Teacher World

Okay, so the news came out regarding how public schools measure up using the No Child Left Behind standards and, as expected, it isn’t pretty! In a recent report from the Associated Press, nearly half of America’s public schools failed to meet federal achievement standards this year. This marks the largest failure rate since NCLB took effect ten years ago, according to this report which was released Thursday.

The Center on Education Policy report revealed that over 43,000 schools (48 percent) did not make “average yearly progress” this year, with the lowest failure range of 11 percent in Wisconsin to the highest failure rate of 89 percent in Florida.

Earlier this year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan predicted that 82 percent of our nation’s schools would not pass muster, so maybe we should be relieved that the statistics are actually lower than his prediction. Regardless, it all reinforces the simple fact that the 2014 goal that requires states to have every student performing at grade level in math and reading is impossible to achieve. (Of course, educators have been trying to say this since the passage of NCLB, but what do we know?)

In his statement Wednesday, Duncan said, “Whether it’s 50 percent, 80 percent or 100 percent of schools being incorrectly labeled as failing, one thing is clear: No Child Left Behind is broken. That’s why we’re moving forward with giving states flexibility from the law in exchange for reforms that protect children and drive student success.”

The report also revealed huge variations in state’s scores which can be explained by a variety of factors. Some of these include the fact that some state’s tests are more difficult, and some states have higher numbers of low-income and immigrant children. Additionally, NCLB mandates that states must raise the passage rate each year, and some states put off the largest increase until this year in hopes of avoiding sanctions.

Jack Jennings, president of the Washington D.C-based Center on Education Policy said that the law, which should have been rewritten four years ago, is “too crude a measure” to give a clear picture of what is happening in schools. However, due to the bipartisan atmosphere in Congress, lawmakers seem unable to agree on how to fix it.

He told The Associated Press, “No Child Left Behind is defective. It needs to be changed. If Congress can’t do it, then the administration is right to move ahead with waivers.”

Recently, President Obama and Arne Duncan have agreed to allow states to file for waivers allowing them to use a variety of additional factors to determine whether they are successful and also to choose how their schools will be punished if they don’t show improvement. Some of these other factors include using college-entrance exam scores and adding the performance of students on their Advanced Placement tests.

With at least 39 states and Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico planning to file waivers, Republicans in Congress are accusing Duncan and the president of using waivers to push a “backdoor education agenda” that will let schools off the hook at the end of the day.

Owen Rust, a Yahoo contributor, published a commentary after this news was released which reemphasizes the dangers of allowing the House education committee to rewrite NCLB.

Rust reported that, according to the biographies of the members of this important committee, none have worked as certified teachers in a K-12 classroom. Glen Thompson, Representative from the fifth district of Pennsylvania, has a background in education but worked in health care. Lou Barletta, Representative from Pennsylvania’s 11th district, majored in elementary education before he left school to try out for a Major League baseball team. And Virginia Foxx, Congresswoman from North Carolina’s fifth district, was a full-time educator, but she taught at the college level, which is very different from teaching in K-12 public school systems.

Apparently, several members of the committee also served on their local school boards early in their political careers. That seems to be the sum total of this committee’s educational experience, leaving many to question, as teachers have from the start, just how qualified these politicians are to be formulating educational policies.

While I have no doubt that this committee is comprised of some very intelligent, caring, and successful legislators, the lack of educational background, training, or experience is troublesome, to say the least.

Would you ask educators to devise business policy? Of course not! So how is it that a group of people with no education background have the expertise to dictate what happens in our classrooms and in our schools? Doesn’t anyone else see the absurdity of this situation?

Georgia schools Superintendent John Barge said, “A lot of educators saw the weaknesses in No Child Left Behind even when it was rolled out – that this day and time would come. It’s kind of a train wreck that we all see happening.”

Before we just continue the train wreck, shouldn’t this committee work with real educators to formulate an education policy that is reasonable and doable? Let’s get rid of No Child Left Behind and replace it with a policy that is best for students (and that does not mean judging their proficiency from a standardized test) and best for our public schools.

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         Students from Holmes Elementary School in Miami

Okay, let’s talk turkey about Teach for America and its impact on improving the lowest performing schools.

First, with a crippled economy and college graduates facing huge obstacles in landing jobs after school, Teach for America is receiving some renewed attention. And why wouldn’t it? Corps members earn teacher salaries, and at the same time, some of their federal student loans are forgiven. Quite a draw for graduates in this tight job market! In fact, applications to join the corps members are sky high.

On top of that, some school districts like one north of downtown Miami are actively working to fill their staffs with Teach for America corps members.

Julian Davenport, an assistant principal at Holmes Elementary in Miami, said, “These are the lowest performing schools, so we need the strongest performing teachers.” Three-fifths of this school’s staff come from Teach for America.

And it is estimated that by 2015, due to a $50 million federal grant, recruits from Teach for America could make up one-quarter of all new teachers in 60 of the nation’s highest need school districts. Here in Ohio, Governor Kasich signed a bill in April which opened the door for Teach for America teachers to begin working in Ohio schools by the 2012-2013 school year. And the program is also expanding internationally.

