November 2011 Archives

As a nation, we've been living beyond our means for decades. Retirees have happily pocketed Medicare and Social Security benefits that far exceeded their contributions, millions of families bought houses they couldn't afford, families lowered their savings rate to zero while piling on the credit card debt, investors "flipped" homes and bought equities with borrowed dollars, and the federal government (under Bush and Obama) cheerfully spent trillions more than it collected in revenues. We need only look across the Atlantic to see what reckoning for all this eventually looks like. My naïve hope was that the Occupy "movement" might demand that we stop asking our kids to foot the bill for the self-indulgence and irresponsibility of their elders, whether it's Republicans cutting taxes or Democrats giving out goodies and then passing the buck to the next generation of taxpayers.

The challenges were highlighted yesterday when the National Governors Association and National Association of State Budget Officers reported that states continue to face a dire budget picture. NASBO executive director Scott Pattison noted, "There is not enough money for all the bills coming in. State officials will still be cutting some programs, and increases in funding for any program except for health care will be rare." States will be squeezed as they find ways to boost Medicaid spending an average of 29 percent this year, with many increases ahead in 2014 when states have to comply with the requirements of the Health Care Reform Act. Meanwhile, local revenues continue to decline (due to deflating real estate valuations) and state general fund revenues in 2012 are expected to be $21 billion below 2008 levels.

Given all this, are the Occupiers urging that we raise taxes, cut spending, and start living within our means, so that we stop sticking them with the tab for our lack of discipline? Are they itching to lead by example, inspiring their elders to do better by their own efforts? Not so much. Instead, as the Washington Post's Daniel de Vise reported Monday, the UC-Davis pepper spray incident has pushed that campus of 32,000 into the spotlight--and students are using it to demand--that someone else pay for their college education. As de Vise reported, "The Davis protestors have two comparatively specific grievances: pepper spray and spiraling tuition." The pepper spray thing makes sense, but former L.A. police chief William Bratton is heading up an inquiry on that. Meanwhile, the sticker price for UC-Davis, ranked #38 among national universities by U.S. News & World Report, is the not-so-staggering sum of $13,181 a year.

Tuition would be much higher were it not for enormous subsidies from California taxpayers to higher ed that total about $2.3 billion this year, even as the state wrestles with staggering budget shortfalls and painful cuts to K-12, law enforcement, libraries, youth services, and much else. But students are irate that the taxpayer contribution is down from a high of $3.2 billion a few years back and that this year, for the first time--if you can believe the outrage--UC students are paying more than California taxpayers for their education. On Monday, hundreds of students made their displeasure clear, waving signs declaring "No tuition hikes" and chanting, "No cuts, no fees." Katheryn Kolesar, 27, from Pennsylvania, who chairs the UC-Davis grad student association, told the regents, "The state has let us down, and you have let us down."

Since these students don't seem to be volunteering to staff the libraries or cafeterias for free, suggesting any cost-saving strategies (dialing back on campus amenities, anyone?), or otherwise doing their part to help make the budget work, they're just demanding more free stuff from taxpayers. This is of a piece with other Occupy demands that policymakers forgive student loans and raise taxes on the "one percent" (e.g. somebody else). I understand why the Occupiers would prefer to pay less for college, but not why being asked to contribute to the cost of their schooling means anyone is "letting them down." Indeed, as best I can tell, these students are asking policymakers to cut even more deeply elsewhere so that they can be spared the annoyance of reduced services or increased tuition. I'm no expert on social justice but, even so, I don't think that qualifies.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A recent series in The Atlantic has explored the "secrets of innovation" and asked which nations the U.S. ought to emulate in seeking to regain our competitive edge. As part of it, I was asked to offer my take on the K-12 question. Despite all the preaching by the high priests of international mimicry (see Marc Tucker's new book Surpassing Shanghai or, well, anything by McKinsey & Co.), I counseled that the U.S. would do well to chart our own course. (An earlier version of this piece appeared in The Atlantic, but I thought I'd share a tweaked version with RHSU readers.)

When asked how to boost America's educational competitiveness, a staple response is the emphatic assertion that we need to be more like Nation X. It can be South Korea, Finland, or wherever country the guru has visited most recently. But, just for a moment, let's entertain the radical proposition that a better course is to tap into uniquely American strengths like federalism, entrepreneurial dynamism, and size and heterogeneity.

Those besotted with international envy find it hard to accept that America's "handicaps" are the inevitable flip side of its unique strengths. Rather than figuring out how to undo them, we would be better served figuring out to leverage them.

American federalism frustrates "Nation Xers," who see states not as laboratories of innovation but as unruly children that need to be firmly brought into line. Thus, they champion national policies for teacher recruitment, preparation, and evaluation. Yet, as with welfare reform, our federal system offers invaluable opportunities to explore different approaches to incentives, monitoring, and delivery. Since the "right" model of teacher evaluation or preparation is hardly self-evident, much less the "best" way to help teachers use new technologies like computer-assisted tutoring or online instruction, this natural variation provides an invaluable asset.

American growth and prosperity have long been fueled by a dynamic private sector supported by sensible public investments in research, transportation, and ensuring honest and open markets. In automobiles, air travel, appliances, media, personal technology, software, and any number of venues, entrepreneurs have lit our path.

America is a really big country. By population, it's the third largest in the world, and it boasts the most racially and culturally diverse society in history. This is a huge impediment for those who dream of mimicking national policies suited to tiny islands of homogeneity, like Finland. However, this makes the U.S. capable of embracing and supporting many models of teaching and schooling, with each still able to reach critical mass.

The idea that America has unique competitive advantages in K-12 is a radical one. More prevalent are grandiloquent international best practice reports, from the likes of the National Center on Education and the Economy or McKinsey & Co., in which the authors identify a couple of homogenous nations the size of Minnesota that produce good test scores, cherry-pick a few of their educational practices, and then draw broad prescriptions.

