals, like Nelson Burton, are eager to shake up their staff. Burton leads Coolidge High School. Low test scores show that his school has been failing for years.
L. NELSON BURTON, Principal, Coolidge Senior High School: It's a terrible thing to say, but half of the staff here ought not be(my bold). They just don't fit in to what we're doing here. And I dare say many of them won't fit into any program where they're trying to raise student achievement.
JOHN MERROW: Does that surprise you, a principal says, "I wish I could fire half my teachers, they're not on board, they're not effective"?
MICHELLE RHEE: Does it surprise me? No. I've heard things like that from lots of principals.

Professional developers say it.

JOHN MERROW: Michelle Rhee has set aside nearly $20 million for professional development. But Cheryl Krehbiel, who runs the program, doesn't think she can help every teacher.
CHERYL KREHBIEL, District of Columbia Public Schools: We have a number of teachers who I don't believe will ever believe that kids can learn at high levels. And those are the teachers we need to move out quickly, rapidly, at whatever cost.
JOHN MERROW: Can you quantify -- I mean, what percentage of your roughly 4,000 teachers feel this way, have this problem?
CHERYL KREHBIEL: Fifty percent don't have the right mindset(my bold). And there's the possibility that more of them don't have the content knowledge to do the job.

I have heard professors of education say that 50% of preservice teachers should never have been accepted into the schools of education. I have heard professors of math classes for preservice elementary teachers say that 50% of their students do not have the math skills or understanding to lay the essential foundation our children need to master math to the levels needed in the modern world. I have heard teachers say that 50% of their colleagues should not be teaching.

Tonight I decided that I have heard the 50 percent estimate so many times that I am going to start a collection of citations and look for research that may confirm or deny the estimate. I fully understand that I have cited nothing but anecdotal evidence, and I fully understand that some people believe anecdotal evidence equals worthless evidence, but anecdotal evidence is a place to start. Anecdotal evidence can often be the first indication of important research-worthy trends.


What research has confirmed is that the most crucial factor leading to academic achievement is teacher quality. If significant numbers of teachers should not be in the classroom and yet remain, all other education reform efforts are a waste of time, money and energy. Research may find that less than 50 percent should find another career, but even so, efforts to recruit and retain quality teachers must be the linchpin of education reform. One place to find quality teachers would be among the proven older teachers from out of district who are routinely denied teaching jobs in favor of younger, less experienced (read: cheaper) applicants. If such older teachers manage to get hired, they must accept deep pay cuts since most districts will only give about five to seven years credit for experience on the pay scale even to proven teachers with ten, twenty or thirty years experience.

The Problem with the Housing Market is the Schools...

...and mortgage bailouts do nothing to address the root causes. According to the book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke , the policy whereby students are assigned to a public school based on their address meant that parents who want the best for their children will be forced to buy a home in a desirable school district. A second wage-earner gives the family an edge in competing for scarce homes. But when so many families send Mom to work, the result is that the price of homes is bid up so high that people buy houses they cannot afford, especially after the mortgage industry deregulation of 1980. A side effect is that families headed by single women are forced into deeper poverty, of not only money, but also opportunity.

How should families escape the trap? The book's authors dismiss what they consider to be both the typical conservative approach of living within their means and the typical liberal approach of more government regulation of the housing market.

In order to free families from the trap, it is necessary to go to the heart of the problem: public education. Bad schools impose indirect—but huge-- costs on millions of middle-class families. In their desperate rush to save their children from failing schools, families are literally spending themselves into bankruptcy. The only way to take the pressure off these families to to change the schools....Schools in middle-class neighborhoods may be labeled “public,” but parents have paid for tuition by purchasing a (very expensive) home within a carefully selected school district

Such parents pay tuition in two ways: first, the original mortgage and second, the increased property taxes generated by these overpriced mortgages.

Any policy that loosens the ironclad relationship between location-location-location and school-school-school would eliminate the need for parents to pay an inflated price for a home just because it happens to lie within the boundaries of a desirable school district.

The authors believe that vouchers may be the answer, but not vouchers as currently conceived and hotly debated today. They believe the problem lies in framing the issue as “public-versus-private rift” and that a comprehensive voucher program based a parental choice is essential.

Local governments could enact meaningful reform by enabling parents to choose from among all the public schools in a locale, with no presumptive assignment based on neighborhood...Tax dollars would follow the children, not the parents' home addresses, and children who live in a (less expensive) house would have the same educational opportunities as those who live in a (much more expensive) house.

Open enrollment is already policy in many school districts. Open enrollment is not necessarily tied to a comprehensive voucher program. I am curious to find out if open enrollment helps to put a brake on the overheated housing market as the authors contend. Or perhaps the US could do what Japan does: all taxes go into a central pot fromwhich they are distributed nearly equally to fully fund schools no matter the tax base of the school's neighborhood. Even as it is common knowledge that studies (cited by the authors) show that many Americans believe the American education system, especially in the public schools, is failing, there are also a number of studies that, intriguingly, show it is all a matter of how the questions are asked. When Americans are asked about the school their own child attends, they uniformly say the school is doing a good job, for just one example, this report from ADDitude . My child goes to a good school; everybody else's child goes to a bad school. Such a perception will naturally stand in the way of any meaningful education reform to benefit all children.

