TeachMoore

Twisted Logic on Teacher Quality

Over 50 civic, parent, teacher, and community organizations particularly those concerned about children with disabilities, have joined to protest a dangerous insistence on part of the federal government to de-professionalize teachers, at the expense of our most vulnerable students. The organizations' explain their concerns in a letter to President Obama and Congressional leaders in which they:

...criticized a provision signed into law last month lowering teaching standards required under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The provision allows thousands of underprepared and inexperienced teachers to continue to be assigned disproportionately to low-income, minority, special education, and English language learner students and denies parents notification of the teachers’ underprepared status.

Intended to overturn a recent civil rights ruling won by low-income students and parents of color in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (Renee v. Duncan), the provision was quietly added by key Congressional leaders into the Continuing Resolution (CR) to fund the government the day before the CR was passed on December 21, 2010....

In Renee v. Duncan, the Ninth Circuit struck down a Bush-era regulation that labeled teachers who have not met the standards for full state credentials as “highly qualified” from the first moment they begin training in alternative route preparation programs. The court ruled that the regulation patently conflicted with the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress in NCLB that only teachers “who have obtained” full credentials be deemed “highly qualified.” The designation is important under NCLB as all non-highly qualified teachers must be reported to parents and the public and cannot be concentrated in low-income, high-minority schools.

Evidence in Renee shows that two-thirds of alternate route trainees in California teach in schools with 75 percent or greater minority students, while around half teach special education students.

The disproportionate placement of underprepared persons to work with the most high-needs students is part of a national pattern of inequity, and one reason the victory in the California case was so important, and hopefully, precedent-setting. However, the intervention by Congress, signed into law by the President not only throws the California outcome into question, but more significantly, undercuts the sincerity of the Administration's stated intention to put a high quality teacher in every classroom while preventing parents from knowing the true status of the staff entrusted with their children.

This move touches me deeply, both as a teacher in one of the highest poverty areas of the country, and as a mother/grandmother of special needs children. Here in the Mississippi Delta we use a large number of classroom staff who are in or have come through various types of alterntive training programs. I am not altogether opposed to such programs, in fact, I argued for the development of one alternate program as a temporary relief for schools that were filling core subject classrooms with substitutes for a full school year. The Delta has been a chronic teacher shortage area for over 20 years, and that shortage has historic as well as economic causes. Yet there are places in the country that have excess teachers or where fully qualified teachers are being laid off in large numbers. As we note in our recent book, Teaching 2030, teachers working in our most challenging schools need specific skill sets. The teachers also need "working conditions that promote student learning" (189).

Addressing this imbalance should be the goal of a thoughtful, national policy on teacher quality. Congress and the Administration could have taken a more positive step in that direction by heeding and supporting the advice of the recent Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation of Teachers sponsored by NCATE. As part of its deliberations, a focus group of my colleagues from Teacher Leader Network developed a policy paper which stated in part:

Effective clinical preparation is especially important for those coming to education via some of the fast-track alternative programs. These least-trained candidates are most likely to be sent to the most challenging teaching situations; they should not be relegated to learning-on-the-job while they are in fact the teacher of record, particularly given the great variation and general inadequacy of mentoring and induction practices in under-resourced, high turnover high needs schools.(7)

The highly qualified teachers who authored that paper go on to describe how effective teachers can be prepared, inducted, and retained in our classrooms, including in high-needs schools and settings. As the Panel's final report notes, preservice teacher candidates, whether they are in traditional or alternative programs, should certainly get the opportunity to be trained in a wide range of school settings, but they should not be placed in those alone prematurely. Rather, they should be embedded into viable professional learning communities where they can hone their craft with support and excellent models.

This misstep by the Administration is part of a larger more disturbing pattern of allowing harmful policies engendered under NCLB to continue, while various groups compete for funds to work towards something better. For example, continuing to force special needs students to participate in state standardized testing based on their age level rather than their performance level, or in violation of their rights under IDEA. Continuing to label students, teachers, and schools as failing using testing instruments that were not designed for such high-stakes evaluations. Secretary Duncan in defending his Blueprint for Reform, insists that those things will be addressed by future solutions. But how is it ethical to allow children to suffer in the meantime?  It would be easier to take the Administration more seriously on its education promises if they at least made the good faith effort of placing a moratorium on some of these practices.