Such reports represent a triumph of the bureaucratic mindset and a disdain for America's historic strengths. Earlier this year, the Washington Post's Charles Lane eviscerated the fascination with Germany's economic "miracle" as a case of latching onto a "foreign flavor of the month." He recalled the awe that the smart set once evinced for the economies of "Japan, Inc." and the Soviet Union, and noted that Germany's current success benefits from liberalization "that made the country a little bit more like...the United States." Lane wisely advised, "[While] there's plenty we can learn from the Germans, Japanese, Chinese, [and everyone else]...Americans need to identify our comparative advantages--social, cultural, political and economic--and exploit them, instead of worrying about copying the competition."

Embracing America's comparative advantages requires appreciating that, when the world changes, the challenges, as well as the tools, talent, and technology at our disposal, also change. Seeking to provide high-quality instruction to every child in the 21st century is a sea change from our agenda a century ago--when we only expected one student in ten to finish high school and when it was impossible to instruct a child who was 1,000 feet away. Today, we can meet new demands by drawing upon a talent pool and tools unimaginable in 1911.

American K-12 schooling is a hotbed of dynamic problem-solving on this front. Non-profits like Teach For America, Florida Virtual School, The New Teacher Project, Carpe Diem, and Citizen Schools are showing new ways to recruit and utilize educators. For-profits like Wireless Generation, Tutor.com, Pearson, Discovery, and Rosetta Stone are offering up a range of ways to harness new tools and technology to support teaching and learning. Figuring out how to leverage these new problem-solvers is a place where our state systems, districts, and schools have fumbled badly. This is an area where would-be reformers have devoted far too little attention. Meanwhile, not only have the "best" performing nations not done any better on this count, but the schemes promoted by those covetously eyeing Finland inevitably entail oodles of regulations and rule-writing calculated to stifle such providers.

Indeed, if we look to nations that are gearing up to lead the pack in 2052, rather than 2012, we see that countries like Qatar and India are busy spying on these American ventures to help them make the leap. We would be well-advised to take the hint, and to push forward by drawing on what the U.S. has always done best.

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note: This week, I'm giving RHSU readers a look at my essay in Richard Elmore's recent Harvard Education Press volume I Used to Think...And Now I Think. If you find this stuff at all interesting, I'd definitely encourage you to check the book out. For days one and two, see here and here.

Say something smart once and there are huge rewards for spending a career saying it, in increasingly elaborate forms. Academics who own an idea get hired by prestigious universities, deliver keynotes, and get all kinds of attendant perks. Consultants who own an idea become must-haves for districts, foundations, and contractors. The result is a familiar kabuki of hyperspecialists airing their prebaked views.

The world is composed of niches. In each, a thinker may be iconic so long as she stays in her little crevice. Thus, an expert in pharmacology may speak to a cheering conference hall of awe-struck attendees only to walk across the campus or the hotel and quickly become just an anonymous face in the crowd. An expert on school violence or science instruction might be feted as legendary by those in her field but sacrifice that respect and deference should she wander outside that circle. The result discourages individuals from spending much time wrestling with thorny questions or complexities that reach beyond their core expertise. Hence, enormously respected thinkers will offer prescriptions for educational policy or practice that are woefully naïve in terms of political dynamics, organizational realities, institutional pressure, incentives, or practical constraints. Why? Because many of these experts have never spent much time thinking about how their expertise intersects with all the stuff in which they're not expert.

Meanwhile, within niches, the interest in weighing competing arguments or determining how one's expertise translates to the larger world is massively undervalued. Expertise promotes deep knowledge, which can too readily lead to inflexibility and self-assuredness (along with the expectation that one's biases and assumptions will be afforded deference). There are always exceptions, but most thinkers become expert by struggling to the top of their niche on the back of their big idea, and then do all they can to extend the reach of that idea and of the acolytes who aid in that quest--incidentally, or quite purposefully, stymieing heterodox perspectives. In fact, the very nature of expertise is that it stifles dissent and reifies the orthodoxy of the moment.

Moreover, since established figures typically find themselves addressing friendly audiences and gatherings where it is deemed impolite to contest their assumptions and evidence too ardently, it is frighteningly easy for experts to settle into a comfortable bubble where they are surrounded by like-minded peers and adoring disciples, their word is gospel and they are buffered from anything more than occasional interaction with those who might disagree.

Finally, our criteria for expertise are, almost inevitably, relational (e.g. my colleague tells me Trang is terrific) or formulaic (e.g. Wylie was executive director of X for a number of years, launched Y program, or has published eleven articles on this). Why? Our ability to form independent judgments of the hundreds or thousands of individuals most directly engaged in our field of endeavor, much less the thousands more peripherally engaged, is limited by our own inexpert grasp of the world. Only the arrogant or the deluded imagine they perfectly understand the strengths and skills of hundreds of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Thus, we turn to proxies that are themselves deeply imperfect--but that can lead to our investing great authority in this or that expert for a season.

Done with sufficient skepticism and care, this manner of finding experts is natural and normal. But there's a decided temptation to lodge excessive influence in our choice of the moment. I can't tell you how many times I've been talking with a superintendent who has become a guru for a foundation and found myself wondering why this unremarkable man was deemed any more deserving of that status than any of a dozen other superintendents. The difference, in many cases, is nothing more than a personal relationship, experience in a few big districts, or the fact that a superintendent was an early adopter of a reform--all of which, perhaps bizarrely, results in an individual being invested with presumed expertise across a broad range of issues.

So why does any of this matter? Does it make any practical difference when it comes to schools or schooling? I think it does. In education, for instance, despite decades of research, experts have no systematic way to tell who will be a good teacher or how to design practices that lead to predictable improvement at scale. This state of affairs means at least four things.

First, we ought to be hesitant in casually suggesting that we can name, based on our experience, a list of the nation's best school districts, superintendents, or reading programs. Short of some protocol that helps us identify excellence in a transparent and consistent fashion (for better or worse), we ought to be much humbler about such exercises. They frequently amount to nothing more than an echo chamber, with participants passing on names that they themselves have received second- or third-hand.

