MN2020: Education

Education: More Like Parks, Less Like an Oil Change

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:00:20 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

I am not particularly car-literate, so my experience with an oil change goes something like this: I drive to the service station, drop the car off, sit in the waiting room for a while, and then pay the bill. I may need to answer a few questions and make an extra decision or two, but that's the basic gist of it. I believe this has become the default metaphor of education, and I think that's a problem.

Schools are too often treated like service stations where kids are dropped off, subjected to little-understood maintenance procedures, and then returned to their families working a bit better than they were before. Everyone pays their taxes, and the service stations keep working. Let's look at three specific problems with this frame of understanding schools.

The Responsibility Problem
Under the oil change model, we assign the bulk of responsibility to the service station. The customer's responsibility is to get the car to the station and not crash it in between visits. Call me crazy, but I think that the successful education of a child is often about what's happening in between visits to school, and that families have much more of a role in education than transporting their child, making a few decisions about service options, and paying the bill.

The Standardization Problem
When I go in for an oil change, I'm looking for a consistent experience, regardless of whether I'm bringing in my sedan or my parents' minivan, and whether I'm visiting Jiffy Lube or Midas. I know that there are differences between vehicles, but I trust the service providers to diagnose and respond appropriately, because at the end of the day, it's the same service being provided with minimal variation. Not so with education, where an ideal system would have many different impacts on children, depending on their needs, interests, and desired outcomes.

The Improvement Problem
If I'm thinking about improving a group of oil change stations, I'm going to focus on a set of easily-quantifiable measurements from a 10,000-foot view. I'd look at cars serviced per person-hour or customer satisfaction surveys. The problem with applying this service provider framework to education is that most of the measurements we have don't match up well with what we want.

Unfortunately, the oil change model (perhaps better generalized as the “product/service” model) underlies most of the effort in education policy and advocacy these days. That's not to say that it's entirely without merit, but we sacrifice a lot by treating schools as black boxes where education happens with the same set of desired outcomes for all students (outcomes that happen to be the same ones we can measure with the tools we have). I'd like to propose a different framework.

When I was growing up in Rochester, there were a few parks that received frequent visits. When I was younger, Allendale Park was the destination of choice; it was near our house and had some basic playground equipment that I enjoyed. As I got older, I spent more time on the fields of the Roy Watson Sports Complex, where my youth soccer games were played and where my dad, brother, and I would occasionally launch model rockets.

A park is a chance for each person to find enjoyment. Rochester has different kinds of people who enjoy different things, and it has different kinds of parks to match. The parks are supported with public dollars, and everyone has the opportunity (if they take it) to find the right parks for their enjoyment.

Our discussion of education would benefit from thinking of schools more like parks than like oil change stations. Instead of being a product or service sold to customers, education is a chance for each student to find a route to success. Different students will have different definitions of success, and even students with the same definition may have very different routes to get there.

Under this framework, responsibility for education is shared between students, families, schools, and the broader community. Standardization is questioned beyond a few basics (that don't dominate the discussion). Discussions of improvement don't start at corporate HQ (or even regional HQ); they start from a classroom desk.

I imagine myself as a student sitting in a classroom. What's more likely to help me find my route to success, a class with 29 other students in it, or a class with 14? A teacher who's overworked and underpaid, or a teacher whose life has better balance? How about a teacher who's knowledgeable of and responsive to my cultural background? A teacher who genuinely wants to be at my school? Am I more or less likely to succeed if I know my family will support me when I get home? Do I have a home?

A school is so much more than a place where kids undergo maintenance, and education is so much more than what happens in school. It's time we started thinking about and treating it as such.

Big Changes, Wrong Reasons

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:00:06 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

So the Philadelphia school system is breaking up. Deeply in debt, they're going to close forty schools in 2013, and six a year after that until 2017. The central office will no longer manage schools; instead, “achievement networks” of 20-25 schools apiece will handle the administrative tasks usually performed by the district. This dramatic reorganization was announced in conjunction with a budget plan. The big shocker? The reorganization doesn't actually save any money.

Instead, it “outsources” kids to charter schools, so that about 40% of the Philadelphia student population will be in charters. Now, if there's one thing we should have learned about school choice by now, it's that triggering a massive exodus from the traditional system isn't good. Any free seats in existing charters will be filled up immediately, leaving a great many kids looking for a new school. The people starting those new schools won't, for the most part, be educators passionate about innovation. They're much more likely to be profiteers, looking to scoop up easy public money in return for quickly slapping together something that looks like a school.

Again, this doesn't save the district any money, it just moves the money elsewhere. The way it was rolled out, however, links it to the district's budget problems. This is a particularly egregious example of a tendency in today's self-described reformers to use distractions and unconnected crises to advance their agendas.

I'm not talking about the changes made by districts in response to actual budget problems—changes like the four-day school week or spring break in February—but about changes using some other issue as cover.

The budget excuse was used in Wisconsin to justify stripping public sector workers of bargaining rights, even though they'd already agreed to the cuts needed to keep the budget afloat. It's been deployed elsewhere to justify the use of so-called “value-added” measurements to determine teacher pay or retention based on test scores. What's more, it was part of the giant yanking of strings known as Race to the Top.

Race to the Top, you may recall, was (and continues to be) an Obama administration competitive grant program. Basically, states would apply for billions of dollars in federal grant money, in exchange for which they had to undertake certain reforms, many of which fall into the more-standards-more-testing framework. With state education budgets in crisis condition, the hope of federal money was too good to refuse.

There was, of course, a catch. States had to implement the reforms before they applied for the grants. The result? Many states passed major education policy changes, only to “lose” the competition and get no federal money for it. Even the states that won saw RTTT money dwarfed by stimulus money (and this doesn't even get into the relatively minor share of state education budgets that comes from federal dollars).

Time and again, we've seen this play out. The looming specter of budget problems is invoked, and yet the changes that come along don't actually do anything to fix the budget problems. Sometimes, they even come with hidden costs and only make matters worse. It's time for that to stop.

If something has educational merit, let's see the case made in the full light of day. Let's see active solicitation of teachers and school leaders in the creation of these policies. Let's see attempts to win the support of the people who will have to implement reform, not just attempts to coerce or frighten them into it. Let's see a recognition that there may be more than one solution to a given problem, and that some problems aren't as severe as they're made out to be.

This will require reformers to actually be open to critiques from teachers and their unions. It will require an understanding from those who claim the mantle of reform that they will not necessarily be trusted. There is deep suspicion, fueled by what we hear about groups like ALEC, that what starts as “Pay great teachers more” will lead to Wisconsin-style destruction of bargaining rights or widespread use of vouchers in place of a genuine public education.

Teachers' unions, too, must be seen offering proactive solutions and be willing to talk with reformers. Ultimately, I would hope that teachers will lead the reform movement from within schools. I think that's much more likely to produce good changes for the right reasons rather than simply big changes for the wrong reasons.

Liberty for Some vs. Justice for All

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:00:46 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

The past few years have taught us a lot about elected conservatives. From the federal government down, we've seen the modern conservative philosophy of governance in action. Wrapped in the rhetoric of freedom, conservative politics has really been about liberty for some, and it's time for progressives to make politics about justice for all.

Conservatives in Congress and Minnesota's state government have made it very clear that, if they can't govern, nobody will. We've seen conservatives orchestrate dysfunction, abuse the filibuster, and shut down governments when they can't get their way. Compromise is not an option for conservatives, unless it's progressives doing the compromising.

And what are the noble principles that drive this tantrum-like behavior? We need only look across the border to Wisconsin to find out. Given control of an entire state government, conservatives strip workers' rights, push to expand school vouchers, and remove equal pay protections for women and other groups. All this they do in the name of liberty, but that liberty only applies to some. In a conservative-governed society, white male employers have plenty of liberty. Everybody else, not so much.

