“Education... From Cradle Through a Career”

I appreciate that the President talks so often about the importance of education, most recently at the Centennial of the NAACP.

All of us can agree that we need to offer every child in this country -- every child --
...every child in this country the best education the world has to offer from cradle through a career.

No argument there. The debate centers around how to do it while still allowing competing interests to perpetuate and prosper. There are reasons society has settled for the current education system. One other thing we can agree on is the value of excellent teachers.

the job of a teacher is too important for us to accept anything less than the best. 

It may surprise you to learn that many, maybe most, school districts have a pernicious policy of rejecting the best school teachers. If a teacher moves from one community to another, that teacher has become what is called an “out-of-district” teacher. These teachers are proven successes with demonstrated competence and experience. They face a good chance of being rejected when they apply for teaching position in their new district. Most districts have a policy of rejecting applicants with more than around five years of teaching experience. And even if they hire the applicant, they will start the teacher on the pay scale at no higher than the five-year-experience level.

If America adopts nothing else from the Japanese education system, America needs, NEEDS, to adopt the idea that teachers are among the most esteemed members of society and teaching is among the most prestigious of professions, a profession capable of attracting our best students.

We need to walk back from the increasingly prevalent idea in American society that teachers are mere technicians. The Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) recently held a conference. One of the workshop presenters, Susan Ohanian, addressed the trend toward making teachers technicians. From a description of her workshop:

19. Teacher Professionalism At Risk
Presenter: Susan Ohanian
Description:
Teacher professionalism is at risk, under bombardment by Democratic and Republican corporate-politicos. When a teacher becomes a technician whose existence is dependent on directives from the State, then the very term 'teacher professionalism' becomes an oxymoron. This jeopardizes alternative schools as well as public schools. We are all At Risk.

 
What Ms. Ohanian is referring to is the increasing desire of schools to have their teachers become “facilitators” who manage computer-based courses, or deliver prepackaged curriculum. Schools have begun making teachers into technicians as a way to overcome the problem with teacher quality. Every teacher hates these scripted packages precisely because using them infringes on teacher autonomy and professionalism. Schools feel they have no choice. Schools feel that entrusting teachers (autonomy) is too risky because too many teachers lack quality (professionalism). Allowing the trend toward teachers as technicians to continue will only debilitate our education system further by making what some believe to be true to become really true, that anyone can be a teacher.
Any parent is witness to the learning power of babies and toddlers. Another thing we can agree on is that the earliest years are the foundational years.

And we should raise the bar when it comes to early learning programs.  It's not enough just to have a babysitter.  We need our young people stimulated and engaged and involved. .. some (early learning programs) are wasting what studies show are by far a child's most formative years.

But we cannot rely on the government. Nor should we.

Government programs alone won't get our children to the Promised Land.  We need a new mind set, a new set of attitudes -- because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way we've internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little from the world and from themselves.

That's a description of one mindset. I encountered that mindset in the person of a junior high boy at an urban school. He was in my science class. I was constantly encouraging students to use education as the way out of the ghetto. This boy said, “Why bother? My father is a janitor and that's all I'll ever get to be.”

But there's another mindset he did not mention, a competing mindset no less debilitating. That is the mindset of entitlement manifested by students who believe that they do not need an education, their future as members of a privileged group is assured, and school is for meeting friends, playing around, and messing with the teacher. They think they are rich, but do not perceive their poverty.

The key to students with a positive attitude towards school is parents.

You can't just contract out parenting.  For our kids to excel, we have to accept our responsibility to help them learn...  And by the way, it means we need to be there for our neighbor's sons and daughters... That's the meaning of community.

With the support of parents, children can aspire to their potential.

It also means pushing our children to set their sights a little bit higher... I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers -- (applause) -- doctors and teachers -- (applause) -- not just ballers and rappers.  I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice.  (Applause.)  I want them aspiring to be the President of the United States of America.  (Applause.)

America needs an attitude makeover. Society needs to respect and esteem teachers. The colleges of education need to turn out teachers worthy of esteem and respect. Many disruptive students yearn to have a teacher who is worthy of their respect. Oftentimes their disruption is a search for someone, please, anyone to earn that respect. Schools need to pay teachers a salary befitting a professional. Once the esteem of society is the norm, colleges of education will have no difficulty attracting a full cohort of the the best and the brightest.

kids are smarter than we give them credit for

Kids ARE smarter than we give them credit for. In America, we really do not believe in our children. By an interesting turn of circumstances, I once found myself teaching high school biology to a multi-age group of students from second grade through high school. I found the youngest children could responsibly handle the equipment, record data, and discuss the implications of their data as well as the oldest students. Where the older students excelled was in writing the lab report. The children loved learning biology. It was fun, challenging and built real self-esteem, not the specious self-esteem so common in schools.

At the conclusion of his speech, the President waxed poetic:

One hundred years from now,
on the 200th anniversary of the NAACP,
let it be said that this generation did its part;
that we too ran the race;

that full of the faith that our dark past has taught us,
full of the hope that the present has brought us,
we faced, in our own lives and all across this nation,
the rising sun of a new day begun.

Incidental Oversight or Deliberate Social Engineering

America is full of sober, responsible people who tried very hard to do the right thing financially. They got their education, got a job, bought a house, stayed out of debt and saved for retirement. They followed all the rules only to wake up one fine morning and find themselves in serious financial trouble. What did they learn? They did not necessarily do the right things after all. They, meaning we, found that very often our financial teachers gave us advice that benefits them rather than us. Yet even now, our financial teachers, wherever they may be found, are advising us to do what we have so long been taught to do: go to school, work hard, stay out of debt, save for retirement, and hope things will be okay. Once the crisis is over and things are back to normal, doing all those old right things will work---except when they don't.

Every financial adviser strangely urges relying on the same failed strategies to work in the future, the strategies that enrich them instead of us. And why not? Most so-called financial advisers are really financial sales people. We should expect what they say to benefit mostly themselves. It seems each financial adviser has a pet financial instrument. For some, no matter what the financial problem is, the solution is life insurance. For others, the solution is an annuity. Still others, it's the stock market. For yet others...whatever it is they are licensed to sell. Once they have been paid, it little matters how their advice impacts their clients for good or ill.

Given the importance of finance in every single person's life, it is astonishing that finance is not generally taught in schools, nor is there much public demand to make finance part of the school curriculum. Teachers may read and groan, Oh, please, do not add even one more burden to the teaching load or one more excellent subject to be neglected in favor of NCLB testing. Even so, finance should be part of the curriculum, perhaps within the math curriculum. To be sure, many math textbooks touch on financial topics, especially when looking for real world applications of the math students are supposed to be learning. But these incidental financial topics are taught by the same elementary math teachers whose lack of a profound understanding of fundamental mathematics has already been well-documented.

Robert Kiyosaki, taking some cues from John Taylor Gatto, believes that keeping our children in ignorance about money and how it works is evil. We are in the information age when knowledge about all kinds of things, including money, is crucial. Yet as any history of education shows, our education system still operates in the industrial age. During the most recent presidential campaign we heard that education and the economy are intertwined and interdependent. However, there are no broad-based initiatives to include finance in the curriculum.

A program to teach financial literacy is probably more important than the technology literacy schools were more than happy to integrate into their curriculum, especially since technology in schools was often generously funded by the foundation arm of corporations in a position to profit. Thus Apple put free computers in many schools. Nearly every foundation's Request for Proposals (RFP) for grant funding requires a computer/technology component. Financial literacy is even better, because almost by definition, financial literacy would enhance that darling of all educators, CRITICAL THINKING. Financial literacy is all about evaluation, the very top level of cognitive knowledge.

What would a curriculum of financial literacy include? Robert Kiyosaki, writing about this very topic, would probably say a curriculum* of financial literacy would include:
1.The language of money.
2.The difference between capital gains and cash flow.
3.The fairytale aspect of most financial advice.
4.The influence of attitude on reality.
5.Selling yourself.