Second, we should be wary of prescriptive advice, especially when it's based on the assumption that expertise easily and immutably travels across contexts. In fact, given its narrowness, expertise can exert a gravitational pull that distorts how one thinks about the larger world. Expertise can come at the cost of perspective when an expert starts contemplating efforts to change policy, organizations, or human behavior. After all, expert advice tends to reflect what experts know, which may not reflect what is most useful for solving the larger problem in the real world. For instance, grand assertions about merit pay, school choice, differentiated instruction, or class size reduction that overlook the practical impact of contracts, policies, existing incentives, and embedded routines can yield results quite different from those the experts are touting.

Third--all that said--expertise has a terrifically useful place, as long as we understand what the experts actually know, which is how to do specific, concrete tasks right. I'm always eager to turn to an expert when the question is how to build a bridge, estimate how many people will visit Vegas next month, design an assessment, erect a new school, or conduct a complicated statistical analysis. I'm less inclined to do so when the questions are bigger, messier, and more dependent on judgment and values.

Finally, we need to recognize that individual experts ought not be invested with too much prescience, but the right mix of experts can help identify tensions, incentives, and the contours of possible solutions. If one assembles the right mix of experts, their competing views can prove enormously helpful in crafting smart policies. The key, however, is not to empower any one expert to play guru but to allow competing expertise to illuminate and inform complex decisions.

One last thought. For what it's worth, my approach nowadays is not to casually reject educational expertise but to regard its acclaimed ministers with the same attentive skepticism I reserve for financial advisers and real estate agents. They know stuff that's useful, but that doesn't entitle them to blind deference or even trusting obeisance. At least not in my book.

Posted by Rick Hess at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note: This week, I'm giving RHSU readers a look at my essay in Richard Elmore's recent Harvard Education Press volume I Used to Think...And Now I Think. If you find this stuff at all interesting, I'd definitely encourage you to check the book out. For day one, see here.

Along my path through academia, I started to doubt whether I'd ever even be able to find a job. I'd ask myself, "Wow, I know so little and all these successful people know so much; how am I ever going to convince anyone to hire me to do anything?"

Little by little, though, I got the sense that these folks didn't know as much as they claimed. I posted a pretty fair score on that political science GRE, one that suggested I knew as much or more than any in that intimidating cast of characters. When I was admitted to the PhD program in government at Harvard and then won a National Science Foundation fellowship, the chilling possibility occurred to me that I actually was a budding expert--in my own little area. That was downright scary, because I knew how little expertise I actually possessed.

I would listen to lectures or read policy proposals and be struck by their seeming naiveté and reliance on wishful thinking. I'd ask an acclaimed guest speaker a question about practical application or potential unanticipated consequences of their recommendations, and I'd consistently be underwhelmed by their inclination to rehash their talking points and brush past any complications. It gradually struck me, as I earned my MEd and then took my first teaching job, that much of the "expertise" I encountered seemed to consist of self-promotion, a dubious title, or misplaced self-confidence.

As I finished my degree, was hired as a professor by a respected university, and started to publish books, articles, and papers that drew attention from newspapers and leading authorities, it became clear to me that I was indeed now one of those "experts." I was still utterly confident that I had no business fixing a car, much less the world. And I knew I had no claim on posing as an unimpeachable source of wisdom. In light of that, I figured there were only two explanations for my newfound success. The first, and the one I favored for the longest time, was that I was a fortunate poseur, a fake, an imposter who had gotten in over my head and who would be found out in due time. The second was that I was like a lot of the other experts and that they actually were (or should be) as hesitant as I to claim they could fix the world with any precision.

Over time, I've become increasingly convinced that the correct answer was the second explanation. And, let me be clear, that realization froze my blood. For one thing, I've been surprised at how many successful and respected individuals I know who, in moments of private candor or over a beer, will smilingly confess to their own version of the Am I a fraud? concern. For another, I've been astonished at the resistance to alternate ways of thinking or seeing that characterizes so many reputed experts. And I've come to believe that arrogance, traditions of deference, the yearning for verities, and the demands of hierarchical institutions have as much to do with creating many supposed experts as does actual merit.

In particular, I've been fascinated to see how success in some role (as a CEO, a superintendent, a politician, or what have you) is broadly seen as giving someone entrée to playing the expert in all kinds of venues where they may or may not know what the hell they're talking about.

I gradually became convinced that this phenomenon isn't unique to education or academia. Really, in pretty much any realm where we can measure how expertise fares, its track record is rather weak. Consulting firms have very uneven records of actually improving the state of affairs for their clients. Most professional stock pickers do worse than simple indexes of stocks. Professional talent evaluators have a famously uneven track record in the NFL, NBA, or MLB drafts when predicting the next crop of star athletes. Industry executives have a horrendous record when it comes to predicting which movies, books, or television shows are going to be hits.

And, of course, there are experts like David Lereah, formerly the chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. In 2005, Lereah published a book titled Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom? Why Home Values and Other Real Estate Investments Will Climb Through the End of the Decade--and How to Profit from Them and told the Washington Post that year that "any talk of the housing market crashing is ludicrous."