Consider education. Today's conservatives don't seem to think public education should exist. Instead, they want it turned over to privately run schools contracting with privately run technology and testing companies. If they can't get that, they'll do what they can to get close: more charter schools, regardless of quality (until they can pass vouchers); mandatory online courses in high school; and always, always, always more testing. This is justified as increasing “freedom” for parents and those who run schools.

What it actually does is create a more chaotic school “marketplace,” narrow curricula, and undermine teachers. The people who actually gain freedom from this set of approaches are the rich (best positioned to navigate uncertain “school choice” options), the companies that specialize in testing and edu-tech, and the people looking to become profiteers in a privatized education system.

Lower income families get the “freedom” to pick which underfunded school they send their children to. Teachers get the “freedom” to hunt for the least abusive school environment. Children get the “freedom” to learn from a less experienced teaching corps, as veterans retire and novices leave for better pastures. That's what conservative “liberty” means in education.

Let's consider an alternative. Instead of conservative “liberty for some,” let's look at progressive “justice for all.”

Under a government that valued justice for all, we would see better funding for our schools (not the inflation-driven cuts of the Pawlenty administration). We would see the state ease the burden of communities that don't have the property wealth to independently support their schools. We would see teachers paid salaries that actually reflect the difficulty of the job. We would see schools with enough resources to shrink class sizes and increase the time available to teachers to give students the high-quality feedback they deserve.

We would see a robust early childhood system with the tools and staff it needs to help prepare children socially, emotionally, and cognitively for kindergarten. We would see diverse approaches to K-12 education, not competing but rather collaborating within a single system that actively helps families find the right schools for their children. We would see a statewide university and college system with tuition rates reasonable enough that all students have a fair and affordable shot at higher education. This is a system that doesn't abandon children or families to an inequitable marketplace; instead, it actively seeks to graduate students on a more level playing field.

We can no longer afford to grant control of our society to the rich and powerful. Justice for all means liberty for more than just a few. Taking away an employer's liberty to abuse their employees is not only more just, it is also liberating for those workers. Adequately funding an education system that provides multiple routes to success won't simply produce more just outcomes, it will give its graduates more freedom in finding employment and lifelong satisfaction.

It's time to stop granting elected conservatives' premise that they're fighting for liberty for all. They only want liberty for some people, and usually the people who will do just fine for themselves no matter who's in charge. It's time to speak up for those who won't always be fine. It's time to fight for justice for all.

VIDEO: A New Approach Autism Education

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:00:42 +0000

By Tom Niemisto, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}Tom Niemisto, Video Production Specialist

April is worldwide Autism Awareness month, a critical chance to shine light on a widely misunderstood condition. A CDC report estimates that 1-in-88 children in the US fall on the autistic spectrum, a rate that will have vast consequences on our education and health care systems.

Minnesota Life College is a residential education center for Autistic young adults, focusing on independent living and job readiness in a modern marketplace. Admission director Amy Gudmestad says she often sees students diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome who don't seek out or don't qualify for state support services, yet still need critical counseling and training to find success in our economy.

“Miracle Schools” and Unweaving Rainbows

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 11:00:00 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

Keats wrote that “Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,” and “unweave the rainbow,” in a passage often interpreted as a condemnation of science taking the wonder out of the natural world. When we describe a rainbow merely as white light refracted through a prism, goes the argument, we take some of the mystery and the miracle out of it. Look too closely, seek too much to understand something beautiful, and you risk destroying the sense of beauty.

Others have pointed out that understanding the mechanics of a rainbow doesn't actually make rainbows less beautiful, and that often the natural world becomes more wonderful and beautiful upon further examination. There's still a human tendency, however, to resist those who look too closely at venerated objects. I've noticed that we've started doing this in education with so-called “miracle schools,” and I think it's time to stop.

“Miracle schools” are the ones you see glowingly described every so often in articles or documentaries. They're the schools that work with the student populations on the losing end of the achievement gap – low-income students and/or students of color – and that many laud for getting amazing results. Perhaps the best local example would be Harvest Prep, a metro area charter school with an African-American student body that's posted impressive math and reading scores on the state test.

The school was favorably cited by Michael Ciresi in a Star Tribune column on the achievement gap, and Harvest Prep's founder, Eric Mahmoud, was the subject of a Star Tribune profile about a week and half earlier. Conservative columnist Katherine Kersten wrote a similarly positive report on the school for the Star Tribune a few months before that. The school's success has led to the Minneapolis Public Schools reaching out to Mahmoud to spread the Harvest Prep model beyond its current walls.

There's no question that Harvest Prep's students are doing better on the state tests for math and reading than many demographically similar peers in nearby traditional public schools. I know many of their teachers through shared experiences with Teach For America, and I know those teachers to be deeply committed to the success of their students. After putting in 20 years with Harvest Prep (and more with the pre-school Seed Academy), there's no question that Mahmoud and his wife, Ella, are invested in the school and its success.

Despite all of this, I've still criticized the school for its obsessive focus on the math and reading state tests. In particular, I point to the school's science proficiency, which has fluctuated between 0% and 6% in the four years since the test debuted. As more attention is brought to that test, I am sure that Harvest Prep will find a way to bring the scores up, but it does raise questions about what other, untested subject areas might look like.

If a criticism is factually incorrect, it should be called out as such. If a criticism is factually correct but materially insignificant, that should be called out, too. However, when a criticism is factually correct and materially significant, it shouldn't be considered taboo. It's not as if a school being criticized makes it a bad school; clearly Harvest Prep is having successes other schools aren't. I do get anxious when we rush to put the school on a pedestal and claim to have found The Answer.

Harvest Prep succeeds at preparing its students for the math and reading MCAs. That does not make it the right model for all students (and that's OK). By all means, let's work to expand access to similar schools for similar students. At the same time, we should also work to increase the overall variety of schools in traditional districts for the kids that won't do well in a Harvest Prep-style environment or that might have different goals.

There are a few other schools out there that are getting excellent results (though they're generally fewer and farther between than the Waiting for “Superman” crowd would have you believe). Even in Milwaukee, an urban area with more dysfunction and segregation that the Twin Cities, Milwaukee College Prep and the Bruce-Guadalupe Community School have started to produce results competitive with the rest of Wisconsin. There are many individual lessons to learn from these schools, not least that critical self-examination is key to success.

Applauding success is good and necessary. Using one school's success to bludgeon others isn't. Being willing to take a hard look at the different components of success is healthy and can help us better understand the rainbows in our school system. Our end goal should be a well-supported public school system with many different schools working well in different ways and always open to fair criticisms and the need to improve.

Teachers, Layoffs, and “Doing Something”

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:00:09 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

H.F. 1870, the bill to replace seniority with an unfinished teacher evaluation system, is wrapping up its time in conference committee on its way to likely passage from both houses of the Minnesota legislature. From there it goes to Governor Dayton's desk for signature or veto. The nominal purpose of this bill is to fix the problems connected to seniority-guided decision making. The real purpose is political, an attempt to pit progressives against teachers.

The natural progressive impulse when confronted with a social problem is to try to do something. This gets us in trouble sometimes, and never more so than when conservatives use it to make us fight among ourselves. Examples of this can be drawn from all over the education reform landscape. Each time, conservatives have duped progressives into believing that “doing something” means “doing this conservative-inspired idea”.

I've had enough of that. Today we'll look at some of the real problems connected to seniority and some other solutions. The solutions I pose aren't the only ones out there, but the point is that we should be talking about more than just the one “solution” coming from the conservative agenda.