In other words, students need a new mind set, a different frame of reference, a modified set of pegs for organizing the basics of financial knowledge, such as rate of inflation, compound interest and tax strategies, just to name a few. Those basics need to be taught within a different frame of reference, because clearly the old frame of reference further enriches the already rich at our expense. Schools need to prepare students for the information age where knowledge is king. So far, schools seem uninterested in the task, perhaps because teachers with the new, different, modified mindset are so rare, and because the usual, but flawed advice, is not only everywhere, but everywhere accepted as correct. I am not necessarily recommending Mr. Kiyosaki's work. He has his own agenda. However, finance is such an integral part of the adult life for which we are supposed to be preparing students, we need to get serious about including it in the curriculum.










*Robert Kiyosaki spelled out his curriculum in chapter 12 of his new online book. The chapter did not exist when I first wrote the post, and the link is now broken.

“History of money...
Understanding a financial statement...
Difference between asset and liability...
Difference between capital gains and cash flow...
Difference between fundamental and technical investing...
Measuring an asset's strength...
Know how to choose good people...
Know which assets are best for you...
Know when to focus and when to diversify...
Minimize risk...
Know how to minimize taxes...
The difference between debt and credibility...
Know how to use derivatives...
Know how your wealth is stolen...
Know how to make mistakes...”

The Education Train May Have Left the Station

The education train may have left the station, leaving traditional educators still groping their way blindly to the platform.

New, innovative, non-educators are poised to blaze the new education trails needed to help America reclaim its status as the world class education system. These new style educators usually have not earned education degrees, have not taught school, and do not possess any state teaching licenses. All that stuff is so last century. Nevertheless, they may be at the forefront of the education reform so many of us yearn for.

I am not talking about technology, a relatively recent buzzword near and dear to education writers and grant-funding foundations. A Request for Proposal without a technology piece is getting pretty rare. However, technology is often nothing more than gussied-up drill-and-kill.

The people currently studying the dynamics of learning are not necessarily publishing in journals, but they are implementing what they learn in domains outside of traditional education settings. Second Life just held its first commencement ceremony honoring virtual students who earned degrees entirely in the virtual world. Talk about online education. I just want to know if the real person behind the Second Life avatar has acquired real-life marketable skills. I mean if the avatar had to complete assignments and pass tests to earn a virtual degree, is it possible the person behind the avatar acquired that knowledge. And if not, could the concept be designed so that the puppetmaster, so to speak, does acquire the puppet's skills? Intriguing.

The government has commissioned Visual Purple to create training simulations that put participants in decision-making roles to maximize learning by doing. Robert Kiyosaki, of Rich Dad, Poor Dad fame, has a game, The CashFlow Game, out to help people master his strategies and tactics. The idea behind these simulations is the the puppet represents the puppetmaster, and the puppetmaster must learn and integrate knowledge and skills in order for the puppet to succeed. The acquired knowledge and skills is then directly useful in real life work.

So am I just talking about games and simulations? No. Games and simulations are nothing new. I used Reader Rabbit, Oregon Trail, Operation Frog, Sim Ant, and other programs with positive effects many, many years ago. But those programs were supplemental to my main teaching agenda, and compared with some of the new developments, frankly clumsy and primitive. With a well-designed curriculum, some of the new games can BE the teaching environment.

To be clear, I am NOT saying you have to subscribe to the opinions of any of the purveyors of games and simulations. I AM saying that Confucius was right. The amount remembered depends on the level of processing. The simulations seek to maximize learning at the active, 90% level.

Uncontrollable Variables Muddy Evaluations

Does Jonathan Alter at Newsweek really know what he wants? His recent article, Peanut-Butter Politics, rightly pinpoints teacher effectiveness as a crucial component of classroom effectiveness, but accuses the teachers union of reluctance to actually hold teachers accountable. The problem is he has no viable accountability plan except a nebulous call for measuring teacher effectiveness in the classroom.

Teacher effectiveness–say it three times. Last week a group called the New Teacher Project released a report titled "The Widget Effect" that argues that teachers are viewed as indistinguishable widgets–states and districts are "indifferent to variations in teacher performance"–and notes that more than 99 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory. The whole country is like Garrison Keillor's Lake Woebegon, except all the teachers are above average, too.

Why? The short answer is teachers' unions. Duncan complained recently that the California school system has a harmful "firewall" between student evaluation and teacher evaluation. In other words, teachers can't be evaluated on whether their students actually learned anything between September and June. The head of the San Francisco union says it's nuts to judge teachers on whether there's evidence that shows improvement in their classrooms. An A for accountability, eh?

...snip...

It takes a tough man to say, in the middle of a recession, "no improvement, no check." But if not now, when?

I addressed The Widget Effect a couple weeks ago. It is not so much that there is a lack of desire to hold teachers accountable. The main problem is that there are simply too many variables the teacher does not control. No one has yet proposed any fair way of evaluating teachers. And no teacher can or should be held responsible for (for example) the drunken uncle who lives in the student's home.

The worthlessness of evaluations creates a major disconnect in the school policy.

Though it is widely accepted that a teacher’s effectiveness matters more than any other school factor in student success or failure, it is almost never considered in critical decisions such as how teachers are hired, developed or retained.

Teacher effectiveness cannot be considered because teacher effectiveness is unknown. What's more, researchers have no consensus as to the characteristics of an effective teacher.
I would like to address the first two points.

It is easy to be negative and overlook the legions of highly motivated, highly competent, and highly effective teachers in our classrooms. In spite of the evaluation difficulties, we know they are there. here's the thing: many are recognized only years after a student has benefited from their influence. At the time, their students, with their lack of life experience, may not have realized what a treasure their teacher was. In fact, they may have even “hated” their teacher. Nevertheless, great teachers populate our classrooms in great numbers. A commonly appearing estimate is 50%. Around 50% of education students have the right stuff, but nearly all students will graduate and end up in our schools. Any college of education cohort can differentiate the more able from the less able among their peers. Maybe our colleges of education should be more selective, evaluating teaching candidates for suitability long before they have invested four plus years of time and money in becoming teachers.

Students (and Teachers) Do Not Understand Math

Three weeks ago educators wondered if conclusions from the Response to Intervention (RTI) research might be applicable to mathematics.

Educators gathered here last week to discuss a recent federal “practice guide” on response to intervention for students struggling in mathematics agreed that applying the RTI approach to that subject is challenging. But they also suggested that doing so was worth the effort.

It is instructive to discover the reasons applying the RTI approach to math is challenging.

Response to Intervention involves six steps: Screen, Teach, Intervene, Probe, Chart and Adjust.

Screen
Valid screening measures predict who is, and who is not, at risk for future reading difficulty. These measures are administered to determine if a child is at risk for failing a state's "high stakes" end of year achievement test, by which the state measures a school's overall performance. Children considered to be "at risk" are expected to experience difficulty responding (not keeping up) in the core curriculum as traditionally delivered in the regular general education classroom. Note: Due to the desire to capture all children who are truly "at risk," the false positive rate of early screening may be as high as 50 percent. In other words, as many as half of all the children who are identified as "at risk" by early screening may not be truly "at risk."
Teach
Core curriculum in the regular general education class should be research-based and field tested. This means, based on evidence from converging research, that the core curriculum contains all the elements found necessary to effectively teach reading and has a known track record of success. Such curriculum is to be delivered by "highly qualified" teachers sufficiently trained to deliver the selected instruction as intended, i.e., with fidelity to design. My note: Notice the language says, “trained to deliver the selected instruction as intended.” I knew one highly competent first-grade teacher in California that refused to deliver the selected instruction (whole language) as intended. It was a good thing because her students ALL learned to read even as California fell to 49th place in reading during the whole language period. The fad lasted until 1995 when phonics was reinstated in the curriculum. The change in the role of the teacher as indicated by the language I have noted is problematic.
Intervene
Provide "at risk" children with enhanced opportunities to learn, possibly including, but not limited to, additional time exposed to the core curriculum in small groups (3-6 students), other supplementary instruction, or special education.
Probe (progress monitoring)
Progress monitoring tests are brief measures of specific reading skills that are administered to determine if the child receiving intervention is responding as intended. They are given frequently, at least once every two weeks.
Chart
Progress is regularly charted to provide a visual record of actual rate of gain in specific reading skills in relation to a specified goal. The goal of intervention is for the child to improve relative standing and perform at or closer to grade level standards and is individualized according to the unique needs of the child.
Adjust
Depending on whether the child is achieving a rate of progress determined by his or her individualized goal, the manner and intensity of intervention will be adjusted. The cycle of progress-monitoring and adjustment of intervention will continue, even if a determination for special education eligibility is made.