Further, we should all keep in mind that I am hardly the first to be struck by the dubious nature of expertise. Aristophanes had great fun with this precise topic more than two thousand years ago, while Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels found the academicians of Lagado intent on extracting sunbeams from cucumbers.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This summer, Harvard Education Press published Richard Elmore's intriguing volume I Used to Think...And Now I Think. The volume's title and theme draw from a professional development exercise in which participants reflect on how the experience has altered their thinking. The book includes essays from a variety of K-12 thinkers--including Howard Gardner, Sonia Nieto, Larry Cuban, Jeff Henig, Deb Meier, and Mike Smith--discussing how their thinking has changed during their time in education. I had the privilege of contributing to the volume, and the piece captured much of my own underlying biases with regards to the issues that I regularly tackle in this blog. Given that (and with the kind blessing of Harvard Ed Press), I thought I'd share some over the next few days. If you find this stuff at all interesting, I'd encourage you to check out the book. Anyway, here you go:

I used to think that experts really understood the world. Now I think that they are people who know a great deal about tiny slivers of life, but that this narrow expertise is often of dubious value when it comes to tackling complex challenges or making the world a better place. More to the point, I now think that experts get so taken with their tiny slivers of expertise that they routinely overestimate both how much they know and their ability to produce broad, beneficial change.

Now, don't get me wrong. Most "experts" always struck me as pompous, self-satisfied, pretentious, venal, and biased. But I tended to place some degree of confidence in their particular insight and expertise. And now, as we say, not so much.

While it may not be immediately obvious, all this has had a profound impact on how I think about schooling, education, and policy. Before I go there, however, it might be useful to back up and explain how I got here.

For the longest time, I was taken with the notion of expertise. I can still remember when I was fourteen and my dad promised me that, if I gave my old bike to my younger brother, I could have his beat-up, yellow Honda Civic when I turned sixteen. The catch was that the Civic no longer ran; rather, my dad (a pretty fair bootstrap mechanic) and I were going to fix it.

It sounded like a good deal. That Saturday we headed out to the Honda resting under the carport, and popped the hood to reveal an indecipherable mash-up of hoses, molded steel, and wiring. I can still clearly recall my response to the sight. It pretty much amounted to, Ah, @#%&! Tellingly, in that moment, I felt a deep and utter helplessness in the marrow of my bones. One thought, clear and certain, ran through my mind: I could study this engine for a month and it wouldn't make any sense to me. Don't be fooled. There's no happy, touching redemptive story here. I slunk away, threw in the towel, and, when I turned sixteen, bought an old Plymouth Duster for $900.

Now, the engine of a Honda Civic, built in the 1970s, was not, in fact, indecipherable. I had buddies who enjoyed working on cars who found engines to be interesting, manageable puzzles. That experience seemed to illustrate for me how sadly inept I was at things that mattered. For much of my life--through childhood, adolescence, college, teaching, graduate school, and into my tenure as a professor at the University of Virginia--I always labored under the strong suspicion that lots of other people had a perfectly lucid understanding of things that were opaque to me.

I remember as a high school and college student reading about new technology companies, research studies, or arms control negotiations and thinking that the people who were doing these things were incomprehensibly smart and informed. I'd read book critics and wonder how they could know so much and find such textured nuance in a book I'd found tedious, or hear football coaches talk about the enormous complexity of their offensive schemes and be dazzled by their terminology.

I would meet fellow college students full of confidence in their future plans, who seemed to know how the medical or legal profession worked and how to go about getting themselves started. I remember standing in line at the Harvard University campus waiting to the take the GRE in political science and listening to all the students chattering about sophisticated political concepts, contacts, and graduate programs. I felt overwhelmed, and tired. How could they know so much?

Posted by Rick Hess at 8:04 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A couple weeks ago, Andrew Biggs, an AEI colleague, and Jason Richwine of the Heritage Foundation, authored a controversial study on teacher pay. They used federal wage, benefit, and job-security data, along with measures of cognitive ability, to argue that teachers are overpaid compared to what they'd earn in the private sector. The analysis generated heated reaction, including an unusual, personal attack by Secretary of Education Duncan. In the aftermath, given that I'm director of ed policy studies at AEI, there were a number of inquiries regarding my thoughts on this provocative analysis.

My take is threefold. (An earlier version of this originally appeared as an Ed Week commentary last week, but I thought it worth sharing a tweaked version here with RHSU readers.)

First, claims that teachers are, in Duncan's words, "desperately underpaid," are a familiar refrain. Yet, given that we've steadily boosted staffing and after-inflation spending in recent decades to little obvious effect, and that states and districts are wrestling with structural shortfalls, it's healthy to question such orthodoxies. Biggs and Richwine remind us that the costs of teacher benefits dramatically inflate the cost of compensation, even if the results aren't always obvious when scanning a paycheck. Recall, for example, that University of Arkansas economist Bob Costrell pointed out during the Wisconsin collective bargaining fight earlier this year that the average Milwaukee teacher earned a salary of $56,500 but, due to benefits, actually cost the district $100,005 in total compensation. This ought to be of particular concern to educators eager to see more of their compensation show up in their pay stubs. In light of that, I'm disappointed (if not surprised) that most of the responses I've seen to Biggs and Richwine have been ad hominem, with Duncan declaring in the Huffington Post that the study "insults teachers and demeans the profession."

Second, their analysis is intriguing, but it rests upon assumptions and data which deserve to be carefully scrutinized. For instance, Biggs and Richwine rely upon SAT and GRE scores to measure cognitive ability. It's fair to ask both how good those metrics are and how much they may say about teaching ability. And it's worth noting that their cognition data are nearly two decades old; if the makeup of the teaching force has changed significantly in that time, it would obviously change the outcomes. Similarly, the job-security and benefits data don't reflect more recent developments or the fact that teaching positions may be less secure going forward; it will be interesting to see how such changes might impact the underlying data. At the same time, it's important to note that Biggs and Richwine penned for the HuffPo what I thought was a pretty compelling response to the two methodological criticisms that Duncan had raised.

Third, I ultimately think the are-teachers-overpaid-or-underpaid question is just not that interesting or helpful to those of us in the fields of schooling and education. It's a useful question for policymakers who must decide how to allocate dollars for highways, health care, and schooling, but for those of us working in the K-12 arena, the more relevant question is: How do we most wisely spend the dollars we have?