So, what is the problem, you might ask? Well first, Teach for America has had mixed results in terms of teacher efficacy and career longevity. According to statistics, these teachers perform about as effectively as other inexperienced teachers. But that isn’t saying much, since novice teachers tend to be less successful in the classroom than more experienced teachers. Additionally, most of these corps members leave the teaching profession within five years.

Using its own review of external research regarding their members, Teach for America concludes that its members achieve student gains that are “at least as great as that of other new teachers,” with some studies showing they did better, and others showing they did worse. Teach for America does not release data to the public regarding information they gather on how their teachers are performing.  “We just don’t feel it’s responsible to show,” the program’s developer, Wendy Kopp said. “There are so many flaws in our system.”

But one finding that is consistent is the program’s high turnover rate. The organization reports that 33 percent of its graduates are still teaching, but in many districts, turnover rates are much higher. North Carolina, for example, reported that after 5 years, only 7 percent of Teach for America corps members were still teaching in the state.

Kopp and those at Teach for America argue that turnover rates are high in general across low-income schools, which is true, but among other teacher preparation programs, theirs has one of the highest turnover rates.

The other huge concern with Teach for America is the limited training and experience they have received before being thrust into a classroom. This inexperience and lack of training, critics say, perpetuates the same inequalities that Teach for America is supposed to eradicate.

Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, which advocates on behalf of low-income and minority children, and a longtime supporter of TFA, said, “There’s no question that they’ve brought a huge number of really talented people in to the education profession.” But, she added, “Nobody should teach in a high poverty school without having already demonstrated that they are a fabulous teacher. For poor kids, education has to work every single year.”

For me, that is one of the major issues I have with Teach for America. I don’t care how intelligent these graduates are; without proper training and intensive classroom experience with students to learn how to communicate that knowledge to kids in a way that they will understand, you should not be in a classroom. Period! And there is no way that can be accomplished in one field experience, which is apparently all corps members get.

Let’s get real! These “teachers” aren’t being placed in schools where conditions are advantageous for instruction. They are being placed in some of the toughest schools which have a record of extremely low performance. I question how effective experienced teachers can be in these schools, let alone these novice young people.

I am sure that there are some naturally good teachers in Teach for America who are able to eventually overcome their lack of preparation and become excellent teachers. Please don’t think I am denigrating these young people, or their desire to make a difference in the schools where they are placed. I applaud their efforts, but I don’t feel they are being given the opportunity to become awesome teachers before they are zapped into a classroom with no real preparation or tools of the trade.

Let’s face it, if Teach for America was as effective as it claims, why aren’t more schools turning around when these teachers are placed there? And why do so many of these young people quickly gravitate to other careers, abandoning the students who need good teachers?

Expand Teach for America? Work out the problems that keep the program from being truly effective before expanding something that seems to be rather mediocre at best. Could it be a successful program? Absolutely! Is it currently successful? You be the judge.

Changes in Teaching, Educational Reform, low-performing schools, Teacher Education, Teacher-World's Blog Teach for America, teacher efficacy, teacher training, Wendy Kopp

This will be the first in a two part series on Teach for America, a program developed by Wendy Kopp while she was studying public policy at Princeton. According to its website, the goal of the program is to “recruit a diverse group of leaders with a record of achievement who work to expand educational opportunity, starting by teaching for two years in a low-income community.” In these blogs, we will explore just how successful Teach for America has been.

Over the past 20 years, thousands of college graduates have joined Kopp’s movement whose mission is to ensure that students who are growing up in poverty have the opportunity to get an excellent education. In fact, since 2008, applications for the program have doubled and foundations have donated tens of millions to the program.

Studies indicate that family income is one of the most accurate ways to predict how students will perform in the classroom. For example, only 18 percent of low-income eighth-grade students received proficient or above scores on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

At the center of the debate over how to achieve educational reform is how do schools overcome the challenges that poverty creates? The solution clearly is to fill these schools with highly effective teachers, but statistically, these schools generally have twice as many teachers who have fewer than three years’ experience in schools.

Tim Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, who served as the founding director for Teach for America in New York City, said, “The reality, particularly in urban centers in America, is they [highly effective teachers] aren’t there.”

Teach for America believes that it can create a corps of highly effective teachers to fill these schools in a short period of time. However, research has supported the simple fact that experienced teachers tend to be more effective in the classroom, while beginning teachers tend to improve with experience.

One Harvard study which focused on students in Texas, for instance, concluded that a teacher’s level of education, experience, and scores on their licensing exams had more of an influence on student performance than any other factor they studied. Research done in North Carolina on various teacher training programs, which included Teach for America, revealed that when elementary students were taught math by a first-year teacher, they lost the equivalent of 21 days of schooling compared to students who had teachers who had four years of experience.

So how are Teach for America candidates recruited and trained to prepare them for the challenges they will face? First, most of those who apply only consider teaching as an option after speaking with a Teach for America recruiter or program graduate; most of them have no education background and have never even considered teaching as a career.

Ryan Winn, for example, was won over when his recruiter showed him a picture of his third-grade Phoenix class. When the recruiter told Winn that half the students in the photograph would probably drop out by the eighth grade, Winn said, “That struck me as incredibly unfair and I was upset about it.” He is currently a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee.

Once a graduate is accepted into Teach for America, they begin their training with thick packages of reading materials. Next, they spend five weeks co-teaching a summer class, usually in an urban school district, with students who are taking remedial coursework in order to move on to the next grade.