Math educators met June 10, 2009 to explore whether the same six steps would be just as effective in math as in reading.

Educators at last week’s event said that fitting math into an RTI framework is hard, but that they believe it is now vital to improving math performance for struggling students.

One of the main difficulties is finding suitable math education materials.

Judith Russ, the mathematics curriculum supervisor for the 134,000-student Prince George’s County district in Maryland, said for her part that finding the right materials is hard.
The instructional materials “are not looking at building conceptual understanding. That’s one of the challenges we have,” she said.

The first step is to screen.

Karen D. Cheser, the assistant superintendent for learning support services for the 20,000-student Boone County district in Florence, Ky., said her school system started using RTI in reading two years ago, and had initially planned to leave math for later. But indications that students were becoming weaker as they reached higher-level math classes, among other factors, pushed the district to act.

Ms. Cheser said the district created its own universal screening program, which allows teachers to dig into what was going wrong for many students. It turned out that many students needed to focus so hard on computation that they were unable to grasp more sophisticated concepts, she said.

The panel found that children's gaps in mathematical understanding were fairly predictable.

... remediation for students in grades K-5 should focus on the properties of whole numbers, like counting, addition, and subtraction. Older students, up to 8th grade, should learn rational numbers in depth, including the meanings of ratios, decimals, and percentages, the panel recommends.

Another recommendation is that all students who need extra math assistance should work on fluent retrieval of basic arithmetic facts, like simple addition and multiplication. Higher-level mathematics often assumes that students can quickly recall facts like “3 times 9” or “11 minus 7,” when such operations may be difficult for those lagging behind their peers, the panel found.

The current reliance on the calculator does nothing to promote fluency with math facts. In fact, some teachers say that, with the ubiquitousness of calculators, it is no longer necessary to memorize math facts. But I know that students who cannot readily retrieve math facts struggle with algebra, and the research is confirming my observations.

Mathematics instruction has emphasized procedural competence over conceptual understanding. You do not necessarily have to understand the mathematics underlying long division as long as you can perform the operation. Sadly, students who perform mathematical operations reliably are told (through test grades) that they understand math when the reality is that they may have no idea why they do what they do. They do not “understand” math. The math materials in our schools “are not looking at building conceptual understanding,” as Judith Russ, mathematics curriculum supervisor, noted. But at least in times past, students were expected to memorize math facts in order to complete the procedural operations. So the situation is that students are not understanding math concepts, nor do they have the basic tools, math facts, for mechanically solving problems.

Years ago we used to call screening “diagnosis” and the best teachers have always made diagnosis part of their teaching practice. I used to diagnose struggling algebra students one-by-one. I still diagnose one-by-one, but nearly always I find the same gaps. They do not understand the function of place value (even if they can name a digit's place). They do not understand whole number properties (and fail to apply properties to numbers that do not look like “numbers,” especially numbers containing variables. They do not understand the difference between one and zero (such as when the “cancel” and say something like, “That's zippo.” They certainly do not understand fractions. Once I address these four abysses of knowledge, algebra suddenly becomes straightforward and even beautiful.

Is Quality Education a Lost Cause?

I love reading old stuff. Did some expert pundit's analysis and future projections come to pass or not? A quarter century ago, there were lots of articles wondering what we would do with all our future free time. The answer turned out to be---work even more. A quarter century ago, lots of articles wondered how America would solve its looming math and science teacher shortage. The answer turned out to be ---not much. Many universities are importing math and science professors from other countries because America is not producing its own. So it was interesting to reread an old article from Time entitled "Help! Teacher Can't Teach" dated Monday, Jun. 16, 1980, nearly thirty years ago. It could have been written yesterday.

Like some vast jury gradually and reluctantly arriving at a verdict, politicians, educators and especially millions of parents have come to believe that the U.S. public schools are in parlous trouble. ..Experts confirm that students today get at least 25% more As and Bs than they did 15 years ago, but know less.

Society holds the teachers responsible.

the new complaints about teachering also arise from a dismaying discovery: quite a few teachers (estimates range up to 20%) simply have not mastered the basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic that they are supposed to teach.

Even as criticism abounds, Time (and all of us) recognize that 20% is quite a bit less than 100%.

Of course, among the 2.2 million teachers in the nation's public schools are hundreds of thousands of skilled and dedicated people who, despite immense problems, manage to produce the miraculous blend of care and discipline, energy, learning and imagination that good teaching requires. ...The best-educated and most selfless teachers are highly critical and deeply concerned about the decline in teaching standards and educational procedures. Their frustration is perhaps the strongest warning signal of all.

Testing tends to be the first line of defense. Many states began mandating teacher competency tests, only to find that far too many practicing teachers were unable to pass these tests. Lest one should think that teacher competency tests were perhaps too hard, most required math typically taught between the eighth and tenth grades, and English at corresponding levels. Any teacher, presumably all of them college graduates, should be able to pass easily. But they do not.

I was astonished to be the first one finished with the California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST). I put that test away in less than two hours. It was supposed to be a four-hour test. I once took the National Teachers Examination (NTE) in early childhood education cold, no study, review or preparation of any kind. I had been a secondary teacher for many years. I scored at the 86th percentile. I was not happy. My score was too good for someone like me who had taken a test outside of my field. According to the normative data on my score report, the vast majority of test takers were graduates of early childhood education programs. I did better than 86% of them. Not good.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan's support of merit pay for teachers, though framed as a way to pay teachers more, is really just a disguised way of saying if teachers taught better, our schools would be better, and so maybe more money would motivate teachers to teach better. One of the problems of merit pay is the unstated assumption that teachers are not already doing their best.

Okay, let's face the issue of teacher quality head on.

1.Teaching credentials are no assurance of teacher quality.
2.Schools do not hire the best qualified candidates, but the cheapest.
3.School of education attract students of lower academic ability than other academic departments.
4.Graduates of colleges of education must often take basic teacher competency tests many times before they pass.
5.Math teachers often do not possess a profound understanding of fundamental mathematics.

Some schools, like The Equity Project charter school in New York*, is determined to acquire high-quality teachers. They are offering $125,000 per year and the application process is a grueling four-step process. The charter school has created such a grueling process because the usual documentation, university degree with or without a state teaching credential, is worthless.

It did not used to be like this.

In 1900, when only 6% of U.S. children graduated from high school, secondary school teachers were looked up to as scholars of considerable learning.

Things were going swimmingly as high schools graduation rates steadily improved to a high of 70% by the 1960's. Sputnik was a huge surprise in 1957.

Almost overnight, it was perceived that American training was not competitive with that of the U.S.S.R. Public criticism and government funds began to converge on U.S. schools. By 1964, achievement scores in math and reading had risen to an alltime high.

Let's repeat that: Public criticism and government funds began to converge on US schools. Though only a child, I remember that time well. Society did not simply complain and moan; society demanded action and the government responded. The result, which directly benefited me, was that by 1964 achievement scores in math and reading had risen to an all time high. Only genuine achievement would do because society had a stake in knowing accurately if education was working. There was no interest in the statistical juggling so common now. Want SAT score improvement? In 1995, the College Board simply added 100 points** to everyone's score.

Over the last thirty years, there has been plenty of societal moaning and complaining, but no demand, no collective will. So society had the education system it wants. What did now Research Professor of Education at New York University Diane Ravitch say thirty years ago?

Diane Ravitch: "It is really putting things backward to say that if children feel good about themselves, then they will achieve. Instead, if children are learning and achieving, then they feel good about themselves."

Colleges of education are still teaching a backwards concept of self-esteem.

Although the driving motivation to beat the Soviets to the moon was not the noblest, my generation was the last beneficiary of America's once legendary education system.

Ever since the mid-1960s, the average achievement of high school graduates has gone steadily downhill.

...snip...