For what it's worth, I'm firmly convinced that, today, some teachers are underpaid and others are overpaid. When I am asked the long-standing question about whether teachers are underpaid or overpaid, my consistent refrain is, "Yes." I'm much more interested in the broader issue of how we can rethink the profession, make fuller use of talented teachers, and wisely spend the dollars we do have than in debating what the "right" wage level should be.

Under today's step-and-lane pay scales, the primary way we determine how much teachers are worth is how long they've taught and how many graduate credits they've accumulated. Now, there's nothing innately wrong with step-and-lane compensation. Indeed, when introduced in the early 20th century, it was a sensible response to reflexive, sweeping discrimination under which women were routinely paid half as much as their male counterparts. When a captive market of women had few options except to teach, the benefits of this more equitable system outweighed its defects.

Today, however, the world has changed. Whereas limited professional options meant that more than half of women graduating from college became teachers in mid-20th-century America, the figure today is closer to 15 percent. At the start of the 21st century, new college graduates--both men and women--are much less likely to stick to a job for long stretches, the competition for college-educated talent has intensified, and we are becoming better able to track educational outlays and outcomes. All this adds up to a new environment in which step-and-lane industrial-era pay is ill-suited to attracting and retaining talent. The consequence of treating different employees similarly, despite their varying work ethics and skills, has become a growing burden.

As school systems wrestle with tough fiscal decisions, it's vital to understand that one-size-fits-all pay is insensitive to questions of productivity. Although the term "productivity" is typically regarded as a four-letter word in K-12 conversations, teacher productivity means nothing more than how much good a given teacher can do. If one teacher is regarded by colleagues as a far more valued mentor than another, or helps students master skills much more rapidly than another, it's axiomatic that one teacher is more productive than the other. Yet, step-and-lane pay makes no allowance for such differences.

Today, we're paying the most productive employees too little, paying their less productive colleagues too much, or, most times, a little of each. In a world of scarce talent and limited resources, this is a problem. School systems casually operate on the implicit assumption that most teachers are similarly adept at everything. In a routine day, a 4th grade teacher who is a terrific English language arts instructor might teach reading for just 90 minutes. This is an extravagant waste of talent, especially when one can stroll down the hallway and see a less adept colleague offering 90 minutes of pedestrian reading instruction.

One approach to using talent more wisely might entail overhauling teacher schedules and student assignment so that an exceptional 4th grade English language arts instructor would teach many more students. Colleagues, in turn, would shoulder that teacher's other instructional responsibilities. An essential component of such rethinking is to adjust compensation to recognize the importance of their various roles.

After all, we pay thoracic surgeons much more than we do pediatric nurses--not because we think they're better people or because they have lower patient-mortality rates, but because their positions require more sophisticated skills and more intensive training and because surgeons are harder to replace. Salary should be a tool for solving problems by finding smarter ways to attract, nurture, and use talent; it should not be an obstacle to doing so.

Almost any effort to really rethink staffing and pay entails some educators earning more--probably, a lot more--and other educators earning less. That sounds about right. The real question isn't whether we should pay all teachers more or less; it's how to pay the right teachers more, in a way that serves students and maximizes the bang we get for the educational buck.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

While I was gone, there were any number of classic examples of well-intentioned folks promoting bad ideas under the guise of "reform."

In Tennessee, it turns out that the teacher evaluation system promised in the state's Race to the Top proposal isn't ready for prime time. Fifty percent of teacher evaluations are supposed to be based on evidence of student outcomes, but such measures are in short supply. No matter, the plan is just to plug in for teachers the growth scores for their school. Because the cutting-edge way to gauge a first-grade teacher's performance is apparently by measuring his school's grade 3-5 ELA and math gains--even though that teacher may not have even been teaching first-grade at that school when those students were first-graders.

Last week, the Senate HELP Committee held its giant "roundtable" hearing on ESEA, prior to moving Harkin-Enzi to the floor. Most of the testimony concerned wish lists of things it'd be neat for the feds to do, if they had money or the tools or the wherewithal. None of that stopped the perfectly pleasant and well-intentioned Wade Henderson, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference, speaking for a laundry list of civil rights groups, business groups, and "reform" outfits, from insisting that Uncle Sam not "retreat" from NCLB's commitment to identifying and fixing lousy schools. The fact that a decade of experience has shown that the feds aren't very good at this doesn't faze Mr. Henderson or his allies in the least.

StudentsFirst leaked a strategy memo tallying their Election Day wins. The memo garnered attention for its rosy take on the defeat of a Michigan legislator that StudentsFirst had backed. What struck me though was the Brill-esque shorthand, with the memo's big takeaway being that, "A pro-education reform message resonates strongly with voters and moves voter sentiment significantly in favor of pro-reform candidates." Truthfully, I don't know what that means. Is it "pro-reform" to push ahead with teacher accountability systems whether or not they're ready for prime time? Are "reformers" wedded to a litany of federal activities, whether or not they're likely to play out as intended, like trying to direct teacher evaluation systems and school improvement strategies from the Department of Education? As best I can tell, the answer is "yes," though I'm not sure why. As I've argued before, when it comes to questions like teacher evaluation and school turnarounds, how you do it matters at least as much as whether you do it--and that gets lost real easily amidst "reformist" talking points.

I like what the "reformers" are trying to do. I've been fighting for school choice, muscular accountability systems, alternative licensure, paying good educators more than lousy ones, and all kinds of other crazy notions since before many of today's reformers got interested in K-12. (And I've got oodles of teacher-generated hate mail to show for it.) But these measures are not solutions or silver bullets. They are tools. How one uses them ultimately matters a lot more than whether one uses them.

By turning school reform into a moral crusade, in which one either is, to quote our last President, "with us or against us," would-be reformers wind up planting their flag atop all kinds of half-baked or ill-conceived proposals. They also make it ridiculously hard for even their allies to help, because they are quick to dismiss criticism as evidence of disloyalty. Would-be reformers insist that overshooting the mark with half-baked proposals is actually a strategy, because that's how they'll cow the unions and change the culture of schooling. Indeed, they think concerns about program design are quaint evidence of naivete.