The Goal in Japan is NOT to Pass the Entrance Exam...

...Rather the goal is to avoid failing it. For Americans this may not seem to be an important distinction, but it is essential for understanding Japanese education. From preschool through high school the goal of every student and every student's mother is that the student will avoid failing the entrance exam. Probably the most crucial entrance exam is the one for high school. Every student in a prefecture (a political entity similar to a state or a province) will take the same entrance exam on the same day regardless of which high school they aspire to attend. But they can only apply to ONE high school and must carefully choose which school according to where they will most likely be able to avoid failing it. It is arguably the most important decision a Japanese person makes in their whole life, and they must make it at age fifteen.

It works like this: If a high school has 500 freshman slots, and 504 students apply, then the entrance exam determines which four students fail. There is no particular passing score. In fact, if the entrance exam is worth 200 points and if the 500th student scores ten points on the whole test, that student “passes.” It means it is possible to pass the entrance exam while getting 95 percent of the answers wrong. Americans are often astonished that some Japanese students commit suicide when they fail the entrance exam, but the 501st student is in true despair. They took the exam on the one day in the year all the high schools are holding the exam and they chose the wrong group to compete against.

There are three kinds of high school. I do not mean there are three tracks in a particular high school. I mean there are three separate and self-contained kinds of high school often located nowhere near each other in a particular region. The most desirable high school is the academic high school. In the Japanese language the academic high school is misleadingly referred to as the “usual” high school. When Americans want to visit a Japanese high school, they will be taken to a “usual” high school as if it were the only kind. In addition, there is the vocational high school for less able (mostly) boys and there is the commercial high school for less able (mostly) girls. Since all three types of high school will be giving the exact same entrance exam on the same day, students must evaluate at which school they will be most likely to avoid failure, that is, avoid being one of the students who fails to win a seat.

But in point of fact, my example of 504 students applying for 500 slots was unfair. Typically, many many students apply for the limited number of slots, so realistically, students will have to achieve very much higher than 5 percent to avoid failure. If the 500th student scores 83 percent, then 83 percent will be the cutoff score. Everyone scoring below 83 percent fails even though, given the difficulty of the exam, such a score is actually an incredible achievement. Each year the newspapers publish the prefectural high school entrance exam a couple days after administration. A little while later the newspapers will publish a variety of entrance exam statistics for each of the high schools in the prefecture. Each year students, parents, and teachers spend a great deal of time studying these exams and annual statistics in an effort to match each student with the high school where they are most likely to avoid failure. If they do fail, students must either study in a private school for the year while awaiting the administration of the next year's entrance exam or abandon plans to continue their education and enter the work force straightway. At which high school to sit for the entrance exam is the most momentous decision a Japanese student will make and the decision is made at age fifteen.

Which Kind of Teacher are You?

That is what the book Mathematical and Analogical Reasoning of Young Learners says there are. The three kinds of teachers are 1. theoretical, 2. experiential, and 3. intuitive. In reading over the respective descriptions and case studies of actual teachers, the categories began to remind me of those primary school reading groups, you know, the squirrels, bears and rabbits. Everybody knows the squirrels are the best and the rabbits, shall we say, are not, regardless of the attempt to camouflage the differences with neutral category names.

The researchers asked about twenty teachers of children ranging from kindergarten to third grade the following questions:

1. What does mathematical reasoning mean to you?
2. Are you familiar with the term, analogical reasoning? What does the term mean to you?
3. How competent at mathematical and analogical reasoning do you consider young children to be?
4. How did you acquire your understanding of mathematical reasoning?
5. How did you acquire your understanding of analogical reasoning?
6. How do you perceive your role in developing the children's mathematical reasoning?
7. How do you attempt to stimulate your children's mathematical reasoning?
8. What differences in reasoning ability do you see in your children?
9. How do you attempt to address these differences?
10. What kinds of mathematical reasoning abilities do you think your children will need to be successful in first and second grade?
11. Do you take these future reasoning needs of your children into account? If so, how do you do it?
12. In what ways do you think the children's out-of-school experiences contribute to the growth of their mathematical reasoning?

The beliefs and practice of the teachers of our youngest students should be examined more often. These teachers are instrumental in laying the academic foundations which may mean the difference later between academic achievement and academic frustration. According to the authors, theoretical teachers displayed substantial and detailed knowledge of mathematical and analogical reasoning, pedagogy, and cognition. Theoretical teachers believed that children are highly capable and competent. They also considered home experiences and mathematical language to be essential to the the children's development of mathematical and analogical reasoning skills.

On every question, as a group (but not necessarily as individuals) the authors found the experiential teachers and the intuitive teachers displayed less knowledge and lower expectations. Experiential teachers relied primarily on their own experience and their reflections on that experience without reference to the professional literature. Intuitive teachers were just guessing and hoping; their answers to the research questions “were brief and often included jargon” (emphasis supplied) (page 148). In fact, their responses often included the phrase, “I guess.” Although all groups emphasized the process of doing math over getting answers, the intuitive teachers “did not see a need for direct instruction. This may relate to their lack of attention to conceptual development and their emphasis on learning being “fun” (page 149). (In the near future, I will be examining the jargon and buzzwords of education, and how terminology can substitute for clear thinking.)