Many teachers have come to see themselves as casualties in a losing battle for learning and order in an indulgent age. Society does not support them, though it expects them to compensate in the classroom for racial prejudice, economic inequality and parental indifference.

In 1957 it was Sputnik. What will it take today for society to set aside complacency, ideological wrangling, or perpetuation of social status quo?


*The Equity Project's 4-stage application process

**To be fair, the purpose of recalibrating scores was not to artificially raise scores, but to realign the scores to the population so that a score of 500 would once again be average. According to the New York Times article,

The average verbal score today is 424; the average math score, 478.
So the College Board officials have decided to "recenter" the scale, changing it so the average student will once again get scores of 500 on the verbal and math tests...
In 1941, when the current norms were established for scoring the S.A.T., the world was a very different place. A small group of middle- and upper-class Americans attended college...

As colleges diversified in the 1960's, opening their doors to more poor and first-generation Americans, S.A.T. scores began a steady drop. By 1969, the average verbal score was 462; today, it is 424.

Teachers are Widgets

So President Obama wants to get rid of the bad teachers.

"We need to make sure our students have the teacher they need to be successful. That means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom. Let me be clear: if a teacher is given a chance but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences. The stakes are too high," Obama said.

Nobody wants bad teachers. But exactly who are the bad teachers? How do we go about identifying them? Oh, I know. Let's take a look at the teacher evaluations. Surely the evaluations, many of them professionally designed, will point out the bad teachers. After the bad teachers are identified, all that remains is the battle with the teacher's union, whose mission is to make sure bad teachers teach until retirement. (snark alert).

Every school I have ever seen has a program (at least in the employee handbook) for annual evaluations. In my whole career, I have been evaluated just five times by supervisors (principal, vice principal, or department chair). And here is something else everyone knows: the evaluations are worthless. Now a new study by the New Teacher Project confirms what everyone knows. Entitled “The Widget Effect,” the study show that teachers are fungible.

The study illustrates that teacher evaluation systems reflect and codify the “Widget Effect”—the fallacy that all teachers are essentially interchangeable—in several major ways:

All teachers are rated good or great. Less than 1 percent of teachers receive unsatisfactory ratings, even in schools where students fail to meet basic academic standards, year after year.

Excellence goes unrecognized. When excellent ratings are the norm, truly exceptional teachers cannot be formally identified. Nor can they be compensated, promoted or retained.

Professional development is inadequate. Almost 3 in 4 teachers did not receive any specific feedback on improving their performance in their last evaluation.

Novice teachers are neglected. Low expectations for beginning teachers translate into benign neglect in the classroom and a toothless tenure process.

Poor performance goes unaddressed. Half of the districts studied have not dismissed a single tenured teacher for poor performance in the past five years.

The worthlessness of evaluations creates a major disconnect in the school policy.

Though it is widely accepted that a teacher’s effectiveness matters more than any other school factor in student success or failure, it is almost never considered in critical decisions such as how teachers are hired, developed or retained.

Teacher effectiveness cannot be considered because teacher effectiveness is unknown. What's more, researchers have no consensus as to the characteristics of an effective teacher.
I would like to address the first two points.

All teachers are rated good or great. And because all teachers are good or great, excellence goes unrecognized.
At best, evaluations are worthless. In many schools, an evaluation is a pro forma process, if it happens at all. The busy administrator visits the class for a few minutes, walks out and writes the glowing report.

At worst, the evaluation is a retaliatory or evidence-fabrication tool. I am reminded of the young elementary art teacher whose reputation for excellence was well-known by staff and parents alike. Teachers dropping off their class at her classroom often lingered and teachers retrieving their class often came early to observe and hopefully glean some useful tips. One fine April morning the vice principal came to observe a class period and stayed for the whole class. His one and only comment after the class left: he did not like that the students were allowed to chat with their neighbors as they worked on their art.

The resulting evaluation was a disaster. On a 5-point scale, her average came to 2.7. She objected to the principal and he allowed her to write a rebuttal. But the rebuttal went nowhere. All that survived of the evaluation was the average which appeared on a list of all the teachers with all their 4.X averages. The school submitted the list to the district office.

She complained bitterly to the principal who told her not to worry—it would have no effect on her future career. She complained to her colleagues, some of whom interceded for her with the principal. You see, this young teacher had rebuffed the vice principal's advances at the school Christmas party. Her colleagues suggested the principal replace the vice principal's evaluation with one of his own, but he refused, saying it would be unseemly to override the vice-principal.

This story is not a fluke. Evaluations, if done at all, are often undertaken only because the teacher has entered the administrator's radar for some reason. In such situations, greatness cannot help but go unrecognized. I would go so far as to say that Teachers of the Year are not necessarily the top teachers. They are teachers with spare time. Many of the best teachers are simply too busy to fulfill the onerous essay and video requirements to be considered for a Teacher of the Year award.

What, you say. You thought Teachers of the Year were nominated for doing their jobs every day. Most Teachers of the Year are self-nominated. Typical is the application for the Arizona Teacher of the Year.

Teacher nominees/applicants must submit a written application that is reviewed by a panel of judges consisting of educators, students and members of the business community. Ten finalists are selected from the written applications.

The 10 finalists are asked to prepare a 15-minute videotape. The final selection process includes review of the videotape, an interview and an impromptu speech by each of the 10 finalists. Following that process, the Teacher of the Year is selected along with four “Ambassadors for Excellence” and five finalists. The Teacher of the Year and Ambassadors have multiple opportunities during the year to make public appearances throughout the state, speaking to professional, civic, educational, parent and student groups. (my bold)

The written application includes 13 double-spaced pages of essay material:

Educational History and Professional Development Activities (2 double-spaced typed pages) – 5 points
Professional Biography (2 double-spaced typed pages) – 5 points
Community Involvement (1 double-spaced typed page) – 5 points
Philosophy of Teaching (2 double-spaced typed pages) – 15 points.
Education Issues and Trends (2 double-spaced typed pages) – 15 points
The Teaching Profession (2 double-spaced typed pages) – 20 points
National Teacher of the Year Message (1 double-spaced typed page) – 10 points
Arizona Teacher of the Year Message (1 double-spaced typed page) – 10 points

The school administrator must agree in writing to approve up to 30 days for a substitute teacher to allow for newly-minted teacher of the year public appearances.


You may be the greatest teacher in the world, but if you are, and you are honest, you are very likely not going to write essays that will get you selected as teacher of the year, especially when you write about “education issues and trends” and “the teaching profession.” John Taylor Gatto was voted New York's Teacher of the Year in 1991 and immediately, with his acceptance speech, began telling everyone about the insidious goal of compulsory education to de-educate students. He has written several books, all with the same message. Somehow I have trouble believing the message he proclaimed from the Teacher of the Year platform was the same message he told the committee he would proclaim when he wrote his application essays.

Neither the complicated, multifaceted, self-selected Teacher of the Year evaluations nor the run-of-the-mill annual evaluations performed (or not) in most schools succeed in any meaningful way.

Can the Top-Scoring State Beat International Scores?

How does the math covered in the highest-ranking American state stack up against that of a top-scoring international performer?

International comparison studies typically focus on the comparing the scores achieved by same-age students in different countries. Also typically, students from Asian countries tend to outperform US students over and over again. Each time a report like that comes out, just as predictably there will be an out-pouring of the same old tired excuses. Their students are different from our students. Their culture is homogeneous whereas ours is diverse. Their schools are allowed to teach whereas our schools must meet social, medical and nutritional needs. Their parents value education whereas our parents, not so much. On and on. The excuses act as a sedative to put society back to sleep. Okay, society says, there are understandable reasons for the differences in performance. The results are not really comparable. Apples to oranges. What a relief. So we stop thinking about it.

Could there be something more?

Sean Cavanaugh of Edweekreports:

A host of recent studies have examined how U.S. students’ mathematics skills compare against those of their foreign peers. Now, a new analysis probes a more precise question: How does the math covered in the highest-ranking American state stack up against that of a top-scoring international performer?

Let's repeat the question: How does the math covered in the highest-ranking American state stack up against that of a top-scoring international performer? It does not matter whether the results are comparable or not. No matter the reason our kids come out second rate, other kids are beating our kids in the worldwide competition. Remember, President Obama said that if we want our kids to out-compete the world, we must out-educate them.

