teachers

January 16, 2013 Leave a Comment

Vision Doesn’t Come Cheap

For as long as I can remember, we’ve heard the statistics about the high turnover rate among new teachers. The numbers vary depending on the study but reports say that anywhere from 30 to 50% of teachers leave the profession in their first five years.

A churn rate like that in the professional ranks of most corporations would be cause for concern, with a battery of VPs and consultants looking for ways to fix a situation that wastes a lot of money for things like recruitment and training. In education, it’s just one more problem to ignore.

As with most issues in education, the reasons for this high turnover are complicated. But for anyone interested in a solution, this might be a good place to start.

The perceived low status of teaching is also a serious obstacle to keeping teachers in classrooms. So, of course, are compensation issues and questions of how teachers’ effectiveness is evaluated, the subject of frequent and corrosive headlines that often reduce teaching to test scores.

Not surprisingly, many new teachers reported a phase where they felt disillusioned, defeated, and a deep sense of having failed. Teachers who have been academic high-achievers often cannot deal with this sense of failure; they have been hard-working, motivated, and successful in virtually everything they have done. They blame themselves for not better overcoming the shortcomings of the system and soon begin to believe they are not good teachers.

It doesn’t help when politicians and pundits also blame teachers for everything wrong with schools (as well as the economy), while at the same time cutting support wherever possible.

The writer of this piece concludes that we need to renew a “broad vision” for the teaching profession based on the ideas of former Harvard president Derek Bok: “Education institutions [must] assume the responsibility to cultivate interests and supply the knowledge that will help young people make more enlightened choices about how to live their lives.”.

That’s very inspirational. But is our society prepared to pay for that vision?

Tags: opinion, profession, reform, teachers

October 8, 2012 1 Comment

Proud of Being Ignorant

Seth Godin ended his post yesterday with this idea

I confess that I’m amazed when I meet hard-working, smart people who are completely clueless about how their industry works, how their tools work…

It never made sense to be proud of being ignorant, but we’re in a new era now. Look it up.

I’m also amazed at the number of smart, hard-working teachers and administrators I meet who are largely clueless about technology. Both the tools available to improve their professional practice as well as the devices being carried by many of their students that could be leveraged in the service of learning.

What’s worse is that many of them are still proud of their ignorance. Or at least of their unwillingness to expand their ideas of what learning could be.

Tags: ignorance, seth godin, teachers

August 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

If It’s Crappy Enough for Bill…

Vanity Fair this month has a long look at how Microsoft has managed to screw up a lot of things about it’s business over the past decade or more. Having been deeply involved with personal computing since the time the company began¹, I found the whole thing fascinating. Your mileage may vary.

However, there is one section of the article that I think should interest anyone involved with public education.

In it the author discusses what she sees as a major cause of Microsoft’s lack of innovation and subsequent decline, a personnel evaluation system used within the company called “stack ranking”.

Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.

“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

Now the CEO who signed off on using this “destructive process” (that would be Bill Gates) is considered a “visionary” leader in the education reform movement. And he and his billion dollar foundation are advocating for several other similarly adversarial assessment programs for teachers such as merit pay and “value added” rankings.

Assessment programs which continue to envision classrooms as discreet spaces sealed off from the rest of the world, and teachers as independent contractors whose work is the only influence on student achievement (aka test scores).

I’m certainly not the first person to make the connection between Microsoft’s stack ranking and Gates pushing the idea that teacher assessment should be a more competitive process. But that point needs to be repeated as often as possible.

The bottom line that Gates and others miss entirely in their efforts to “reform” education is that schools are not businesses and those corporate practices cannot, and should not, be applied to the process of teaching and learning.

Especially an evaluation system that has been a major contributing factor to screwing up what was at one time the most valuable company in the US.

1 Although, in all those many years, I’ve never actually bought a Microsoft product or anything containing one. I do have Windows and Office on my MacBook Pro but those licenses belong to my school system.

Tags: bill gates, evaluation, merit pay, microsoft, teachers, value add

April 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

Stuck in Isolation

There’s a lot wrong with the traditional structure of most US schools, little changed in the past sixty years. But a recent article in The Atlantic hits on the piece that’s number one on the list of problems: teacher isolation.