Read This: Duncan Details Bipartisan Rural Schools Reform Plan

A plan to make some changes in the NCLB-imposed requirements that have large negative effects on rural schools has won some important support from both sides of the political aisle. However, the proposed changes leave some other major NCLB problems for rural schools unaddressed, such as how performance targets are defined. This excerpt is from the report in Agri-Pulse:

The proposed new flexibility specifically aims at helping the 80% of the U.S. which has just 20% of the school population -- rural America. According to the administration's Blueprint, under the new approach, we will provide districts flexibility for designing interventions in schools that are not meeting their performance targets, giving rural communities the ability to decide what works best for their schools. The proposal eliminates federal mandates to provide supplemental educational services and public school choice  interventions that are difficult for many rural communities to provide.

Duncan explained the plan also calls for recognizing that teachers in rural schools often may teach multiple subjects. He said under the new proposal, rather than being penalized for not being "highly qualified" in a specific subject, these multi-talented teachers would be praised for being highly effective overall. He said another rural-focused proposal is to overcome the trend of teachers serving a short time in rural areas before moving away by training rural residents to become teachers in their own communities.

If these types of concessions can be made for some schools, then the Department of Education should be able to broker some relief for other onerous sections of NCLB such as the ignoring of IDEA provisions when testing special needs students -- or placing a moratorium on the extensive testing of students until more appropriate assessments are at least piloted.

Thinking Aloud About: Merit Pay

Someone recently noted that I am a proponent of performance pay for teachers and expressed shock that I would support "merit pay." That misunderstanding suggests a need to clarify some terms.

I fundamentally disagree with one of the conceptual pillars of most merit pay plans: That teachers can be motivated to achieve better results for our students through pay incentives. The majority of teachers are working as hard as we can and getting little recognition and less support. To suggest that we are withholding our best from our students and would provide that in exchange for a few extra dollars is a slap in the face of every professional educator (not just the "bad" teachers). Consistently, across the nation, the best teachers report that it is not money, but lack of time and support that hinder us from doing more of what is really best for students. A more successful strategy might be attaching dollar values to at least some of what truly effective teachers already do. Through such appraisals, the practices receive status from the employer which means they become not only legitimate activities for teachers during work time, but more important, they become performance expectations. The result would be highly effective teaching behaviors and practices as the norm in a critical mass of classrooms and schools, rather than something we have to squeeze in between the many ineffective things we are currently required to do, or accomplish by stealing time away from our own families.

Of course, there is much, much more to creating comprehensive, equitable, and practical performance-based compensation systems than just this one aspect. As I suggest in our new book, Teaching 2030:

In the future, our pay systems must build on more rigorous and comprehensive evaluation measures of student and teacher performance, so that the right indicators can create true accountability for teachers and administrators. It must draw on accomplished teachers as full partners in designing and implementing such measures, so the resulting accountability systems will be transparent and useful to policymakers, practitioners, and the public. It must rest on a nuanced approach to paying teachers differently, so that our public school systems are more flexible in adapting to future changes, including the many forces and events we cannot yet delineate. (p.127)

The development of better compensation systems for the educators of the future will require thoughtful, good-faith collaboration of teachers, parents, administrators, school boards, and legislators, and those new systems may look very different across the country. Meanwhile, the teaching profession itself will be changing over the next two decades into something very different from what we have seen for the past 100 years...but I'll muse on that in another post.

Anybody else have a vision of how teacher pay might/should look and how we could get there from here? Love to hear it.

Lead From the Front

My first principal, Mr. Leroy Byars, who had been a very successful football coach, always admonished the staff at our school to "lead from the front."  He said we should show our expectations for our students through our own actions and behaviors.

As I reflect on the life and work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it strikes me how well he exemplified that admonition---and how many of us in public education do not.

One of my favorite pieces to teach to both my high school and community college students, is Dr. King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail."  Written in 1963, while he was being held in solitary confinement in Birmingham, Alabama during the intense struggle against segregation there, the letter is his response to a published letter from eight local clergymen urging an end to the civil rights activities in the city. Specifically, the writers wanted an end to the nonviolent direct actions (demonstrations, sit-ins) led by Dr. King and the local activists. King's letter is one of the greatest examples of persuasive writing in American history, second only to the Declaration of Independence.