So how does the math covered stack up?

A study released last week finds that elementary students in Hong Kong are exposed to more difficult and complex math than pupils in Massachusetts, an elite scorer on national and international exams. The analysis, published by the American Institutes for Research, in Washington, examines the math content of Hong Kong and Massachusetts by comparing the two jurisdictions’ standardized tests in 3rd grade math.

We're talking about third grade, part of the foundation of the rest of a child's academic career. The study did not look at scores on a specially designed test for international comparison purposes. The study did not look at the content of such a specially designed test. The study examined the respective jurisdiction's in-house test, the standardized test for Massachusetts and Hong Kong. Even more interesting, the study had no interest in the children's scores on these tests. The study studied the test content itself. And why Massachusetts?

Massachusetts is also a consistent elite-scorer on the primary U.S. domestic test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

What the study found is that the Hong Kong test emphasizes number and measurement concepts. The test also contains a larger percentage of constructed responses rather than chosen responses. The Hong Kong test questions were more complex, requiring the application of knowledge and non-routine, multi-step solutions over simple recall. From the foundations, children in Hong Kong are tested on higher-order thinking skills than American children, even “elite” American children.

Do Chinese teachers teach to the test?

(Steven Leinwand, one of the study's authors), said the authors chose to examine test content in Hong Kong and Massachusetts because the two jurisdictions' early-grades math curricula were relatively similar—and because state tests in the United States tend to guide math instruction.

American educators “pay attention to the tests,” he observed. “If you change the state tests, it’s a powerful lever for what goes on in the classroom.”

In the US, the favorite quick and dirty way to reform education is to redesign the tests. That's what Arizona did in the 1990's with their AIMS test. Arizona created high-stakes tests for fifth, eighth and eleventh grade, as if new tests automatically change educational philosophy and encourage innovation. Even honor students flunked these tests. The overwhelming response to high-stakes tests is to teach to the test, a response well-documented by No Child Left Behind. When a test reflects existing educational philosophy, there is no need for sample tests or practice materials.


Liping Ma has documented the emphasis Chinese teachers place on concept development over computational procedures. James Stigler reiterated many of the same points. Chinese math education, exemplified by Hong Kong, already valued conceptual understanding and the test reflects that value. The US, regardless of all the pretty talk in the media, values computational procedures and the Massachusetts test reflects that value.

How did Mr. Leinwand put it? “... state tests in the United States tend to guide math instruction.” That is the large part of the problem. We are suppose to test what we teach, not teach what we test. The US mistakenly thinks testing drives instruction.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

Laying solid foundations in the early years matters.

Hong Kong’s use of more difficult and complex test items could be connected to a higher proportion of its test-takers, 40 percent, scoring at the “advanced” TIMSS level, than Massachusetts, at 22 percent. Just 10 percent of American students, on the whole, reached that level, the authors argue. In addition, research shows a “strong correlation” between nations’ math performance in early and later grades, they say.

Why Standardized Testing Will Always Fail

The most basic characteristic of any test is validity, that is, whether the test actually tests what it purports to test. Everyone, from the “professionals” who write standardized tests, to the everyday classroom teacher putting together a five-point quiz, learns that a test that does not actually test what it claims to test is worthless. They all learned about validity in the colleges of education.

So John Pearson makes a great point when he observes that every test is a reading test.

TAKS is stressful enough to prepare for at the 3rd grade level, and our kids at least can get reading assistance on the math test! There has been a little bit of debate over exactly what that means, but at least it is specified that, on an individual basis, a student may ask to have a word or a question read aloud. This helps immensely, especially with a child who is a struggling reader and/or an English Language Learner.

However, after 3rd grade, the kids are completely on their own for every TAKS test -- excepting those kids with special modifications, of course. The vast majority of kids taking these tests every year cannot ask to have a word read, cannot ask for clarification on a question, cannot ask ANYTHING except a question about the directions, and the directions are usually "Pick the best answer."

So what it comes down to is that these kids are taking a series of reading tests. Some of them are ABOUT math or ABOUT science, but they don't strictly assess those subject areas as much as they assess whether or not the child can read the questions, some of which are highly complicated.

I knew a little boy in Japan who was completely bilingual in both Japanese and English, but who had attended only Japanese preschool and kindergarten. The first thing to understand about his situation is that the Japanese kindergarten ends near the end of March, so when he “graduated” from kindergarten, his parents decided to enroll him in an international school where instruction was conducted in English. The principal said the first grade teacher needed to access the boy's readiness.

On the appointed day in March, this boy sat down with a clearly unhappy first grade teacher. She did not want any new students entering her class so close to the end of the school year, especially one whose parents had the idea the child would go on to second grade after less than three months in first grade. The teacher asked a number of questions about fairy tales and a few addition problems and announced that the boy was “marginal.” She would allow him into her first grade class on the condition that the parents understood that in September he would very likely have to “repeat” the first grade. The parents accepted the condition.

In April, the school gave the annual Stanford 9 bubble tests. The first grade teacher made a copy of this boy's answer sheets to hand grade, because the score reports would not be available before the end of the school year. She needed ammunition for the parent-teacher conference she was sure she would need when she planned to tell the parents that yes, indeed, their son would have to repeat first grade.

To her utter astonishment, the boy had almost a perfect set of answer sheets. The score report, when it eventually arrived, placed the boy in the 99th percentile on every battery. Obviously he went to the second grade along with his class. Eventually the same boy graduated from an American university at age eighteen with a degree in chemistry.

So why did the teacher consider the boy marginal? Mostly because he did not know who Rumpleskilskin was. The boy could have told her all about Momotaro, a Japanese fairy tale character the teacher had never heard of, if only she had known to ask, except Momotaro was not included in the school's first grade curriculum anyway.

Imagine going to live in Russia for a year and taking a math class. After 3 months, you are given a math test in Russian, consisting of word problems and lengthy questions. I don't know about you, but I would fail that test miserably. Would ANYONE in their right mind think that that means I don't know math?? Or that that test accurately gauged my knowledge??

I was a teacher in that international school in Japan. I taught math and science to the middle-schoolers. Every year fully 50% of my students were non-native speakers of English. One year four of my students were non-English speakers who had transferred from the Japanese school just that year. Lucky for me I also speak Japanese. I was the only American teacher in the school who spoke Japanese. There were a few Japanese-speaking teacher's aides.

I made all kinds of accommodations to help my non-native English-speaking students. I paired each one with a native speaker for labs. I translated my instruction to Japanese on the fly on a regular basis. I adapted reading instruction techniques usually used in much lower grades to the science book as if the science book were a basal reader. I read words or whole questions from my tests for any student who asked. And for those four non-English speakers, I translated the whole test to Japanese. I did all these things because I knew what every tester should know, that is, the purpose of the tests. The purpose of my tests was to evaluate the student's mastery of my instruction with the corollary purpose of giving the students the best chance for success.

We may think the purpose of standardized is to evaluate individual student's knowledge, but in reality, the tests serve to rank students compared to the norming population, and then by extension, to rank the quality of the school relative to the norming population. The reality will always frustrate because the nature of norming means that half will be above the 50th and half will be below the 50th percentile when compared to the total population.

If some schools can attract an overabundance of topside students, obviously other schools will end up with an overabundance of bottomside students. Testing can, by design or not, perpetuate the inequality of educational opportunity and undermine any promising efforts of school reform.

So who would want to perpetuate inequality of educational opportunity? Sadly, dear parents and other adults, Lake Wobegone does not exist.

NOW They Notice That Teachers Will Go Missing

The most experienced teachers are retiring. Report Foresees Mass Teacher Retirements. No kidding. Back in the 1980's, the government noticed that baby boomers would start retiring in 2008, increased the percentage of social security withholding, and created the social security trust fund to hold the money. The point is not the current political debates about social security; the point is the foresight displayed. Our schools, as the educators of the nation's future, should be experts in foresight and preparation, but no.

As recently as 2003, according to a National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) report, retirement was not considered a factor. In fact, one chapter of the report is entitled, “It's Not About Retirement.”