A recent study by Scholastic and the Gates Foundation found that teachers spend only about 3 percent of their teaching day collaborating with colleagues. The majority of American teachers plan, teach, and examine their practice alone.

The problem is not that American teachers resist collaboration. Scholastic and the Gates Foundation found that nearly 90 percent of U.S. teachers believe that providing time to collaborate with colleagues is crucial to retaining good teachers.

Interesting that many of our national education “leaders” (like Gates), the ones who believe kids don’t take enough standardized tests, are also pushing more teacher competition in the form of merit pay. Unlike in those high achieving countries like Finland that they like to use for comparison where “collaboration among teachers is an essential aspect of instructional improvement”.

Anyway, identifying teacher isolation as the problem is a good start. However, from there the writer goes on to suggest that a national curriculum, such as the Common Core, “could be a major step towards productive teacher collaboration”. Which completely ignores the fact that time is a bigger impediment to teachers planning together, especially at the elementary level.

Long before we standardize (and homogenize) the curriculum any more than it already is, we need to rethink the whole structure of what we call “school”, an institution that hasn’t changed much in a century.

School need to organize the relatively scarce time available around the idea of teachers – and students – working in teams to achieve everyone’s learning goals. Not entirely different from the way people work in Mr. Gates former company, and other parts of the real world.

Tags: collaboration, curriculum, teachers

February 15, 2012 Leave a Comment

Tenured Stupidity

Some of the teacher-bashing crap from Wisconsin and other places has arrived here in Virginia.

The Virginia House of Delegates voted 55-43 Monday to eliminate seniority-based job protections [aka "tenure"] for public school teachers, a measure pushed by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) as part of his education reform package.

Under H.B. 576 and S.B. 438, probation would be extended to five years and continuing contracts would be replaced with three-year contracts.

At the end of every three years, a teacher could be let go for poor performance or any reason at all. [emphasis mine]

There are a couple of things in all of this that just don’t make sense.

First is the fact that many of these politicians just don’t understand the concept of tenure as applied to our jobs. It certainly doesn’t mean lifetime employment.

Academic tenure was created to prevent an educator from being dismissed for reasons other than performance – political or social views that differ from the administration, for example. Tenure is all about that “any reason at all” for being fired. Like blogging about clueless members of your state legislature.

In other states, the vilification of teachers has been driven by a political dislike of teacher’s unions. They say nice things about the concept of “teachers”, but really hate us when we get into groups to defend the profession.

Here in Virginia, that’s really not much of an issue since this is a “right to work” state that doesn’t allow collective bargaining for government workers. The local versions of the NEA and AFT have almost no actual power and thus are not much of a threat to the governor and his friends.

However, the worst part of all this is the pure unadulterated hypocrisy of the people pushing these measures. The ones who make statements like: ”Here in Virginia, we are fortunate [to] have a world-class educational system with world-class teachers.”

And the former teacher serving in the House who supports the bill who wants to get rid of the few bad teachers who use “the same tired lesson plans year after year and couldn’t get control of their classrooms” by eliminating protections for the many “world-class” teachers.

It’s hard to understand all the teacher bashing going on in far off exotic places like Madison. It’s even more difficult when it pops up close to home, driven by “leaders” who smile and say nice things about our educational system, while doing what they can to handicap the teachers responsible for making it “world-class”.

Tags: politics, teachers, tenure, virginia

January 26, 2012 Leave a Comment

Flawed Logic

In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Obama addressed education reform, including this statement about teachers.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

In the Post’s Answer Sheet blog, a veteran educator points out a huge logical flaw in what the President had to say.

The second problem is a glaring contradiction, a logical flaw that is huge even though it has been overlooked by almost every journalist apparently too polite to challenge the administration on it. If you do not wish teachers to teach to the test, if you want them to be passionate and creative, then how can you insist that their performance be measured by the use of test scores?

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot tell teachers to be creative, you cannot pretend you are “flexible,” when you mandate the use of test scores for teacher and principal evaluations, and continue to use them as the basis by which schools are condemned as failures. [emphasis mine]

I suspect the President, and many other education reform “leaders”, will continue to miss the disconnect between what they say and what they do.

They will produce even more lofty speech about the importance of teachers, while still demonizing the profession and implementing policies that marginalize the practice of teaching.

Tags: logic, president, reform, sotu, teachers