Problem: Some older teachers are ineffective.

This gets back to one of conservatives' favorite boogeymen: The Bad Teacher. The Bad Teacher is the bane of education, a compensation-sucking, education-neglecting “lifer” sitting back with feet on the desk waiting to collect a pension. If you listen to conservatives and allied reformers, Bad Teachers have infested most of our lowest-performing schools and are the chief reason for the achievement gap and overall low performance.

H.F. 1870, presumably, is meant to expose these Bad Teachers and get them fired when budget layoffs come around. This neglects to engage with the actual processes districts already have in place to remove teachers for performance reasons. Those who feel that these processes are too slow or too complicated should focus on trying to improve them rather than running an end-around through layoffs necessitated by budget. We could talk about re-evaluating teacher's tenure status every three or five years so that persistent low-performers can be put back onto probationary status and removed if they don't improve. Instead, we're talking about what conservatives want us to talk about.

Problem: Seniority-guided layoffs sometimes layoff younger teachers who are more effective than more senior colleagues.

Especially in large districts with massive teacher populations, this can result in unfairness when a promising up-and-comer is let go ahead of a more experienced teacher who plateaued at a level of questionable performance. The options on the table for tackling this have gone largely undiscussed. Some of these possibilities include giving principals a certain number of “franchise picks,” allowing them to protect a certain proportion of teachers from seniority-based layoff decisions. Alternatively, we could look into tiered professional structures that allow exceptional teachers to qualify for increased protection based on multifaceted, teacher- and administrator-informed promotion processes.

Instead we're talking about a teacher evaluation system that places significant weight on test scores. Other areas that have experimented with such systems saw Teachers of the Year laid off while teachers who got luckier at Test Score Roulette stayed on. We have no reason to expect that this evaluation system will be any better, and in may in fact be worse than using seniority, seeing as how most teachers do in fact get better the more years they spend in the classroom.

Problem: Seniority-guided layoffs disproportionately hurt low-income schools with less experienced teacher populations.

In districts with many schools (like Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Anoka-Hennepin), some of the worst-off schools have the highest concentrations of low-experience teachers. As a result, they suffer from higher teacher turnover which is destabilizing for students. In response, we could explore pupil-proportionate layoffs, where each school lays off a certain percentage of teachers equivalent to the rest of the district. There may be other choices out there, too, but we're not talking about them.

Problem: After seniority-guided layoffs, some teachers are transferred to schools they don't want to be at or that don't want them.

The result of the problem above is senior teachers being reassigned to replace the less effective teachers who were laid off elsewhere. Most senior teachers make it work, but a few end up forcibly moved to schools where they don't want to teach or that don't want them. We could be discussing giving principals the final say on whether to hire a teacher or soliciting other ideas. That's not what we're doing, though.

What we're doing is dancing to conservatives' tune. What I've tossed out here are not the only possible solutions, but they are some possible solutions. Progressives and reformers should not rush to embrace the first ALEC-inspired idea that claims to fix a problem. Whatever “something” we do, let's make sure it's the right thing, too.

One Break, Two Break, Spring Break, Summer Break

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:00:24 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

Many Minnesota schools have already had their spring breaks, with many more taking this week off. By historical precedent, this week would have been the most likely pick, ending as it does with Easter. As we've done a better job recognizing the multi-faceted nature of our populace (and as budgets have recommended other times to realize seasonal savings), we've got a little more variety. This is also a good time to reflect on the notion of time off from school.

Contrary to popular belief, summer break is not solely a concession to the country's agrarian heritage. In fact, many rural schools used to run summer and winter terms so that students could plant in spring and harvest in fall. Many urban areas would take time off in the summer to avoid the unsanitary conditions caused by bringing dense concentrations of children together in stifling heat.

Another rationale offered in defense of breaks was that they helped avoid burnout. Many feared that children forced into structured learning all year long would face higher rates of nervous conditions and other mental problems. As the United States goes through year after year of watching countries with year-round schooling beat us on international assessments, however, some people want to reconsider the length of our school year.

As always, this is more complicated than it seems at first blush. Would kids do better if they were in school year-round? Some would, some wouldn't. The RAND Corporation has found that summer break is a leading contributor to the achievement gap. Children from higher income households often spend summer at various camps (ranging in focus from language to chess to music to traditional outdoors activities) or traveling with their families. Children from lower income households often don't have these same opportunities. The result? Children from the middle class and above tend to hold or gain ground in academic proficiency while children from lower incomes tend to backslide.

When it comes to addressing the question of breaks, we have different options. We can stick with the traditional schedule and try to do a better job creating free or low-cost summer enrichment opportunities for low-income children (and such activities should be noticeably different than remediation-focused summer school). We can shift when breaks occur, moving to a schedule like the 45/15 calendar that runs 45 school days (about nine weeks) followed by 15 school days (about three weeks) for most of the year. This doesn't add to the number of days, but it reduces the length of time during which backsliding can occur. And, of course, we can just lengthen the school year.

Minnesota already has some schools trying all of these approaches (plus, undoubtedly, a few more). Which is best? That's the wrong question to ask. The right question is: Are we getting each kid into a school with the schedule that's best for them?

The answer to that? Probably not. Most of our schools still run with the traditional schedule and minimal summer enrichment opportunities. We need larger proportions of our school system following the different available models, and we need districts that are invested and effective in guiding students to appropriate schools. Whether this is achieved through increased use of the state's relatively new and untried site-based governance law or through more public choice options like Longfellow Elementary in Rochester, we need a greater diversity of approaches in our traditional public school districts.

Some might point out that this is why we have charter schools. It is true that several of our highest-performing charter schools (despite the narrowness of that definition in most cases) run with longer school years and/or days. Charters serve a small share of our student population, however, and I'm not ready to concede the notion that innovation or diversity of approach belong outside the traditional public schools. We need to get intentional about school diversity through traditional public schools, which means creating lots of different options and making sure that the staff at each school buy into its approach and want to be there.

A Question of Professionalism

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:00:15 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

A friend recently reminded me of an old joke: What do you call the person who graduates last in their medical school class? Doctor. To me, that's a reminder that every field contains a range of abilities, and how employers manage that range in terms of pay, promotion, and retention sets the professional norms for that field. As we enter the closing stages of the fight over teacher seniority, waiting for the governor's signature or veto of a final version of H.F. 1870, the question of professionalism deserves some discussion.

It should be clear that teachers right now are not treated as the creative professionals they are. They aren't paid enough, and they're overworked. Pay is determined in most districts by a calculation of seniority and credentials, with minimal attention paid to quality of performance. In short, teachers are still treated like factory workers, as if they simply dumped knowledge into the heads of each batch of students before the assembly line sweeps in the next batch.

Unfortunately, moving past this is a lot harder than it seems. There's general agreement from reformers and teachers alike that teachers should be evaluated based on the quality of their teaching [PDF, check pages 32-41], but defining quality gets tricky. The most difficult part is resisting the siren call of the easy measure.

Consider a software company. The main product of the company are programs, composed of lines of code. The easiest available measure is lines of code, and at first glance "lines of code" seems a reasonable proxy for worker output -- more productive workers will write more programs, which means more lines of code, right? Well, sometimes. Often, however, the best solution requires fewer lines of code, so the best programmers won't always produce the most lines of code. And what about the accountants, the project managers, the customer service representatives? Lines of code is meaningless for them.

In education, the easy measure is test scores. As analysis of teacher data from New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere has shown, these scores are ridiculously unreliable. The margins of error for individual teachers are so high, and there are so many other factors that affect scores, that these scores aren't a good proxy for teacher quality. What's more, many teachers are in untested subjects, and it will always be ridiculous to use math and reading scores to determine the quality of a band director, computer skills teacher, or US history teacher.