I'll just say this: If reformers think it's a winning strategy to push awkwardly constructed, ill-designed programs that are going to create entirely foreseeable problems, then I'd encourage them to check out the history of NCLB, in which well-intentioned advocates have managed to alienate sympathetic voters and tarnish sensible ideas. The problem is that the impassioned good intentions of today's reformers brook no delay and countenance no nuance. That may be a not-bad strategy for building an effective non-profit or for-profit firm, but it's a flawed strategy for overhauling policies governing the sprawling, complex ecosystem that is American education.

Posted by Rick Hess at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Hidy, all. I'm back. Thanks to Melissa, Sheara, Celine, and Roxanna for three weeks of stellar guest turns. While I was out, in last week's Republican debate, Texas Governor Rick Perry promised (in the course of a major gaffe) that the Department of Education would be "gone" if he's elected President. Rep. Michele Bachmann and others have made similar pledges. While I've some sympathy for the premise, I'm not sure what it actually means to "turn out the lights" at ED. Here are six questions I hope an enterprising reporter asks Perry, Bachmann, et al. on this score:

1. It isn't clear that abolishing the Department would itself end any federal education programs (since they can migrate elsewhere). So, specifically, which programs and activities will you eliminate?
2. Do you intend to push to eliminate federal funding for special education? If not, who will be responsible for ensuring that states and districts spend those tax dollars in accord with statute? If yes, how will you argue the case to families with children enrolled in special education?
3. Do you aim to eliminate the Pell grants and student loans that make up the lion's share of ED's activity? If you don't intend to eliminate them, who will be charged with administering and policing them? If you do, how will you make the case to millions of families and students that use them?
4. Do you hope to eliminate Title I funding for schools serving low-income students? If not, who will be responsible for ensuring those dollars are spent in accord with statute? If so, how will you justify cutting federal aid for the neediest students?
5. Practically speaking, you know that special education and student lending are popular, with influential, outspoken, middle-class constituencies. How will you convince Congress to go along if you intend to eliminate these programs?
6. If you don't intend to zero out federal K-12 spending, do you hope to turn it into a giant block grant? If so, will you seek to eliminate rules requiring that federal Title I aid and special aid funds be spent on low-income children or those with special needs?

Many will think there are obvious right and wrong answers to these questions. I'm not so sure. But I do want to know what the GOP candidates' bold promises really mean.

Posted by Rick Hess at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note: Roxanna Elden is the author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers. She is a National Board Certified high school teacher currently teaching in Miami.

There is a growing assumption that education reformers are anti-teacher and teachers are anti-reform. Disagreements between these groups have become so heated and so public recently that this seems like a reasonable conclusion.

The real story is more complicated. Over the past year, I've had the chance to speak with many people in the education reform world. I have come to believe that most reformers became reformers for the same reasons that most teachers became teachers: a hope that we can provide a higher quality education to a greater number of children in a fairer and more equal way.

As a teacher, though, I share my colleagues' frustrations with some of reformers' catchiest feel-good phrases. Teachers are not so much against education reforms as we are downstream from them. We see the way well-meaning changes play out in our schools and classrooms, and often hear troubling subtexts in talking points that sound great on TV. Here are a few examples, along with tips on how to engage teachers in the real conversations that we should be having about these issues.

"We know what works!"
This line promises a great sigh of relief to the non-teaching public: Now that we finally figured out what works in education, all we have to do is get teachers to do it! Then we can move onto fixing healthcare and jumpstarting the economy! Teachers, on the other hand, recognize this claim as an exaggeration used to introduce short-term fixes that in many cases don't work. We also know that teaching is complex. Even in the same room, a successful lesson from first period might bomb after lunch. Likewise, instructional strategies may work for teachers who use them by choice, but lose their benefit when special-ops teams of non-teachers are deployed to mandate them throughout the district. In most cases, this approach leads to dog-and-pony shows that let observers walk away thinking their mandates "work" as advertised. At worst, it damages instruction by taking away teachers' autonomy to make judgment calls about what really does work in our own classrooms. On the other hand, teachers are happy to hear about what has worked well for other teachers--as long as it is presented as such, not oversold by the same presenter who pushed a contradictory foolproof formula last year... using many of the same Power Point slides.

"Demographics don't determine destiny! (You lazy racist!)"
No one really says the part in parenthesis. It would ruin the alliteration. However, the line above suggests those who disagree with the speaker are insisting that demographics DO determine destiny--and presumably think it's not worth working hard to teach poor, minority students. This phrase sets off alarm bells for teachers, who know that while demographics don't "determine destiny," they don't tell the whole story, either. Kids from similar demographics or neighborhoods aren't necessarily similar kids. Factors like motivation, behavior, parent involvement, attendance, and distractions outside of school all affect academic progress. Charter schools can select for these non-demographic factors in a variety of ways that neighborhood schools can't, which means not only is their population different, but they may change the makeup of district schools nearby. Charters involve tradeoffs. District teachers may see some merit in these tradeoffs, but only as long as they are presented honestly. In many cases teachers who seem to be anti-charter are really just resentful of suggestions that instructional quality is the only difference between charters and neighborhood schools.

"Measurable results"
Some information in education lends itself to accurate measurement. In other cases, measurements can be counterproductive. For example, pushing for improvements in "discipline numbers" encourages schools to let behavior problems slide rather than processing discipline referrals. It's also no secret among teachers that the obsession with test scores often forces schools to do things that are bad for kids. This is especially true during "crunch time," the unspecified period leading up to a high-stakes test. During crunch time, non-tested subjects like science and social studies are eliminated, and schools replace the type of reading instruction that yields long-term improvements with strategies meant to maximize points on test day. The higher the pressure to put a rush-order on reading scores, the more of the year becomes crunch time. This means more fourth graders who think Texas is a country and Martin Luther King was president, plus more high school freshmen who have never read a novel and think of reading as a tedious chore. As we increase the emphasis on "data driven instruction" that "moves the needle" on reading scores, we must also be willing to examine whether data collection affects instruction more than it reflects instruction.