While co-teaching, they are overseen by another instructor, who might be a more experienced school teacher or a current or former Teach for America corps member.

Sarahi Constantine Padilla, a recent Stanford University graduate teaching at Holmes Elementary in Miami, said of the training program, “It was a real steep learning curve.”

After this short summer experience, these “trained” Teach for America teachers are sent to the districts they have been assigned to where many of them don’t even know what they are going to teach until just before the school year begins. The districts which hire these teachers pay up to $5,000 to Teach for America for each corps member who gets hired on, as well as paying the teacher’s salary.

Interviews with nearly two dozen Teach for America corps members were mixed. Many described classroom victories, but many also admitted to feeling uncertain about their abilities as first-year teachers.

Brett Barley, who taught in the San Francisco Bay area, said,  “I struggled personally with my ability to be effective, and I think the gains my kids achieved were largely in spite of me. I thought the key thing I was able to bring to them was communicating the urgency of the predicament they faced and having them buy in to the idea they could be successful.”

Barley had reasons to be dismayed; most of his fourth-grade class started the year at a second-grade level in reading and writing. Two of his students were classified as blind, and roughly 30 percent weren’t native English speakers.

“The biggest challenge was trying to learn on the job to meet all the kids at their different skill levels,” Barley said.

Kopp’s book, A Chance to Make History, tells the stories of several Teach for America corps members who achieved extraordinary success in their classrooms, but there are many teachers whose experiences were far from successful, like Megan Hopkins. A Spanish major in college, Hopkins was assigned as a bilingual teacher in Phoenix, but she received no training regarding how to teach English language learners.

“I had no idea how to teach a child to read,” Hopkins said. “I had no idea how to teach a second language learner to read in Spanish, much less in English. After five weeks of training, I really had no idea what I was doing. I felt that was a big disservice to my students.”

She was encouraged by Teach for America to set a goal to advance her students one and a half grade levels, but she had no idea how to attain the goal. She had to work with other teachers to develop a plan.

She said that she was praised “up and down” for increasing her students’ reading levels, but she questioned the validity of the results. She claimed that one of her students, who was a native Spanish speaker, was able to read fluently in English as a result of her efforts, “but if you asked him what he read, he had absolutely no idea.”

So how effective is Teach for America, and how effective are the teachers who the program “trains?” These are questions we will explore tomorrow in the second part of this blog.

Educational Reform, low-performing schools, Teacher-World's Blog effective teachers, low-performing schools, Teach for America, Wendy Kopp

The more I thought about yesterday’s blog (you might want to read it if you haven’t already, or this will make little sense to you) and the fact that districts in Idaho are actually allowing parents to have input in decisions regarding whether or not to grant performance bonuses to teachers, the angrier I got. And the sorrier I feel for the teachers in these districts. Now teachers are problem solvers by nature, so I began to contemplate how such a policy could be made fair for both parents and teachers alike, and here is my counter proposal for Idaho’s performance bonus issue.

If the state of Idaho feels that the amount of contact a teacher has with his/her students’ parents and the teacher’s ability to get her parents involved in school activities are important factors in a teacher’s evaluation, than the flip side of that coin most be explored as well. Teachers should be able to document how receptive parents have been to being involved in their children’s education. Such documentation could involve the following checklist for each child’s parents:

Do these parents:
* Answer phone calls, emails, or letters sent home
* Come in for conferences, especially when the teacher has expressly requested their attendance
* Check their child’s assignment book and make sure homework is being completed regularly
* Help their child with homework if they are struggling
* Review information with their child before upcoming tests
* Respectfully communicate areas of concern with their child’s teacher in order to resolve issues
* Keep the teacher informed of situations occurring at home which may have an impact on their child’s effort and attitude at school
* Follow through at home when there has been a problem at school which involves their child, such as not completing homework, bullying other students, not being honest with their teacher, not obeying teachers and staff in their building, etc.
* Get actively involved in their child’s school either by coming in to help the teacher, being a room parent, showing up for PTA meetings, helping with after-school activities, going to school board meetings, etc.

This is a general list which could be fine-tuned by each school, but I think you get the general idea; it weeds out the parents who really don’t do much to co-operate, communicate, or get involved with their child’s school from those parents who are an integral part of their child’s education as well as their school.

Now, I hear some of you grumbling that the hours you work keep you from being actively involved in the day-to-day activities in your child’s classroom. Hey, I understand that; as a teacher, I could never take off work to go and be in my children’s classrooms because I had my own classroom to run. But there are so many other ways that working parents support and stay in touch with their child’s teacher which are just as important. So, don’t think I’m bashing working parents.

Now we come to the next phase of my proposition. After careful documentation by teachers of parental involvement, or lack thereof, and their attempts to encourage such involvement, teachers would turn said documentation into their principal. At this time, the principal would exclude those parents who, through documentation, have proven themselves to be uninvolved with the teacher and/or the school, from any input in that teacher’s ability to earn performance bonuses.