Determining the quality of an employee's work in a creative field like teaching requires more than an algorithm. It requires supervisors and peer reviewers who are trained in a good system, who identify a different threshold of success for each teacher, and who use a variety of measures to assess that teacher's success. This is complicated and depends on having good evaluators with manageable workloads, which may be why it doesn't get nearly as much attention from our policymakers.

Assuming that we've got strong evaluators providing good assessments of teacher quality, the question then becomes what to do with those assessments. A few states have just started to experiment with sorting teachers into tiers (for example, Iowa is looking at a system with novice, career, mentor, and master teachers), and there's potential in these structures to create a more nuanced understanding of teacher quality and a greater variety of teacher roles and responsibilities to be apportioned based on interest and ability.

With this nuanced understanding should also come the realization that, while we may not have as many excellent teachers as we'd like, we also don't have as many irredeemably terrible teachers as some fear. We need to recognize that having human beings take on a very difficult, time-intensive job means that most people won't meet every expectation all the time. Absent a supply of superhero-teachers, however, we need to be OK with this while expecting teachers to work towards excellence.

In the short-term, we need to call out the current efforts to punish teachers using unreliable tests for what they are. They won't advance "professionalism," and linking the notion of "education reform" with a quest to replace one unprofessional standard with another is counterproductive. Progressives need to look for better solutions to advance, and they need to work with our current teachers and administrators in developing those better solutions.

Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:00:19 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

We sometimes lose track of it in today's United States, but it used to be common knowledge among employers that 40 hours a week was the maximum that should be expected of employees if productivity was to be maintained. The more hours a week people are made to work, the less productive they become. This raises some important questions about how we manage our teachers and students.

Over a century ago, factory managers began to realize that daily productivity increased when workers' hours were cut from nine a day to eight a day. That is, by working one hour less a day, workers produced more over the course of that day. Henry Ford made waves in 1926 when he cut worktime from ten hours a day to eight, and from six days a week to five, without reducing pay. The result? Increased output and lower production costs. Subsequent research in more modern fields like software development have confirmed that similar results hold for contemporary creative work.

It turns out, that human beings are not automatons whose work output stays steady during every hour we work. Instead, when worked too long we start making mistakes, and the time it takes to correct those mistakes quickly removes any benefit from the increased work time. Work a little longer and we reach negative productivity, requiring more time to fix mistakes than the extra time scheduled to work.

What does this mean for teaching? Isn't it, like, a part-time job? And what about all those summers off?

Well, not so much.

To offer one example, I submit my own, final year in the classroom. During that year, I taught three sections of twelfth grade English, one section of advanced ninth grade English, and one section of “reading lab,” a course aimed at helping students pass the state reading test required for graduation. My summer was mostly spent building the curriculum for the twelfth grade course. (I wasn't told about the advanced ninth grade class until a couple weeks before school started and the reading lab was supposed to be supported with a new online reading program that didn't quite pan out as expected).

In the case of the twelfth grade class and the reading lab, I basically had a course title to work off of. For advanced ninth grade, I had a list of books that had been taught before and access to some of the materials tied to those books (though I didn't end up using any of those). The bottom line was that I was basically building three courses from scratch.

I had about 60 twelfth grade students, 30 advanced ninth graders, and 10 reading lab students over the course of the year (with some fluctuation as students came and went). That's makes for a 100 students even, an atypically low student load for the school.

Our contract time allowed for 7.75 hours a day, or 38.75 hours a week. Hey, there's that easy teacher schedule, right? Wrong. The total amount of prep time scheduled during the week worked out to about 5.5 hours. How much time did I actually need for prep work? Well, let's go to a table.

“Reading Work” refers to the amount of time spent reading and marking up a student's work for the week. My seniors turned in one written piece every week, usually between one and three pages. Reading work also meant marking errors or places of awkward phrasing.

“Providing Feedback” is what it sounds like. My ninth and twelfth graders would get a paragraph of specific feedback in response to everything they wrote (this all looked a little bit different in reading lab, but the time estimates should be about right), though things usually went a bit faster with the ninth graders since their pieces were generally shorter and average writing ability generally higher.

“Lesson Prep” includes finding or creating examples and non-examples, designing exercises, building digital presentations, etc. Again, most of these courses were built from scratch, and the reading lab in particular required a significant amount of prep time if it was to be done right—pieces needed to be pre-read, with specific questions tied to specific passages.

The grand total works out to 17.25 hours a week of prep time. Throw in another hour of “administrivia,” or the random paperwork needs that come from being part of a complex organization, and we're looking at 18.25 hours of “prep” work a week. Individual teacher loads will vary, of course, but I would say that this was largely typical for my school, if not on the low side (as I've been leaning low in my time estimates here).

One last bit of math: 38.75 contract hours minus 5.5 “prep” hours plus 18.25 needed prep hours equals 51.5 hours of work a week.

This is not sustainable. The life of a teacher during a school year is not a recipe for maximum productivity; it's a recipe for burnout. We need something different.

Arrival at Core Competencies

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:00:18 +0000

By Kaye Thompson Peters, Fellow

This is the second part of my experience with effective Core Competency instruction.
(read part 1)

As I and the St. Paul pilot team began to work on analyzing the English Language Arts Common Core standards, I had reservations about who designed them. Was this another group of people trying to drink from the trough that should be funding public education? I got my answer in November when I attended a conference sponsored by the Council of Great City Schools and got to speak directly to the co-writers of the standards and architect David Coleman. Then, the pieces began to fall into place.

Coleman was very clear that he created a non-profit to oversee implementation of the standards, but it is funded independently by foundations. He takes no fees and he will endorse no products or tests. He is trying to be as authentic as he can be. In a world where everyone is a consultant with few years of classroom experience, but a lot of high-priced ideas on what teachers should do, Coleman is an exception. His principled stand impressed me. His lesson wowed me. He was clear that he has not been a classroom teacher, but his lesson established his integrity.

Coleman led a group of teachers through an exploration of two poems that trumped any previous workshop experience I have known. It was a masterful example of the power of text-based learning. He did not tell anyone what anything meant. He asked us to think.

“This is an equity issue,” he said then, and many times before and since. Herein lays one of the subtle but profound differences in the new English standards. Instead of front-loading information such as vocabulary or a history of Classic Greek theater, Coleman says we teachers need to take kids directly to the text. Every time we ask a student if they have heard of Sophocles, we are losing students in the room who have not. When we give students a bunch of vocabulary and contextual information, we are telling them that they need to know all of this stuff to be able to understand the text—and we turn off the very students we most want to engage. “Take them to the text,” Coleman says, and you teach them they can do it.

Coleman has been criticized by educators for being too focused on preparing kids for college and careers and neither on the literature at hand nor students’ own experiences. Yet, that afternoon in November, he had a room of 100+ educators joyfully explicating Dylan Thomas and learning from a poem they thought they knew.

Science teachers joined in to help us understand the significance of the light imagery. It was a perfect moment where teachers experienced the joy of learning, the experience we hope to bring to every child. Coleman says that too often students can discuss their own experiences in a class and avoid ever reading or addressing the text assigned. If they are only discussing what they already know, what are we teaching them?

Coleman also says the new standards for English involve three shifts: A greater focus on “content-rich” nonfiction, reading and writing grounded in evidence from the text and a focus on increasingly complex texts. The complexity of text with which students can engage is a predictor of college success, he says.

Accepting his challenge, I returned to teach Antigone to my 10th graders. I provided no “History of Greek Theater” lecture, no vocabulary. We opened the text and began looking at the character list. Then, we started reading the play with students taking roles. Every half page, we stopped to discuss what they had heard through the lines. I had kids holding up their hands who had never raised a hand before.