"If grocery stores were run like public schools..."
This is supposed to be an argument about how introducing market-based competition in education encourages innovation and leads to better opportunity, especially for low-income families. If kids and families are treated as consumers, the thinking goes, they will have the buying power to demand a quality education. There may well be some truth to this, but teachers have experience with kids and families as consumers of educational products. We've seen, for example, how hard it is for high-school students to distinguish between respected universities and for-profit career colleges that advertise on daytime TV. It is also worth noting that businesses aren't run for the benefit of consumers. They are run for profit, and many businesses make their biggest profit on people who don't read the fine print. Teachers have insight on how market values may translate to the world of education, as well as the dangers of opening a huge new market of "consumers" to an industry that will likely include the education version of predatory credit card companies and mortgage brokers. After all, there is a long history of corporations marketing destructive products in poor neighborhoods, which are often saturated with billboards for liquor and fast food... and poor quality supermarkets.

"We need transformational change!"
Bashing the status quo is so 2010. This year, the issue is transformational, disruptive change (cue applause) vs. incremental change (eeewwww). In 2011, reformers delivering gleeful knockout punches to anyone who disagrees with them have drowned out their more reasonable colleagues. This leaves teachers uneasy. After all, history (and the history of education, according to Rick's most recent book) is filled with examples showing that good ideas, taken to extremes, become bad ideas, and that change can bring unintended consequences. Teachers have a huge interest in curing education's ills, but we can only be open to reformers' prescriptions if we know reformers are willing to address the side effects.

--Roxanna Elden

Posted by Roxanna Elden at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note: Roxanna Elden is the author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers. She is a National Board Certified high school teacher currently teaching in Miami.

November is the month I most often hear from new teachers. This month also brings an uptick in speaking and writing requests from organizations that recruit, train, and support new teachers.

The most common concern from organizations is how to reinvest recruits in their overall mission: The achievement gap can't wait. The future is in your hands. This is the most important job in the world, and the kids can't afford for you to fail.

The most common concern from individual teachers is that they've already spent the last few months failing at the most important job in the world.

It's not for lack of effort.

Many rookies hit the ground running when they should really hit the ground walking at a brisk pace they can maintain. They overpromise things like pizza parties, constant parent contact, and behavior management systems that require hours of afterschool paper work. They are so afraid of what will happen if they stop moving that they can't sit down long enough to take attendance.

Meanwhile, they're learning that the achievement gap--this source of both outrage and motivation--sometimes manifests itself in the form of 7-year-olds who curse at teachers, or bullies who torment special education students, or any of the many other idealism-meets-reality, non-mission-statement-matching moments that happen in beginning teachers' classrooms. They are learning hard life lessons in front of kids who are supposed to be learning from them.

On top of this, today's rookies know their every move is being monitored for effectiveness data, which creates pressure to not only become successful teachers, but to be successful from day one.

November is also a tough time for organizations. On one hand, they have to generate funding and positive PR from those who want to back great teachers. On the other, they must offer support to rookies who feel anything but great. The suggestions below may help organizations walk this thin, fuzzy line. They are distilled from rookie concerns that have surfaced during my workshops and in emails I typically get from beginning teachers around this time of year.

1. Find a low-key way to congratulate your superstars. If one of your new teachers has managed to start a championship soccer team, single-handedly staff the school clinic, bring student achievement up two grade levels, and get a masters degree in public policy by Halloween, it is tempting to update other recruits with constant reminders of his or her success. This is about as inspiring to struggling rookies as being a bridesmaid the day after getting dumped. New teachers are especially sensitive right now to messages that can be interpreted as, "We don't understand why you suck when everyone else is so good."

2. Acknowledge that some teaching assignments are harder than others. Teaching in a high-needs school doesn't mean the same thing in every case, and teaching conditions can vary wildly even within the same school. Acknowledging this reality is important. The battle cry of "No Excuses! The teacher is the most important factor in student achievement!" is a half-truth at best, mostly used by people who wouldn't dream of skimping on the out-of-school inputs that affect their own children's achievement. Insisting that the teacher controls every factor in the classroom doesn't help kids nearly as much as it demoralizes the teachers with the hardest assignments. Teaching is tough, but it's not supposed to be masochistic.

3. Encourage humility. Traditionally, experienced teachers have provided lifelines for new teachers at their schools, but changes in education politics have complicated this relationship. New teachers aren't just struggling colleagues anymore. They are cheaper, younger, often non-union-joining competition in an increasingly zero-sum game of you-bet-your-career. Many of the organizations that send teachers into schools for short-term commitments have also set their sights on proving experience doesn't matter much. Beginners who take this inherent tension into account and try to build relationships with coworkers are more likely to get help when they need it. Those who don't may alienate would-be mentors.

4. Lighten up on the data-mining requirements. Maybe there was a time when schools didn't focus enough on collecting data and this was something organizations needed to push on their own. That time has passed. Schools and districts have gotten the memo on the importance of collecting data every second of the day and keeping it in a binder for a constant stream of data-obsessed visitors. The last thing rookies need in November is an additional person pushing investigation of data-driven solutions based on the most recent benchmark assessment. Instead, they need concrete answers about how to get kids to stop interrupting them with loud, off-topic questions, or what to do with kids who say, "I don't have to pass this class - I'm going to summer school anyway," or whether requesting an aide for an autistic student will make administrators hate them.

5. Treat teacher time and energy as finite resources. Programs often play up their recruits' willingness to put in long hours, but at some point it becomes counterproductive to stay up another hour cutting paper pepperoni for the next morning's fraction-pizza lesson. Yes, our nation's most vulnerable kids deserve a teacher who will work tirelessly to close the achievement gap. They also deserve a mentally healthy teacher who wants to be in the room with them and has the emotional reserves to show compassion when they need it. Rookies propping themselves on energy drinks are more likely to commit cringe-worthy, regrettable teaching mistakes.