I must state that I think linking teacher performance bonuses to parental input or engagement is absolutely insane and I don’t say that to put down great parents. If all parents were actively involved and supportive of their child’s academic experience, this would not be such a powder keg. But to believe that is the case is just as insane as Idaho’s policy. Therefore implementing a method by which teachers could have parents excluded from decisions regarding their pay who have no business having a voice, might make this policy easier for teachers to swallow. 

Anyone involved in education knows that it is often the parents who expect schools to teach their child and raise their child, too, who tend to be the most negatively vocal.

Let me give you an example. I have a student who is severely ADHD, but the student’s mother refuses to put her on medication. We are lucky if we get 20 good minutes a day from this child, whose mother also refuses to come in for conferences, did not show up to even sign their child’s IEP, and yells and swears at you if you call her. Recently, we sent a letter home requesting that she start checking her child’s assignment book and initialing when she gets each assignment done. Her response? She actually asked us if we could let her child stay after school to get her homework done there so she wouldn’t have to deal with it at home.

Should a parent like this have any say whatsoever in whether her child’s teacher gets a performance bonus? And I guarantee that if she were asked to evaluate us, she would have only negative things to say, although she hasn’t even stepped foot in our classrooms or met with us face-to-face.

This is a screwy system, Idaho. It isn’t fair to teachers, unless all of the parents in Idaho are awesome, highly involved parents. Yeah, I thought not…

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Teachers, how would you feel if your ability to earn a performance bonus was, in part, decided upon by the parents of the children you teach? Well, this is exactly what many school districts in the state of Idaho have decided to do. Let’s take a closer look.

Idaho is in the process of implementing broad education reforms which will require schools to award deserving teachers with performance bonuses. And about a third of their school districts will be asking parents to play a key role in the evaluation process.

To be exact, 29 school districts throughout the state are allowing parents to be an integral part of the decision regarding performance bonuses for teachers. For example, in the Challis district in the central Idaho countryside, teachers will be required to be in contact with each of their students’ parents at least twice every three months in order to remain eligible for bonuses.

Let’s explore that requirement for just a moment. My first question is whether this means that teachers who have more than one group of students which they teach would be required to make contact with the  parents of all of the students they teach the same number of times as an elementary teacher with just one class? Let’s just do the math for a moment. I team teach with another teacher, and together we have 57 students. If we each had to call all of those students’ parents two times every three months, that would mean 114 phone calls. If we stretched those phone calls over approximately 90 days, we would have to make 1 to 2 phone calls daily, along with all of our other duties (and there is no way of knowing how long these calls will take). I don’t even want to consider mathematically what this would mean for high school teachers.

My second question is this: When do you think you are most likely to reach the majority of your students’ parents? The evening, right? Most of our parents work and can only be reached in the evening when teachers are home with their own families. Now, these teachers in Idaho are expected to make school-related phone calls from their home on a regular basis? Is that fair to their own families? This would not only cut into their time with their family but would also cut into the time they set aside for grading and planning at home for school. And what about those parents who, for whatever reason, you are never able to reach? You have to keep calling repeatedly in the hopes that you are able to reach them twice in that 3-month period? And what if there are some parents, try as you may, that you just can’t reach? Does that take you out of the running for bonus pay? Seems very unfair to me.

In the farming town of Gooding, Idaho, near the Challis district, some teachers will receive 25 percent of their bonus pay if they can somehow get enough (not sure what is considered enough) of their parents to attend three meetings throughout the course of the academic year. Challis Superintendent Colby Gull told the Associated Press, “We’re a really little town in the middle of nowhere. Parents are pretty involved in what’s going on. But we wanted to get them more involved in the academic side of the school.”

Now, maybe in a small farming town this is a little easier for teachers to accomplish, but is this a fair expectation of teachers everywhere? Should teachers really be placed in a position of coercing their students’ parents to attend school meetings? I think this crosses the line, and I would be very reticent to contact parents to persuade them to do anything other than to ask for their help with an issue I am facing regarding their child.

Jeanne Sager, a parent and writer of The Stir, wrote, “In Idaho, a teacher’s raise could be rated on how many parents show up for conferences or how many parents return paperwork sent home. To me, that’s just bizarre. It’s not her (or his) fault if some parents don’t take an involved role in their kids’ education. As far as I can tell, going to a house to kidnap a parent, then carting them into a school building is still a felony!”

RiShawn Biddle at Dropout Nation says to get used to it. “Accepting families as lead decision-makers in education” is critical to addressing America’s education crisis. Parents aren’t “nuisances and enemies” — they’re a necessary part of any successful school.

I have had some wonderful, highly-involved parents over the years who have helped in the classroom, supported their child’s education, attended every parent-teacher conference and PTA meeting, and been an integral part of their child’s educational experience. On the flip side, I have had parents who have ignored my phone calls, emails, and letters home to come in for a conference, who never look at their child’s assignment book or help in any way with their child’s homework, who don’t even leave a working phone number in the office in order to contact them in case of an emergency, and who have the audacity, given the fact that they have rarely, if ever, even set foot in the school, let alone my classroom, to tear public education down in general and teachers down specifically.

Do I want parents to be a factor in determining my pay? The good ones, yes, the uninvolved ones, no way! Unfortunately, teachers will not be able to pick and choose which parents will be questioned. And if you don’t think that will influence how teachers teach and how they discipline the children in their classrooms, you are sorely mistaken. To please parents, teachers will have to please their children, and that is not always possible, especially when dealing with children who have behavior or academic issues.