They got it. Once they began to study the text, their questions and ideas drove our study. They came into class every day ready to get to work. As the unit progressed, I handed more of the discussion off to the students until small groups were completing the play on their own. The “trial” I have often used at the end of the unit was richer and the students ended with writing an argumentative paper that examined Antigone’s side versus Creon’s (a required paper under the new standards).

I consider myself a pretty rigorous teacher who has learned to keep her interpretation to herself and not trample on students’ ideas, but my experience with teaching the Common Core the way David Coleman envisioned it has regrounded me in my earliest belief that my job is to help students find their own answers. Every time I tell a student what “it” means instead of stopping to think of a question that will guide their own discovery, I am limiting that child’s opportunity to figure it out.

So here, as I enter my second year with the Common Core standards, I am a believer. The Common Core is an antidote to the rote, formulaic curriculum bred by standardized testing. The two testing consortia that are designing tests off of the Common Core have worked closely with AFT and Coleman. While I, like most teachers, am tired of students being measured by these high-stakes instruments, the Core was not designed to fit a test, and the effort to build the tests off the Core likely ensures that they will be better tests than the poorly formulated tests we have currently. (Minnesota does not belong to the consortia and is designing its own tests.)

In fact, the Common Core standards, with their text-based, inquiry focus offer our students opportunity for joyful learning, for sharing and growing. They provide us with a philosophy of student learning as rigorous and collaborative, with students making their own meaning. That is sorely needed. Will they have a greater impact than previous standards? The answer depends on how well we stick to the text, or, in this case, the standards.

A Journey Toward Core Competencies

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:25:54 +0000

By Kaye Thompson Peters, Fellow

This is the first of a two-part series.

More than 14 months ago, I joined a pilot team of St. Paul teachers working with what is known as the Common Core standards for English Language Arts. I, frankly, joined the effort to make sure that the implementation of the standards would benefit my students. I have taught for 14 years and have gone through three previous iterations of standards that were at best negligible. At the least, I wanted to ensure these new standards did no harm so I signed on. We were one of six cities around the country to receive Gates Foundation money to plan for and test the standards before they went into full force this coming fall.

The ensuing year has been a true journey from a well-founded skepticism, noted above, to a real respect for the potential of these standards to stave off the madness of reducing education to a simplistic, testable and routinized system that will bore rather than inspire our children. There is a lot of buzz and misinformation around the Common Core State Standards. Teachers in one suburb are dropping literature in favor of sports biography because of new standards for non-fiction text. (When I told one of the Core’s authors about that choice, he blanched.) Parent groups are challenging the standards for fear of the new wave of testing they think will come. Many teachers are dismissing them as the same song, different tune, that will be gone in another couple years. I think they are all wrong and I would like to share with you what I have learned so that you can understand why I believe the work I have put into really understanding the standards was well worth it.

Last January, our group began with what is called a “gap analysis” where we compared the standards we had been governed by to the new standards. There were many similarities in the writing standards (grammar is always on English teachers’ minds), but we also began to notice some significant shifts in reading, especially. We all agreed that the recursive, structured nature of the standards ensured a sequenced and well-thought-out development of English, writing and reading skills over the span of kindergarten to 12th grade. The most troubling aspect--to me—was the heavy emphasis on non-fiction and informational text. As someone who has lived in the language of Shakespeare, Zora Neale Hurston and Arthur Miller for years, I knew that I could develop college-ready minds through the richness of such texts. I spend my life helping kids deconstruct the language and structure of literature for how meaning is created. I know that those skills translate to other content because I have had students email and tell me how well prepared they felt for college once there. Then, there was the push to look at other forms of literature through image-based texts, such as cartoons and graphic novels, and electronic media.

Over the course of last summer, a few dozen K-12 teachers met several times to decide how we would sequence what were initially called “products” required by the Common Core (narrative, literary, argumentative, and informative essays and research and media projects) and to begin writing sample lesson plans. We tethered the standards to the products and created supporting units that ensured all of the standards were addressed. There were challenges for us in letting go of what we knew was our existing curriculum and addressing the standards authentically, not just trying to squeeze existing curriculum into the new standards. We were, again, particularly challenged with looking for how to use informational text with integrity and where to place the Minnesota and American Indian literature that our state added to the national standards. Here it is important to clarify that all states may add up to 15 percent of the total standards for their own state’s interests. In New York and other states, that 15 percent was dedicated to standards for preschool. Here, the 15 percent was used to specifically require Native American or Indian literature.

We disagreed and debated over how much weight to give to informational text and whether literary non-fiction, such as memoir, counted as non-fiction under the new guidelines. The standards in fact call for 85 percent of text to be informational, that includes social studies and science. Narrative is an appropriate non-fiction text for English. This is in response to colleges’ complaints that students do not know how to engage with or respond to college-level readings, much of which are non-fiction.

I went home, completely overhauled my honors 10th grade curriculum to coincide with the core and the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme (yes, I had to incorporate two new sets of standards for this class), and prepared to teach. I had to take out more than a third of what I used to “cover” in the class to make room for me to develop students’ knowledge and proficiency in the standards. We had agreed that in high school, where the standards are “banded” for grades 9-10 and 11-12, that only three of the six products would be assessed for proficiency each year. The others would be addressed or reviewed.

As I worked with the standards, I became increasingly persuaded—non-fiction reservations notwithstanding—that the Common Core could well up the rigor in our English classes to the benefit of all students. I still had many questions, which were to be addressed as the team progressed, and some old vestiges of my role as the teacher I would need to shake off. I will address those in tomorrow’s discussion as I take you to New Jersey to meet the architects of the standards.

Read Part 2

On the Containing of Multitudes

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:00:41 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

In his “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” If this can be true of one person, how much truer might it be for our school system? The sheer diversity of our student body—not just diversity of race and class but diversity of interest and learning style—suggests that the quest for the one “right way to do it” may very well be a fruitless one. Instead, we should strive to develop a system of diverse schools working together to serve all students.

That italicized piece, “working together,” is what is missing from so much of our discussion of schools today. Whether a result of the glorification of the rugged individual or a byproduct of an overblown faith in the magic of the free market, our policymakers have bought into an approach to education reform that pits each school and program against all others in the hope that The One Right System will emerge triumphant in the end.

As a result, those efforts that have sought to innovate and bring creative approaches to educating students end up fractured and divided, forced to fight each other. Charter schools, which were supposed to be about teachers working with parents in the development of truly new approaches, have been co-opted by non-educators and a perverted set of incentives tied to test scores. Now, the charter schools that get the most praise aren't the ones that are the most innovative or dynamic; they're the ones that have become the most efficient test score factories.

The alternative programs that serve students who have struggled more than most with traditional schooling face similar pressures to standardize the education they provide, when the needs of their students clearly fall outside the standard range.

Indeed, it is clear that too many students fall outside the standard range (such as it is) of our education system. There are plenty of students just getting by in a traditional setting that would thrive in a different kind of school. Their experiences don't qualify them for the ALCs, however, and most of the charter schools aren't that different from traditional public schools in terms of instruction and pedagogy. As a result, these students are stuck in the middle of the class when they could be excelling elsewhere.

The problem is, that “elsewhere” doesn't exist yet, and it's not likely to anytime soon. There's too much pressure to tweak and fiddle with traditional classroom instruction in the hope of jerking a few points higher on average standardized test scores. Those that challenge the notion that higher test scores are in fact the goal of modern education are often labeled as having low expectations or not caring about student outcomes.