The skeptical often ask: But don’t high retirement rates contribute to the high rate of teacher attrition? Not as much as we might think. More people are leaving teaching for non-retirement reasons (see figure 6) and available new entrants could easily offset the number of retirees if teacher turnover and attrition were not so high.

It is true that a large number of teachers currently in the classroom were hired in the late 1960s and the 1970s and that they are now approaching retirement. It is also true that retirement rates have been increasing each year. But the number of retiring teachers is far below the total number of teachers hired into our schools from all sources (see Table 2). Over the next 10 years, about 700,000 teachers are projected to retire, accounting for about 28 percent of hiring needs during that period.8 Teachers leaving the profession for reasons other than retirement (e.g., low pay, lack of professional support, poor school leadership) outnumber those retiring by almost 3-to-1. These reasons also drive some experienced teachers into early retirement.

In the end, the combined number of new entrants and re-entrants greatly exceeds the retirement rate. Even without drawing on potential re-entrants from the reserve pool of former teachers and those with teaching degrees who never entered teaching, our teacher preparation system could easily accommodate the current retirement rate. It is the high attrition rate among those who are not retiring that is fueling the teacher shortage.

For at least the last twenty-five years, schools have been rejecting mid-career expert teachers who move from one district to another. If, and that's a big if, a district hires an out-of-district teacher, the most credit for experience the teacher will get on the salary scale is a mere five years, if that.


So the expert essentially takes a big pay cut in proportion to experience. The more experience, the bigger the pay cut. Even so, districts have been routinely rejecting the expert teacher in order to save the extra few thousand that paying for a mere 5 years would cost.


So why the alarm now?

...a third of experienced teachers could retire. The problem is most dire in 18 states where half of all public school teachers are over age 50....To complicate matters, the report says, attrition rates among new teachers are as high as ever, with over a third of teachers leaving the profession within their first five years.

And what is the result? The old teachers are leaving, the new teachers are quitting, and the mid-career teachers are missing, working as insurance agents, receptionists, or tax preparers or whatever. What few mid-career teachers are left in the schools will be overwhelmed. Teachers with experience will be at a premium.

What should be done?

The first answer is usually to recruit more. But the problem is not so much recruiting as retention.

Districts are able to hire an adequate number of teachers, it says, but many turn over within three to five years, leaving schools with massive gaps to fill each fall. According to Carroll, attrition rates among career changers and alternative-pathway recruits are often the highest.

The report cited earlier agrees.

But in fact, we dramatically increased the supply of teachers during the late 1990s (see Table 2). The problem is that the teacher attrition rate has been increasing even faster. We are losing teachers faster than we can replace them. Teacher retention has become a national crisis.

How about emphasizing retention?

With the supply of new teachers “collapsing at both ends,” as the report describes, schools need to make a new effort toward retention.

To help solve the problem, the report suggests restructuring district staffing practices, by hiring retirees for flexible, part-time positions within schools and by replacing one-classroom-one-teacher models with cross-generational collaborative-learning teams. Such teams, NCAFT believes, could serve as an internal support network for new teachers, keep experienced teachers on staff to share their expertise, and provide a diverse set of experiences for students to learn from.

“We need to break out of the idea of classrooms altogether,” Carroll said. “It’s not one teacher per classroom, but a team that works with 150 or 200 students.” In NCTAF’s conception, learning teams would be led by National Board-certified or otherwise highly accomplished teachers and would incorporate community members, including adjunct content experts, and representatives from neighborhood agencies.

However, out-of-district teachers have become invisible. Many of these teachers were highly successful, went on to get their Master's degrees, love to teach, only to become virtually unemployable. No Child Left Behind may mandate highly qualified teachers, but these teachers have three strikes against them: education, experience, and possibly no certification in a new state.

These teachers are not asking for “alternative certification.” They just want recognition for what they have already accomplished. These highly qualified, but uncertified teachers, may be found in private schools all over the country. Sometimes a charter school will pick them up, but as more and more charter and private schools accept the conventional wisdom that somehow a teaching credential is an indication of quality, these teachers are nowhere. They want to teach, but society has thrown them away as just so much garbage.

The Limits of Educational Software

So if you control for the variables you know help students achieve, your study of (fill in the blank) shows no significant gain due to (fill in the blank). In this case the blank is filled by the darling of grant funders everywhere, technology, specifically education delivered by computers.

For the second year in a row, a controversial $14.4 million federal study testing the effectiveness of reading and math software programs has found few significant learning differences between students who used the technology and those taught using other methods.
...snip...
“These studies are intended to wash out all the variation in school environments, teacher quality, resources­—all the things that we, in fact, know make a difference when it comes to student learning,” said Margaret A. Honey, a technology expert who is the president of the New York Hall of Science.

In other words, students who do well with the educational software were doing well anyway, probably because of the school environment or teacher quality or other known predictor of student achievement.

Technology is way over-rated. Consider the mathematical concept of place value. Teachers can design an activity that involves students boxing objects into groups of ten, and then packing ten boxes into a case, then stacking ten cases on a crate. I have such an activity with pinto beans. Students keep a columnar tally as they fill each “box” with beans. One rule of the game is that there can be no partially filled boxes, cases, or crates.

Subtraction is modeled with the same manipulatives. Students must often unpack a crate or a case or a box do complete the subtraction. If, for example, students must open a case in order to subtract boxes, they must empty the case entirely and stack all ten boxes with however many full boxes they already have, all the while keeping a columnar tally. If students have 2 crates, 4 cases, 3 boxes and 6 loose beans and want to “fill an order” (subtract) 4 boxes, they must empty a case. Now they have 2 crates, 3 cases, 13 boxes and 6 loose beans. We do not worry about conforming to the standard algorithm when we model on paper the actual mathematics of the task.

I once had a group of education students do the same activity on computer using a Java applet. Among other features, the applet used a rope tool to surround 10 loose objects and a box tool to pack into full boxes. I asked the students to compare the educational soundness of each activity. They quickly observed the “magical” aspect of the computer version. The concrete activity was real. Students could easily see how boxes were filled because they physically filled the boxes. The computer converted a lassoed group of objects to a box by some mystical means. At least, it may seem mystical to a child of the target age group.

Computers compromise sensory experience. No matter how 3D the graphics, the display is essentially two dimensional relying almost exclusively on the visual. Brain scientists might say the concrete activity forms more neural pathways by utilizing more of the five senses.

Paradoxically, some computer animation looks amazingly real. I often wonder how unhealthy a reliance on computers might be. At least in the days of Captain Kangaroo, small children could easily distinguish the real from the unreal. At a age when children are known to confuse reality and fantasy, can it really be a good idea to deliberately smudge the line between the two? Could computer animation undermine the development of analytical ability when the child's own senses cannot be trusted? When painted pictures of squirrels on cardboard placard danced around on Captain Kangaroo, no child was led to conclude that squirrels actually do hip-hop. The cardboard squirrel was obviously unreal. Can the same be said for the squirrel in the famous commercial doing a fist pump after causing a car accident? Will our children think less critically and be more vulnerable to scams?

Charter School Misconceptions

A post about charter schools is sure to scare up the usual litany of misconceptions. As long as ideology drives the debate, then nothing anybody says matters. Each ideologue cherishes their own set of misconceptions.

Charter schools are private schools, or at least, a variation on private schools. Less money goes to public education when charter schools are operating, with the result that public funding can be reduced.

The word “public” in the phrase “public school” means publicly funded. Parents do not pay tuition. In fact, charters schools sponsored by a public entity such as a traditional public school or the county office of education, usually operate on 85% of the per-pupil funding of the traditional public school. The sponsoring entity retains 15% of the funding, ostensibly to pay for stuff charter school parents do not use, such as busing. Some of the 15% also pays for support, such as having the charter school payroll handled along with the payroll for the public entity.

Critics of charter schools recognize the public nature of charter schools when they worry that a churchgoing principal of a charter school is deceptively running a private religious school on the public dime. No one similarly charges the churchgoing principal of a traditional public school. Now I will admit that some founders may have hoped that they could get public funds for their private religious schools by going charter. Even if they successfully secure their charter, the religious aspect immediately goes by the wayside. Typical religious private or parochial schools have weekly chapels; charters cannot.