As Jeanne Sager writes:”… some parents are more than happy to go on the attack because they don’t get what they want: flawless teachers who have personal time for every student and their parents. Now add in the parents who are always convinced their kid is right 100 percent of the time (we all know at least one). Plus the parents who start out every year convinced teachers have it easy because they have summers off. Oh, and we might as well throw in the parents who heard from a friend of a friend that this teacher did X, but have no real idea.”

“If these parents all get a say, what does that do to a teacher? More importantly, what does it do to a classroom? Suddenly the teacher has to decide whether or not she disciplines the class brat because she has to worry that his parents are determining her paycheck! And she’s spending more time on the phone trying to coerce parents to show up than actually teaching your kid 3 + 3.”

And the last piece of bad news for teachers in Idaho is this: One hundred five school districts and charter schools have written their own merit-pay plans so far, which use an assortment of benchmarks. Some of these include graduation rates, student attendance, and writing assessments. Fifty districts and charter schools in the state decided to comply with the state’s plan, which attaches bonuses to standardized test scores. And since teachers across the state will have to meet Idaho’s goals, test scores will be the one common factor upon which all teachers will be judged for performance bonuses.

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Heavy controversy surrounds Idaho’s new education plan which, among other things, makes Idaho the first state to require high school students there to take at least two of their high school credits online in order to graduate.

In spite of the fact that this proposal received heavy opposition this past summer at public hearings across the state, the education board gave its initial approval to the online graduation requirement in September. Over the month of October, trustees collected feedback regarding this requirement during a 21-day public comment period.

Those who were for the virtual classes claim that it will help the state to save money while better preparing its students for college. But those who were against the requirement claim that it will reallocate state taxpayer money to the out-of-state companies which would provide the online curriculum and the laptops. They also expressed concerns that the state will ultimately replace teachers with computers.

Board member Don Soltman said, “A majority of the comments felt there should not be an online learning requirement.”

Yet, in spite of huge opposition to this online requirement, the plan received final approval Thursday. This law will apply to students who are entering the 9th grade in the fall of 2012. It will then go before Idaho lawmakers for review in the 2012 session, which begins in January.

It comes as no surprise that the Idaho Education Association criticized the decision in a statement on Thursday, where they said that the board “overruled the wishes of a majority of Idahoans and disregarded parental choice” by mandating the online credits.

Online learning advocates, however, feel that this requirement is reasonable because it is necessary for children to be prepared for life after high school.

Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a Washington-based nonprofit, and an obvious proponent of online learning, argued, “There is still a live teacher. It may be at a distance, but that teacher is still instructing and interacting with the student.”

One of those opposing this new requirement is Kendra Wisenbaker, an elementary school teacher in Meridian, the largest school district in Idaho. While she agrees that some students may actually flourish from online learning, she also expressed concerns, saying, “The poor kids are guinea pigs. I am a little conflicted, I am. It won’t work for every kid, and I think requiring it is a horrible idea. But it shouldn’t be an option for saving money,”

Members of the Idaho State Board of Education have stated that the majority of the opposition people are expressing is directed at the whole education law, not just the online requirements. While state legislatures nationwide are tackling education policy this year, education experts agree that Idaho has made some of the most far-reaching changes of any state.

Idaho’s new education plan is introducing merit pay, limiting union collective bargaining rights, and reallocating money from salaries toward changes which include more classroom technology; all part of the changes backed by Idaho’s governor and Tom Luna, the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Some in Idaho have praised Luna for changing how the state’s limited education dollars are being spent and for working to fix a badly broken system.

But others, including educators, have heavily criticized Luna’s plans. In fact, a group sought to recall Luna because of the education changes, but they failed to garner enough signatures earlier this year to be successful. Since then, parents and teachers who want to overturn the new laws met a June deadline to put three repeal measures on 2012’s November ballot.

What’s my opinion? First, while I understand the need to cut costs, I don’t understand how that is going to happen if tax dollars are simply being sent out of the state to provide curriculum and technology.

Second, online learning is certainly a wonderful alternative for some students and being exposed to this avenue of learning is probably very constructive for them. But to make it mandatory is ludicrous. There are students who will struggle with this method of instruction: students on IEPs, those with ADD or ADHD, students with vision problems, etc. Forcing all students to conform to this type of instruction is diametrically opposed to basic educational philosophy which requires us to meet children’s individual needs based upon their dominant learning style. Shouldn’t the superintendent of public instruction be well-versed in basic school pedagogy?

Finally, do I worry that computers could take the place of teachers some day? Well, who can really say what the future holds, but I will tell you, without any hesitation, that there is no computer online course on this earth that can ever replace a caring, sensitive, child-motivated, highly-trained, competent teacher. Teachers don’t just teach; they nurture. No online program can ever compete with that.

Changes in Teaching, Educational Reform, Merit Pay for Teachers, Teacher's Unions, Teacher-World's Blog Idaho Education Association, Idaho's new education plan, K-12 Online Learning, online classes, Tom Luna

As the Senate education committee continued to haggle over how to redraft the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) last month, Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota spoke up passionately for a new law to incorporate language which would specifically protect LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) students. Rather than leaving such policies to individual states and school districts, he and other lawmakers are pushing to adopt legislation to protect students from harassment and bullying which would apply to all schools nationwide.