I see now that attention is being brought to hybrid schools, those that combine in-class learning with online learning. Reading the assessment of the programs that are out there, I've noted some familiar phrasing: “Some blended-learning [hybrid] models are great and some are pretty bad.” That's a direct quotation from Michael Horn, a representative of a group that's worked to evaluate the potential of hybrid schooling.

You know what else that phrasing applies to? Charter schools. “Some charter schools are great and some are pretty bad.” Sounds accurate enough to me. Let's try it with traditional public schools. “Some publics are great and some are pretty bad.” Yep. How about private schools in Milwaukee's voucher program? Same thing.

It turns out that, no matter what approach we're talking about, some schools are great and some are pretty bad. If we relaxed the pressure on test scores as the prime signifier of school quality and put some real support into helping public school districts develop a variety of different kinds of schools and programs, do you know what we'd find? Some would be great, and some would be pretty bad. Instead of trying to make every school be like the ones that are great, however, we should figure out which types of students still aren't being served and try to build schools for them.

In the end, the idea is simple. We need one public system, containing a multitude of educational approaches, with a vested interest in getting each student to the school that's best for him or her. With a critical eye and a willingness to keep trying new things, we'll be better served than we are by the constant hunt for The One Right System as measured by standardized tests.

Fewer Options for Greater Minnesota

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:18:07 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

The past few weeks have seen a major legislative battle in Saint Paul about teacher seniority and school layoffs. The proposed policy, spearheaded by the same legislators happy to cut school funding at any opportunity, would replace seniority with an undeveloped, unproven evaluation system when schools are forced to fire teachers because the money's run out. This is the wrong fight, waged for the wrong reasons, and it's wrong for greater Minnesota.

Our fight should be about how to avoid layoffs, not how to conduct them. After a decade of letting inflation slash state support to schools, too many districts have reached or passed the point of nothing left to cut. Still, they carry on, seeking out new ways to save here and there without having to further reduce their staff sizes. We've seen districts adopting four day school weeks, rearranging breaks to lower utility costs, and pushing out their busing boundaries. This is not good for our schools, and it's not good for our kids.

What would be good for our kids would be a state government that follows through on its commitment to support local schools. Instead, we've seen less money, and it's been spread out by delayed payments. We need more equitable funding that helps rural areas keep up with the Twin Cities, but we only get the same platitudes about increasing efficiency and “doing more with less.” Our schools have been “doing more with less” for years now, and it's time for that to stop.

This fight about seniority, layoffs, and the new evaluation system also undermines the principle of local control that has always been central to our school policy. Under current law, districts can negotiate alternatives to seniority on their own, and four out of every ten districts (serving six of every ten students) in the state have done so. The new law doesn't trust local districts to negotiate the right deal for their communities, requiring districts to either use the statewide evaluation system that's still in development or develop their own system that meets the same standards.

What's more, this is the worst kind of state overreach, forcing districts to fire teachers using this new system during the first year that system is being tried statewide. This is not responsible, and it could force districts to fire teachers everyone knows shouldn't be kicked out. This isn't to say that the current approach doesn't occasionally have a similar problem, but rather to say that we don't know the new system would be any better. We shouldn't have to sacrifice local control in exchange for a system that might not be any better (and really could be worse) than what we already have.

This distracting fight that undermines local control comes from many of the same legislative conservatives that have resisted efforts to give schools the resources they need to succeed. State support for schools has declined 13 percent since 2003, but these legislators want to cut more. Some have even tried to convince communities they don't represent to vote down their own local support. This is not the approach of people who truly care about the success of our public schools.

What we're really seeing here is the next set of steps in a long-standing conservative campaign against public schools. They can camouflage their intention by talking about “closing the achievement gap” and “accountability” (and there are plenty of people who are truly working towards these goals), but the real impacts of conservative-supported “reform” are less money for schools, more hostility towards teachers, less respect for local districts, and more obstacles to our kids' success. It's time for this to stop.

Testing Out of Control

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:00:39 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

Late last week, in an absurd fit of data-mania, New York City made the shameful decision to release three years' worth of test scores attached to individual teachers' names. This is a gross violation of any conceivable standard of professionalism and a sign that the conservative war on teachers has reached new heights of repulsiveness. There is no acceptable justification for this disgraceful behavior.

New York is the second city to make this reprehensible decision. Los Angeles made a similar dump in 2010 and faced righteous indignation as a result. You would think New York would have learned from that example, but they apparently decided that the public outcry was worth hurting teachers with bogus scores.

There is no question about the bogusness of these scores. Indeed, their bogusitude knows no bounds. Want to know the average teacher's variation for math scores from one year to the next? 35 percentage points. The average variation in English? 53 percentage points. These “data” are so worthless, other statistics hide in damp basements rather than be seen with them in public.

Of the 18,000 teachers whose names are attached to this travesty, only 521 were ranked in the bottom 5% for two or more years, and only 696 were in the top 5% with the same consistency. This is what you'd expect if test scores were allocated at random instead of being indicative of a teacher's actual performance. (And looking at those average variations, it's clear that these scores are being allocated at random.)

On a 100 point scale, the margin of error required for 95% confidence is 54 points. That means that a teacher with a score of 50 could actually be anywhere between -4 and 104 on a 100 point scale. To quote Douglas Harris, the University of Wisconsin economist who helped design the system, releasing this, “strikes me as at best unwise, at worst, absurd.”

Absurd is right. This is a meaningless collection of numbers with delusions of accuracy, yet it will be used to publicly humiliate hard-working teachers in difficult classrooms. Those of us who call this farce out for what it is will be pilloried for trying to hide failures or cover up for bad teachers when what we're really doing is calling out a pile of bull pucky for the rancid mess it is.

The ones doing the pillorying have bought into a vision of education reform built around these unreliable tests. They come from all points on the political spectrum and both major parties, but what they're really advancing is a slipshod conservative model of “accountability” built on measurements that can't carry the weight ascribed to them.

There are real problems in our school system's outcomes. The achievement gaps between the poor, the middle class, and the rich are morally wrong and bad for our social and economic stability. The route to fixing these gaps runs through a strong public school system with robust support, actual professional respect for its teachers, and the flexibility to offer a multitude of different educational approaches within a unified system.

What we have right now is a hunt for “bad teachers” advanced by people who hurl that label around using bad tests. When the mathematicians [PDF], economists, and education researchers [PDF] who understand these subjects all agree that we need a lot more work before “value-added measurements” could possibly be used in a fair evaluation system, maybe we should listen to them.

The most bitterly amusing part of this whole misadventure is New York's “chief academic officer” Shael Polakow-Suransky's disclaimer, “The purpose of these reports is not to look at any individual score in isolation ever.... [W]e would never invite anyone — parents, reporters, principals, teachers — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone.”

Then why did you release these scores this way? If the purpose was to make the “data” (such as it is) available for analysis, there was no need to attach names to scores. Now, however, you can bet that these scores will be looked at in isolation and people will draw conclusions based on these scores alone. To link individual names to terrible “data” and then say, “Don't draw any conclusions about these individuals based on this 'data,'” is clearly a laughable attempt to cover one's butt.

This is what our testing obsession has wrought. It is out of control, and it must be stopped.

VIDEO: No Child Left Inside

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:00:44 +0000

By Tom Niemisto, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}Tom Niemisto, Video Production Specialist

Some Minnesota K-12 schools emphasize environmental education on their own, yet shrinking state aid has made field trips and ELC visits cost-prohibitive for some districts.

A federal bill, branded "No Child Left Inside", would augment the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to help Minnesota school districts incorporate environmental education across the curriculum to promote literacy of the natural world, and combat nature deficit disorder head on.