In the letter, King is especially poignant in expressing his sad frustration with those "moderates" who claim to be in support of ending segregation, but refuse to speak out or support the efforts to end it. He particularly rebukes those in the Christian community who shrink from their responsibility to intercede on behalf of their Black brothers and sisters. One of his most quoted statements from that letter:

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

Rev. King put his beliefs into action. He never expected others to do more than he himself was willing to risk.  How many of us--parents, educators, and policymakers--will have that same testimony? 

How many of us will continue to pretend we can just "close our doors and teach," while gross inequity of resources remains the norm for many U.S. teachers and their students?

How many of us will continue to allow the classrooms and schools of "other people's children" to be reduced to test prep drill camps?

How long will we continue to force too many children to spend their school days in fear of gangs, threats, and abuse, while we allow a precious few pleasant, even inspiring learning environments?

How long will we let ignorant or malicious voices fill the public space with distortions on teachers, teacher education, or teacher unions, hoping the hurt and the damage to the entire teaching profession will just go away?

Dr. King did more than dream, and so should everyone who believes in full, free, quality public education for every child in America.

 

Read This: Teaching 2030

Since everyone from billionaires to pundits, have had something to say about education reform--what say we listen to what some of America's top teachers have to offer on the subject?

Shameless plug and disclosure: Yes, I'm one of the authors.

So are 11 truly amazing teachers from around the country; some veterans, some newbies; some from traditional teacher preparation, some from alternate routes; some urban, some suburban, some rural. All of us sharing a passion for students and for teaching, and deeply concerned about the future of both in America. Also on the writing team, our friend and colleague, Barnett Berry, head of the Center for Teaching Quality (which sponsors this blog).

The book, Teaching 2030: What We Must Do For Our Students and Our Public Schools..Now and in The Future, is now available from Teacher College Press (also at Amazon or Barnes and Noble). 

Would love to hear some of your reactions to the ideas in it, and how we can turn the discussions about teachers and teaching in a more productive direction. You can also share your thoughts at our authors' blog: The Future of Teaching.

Parents as Teacher-Evaluators: The Care Test

I ended last year with a question: Should parents help evaluate teachers?  Having raised 11 children, all of whom went through public school, and now helping the 8 grandkids navigate through, guess I can offer an informed opinion on this one.

Since I was a public school parent before I was a teacher, there have always been some things that I knew about the work of my children's teachers.  Most of all, I knew which teachers cared about my children as human beings, and which ones cared about whether they learned. I also knew which ones mistreated my children in ways they would not have tolerated for their own. That metric was always the most important criteria in my evaluation of my own children's teachers.

I took the teachers' competency in their subject areas as a given--that was the responsibility of the licensing agency and the district administration that hired them. I took knowledge of how to teach (pedagogy) as a given--that was the responsibility of their teacher preparation program.  My focus was on whether each teacher could use his/her subject and pedagogical knowledge to meet each of my children at his/her unique point of development and talents and move each of them further towards individual potential.

Grades were an indicator of how things were going, but my husband and I were more concerned with what we heard come out of our children's mouths when they talked about school; what kind of questions they asked about things they were learning; whether there was any excitement; and what they wanted to do with what they were learning. 

I was most involved with the education of our deaf son, for whom I often had to advocate to get the services to which he was entitled under IDEA (special ed parents and teachers can you relate?). Although most of his teachers were great, there was one who deeply resented having a hearing impaired child placed in her classroom and made it well-known. She refused to put directions for him in writing; she resisted not being able to give oral spelling tests; she resented having to face him when she spoke rather than being able to talk over her shoulder as she wrote at the board.  She was considered one of the best teachers in the building and was clearly a favorite of the principal.  To me, she was ineffective and hateful. Had I been able to participate in her evaluation it would not have been favorable.

During ten years of classroom research that I conducted on teaching standard English to African American students, I held some focus group discussions with parents of my students. When I asked them to describe what they meant by a "good English teacher," the consistent top response was: Someone who cares about my child. And make no mistake: Just because a parent is single, poor, uneducated, or doesn't show the type of "involvement" educators might want to see, does not mean that parent does not care about his/her child. I know too many teachers who learned that lesson the hard way.

I don't suggest that I or other parents do not care about the academic accomplishments of our children, or other aspects of the educational experience. Nor do  I minimize the pressing need for greater parental involvement in many areas as well as greater outreach by educators to parents, especially in our most challenging schools. But this I do know: As a mother, I did not want any of my children in the classroom of someone who could not or would not value them as God created person.

Caring is a qualification that should be part of every teacher's evaluation, and parents may be our best tool for measuring it.