Charter schools do not have to accept every student. Public schools must take everyone.

The charter for every single charter school by law must contain the standard non-discrimination clause. Many states mandate the exact language of this clause. Charter schools take every student they can on a first-come, first-served basis. Some fortunate charters have waiting lists, but most take all comers. Their funding is based on enrollment numbers just like traditional public schools. Would that our public schools were as desirable as the need for a lottery at some charters indicates.

Charter schools “skim the cream.” Charter schools can expel disruptive students. Public schools cannot.

Public schools routinely kick out extremely disruptive students.  My local school board has expulsion hearings about twice a week.  Because actual expulsion would put the expelled students on the street with way too much free time, such students are not actually expelled in the classic sense, but are sent to alternative education, community schools, the county independent study program or charter schools. Some charter schools specialize in these students.

Charter school are less likely to offer special education services because it costs too much money and the schools are too small.

I do agree that there are fewer special services.  Yet charter schools may have special ed teachers, and if an aide has been assigned to a student, the aide will accompany the student to charter school classes just as readily as to classes in a public school.  Public schools, while providing many more social services than when I was a child, are failing to provide other basic services because of cost.  The most conspicuous example is the school nurse.  In my day, every school had a full-time nurse who had her own office with a couple beds.  Today, one nurse may be responsible for multiple schools.

Charter school teachers are unprepared and unqualified. If qualified, they tend to be inexperienced novices because charter schools pay less than traditional public schools.

What every teacher knows is that public schools tend to hire newer, less experienced teachers over more experienced teachers because of cost. What often happens is that the more experienced teachers will work at a charter school for less pay. Such a situation happens when teachers move their household to a new district. These out-of-district teachers find themselves virtually unemployable in the public schools.

Most credentialed private schools require their teachers to be certified if only to avoid paying the fine for hiring uncertified teachers. I have seen private schools lay off uncertified teachers for the year they are renewing the schools credential. I have also seen private schools pay the fine as the cost of keeping an excellent uncertified teacher.

Half of the teaching staff of many urban or rural traditional public schools may be uncertified. Funny thing is certification is a very poor predictor of teacher quality. Certification only certifies the teacher has completed the state-mandated indoctrination, usually at a college of education. Most colleges of education give short shrift to proven educational philosophies such as Montessori or Waldorf, among others.

Charter schools lack oversight and accountability.

I also agree that sometimes oversight can be a problem. Regardless of the official accountability mechanisms in place, practically speaking, parents handle academic oversight ad hoc. They expect results for their extra effort, or they pull their children. Some charter schools have had their charters pulled for financial hanky-panky.

Charter schools cheat on tests so their scores will look good.

In the beginning charter scores tended to be better than the traditional public schools. Over the years considerable regression toward the mean has occurred so that now there is no significant difference in scores on the aggregate. Teaching to the test plagues charter schools AND traditional public schools.

The existence of charter schools threatens the existence of traditional public schools.

Charter schools are public schools.  If traditional public schools want to diffuse the so-called threat of charter schools, they could do so by providing a superior alternative.  If parents thought they were getting a superior result in the traditional public school, they would not expend the extra time, effort and personal cost to send their children to a charter school. They would happily send their children to the local public schools.

But most parents do not have the luxury of, in their perception, sacrificing their child's short window of academic opportunity to political or ideological considerations.  If motivated parents believe the local traditional public school compares unfavorably to the local charter school, it is quite understandable they would choose the charter school or even other alternatives, such as private schools, or homeschooling.

There are excellent traditional public schools and there are failing traditional public schools. And there are merely satisfactory traditional public schools. There are excellent charter public schools and there are failing charter public schools. And there are merely satisfactory charter public schools. As Dr. P.L. Thomas observed, "Evidence on charter schools, public schools, and private schools all produce a RANGE of quality. There is no evidence that "charterness," "publicness," or "privateness" is the reason for any differences, be it positive or negative." Here is another effort to debunk the persistent myth that from the beginning the entire purpose of charter schools has been to destroy public education.

Charter School Good News, Bad News

A new study of charter schools will vindicate some and disappoint others.

In the last seventeen years since the first charter school opened in 1992, 4000 charter schools educate over one million students. So far most studies have managed to harden preconceived notions.

Supporters argue that charter schools can improve student achievement and attainment, serve as laboratories for innovation, provide choice to families that have few options, and promote healthy competition with traditional public schools (TPSs). Critics worry that charter schools perform no better (and, too often, worse) than TPSs, that they may exacerbate stratification by race and ability, and that they harm the students left in TPSs by skimming away financial resources and motivated families.

The study sought to answer four questions:

(1) What are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools? (2) What effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer between TPSs and charter schools? (3) What is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and of entering college? (4) What effect does the introduction of charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby TPSs?

Characteristics of Charter School Students

Charter schools do NOT skim the cream.

We find no systematic evidence to support the fear that charter schools are skimming off the highest-achieving students. The prior test scores of students transferring into charter schools were near or below local (districtwide or statewide) averages in every geographic location included in the study.

...snip...

...students entering charter schools often have pretransfer achievement levels lower than those of local public school students who have similar demographic characteristics.

My own experience with charter schools supports the study's finding. Many parents pull their children from the traditional public school and enroll them in a charter school precisely because their children are not doing so great. Far from picking and choosing their students, charter schools will accept every child. In fact, the charter school law of most states requires charter schools to include in their charter document language that explicitly forbids exclusion on all the typical grounds.

Effect on Test-Score Gains

Because the study's authors could not locate baseline scores for kindergarten age children, they hesitate to overgeneralize. They have more confidence in data gathered from charter schools that begin accepting students at later ages.

In five out of seven locales, these nonprimary charter schools are producing achievement gains that are, on average, neither substantially better nor substantially worse than those of local TPSs.

Older studies consistently found superior results for charter school students, but those studies may have been flawed, or the exploding growth of charter schools has been accompanied by that bugaboo, regression toward the mean. Poor performance of charter school students has been associated with virtual delivery of education, but the authors have no confidence in forming any generalizations. More work must be done to identify possible idiosyncratic characteristics of students or their parents who choose virtual delivery. The educational implications of the technology itself also merit further research.

Likelihood of Attending College

Charter school students are significantly more likely to attend or graduate from college than students from traditional public schools. Given the flat difference in test scores, perhaps parents of charter school students have higher expectations for college attendance. Certainly, charter school parents are more likely to have invested substantial time and effort in their children's education, if only the daily grind to drive the kids to school every day.

Charter schools do not necessarily have to provide the one-stop comprehensive education experience usually expected of a traditional public school. Parents often make the extra effort and pay the extra expense to supplement the charter school program.

Charter School Effect on Neighboring Traditional Public Schools

None, one way or another.

There is no evidence in any of the locations that charter schools are negatively affecting the achievement of students in nearby TPSs. But there is also little evidence of a positive competitive impact on nearby TPSs.

Charter schools receive money on the same basis as traditional public schools—according to enrollment. What may surprise some people is that charter schools are often required to educate their students on 85% of the public funding allowed per child enrolled. The other 15% goes to the sponsoring school district supposedly for infrastructure costs that do not benefit the charter school. An example of an infrastructure benefit the charter school does receive may be payroll services for its employees. An example of an infrastructure benefit the charter school does not receive may be school bus service. The charter school must pay a share of the transportation costs even though none of its students takes the bus.

I know of situation where, at one time, the sponsoring traditional public school had 150 students while its charter school had 600 students. Thus the traditional public school got funding as if they had 240 students without the costs of the additional 90 students (6.67 charter school students equals 1 traditional public school student). Mountain Oaks Charter School started out as the independent study department of the Calaveras County Office of Education.

The researchers identified possible shortcomings and recommended further research.

Finally, one of the most important implications of our work for future research on charter schools is the need to move beyond test scores and broaden the scope of measures and questions examined. Our estimates of positive charter-school effects on high-school graduation and
college entry are more encouraging than most of the test score–based studies to date (including our own test-score results). Future studies of charter schools should seek to examine a broad and deep range of
student outcome measures and to provide evidence on the mechanisms producing positive long-term impacts.