I mentioned earlier that I got the impression that the labels, “theoretical,” “experiential” and “intuitive,” were hardly more than euphemisms for good, middling and poor. By the end of the book, the impression was pretty much confirmed.

The knowledge, beliefs, and practices of the teachers in this study can be placed on a continuum from intuitive to experiential to theoretical. Theoretical teachers explained their knowledge and and beliefs by referencing theoretical frameworks, teaching experience, and listening to children. They provided rich examples of practices associated with effective/exemplary teachers. The experiential teachers made decisions based on knowledge that appeared to reflect their experience as opposed to the multiple sources of knowledge used by theoretical teachers. In contrast, the intuitive teachers appeared to make instructional decisions more spontaneously. Although the examples of practice the intuitive teachers provided were not necessarily ineffective, these teachers could not clearly articulate any rationale for the decisions they make regarding their instructional practices (p 167).

Since the book was written by a bunch of education researchers, the high standing of theoretical teachers may mean nothing more than theoretical teachers quote education researchers so education researchers like them. The authors recommend that future research focus on the question of whether more learning occurs in the classrooms of theoretical teachers than in the classrooms of other teachers. Maybe I am a little rankled because I know that most of the here-today-gone-tomorrow education fads that have burdened veteran teachers over the years are usually perpetrated by education researchers, researchers who may have little teaching experience of their own.

Japanese Schools are More Homogeneous than US Schools.

There are many reasons why Japanese secondary schools display a much more uniform high quality than US secondary schools, including, but not limited to:

*Top students commonly choose teaching as a career.

*Teachers must rotate every three years from school to school with the express purpose of ensuring that all schools, rural or urban, rich or poor, share the teaching talent of the nation.

*The tax base for each local school is national, not local.

*Every school is required to have certain minimal basic resources, ie, every school has a fully appointed science lab, a library, an art room, physical education facilities including a gym, and more.

*Homeroom teachers visit the home of every student early in the school year.

*Every school provides a hot, highly nutritious lunch to every student.

*There is a real, national curriculum.

*Textbooks must be approved by the Ministry of Education, and schools choose only from the approved list.

*Practically every secondary student attends supplementary schools (called juku) at private expense.

*Students must pass a college entrance exam to go to college. Each year the exam is published in the local newspapers after the exam is given.

*The express goal of secondary education is to enable students to pass the entrance exam.
*And more...

I must add that the Japanese system of high schools is really three separate systems with discrete campuses. Western writers often never realize that when they think they are writing about the Japanese education system, they are not talking about a multi-track comprehensive high school such as what we have in the US. Normally Western writers research, visit and write about academic (sometimes called college-prep) high schools whether they know it or not. There are also vocational high schools attended mostly by boys with a few girls, and commercial high schools attended mostly by girls with a few boys.

When you read about the Japanese secondary education system, you are almost always reading about the academic high school system. In my experience, writers seem oblivious to the existence of the other types of Japanese high schools. I am not suggesting that the US should wholesale adopt the educational policies of Japan. However, I am suggesting that a serious discussion regarding the portability of some features of the Japanese system would be valuable. Since US society is choosing the education system it has, warts and all, it would be nice if that choice were made with eyes wide open.

Teachers Are the Most Important Variable!

Plenty of PhD types have made their careers researching and reporting on what is wrong with our education system and how to fix it. Most research leads to here-today-gone-tomorrow education fads. These fads consume precious resources and impose extra responsibilities on teachers, but in the end, education reform remains as elusive as ever. The research does not even agree on the characteristics of academic achievement except for ONE factor.

Over and over again, the most important factor contributing to the academic achievement of students is THE TEACHER. Just this week yet another testimony to the importance of the teacher appeared in “Education Week” summarizing a recent report of ten “top performing” education systems and seven other “rapidly improving” systems, and concluding that what all the systems had in common was a commitment to attracting and keeping the highest quality teachers. Encouragingly, three of the seven rapidly improving systems were in the United States: Boston, Chicago and New York.

“Top-performing systems, for instance, are typically both restrictive and selective about who is able to train as a teacher, recruiting their teachers from the top third of each group leaving secondary school.” Once top performing systems have their high quality recruits, they train them well, pay them well, and accord them professional respect and esteem.

In typical fashion, critics justified the poor performers. “Tom Loveless, a senior fellow in education at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, said the report 'needed to define the variables [that affect school performance] and measure them carefully' across systems hitting the full range of performance. Identifying the practices of the better-performing school systems does not mean much if less successful systems do the same things, he said.“

That is the question, is it not? Do less successful systems, in fact, do the same things as the better-performing systems? For example, can the less successful systems show that their teachers came from the top third of each group leaving secondary school? One of the top performing systems cited in the report, Japan, because of various factors, tend to have more consistent quality of secondary schools across the country than the US. So how does the top third from one community differ from the top third of another community within the United States? There's a great research question.