In Sen. Franken’s plea, he reminded the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee of several high-profile cases which have occurred in recent years, in which individuals committed suicide after being bullied due to their perceived or actual sexual orientation.

“Nine out of 10 LGBT kids are harassed or bullied in school. One-third report having skipped school in the last month because they felt unsafe, and study after study has shown that LGBT youth are more likely to commit suicide. But the sad fact is that our federal laws are failing” those students, Franken said.

And comparing his proposed addition to civil rights protections to federal anti-discrimination laws that protect students on the basis of race and sex, he said, “Well, yet again, we are facing a group of students that is facing pervasive systemic discrimination. There is no law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation at school.”

Recently, the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights has begun investigating schools where students have committed suicide in order to determine how they handled the bullying of these students based on their sexual orientation. Tehachapi Unified school district in California was actually faulted by this office for failing to stop schoolmates from constantly harassing openly-gay Seth Walsh, who was 13 years old when he committed suicide. 

In spite of Sen. Franken’s strong feeling that such legislation needed to be added to the rewriting of ESEA, he withdrew his proposal which would make LGBT students a protected class and grant them the power to sue their tormentors, deciding instead to wait until the bill’s rewrite hits the Senate floor to reoffer this proposal.

Sen. Franken said that he would work to rewrite his proposal in the meantime, in the hopes of getting Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill, to endorse it as well. Sen. Kirk and Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa, have proposed the Safe Schools Improvement Act, which would call for all schools and districts that accept federal funds to create codes of conduct to prohibit bullying and harassment for any reason, which would include gender identity and sexual orientation. Additionally, it would require states to track bullying cases, reporting such statistics to the Education Department, which would then report the state to Congress.

In response to Sen. Franken’s remarks, Sen. Kirk said, “If we can more clearly define rights and focus on education so the maximum number of students survive and have healthy self-esteem, and … kids learn a fundamental American value of tolerance, I think this is something we should explore on the floor.”

It remains uncertain, however, whether a proposal calling for anti-bullying language and explicit protection for students based on gender identity or sexual orientation would even pass in both chambers.

Some, like Sasha Pudelski, who is a legislative specialist for the American Association of School Administrators, which represents superintendents and district-level officials, said that her organization can’t support federal anti-bullying legislation.

“We believe decisions as to how a school defines, prevents, addresses, and reports bullying should be a decision made by the superintendent, school administrators, school board, parents, teachers, and other engaged community members in the context of state law and existing civil rights protections in federal law and case law,” she said.

She recommended instead that Congress provide money for districts to create school-wide, evidence-based bullying-prevention programs.

The director of federal affairs for the National School Boards Association, Roberta Stanley, reported that her group would also prefer to allow states and districts to adopt bullying policies that were appropriate to the needs of their communities.

Stanley said, “Depending on where you sit and where you live, it may have never been a problem.”

Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, GLSEN, disagreed, stating that specific laws and policies which make clear who they protect are more effective than more general bullying prevention measures. She is in support of Sen. Franken’s proposal as well as Sen. Kirk and Sen. Casey’s proposal due to their unique goals.

Of bullying policies that don’t name LGBT students specifically, Byard says, “When unpopular, potentially difficult, maybe complicated issues come up, teachers may be afraid to act. If you don’t name it, they don’t act.”

If neither measure wins the support of the full Senate, Education Week points out that within the body of the Senate reauthorization bill, bullying is addressed, although the language does not specifically refer to LGBT students.

The bill reads that any state which receives a grant under the Successful, Safe, and Healthy Students program must establish policies “that prevent and prohibit conduct that is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive to limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from a program or activity of a public school or educational agency, or to create a hostile or abusive educational environment at a program or activity of a public school or educational agency, including acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility.”

We will have to wait to see if Congress agrees to more specific LGBT language in their anti-bullying legislation. If they do, it will be interesting to see if naming it really stops the bullying.

Bullying, Educational Reform, LGBT youths, No Child Left Behind, Teacher-World's Blog, teen suicide Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Eliza Byard, GLSEN, LGBT bullying, Safe Schools Improvement Act, Sen. Al Franken

Several differing news reports came out on Thursday regarding the Michigan Department of Education’s proposal for new teacher certification rules.

One report stated that the Department of Education was considering a move to revoke under-performing teachers’ provisional teaching licenses after one year of poor reviews. In this report, Superintendent Mike Flanagan, Michigan’s superintendent of public instruction, argued that one year wasn’t long enough. Instead, it was reported that he pushed for revocation to occur after three years to give teachers time to improve.

In another news report, Flanagan reassures teachers revoking licenses is not his intent. This report claims that in a statement to the educators across the state, he denied his desire to implement a certification system that would threaten a teacher’s license based on their annual reviews.

This report does state that the proposal allows for immediate action, but according to Flanagan, that does not involve losing a license. In his statement, he wrote, “While I feel that it is vitally important that every teacher be effective in the classroom, everyone deserves a chance to improve and become effective in the most appropriate and supportive situations.”