No Surprise Algebra-For-All Fails

“Algebra-for-All Policy Found to Raise Rates Of Failure in Chicago”

Math educators, with good reasons, have long recommended that students be required to study algebra. Many districts mandate algebra in the ninth grade. California, one-upping everyone else, currently requires eighth graders to take algebra. Japanese children begin studying algebra in the fifth grade. So how's it working out?

Findings from a study involving 160,000 Chicago high school students offer a cautionary tale of what can happen, in practice, when school systems require students to take algebra at a particular grade level.

160,000 is a lot of students, and normally the bigger the sample from the population, the more reliable the conclusions. Researchers studied eleven “waves” of students entering ninth grade from 1994 to 2005.

(Researchers) compared changes within schools from cohort to cohort during a period before the policy took effect with a period several years afterward. They also compared schools that underwent the changes with those that already had an “algebra for all” policy in place.

What did the researchers find?

The policy change may have yielded unintended effects, according to researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research, based at the University of Chicago. While algebra enrollment increased across the district, the percentages of students failing math in 9th grade also rose after the new policy took effect.

By the same token, the researchers say, the change did not seem to lead to any significant test-score gains for students in math or in sizeable increases in the percentages of students who went on to take higher-level math courses later on in high school.

Not much upside. More students failed, test scores were flat, and the percentage of students motivated to take advanced math course did not rise, but, gee, “algebra enrollment increased.” The district says more students will fail when required to take harder courses without supports in place. Yet the district made attempts to include supports over the last seven or eight years.

Steps include developing curricular materials introducing students to algebra concepts in grades K-8, requiring struggling 9th graders to take double periods of algebra, and providing more professional development in math to middle and high school teachers..

One of the researchers thinks that test scores did not improve because teachers may have “watered down” the content since “math classes included children with a wider range of ability levels following the change.”

But Japanese elementary schools are not tracked. All children study exactly the same material with such predictability that some observers have quipped that every child in Japan is on the same page of the textbook on any given day. I have successfully taught Algebra 1 to high school special education students, or to give due credit, special education students have successfully learned Algebra 1 under my guidance.

The problem is with issuing mandates without a coherent, integrated societal commitment to the foundations of education, mathematics in particular. I have seen Montessori preschool students exploring algebra with manipulatives. I have often said that lots of profound math can be learned without any resort to pencil and paper. Children do not necessarily need numerals to understand number.

There is one other thing. Japanese children from kindergarten age regularly take abacus lessons the way American children take piano or ballet. Generating a sum with the abacus is different than generating a sum using the written algorithm. The very process of thinking about number and computation in more than one way leads to greater mathematical flexibility. Japanese students can therefore more readily absorb and manifest algebraic thinking. That's my hypothesis anyway and maybe the Gates Foundation or somebody else will provide me a grant to test it.

“The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens.”

President Obama gave another stirring speech about education. Is it just a lot of yadayada?

America will not remain true to its highest ideal... unless we give them the knowledge and skills they need in this new and changing world.

For we know that economic progress and educational achievement have always gone hand in hand in America...

The source of America's prosperity has never been merely how ably we accumulate wealth, but how well we educate our people...

So let there be no doubt: The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens -- and my fellow Americans, we have everything we need to be that nation...

The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, it's unsustainable for our democracy, it's unacceptable for our children -- and we can't afford to let it continue...with the right education, a child of any race, any faith, any station, can overcome whatever barriers stand in their way and fulfill their God-given potential.

(bold added)

But the president is not blinded by his own dazzling rhetoric. He knows what all veteran educators know.

Of course, we've heard all this year after year after year after year -- and far too little has changed.

It is easy to lose optimism and fervor.

Certainly it hasn't changed in too many overcrowded Latino schools; it hasn't changed in too many inner-city schools that are seeing dropout rates of over 50 percent.

Even more maddening, the problem with education in America is not scarcity of ideas and resources.

It's not changing not because we're lacking sound ideas or sensible plans -- in pockets of excellence across this country, we're seeing what children from all walks of life can and will achieve when we set high standards, have high expectations, when we do a good job of preparing them.

So what is our problem?

Instead, it's because politics and ideology have too often trumped our progress that we're in the situation that we're in.

A good example is the kneejerk opposition to charter schools on the left, and the equally kneejerk opposition to teachers unions on the right. While adults engage in turf wars, America falls further and further behind. We must set aside ego and listen to each other with open hearts.

Secretary Duncan will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars: It's not whether an idea is liberal or conservative, but whether it works.

But in the meantime, it would not hurt to unify behind the President's top three priorities for education:

1.Early Education—It is essential that foundations for future academic achievement be solidly laid in early childhood. The attitudes children acquire at a very young age can propel or hinder academic achievement.
2.World Class Standards—American do not give their children enough credit. It is possible to have much higher expectations and standards without destroying childhood. In fact, higher standards, well done, have the potential to enhance childhood.

Several years ago I began facilitating biology and chemistry laboratory experiences for homeschooled junior high and high school students. Moms tried to occupy the younger siblings with other work, but the younger siblings were curious about the fascinating experiments of their older brothers and sisters. Soon I allowed the little kids to participate.

I discovered children as young as eight years old could use the equipment just as capably and responsibly as the older kids. The little kids could record data just as accurately. They could form conclusions and discuss their results as intelligently. What they could not do as well as the older kids was write the lab report. And that was fine, no problem.

A wonderful side effect was the increase in inter-age respect. Multi-age interaction is more like the real world than self-contained groups of same-age peers.

I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.

3. Quality Teachers---Recruiting, preparing, and rewarding outstanding teachers

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. That's why our Recovery Act will ensure that hundreds of thousands of teachers and school personnel are not laid off -- because those Americans are not only doing jobs they can't afford to lose, they're rendering a service our nation cannot afford to lose, either...

And if you do your part, then we'll do ours. That's why we're taking steps to prepare teachers for their difficult responsibilities, and encourage them to stay in the profession. That's why we're creating new pathways to teaching and new incentives to bring teachers to schools where they're needed most. That's why we support offering extra pay to Americans who teach math and science to end a teacher shortage in those subjects.

Schools should not only work harder to keep their best teachers, schools should also seek out the veteran non-practicing teachers in their communities. Schools should eliminate the arbitrary obstacles that block out-of-district teachers and offer incentives to attract them back to the classroom.

There are many great teachers in America who moved from one district to another, for whatever reason, to find themselves virtually unemployable. Some of them, like me, are math and/or science teachers. A few of them taught in our Department of Defense Dependent Schools overseas, and now back home, they find, like I did, that they are out-of-district in every single district in America.

Now, here's what that commitment means: It means treating teachers like the professionals they are while also holding them more accountable -– in up to 150 more school districts. New teachers will be mentored by experienced ones. Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools. Teachers throughout a school will benefit from guidance and support to help them improve

Money cannot be allowed to remain an excuse for blocking veteran teachers from returning to the classroom.

We can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children's teachers and the schools where they teach.

4. Innovation and Excellence—even if innovation and excellence is found in a charter school. Learn from the best charter schools, adopt their best practices in public schools, and follow John Wooden's advice, “Don't whine, don't complain, and don't make excuses. Just get out there and do your best.”


5.Higher education---College is the new high school.
6.The Bottom Line---Personal Accountability

Of course, no matter how innovative our schools or how effective our teachers, America cannot succeed unless our students take responsibility for their own education. That means showing up for school on time, paying attention in class, seeking out extra tutoring if it's needed, staying out of trouble. To any student who's watching, I say this: Don't even think about dropping out of school. Don't even think about it...

No government policy will make any difference unless we also hold ourselves more accountable as parents -- because government, no matter how wise or efficient, cannot turn off the TV or put away the video games. Teachers, no matter how dedicated or effective, cannot make sure your child leaves for school on time and does their homework when they get back at night. These are things only a parent can do. These are things that our parents must do...

So today, I'm issuing a challenge to educators and lawmakers, parents and teachers alike: Let us all make turning around our schools our collective responsibility as Americans. (my bold)

Reactions to the President's Speech.