Rep. Petersen Skirting Teacher Tenure

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:00:02 +0000

By Kaye Thompson Peters, Fellow

Once upon a time, teachers could be fired for wearing a skirt above the ankle, appearing in public after 8 p.m., or speaking on topics not approved by the school board and superintendent. Students were seen as empty vessels into which knowledge was poured. A teacher’s responsibility was to train students to work on assembly lines where they would not question their bosses.

Then unions won hard-fought and often bloody battles to ensure workers’ rights to fair wages, safe working conditions and a constitutional right to free speech. Teachers could freely engage students in topics that were controversial. In the process, teachers developed an education system that was and is the envy of the world—because it produces innovative thinkers and risk-takers.

Some believe the battle for equality in hiring and firing is now complete and that poor teaching is our greatest threat. However, we teachers need tenure protection now more than ever because the foundation of our democracy—public education—is threatened by those who want to dismantle it or make money off of it. Those parties include ALEC, and the wrong-headed reformers of both MinnCAN and Students First who operate on false assumptions because they have spent little time in schools. Teachers need job protection so we can advocate for our students and challenge bad policies that are rashly implemented in the name of improvement.

Tenure is not in place to protect bad teachers. Nor was it implemented just to promote race and gender equity. It is not obsolete. It was and is essential to protect the integrity of classrooms so teachers can engage students in meaningful learning. Tenure is also important to our work as advocates on behalf of students. I happen to have a principal who believes that multiple opinions only strengthen the fiber of our school, but I have colleagues in other schools, where principals are new and fear antagonizing the district. Even with tenure behind them, these teachers know that a principal can single them out for “improvement” or intensify observations. This is true. I know teachers who have even been told they are not paid to think. Really? Then, what is a teacher paid to do?

If Minnesota removes tenure, it only further weakens the voices of teachers to speak up on behalf of our students. Both the union and tenure give me and my colleagues the standing and protection to do that work—work that has led to meaningful improvements in the education of Minnesota’s children, including a stronger teacher evaluation program. Experience-based pay, which the bill proposed by Rep. Branden Petersen (R-Andover) would protect, is the least of my concerns.

Another fallacy is that Petersen’s bill ensures only good teachers are kept. Any human enterprise has those who perform at varying levels. That problem will not be fixed by nullifying tenure. These are two separate issues. Minnesota has just passed a law on stronger teacher evaluation. If the state agrees to Petersen’s system, you may find that the strongest teachers are weeded out while the mediocre teachers remain because they don’t rock the boat. This is even more disturbing in light of Petersen’s proposal to permanently remove any teacher who is laid off. Under his proposal, any teacher laid off loses all seniority and cannot be moved to another position for which he/she may also hold a license. To think that 14 or 30 years of work could be erased and that being rehired means to start with no credit for that service would be chilling and further discourage teachers from taking risks.

It is important the public understand that new isn’t always better. Schools that have constant turnover are much less stable and less able to address the needs of our most at-risk students. Schools need the institutional memory and collegiality that comes with a stable, seasoned staff. Research shows that teachers need 4-5 years before they become proficient practitioners. We grow stronger with age as we learn to juggle planning, grading and systems that hold students accountable.

A more consistent teacher evaluation system is the means to ensure we have the strongest possible teachers in our classrooms at all times. If there is an underperforming teacher, that teacher should receive support to improve. If there is no improvement, he or she should be removed—not just when layoffs are required. Then, when economic layoffs are needed, we can be assured that a good teacher is not lost while a bad one is kept. The argument that great young teachers are lost during layoffs implies that the experienced teachers are not also “great.” When does Wells Fargo lay off experienced executives because clients wanted to keep the newest loan manager?

Tenure—and its effect—is one of the most maligned and misunderstood aspects of teacher professionalism. Tenure’s purpose is to protect good teachers so they can continue to advocate for their students and to learn in classrooms unfettered by the political or administrative whim of the day. I suspect Mr. Petersen knows that—and it galls him. He would like to go back to the days when skirts were ankle length and students were empty vessels. Those days, thankfully, are past—once you open a student’s mind, it cannot be closed again. We teachers will not be silenced.

The Case of the Three Teachers, Part 2

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 12:00:52 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

Yesterday, we met three teachers – Ms. Holmes, Mr. Chandler, and Ms. Spade – along with their principal, Ms. Doyle. Ms. Doyle observed each teacher deliver a tenth grade English lesson, and was now in the process of evaluating their work.

When evaluating each teacher, Ms. Doyle examined the results of the assessments each teacher had given his or her students to measure mastery of the lesson's objective. She also asked each teacher to examine the results independently and offer their own conclusions during the observation debrief.

For the methodical Ms. Holmes's lesson on identifying elements of similarity between poems, her mini-essay assessment found most students able to make connections at the level of plot, setting, and character and roughly half of students able to make connections between the themes of poems. It was clear from reviewing her students' assessments that the difficulties with thematic connections came from an incomplete understanding of theme as it relates to poetry.

The discussion-focused Mr. Chandler found that half of his students were consistently able to write research questions that met his expectations for clarity, focus, and depth, a quarter wrote good questions about half the time, and a quarter wrote questions that all needed improvement. Since his assessment only asked for students to submit a list of questions, he and Ms. Doyle couldn't be sure based on the data about where learning broke down for the students still struggling with the skill.

As for Ms. Spade, two-thirds of her students ranked themselves as comfortable connecting an author's text to its historical context, while a third expressed less comfort. Ms. Doyle, however, noted that assessing students' confidence doesn't say anything about how well they can actually perform the skill in question.

These three results demonstrate the importance of having good assessments of student learning. Creating assessments that (a) measure mastery and (b) are sufficiently detailed to explain which particular sub-skills were mastered and which require more work is an important skill for teachers that strengthens over time. Good assessments are critical to understanding the real effects of actual teacher actions, and assessments – like the MCAs – that don't provide that kind of information are useless for meaningfully evaluating teachers.

Good teacher evaluation requires actual knowledge of a teacher's classroom and practices. It also requires good evaluators. The three teachers we've looked at are fortunate to have a principal who understands their content area and knows how to conduct an evaluation with an eye towards encouraging growth rather than rooting out teachers to judge or punish. Too many teachers don't have that advantage, which means that too many students have teachers that aren't getting the kind of support they deserve.

Even given a universally excellent corps of knowledgeable, fair-minded principals, teachers should be evaluated by more than just their principal. Peer evaluations, especially by master teachers in their school or district, can be very helpful. Ms. Doyle may be a great evaluator for her English teachers, having previously taught that subject, but the social studies and music teachers at her school deserve evaluators who know their subjects, too.

Evaluators also need to have a fair system for assessing teachers, and they need to understand how to use that system. Giving an evaluator a rubric and a one-hour workshop is not enough, and poor use of an evaluation system is a great way to discredit its worth in the eyes of those being evaluated.

Beyond who is doing the evaluating, we also need to consider what the response to those evaluations will be. In general, the goal of teacher evaluation should be about encouraging growth and development. Teachers who receive negative evaluations from multiple evaluators deserve support (in the form of mentoring from master teachers and/or the school's instructional coaches) to help them improve. It is only when a teacher shows a persistent unwillingness or inability to improve that evaluations should be used to remove them from the classroom.

As for determining which teachers to lay off when the budget requires it, we need a clear, fair system with an appeals process to be in place and well-understood before we replace seniority as the default mechanism for determining layoff order. The quality of teaching demonstrated by Ms. Holmes, Mr. Chandler, and Ms. Spade has little or nothing to do with their students' test scores, and those scores do not have a place in determining which of the three to let go (assuming layoffs came down to one of the three).