He went on to explain that the language that the Michigan Department of Education put out which proposed the possibility of losing a license after one year would be changed. Another proposal made by this department which is under review, according to this report, is teachers losing a provisional teaching certificate if they are deemed ineffective for three consecutive years.

Yet a third report claimed that the Department of Education added language that was stronger than the actual proposal stating that teachers who received ineffective evaluations for three consecutive years and held a provisional certificate could lose their certification. This one didn’t even mention the possibility of a teacher losing their certification after only one year of receiving a poor review.

According to this report, Flanagan’s memo to teachers claimed that this language would be removed before the proposed rules would take effect. This report said that in spite of the language in the proposed rules that would make it possible to revoke their license, he would not do so. In the memo, he stated, “I do not want to have a teacher certification system that threatens an educator’s license on the basis of annual evaluations.”

There are so many discrepancies here that I am not sure what was actually proposed and what these teachers actually face under these changes. I can tell you that, whatever the real changes are, they are being called for in order to address laws that the Legislature adopted requiring schools to fire those teachers who are receiving poor ratings on their annual evaluations.

And I can also tell you that the spokesman for the Michigan Education Association, Doug Pratt, said that stripping a teacher’s license over an evaluation that may not have even by done properly would be “a career ender.” Pratt said, “You can’t get another job in Michigan, and you’ll have a hard time getting a job teaching anywhere else.”

And last, I can definitively report that Michigan’s Department of Education has scheduled several public hearings throughout the state to hear comments regarding their proposed changes. (This might be a good time for those of you who teach in Michigan to get some of these confusing details figured out.)

As I contemplated the various differences between the articles I read, I pondered what might have caused the little, nagging disparities. I’m just guessing, but I imagine that during the talking stage, the idea of yanking a teacher’s license due to a poor annual evaluation probably sounded like a good solution to these people who are trying to “clean out” ineffective teachers. But I wonder if, when the proposal was brought to light, it sounded like what it really is: very harsh and punitive with virtually no opportunity to allow for improvement. And it seems that each subsequent report after that required a quick rewriting so it sounded less like a sledge-hammer proposal and more like a let’s-try-to-help-them-improve proposal.

In the meantime, I hope we will all be able to eventually figure out what the heck is happening in Michigan’s schools.

Educational Reform, teacher evaluations, Teacher-World's Blog annual teacher reviews, Michigan Department of Education, State Superintendent Mike Flanagan, teacher licenses

Finally, the Senate education committee approved a bipartisan rewrite of the No Child Left Behind Act this Thursday, which will continue to face huge opposition as it moves forward. Some of that opposition will likely come from civil rights and business leaders who feel it is a step back on student accountability and from Republican lawmakers who are likely to say that it does not take away enough federal control of K-12 education.

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and lead engineer of this bill, is hopeful that it can be brought to the Senate floor for a vote before Christmas, which would derail President Obama and Arne Duncan’s plan to offer state waivers from integral parts of the current law.

This bill would continue the system of testing students as they are currently tested in grades 3 through 8 and in high school, as well as continuing to provide achievement data for a variety of student subgroups. Some of these subgroups include students with disabilities, racial minorities, and English-language learners.

But, at the same time, this bill would significantly scale back the accountability system which was an integral part of the old NCLB legislation and had won such huge bipartisan support in 2001. The panel’s bill would also (as reported by Education Week):

* Do away with Adequate Yearly Progress
* Halt federally-directed interventions except for the lowest-performing schools and those with continual achievement gaps between low-income
* Based in part on the administration’s regulations for the School Improvement Grant program, it would spell out a series of federal interventions for turning around these lowest-performing schools
* Require states to create college-and-career standards, and although almost every state has already joined the Common Core State Initiative, they would not be required to do so
* Restructure the Department of Education, consolidating it into 40 programs from its current 82

During the panel’s discussions, multiple amendments were filed which provide some insight as to the hot issues that will be debated when this goes to the Senate floor. One of these includes Sen. Michael Bennet’s amendment requiring states to set performance targets which would include setting goals to move all students to proficiency by 2020 and cutting the achievement gap in half within various student subgroups. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., disagreed, arguing that such an amendment would be a “back-door way” of maintaining the AYP yardstick which has been widely ridiculed as an assessment tool.

Strangely, some of the debate has brought some interesting agreements between some very unlikely groups. For example, Sen. Harkin’s draft version of the bill which was released on Oct. 11, called for states to devise teacher evaluations which would take student achievement into account. However, Republicans on the committee disagreed, saying this would be a federal mandate dictating what should be a state and local issue. This was an argument that the National Education Association was on board with, as they also felt this provision was a federal intrusion.

Another issue that the NEA and GOP agreed on was one that would allow states to tender their own plans for turning around the lowest-performing schools to the U.S. secretary of education.

On the other hand, this issue brought heated debate between Democrats and Republicans. Sen. Alexander argued that his amendment would give states the opportunity and flexibility to create a turnaround plan that would best work in their circumstances making it more effective than the one spelled out in the bill.

However, seven Democrats on the committee voted this amendment, which passed unanimously by Republican members, down. Clearly, this will be a hot topic on the Senate floor, which is not surprising as it relates to how much federal control there should be in state and local affairs.