Quality teaching is demonstrated by so many things other than test scores. “Student data” or “student outcomes” deserve a central role in evaluating teacher effectiveness, but policymakers should take care not to conflate those concepts with standardized test scores. We need many strong evaluators participating in a growth-oriented, fair process that encourages a professional mindset of continuously increasing effectiveness instead of constant fear about losing one's job based on test scores or a single dog-and-pony-show observation. Our students deserve teachers who are supported in getting better, not teachers intimidated by an unfair system.

The Case of the Three Teachers, Part 1

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:00:29 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

Hypothetical High School in Imaginary, Minnesota has three tenth grade English teachers: Ms. Holmes, Mr. Chandler, and Ms. Spade. All three have been teaching at Hypothetical for seven years, but they have very different styles. Their principal, Ms. Doyle, wants to know how each of the three is doing. Hypothetical's scores on the tenth grade MCA have been slowly trending upward for the past few years, but too many students were passed between the three teachers at semester each year for Ms. Doyle to know for sure what each teacher's “value-added” has been. A former English teacher herself, Ms. Doyle also knows there's a lot more to being good than an increase in reading comprehension scores.

Ms. Doyle decides to observe each teacher deliver a full lesson three times over the course of the year. Before each observation, she collects the teacher's stated objective for the lesson as well as any meaningful context that she needs to understand about why the teacher is making those particular choices. Ms. Doyle wants an objective for each lesson to confirm that her teachers have reasonable but ambitious goals in mind.

For one of her observed lessons, the methodical Ms. Holmes has adapted one of the state standards into an objective using student-friendly language: I can explain how different poems are like each other. The minute the bell rings, her students read two haiku and make a list of similarities and differences. They then share lists with a partner. Ms. Holmes calls on several partner pairs and creates class lists of similarities and differences. She projects four story elements – setting, character, plot, and theme – that the class already learned and asks a mixture of students to define the terms in their own words and offer modifications to their classmates' definitions.

Students then spend two minutes classifying the items on the lists they made earlier by story element. As students write, Ms. Holmes walks through the classroom, reading over their shoulders. Students then get two minutes to explain their classifications to their partners and jot down any questions they have. Ms. Holmes spends five minutes gathering and answering these questions, and then gives students the rest of the class to read a set of four poems, pick two, and write four or five paragraphs exploring the similarities between the two poems they chose. Observations are to be turned in at the end of class. As students work, Ms. Holmes walks through the class to answer questions or refer students to particular graphic organizers or other tools she's made available to help with writing.

Mr. Chandler is less regimented. His first observation comes at the beginning of a unit about writing research papers, and this particular lesson's objective is for students to be able to write a clear research question that is open-ended, yet defined enough to offer direction and the possibility of a conclusive answer. Instead of making that a student-friendly statement, he turns it into an inquiry: “How do I ask the right questions?” He opens his class with a few minutes of journaling with just that question as a prompt. He then leads the class through a discussion about their responses, focusing on what constitutes “the right questions” before getting to the matter of how to ask them. Finally, he has his students write down five or more “right questions” that interest them and turn the questions in.

As for Ms. Spade, her objective is, “Explain how an author's historical context impacts his or her writing.” She has prepared copies of eight different packets, each of which contains a picture of an author, a brief biography, a short story or group of poems by that author, and a graphic organizer with bubbles for “Historical Context” and “Elements of Writing” on opposite sides of a larger bubble labeled “Impacts of Context on Writing”. She begins the class by displaying the objective. She then asks if anyone has any questions. After fielding one question (“What's 'context' mean?”), she turns the kids loose, letting them roam the room to the different stations where she's put the packets. Once students have picked a packet, they can go wherever they want in the room to work on it. Ms. Spade circulates to make sure students are staying quiet and working alone. At the end of the class, she has students score how comfortable they are analyzing the effects of historical context on writing using a 1-5 scale and write a one-paragraph reflection on what they've learned and what questions they have.

When it comes time for Ms. Doyle to evaluate each teacher, she asks a series of questions:

How appropriate was the objective? How well did the assessment actually assess the objective? What do student results say about their mastery of the objective? What student actions led to those results? What teacher actions led to those student actions?

How did our three teachers do? What does all this mean for teacher evaluation in Minnesota? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

Aiming Higher

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:00:14 +0000

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate

By next school year, Minnesota's English/Language Arts classes must adopt the Minnesota variation of the Common Core Standards. Here's a sampling of the standards aimed at ninth and tenth graders:

Literature
“Analyze a particular point of view or cultural experience reflected in a work of literature from outside the United States, drawing on a wide reading of world literature.”

Informational Text
“Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.”

Writing
“Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.”

These are worthy skills, and I dare say one or two might still challenge many successful adults. A student who meets these standards will be well-read, inquisitive, and critical in her thinking. He or she will move to eleventh and twelfth grade prepared for success, and will then be positioned to do well in college. A teacher who can work with all students and their families to develop these abilities should be lauded for achieving this ambitious goal.

A teacher who does those things, however, won't be recognized for it through test scores. We currently test ninth graders in writing and tenth graders in “reading comprehension,” a limited subset of skills related to literature and informational texts. The ninth grade writing test is, to be frank, a complete joke. Any student who can string together a marginally comprehensible beginning, middle, and end in response to a question about personal experience or opinion will pass the state writing test. The reading test is more difficult, but it's still a far cry from assessing the standards above.

It's true that we'll likely redesign our tests in response to the new standards – there are two different groups currently working on a consistent set of tests that can be used by all states that have adopted the Common Core – but those tests will still struggle to assess skills like the ones above. This is dangerous in a time when test scores continue to gain dominance as a measure of educator “success.”

The vast majority of standardized test questions go after the low-hanging fruit of academic standards, questions about knowledge and comprehension, but not about analysis, evaluation, or creation. The simple reason for this is logistical; we don't have a good way to assess every high school sophomores' sustained research project at the same time.

The risk here is that the tested knowledge and skills become the focus of education, when the real effort should be to cultivate higher order thinking. We have already seen curricula narrowed as a result of testing, and we have seen schools go to great lengths to get students enthusiastic about the fundamentally artificial achievement of doing well on the state test.

We have let our measurement become a goal it wasn't designed to be, and our standards have dropped as a result. I hear people argue that too many of our kids can't reach the low standards already being tested, and this is true. Part of the reason it's true, I'd suggest, is that many students – particularly those in low income environments – recognize the artificiality of the state tests. They see teachers trying to come up with reasons for going over particular skills, but the universally understood answer to, “Why are we doing this?” is, “Because it's on the test in the spring.” This does not motivate students.

The greatest effort I ever saw from my students was when I assigned tasks explicitly designed to get them ready for college. They weren't always successful, but they tried a lot harder and made a lot more progress than when we did work that was clearly aimed at test questions.

To continue to hold up test scores as the definition of success is to aim too low. It puts pressure on schools and teachers to lower their standards and fosters anxiety around a goal that nearly everybody, in their hearts, knows to be manufactured and inadequate. It's time to restore our tests to their original purpose: providing information about the overall outcomes of our educational system so that we can target support to the right places. Tests aren't meant to be the core of a carrot-and-stick system, and when we make them serve that purpose, the quality of education suffers.

VIDEO: Grad Students Vie for Union

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:00:02 +0000

By Tom Niemisto, {related_entries id="article_author_blogger"}Tom Niemisto, Video Production Specialist

University of Minnesota Twin Cities graduate students are following the trend of schools around the country to form a union under the United Auto Workers.

Graduate assistants perform crucial research, serve as a resource for undergrads, and even teach courses; yet they're often left out of contract negotiations effecting 5,000 assistants. Recent attention of union rights has fueled a resurgence and now they're closer than ever to an election to establish collective bargaining on campus.