Some of the amendments that were accepted include:

* An amendment allowing students in the lowest-performing 5% of schools in a state to transfer to better-performing schools
* An amendment that would require new principals coming into turnaround schools to have a background in school improvement
* An amendment giving states the choice of using computer-adaptive tests for accountability purposes under the law
* An amendment to provide competitive grants to recruit and train principals to lead turnaround schools

Some amendments which were rejected include:

* An amendment which would have permitted teachers to be considered “highly qualified” only if they complete a state-approved traditional or alternative teacher-preparation program, or pass a meticulous state-approved teacher-performance assessment, and earn certification in their particular subject matter
* An amendment to do away with the approval for the Promise Neighborhoods program, which aids communities in developing cradle-to-career services

Several amendments were offered, but later withdrawn dealing with highly qualified teacher provisions, continuous improvement of schools, and scrapping authorization for the Race to the Top program, providing an interesting  preview of what is to come when this committee’s bill hits the Senate floor.

Educational Reform, low-performing schools, state achievement tests, Teacher's Unions, Teacher-World's Blog AYP, ESEA, highly qualified teachers, lowest-performing schools, No Child Left Behind, Senate committee, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin

I have a very intriguing story to tell you about a small, rural community that seems to be outperforming both American students from wealthier schools and students in developed countries around the world. So, what do they do that makes them so successful? Well, let’s take a look.

First, let me introduce you to the rural Waconda Lake area in North Central Kansas. The Waconda school district is made up of four small towns: Cawker City, Downs, Glen Elder, and Tipton, with seven schools that are spread over a 411 square mile area. The people in the community either work in agriculture or manufacturing. This is a quiet, agricultural community, whose best known local landmark is an enormous ball of twine, which they claim is the largest in the world.

But their real claim to fame is more academic, according to The Global Report Card, which was published in Education Next. According to this recent report, the average student, in this district of 385 students, scores better than 90% of students in 20 developed countries on their math and reading tests, and it is the second highest performing school district in math in the U.S., in spite of the fact that 65% of its children live in poverty.

Jeff Travis, the district’s superintendent for seven years, reported that 65% of the students in the district qualify for free or reduced lunches through the federal government. And yet, unlike other high poverty schools in our nation which tend to produce low test scores and high dropout rates, this district has risen above its poverty level and is outperforming affluent school systems.

What, I’m sure you’re wondering, does this district do to be so successful? Travis suggests that one possible theory is that the kids at Waconda have no realization that they are materially deprived. . “North Central Kansas is rural, and urban poverty is kind of different [from] rural poverty,” he said. “A lot of our people don’t even understand that they’re living in poverty.”

There are no students who need English learning classes, and most of them are white, according to state data. Travis also said that about 10% of the students are in foster homes. “We just [have] a lot of adults that care about kids, so it’s been a popular thing for parents to take in foster children,” he explained.

Travis also attributed their success to the simple matter of expectation. He said that after years of earning high test scores, it has become an expectation in the community that their students will excel. He said that in most years, no one drops out of high school! Imagine that! Additionally, over the past four years, the district has earned 14 Governor Achievement Awards and one national “Blue Ribbon Award School.”

Travis said, “It’s a tradition now, and they expect themselves to do well. Like a ball team that continues to win because of a tradition, we have an academic tradition. Everybody’s pretty happy [but] nobody understands how big a deal it is.”

He attributes three essential factors to the district’s great success. First, is the tremendous amount of parental involvement which occurs in these schools. Almost every parent attends their child’s parent-teacher conferences at the elementary level, and Travis says the participation is still very high in the older grades.

The second factor, according to Travis, is small class sizes. He explained that the district is committed to keeping classes from pre-kindergarten to third grade very small. With only 12 to 15 students in each class, he said, “We get to a lot of problems quickly and early in child development,”

The third factor is the district’s assessment card which follows each student from grade to grade. This is a card, created by the district, which lists the skills that the state expects children to master in each subject. These cards are updated by teachers all the time, which gives them a good idea of what they need to work on in order to pass their state standardized tests.

In spite of national education reform movements which advocate linking teacher pay to student test scores, Travis said that their district doesn’t keep up with these education trends. “We don’t believe in the next biggest thing or the next biggest theory. We’ve not made any major changes.”

But the news in Waconda is not all good; like districts everywhere, they face funding challenges. About 10% of their staff positions have been cut over the past few years due to budget cuts, and the average teacher only makes about $40,000, making theirs the lowest teaching salary of any district in their state. Travis acknowledged, “It’s going to get tougher as we go.”

Travis also shared that the district faces an additional challenge; many of the high-achieving students go to Kansas City rather than staying in their home towns.  “It’s where the services and the goods and fun are,” he said. But they do what they can to encourage them to come back after college by challenging them to design a small business plan for the area.

While one of the authors of The Global Report Card said that the small size of this district may have slightly skewed the results of their research, it is pretty clear to me that this district has something really awesome going on. And I think that Travis hit the nail on the head when he said that the community expects that its students will do well, and the parents are actively involved.

I wonder how many districts can say the same thing. Maybe education reform is more about attitude, expectation, and community involvement. Maybe this little community has a thing or two to teach us all…

Educational Reform, High Caliber Schools, state achievement tests, Teacher-World's Blog high performing district, Kansas, poverty level, state standardized tests, Waconda school district