6. Give all that good advice some time to sink in. At some point between Halloween and Thanksgiving, new teachers question what they learn in training. This is not necessarily cause for panic. They spend much more time questioning the parts of their own character that they thought would make them good at teaching. As tempting as it is to reinforce the validity of your training or reinvest recruits in your mission, this month might be better used to reassure rookies that they're up to this demanding job.

In November, the treadmill has been turned up high for nearly three months. Rookies don't need the speed turned up higher.

They need to catch their breath.

--Roxanna Elden

Posted by Roxanna Elden at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note: Roxanna Elden is the author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers. She is a National Board Certified high school teacher currently teaching in Miami.

Many thanks to Rick for inviting me to guest blog this week. When I blogged last year, I tried to offer a teacher's point of view to reformers, researchers, and policymakers. This year, I'd like to share our feelings with another sector of the edu-world that has been on our minds lately:

Dear educational technology,

These days, we run into you everywhere. People who say you're just what we need have gone out of their way to introduce you, and are quick to criticize us for not showing more interest. So why aren't we more into you? Well, if you want to win teachers over, you have to understand where we're coming from.

You're not the only one we're seeing. When teachers claim our calendars are full, we're not just playing hard to get. We've probably had several other tech-dates this month, including multiple computer-based reading programs for which we have to herd kids into the school library to use the computers. Each of these probably involves a diagnostic assessment, plus corresponding practice and makeup assessments, each of which requires the library to stay closed for the day, which means kids can't check out any actual books until well into the third month of school, once we've finished assessing why they're not good readers.

We want to know you respect us. Teachers have plenty of experience with products that require two hours of tedious busy work for every hour they "save." During a first impression, we look for signs that innovations in technology are matched by a genuine desire not to waste our time. High-tech isn't always best for this: A 90-minute webcast of an underprepared presenter mumbling through a PowerPoint presentation in another school's auditorium is arguably more insulting than making us sit through a bad presentation in person. If you want to start things off on the right foot, show the same consideration for our needs that you claim your technology does for students.

We've been hurt before. Teachers want products that are user-friendly--and won't leave us feeling used. It will be hard for us to trust you again if we have to find out about password problems in front of our students, or troubleshoot during computer based high-stakes testing. Please, work out your own issues before introducing yourselves.

We get suspicious when you promise us the world. These days, if students were motivated enough, they could get the equivalent of a college education through their smart phones. Or they could spend all day playing video games and watching porn. Even the best high-tech solutions don't override the bugs in human nature. Kids who struggle with reading will struggle to guide themselves through computerized directions. Cheaters will find high-tech ways to cheat, and students whose printers seem to break the night before every due date will have similar excuses for why they couldn't watch their online lessons when we "flip" our classrooms. Sure we'd like your help, but you'll get farther with us if you don't pretend to be something you're not.

Sometimes the problem isn't you. It's us. Your software is only as good as our schools' hardware, and many schools still have slow computers, or not enough computers, or don't have the Internet capacity to stream videos and interactive lessons into multiple classrooms. Your three-minute video may take five minutes to load on our interactive whiteboard, which feels like twenty minutes in a class full of rowdy seventh-graders. If high-tech lessons take a toll on classroom management, or require us to track down the IT guy our school shares with three other schools, don't be surprised if we decide we're just not compatible.

Deep down, we still believe in love. Sure, we've got some trust issues from being burned in the past, but that doesn't mean we're nostalgic for the days of clapping erasers and calculating grades by hand. Teachers have had good experiences with technology, too, and we'd love to have more. The good thing about teachers is if you treat us right, we're loyal, and we'll tell all our friends how great you are. For now, trying to take it slow doesn't mean we're not interested.

We just want to know we can rely on you before we introduce you to our kids.

--Roxanna Elden

Posted by Roxanna Elden at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note: Celine Coggins, founder and CEO of Teach Plus, is guest blogging this week.

At Teach Plus, we run a selective eighteen-month training for experienced urban teachers called the Teaching Policy Fellows program. It is designed to break down barriers between teachers and the policy leaders who make decisions about their classrooms. The program is one part graduate-level course in the teacher quality research, one part speaker series where teachers meet with top education leaders in a small group, and one part action center with teachers advocating for ideas they believe will help their students. In short, our role in the Fellows program is to broker between the world of policy and the world of practice.

In my role as a broker between these two worlds, I often see how things get lost in translation. There is one example that I'd like to point out because it is central to the conversation on teacher effectiveness that is raging today.

As the body of research demonstrating that differences in the effectiveness of teachers impact student learning has grown, policy makers at all levels of government have responded. Over the past couple of years, spurred in part by Race to the Top, firewalls between student growth data and teacher accountability have been dismantled.

The dominant narrative about teachers' response to all of these changes has been predictably negative. Both in traditional media and the blogosphere, teachers representing "the other side" of a divisive story have been well-represented. In our sound bite driven culture, there seems room only for teachers to say "no," "hate tests," and "accountability unfair." I'm sure this narrative is accurate for a large swath of teachers, but I have heard something very different in conversations with teachers time and again.*

Here is the dialogue I have witnessed in several different cities before the start of a Fellows session. It typically occurs in late spring:

Teacher 1: I'm so pumped! My students had their final round of testing today and got back their scores online immediately. They cried; I cried. Some made as much as three years' growth this year in reading. They worked so hard toward a clear set of goals and I'm so proud of them. They've learned to love reading and they have the confidence that they are good at it.

Teacher 2: I just had that same experience. It was the highlight of my year.

Teachers 3-25 in a frustrated chorus: Are you kidding?! I would kill for access to that kind of information. My experience with testing could not be more different. I'm administering the state test to my students next week. It has nothing to do with the curriculum I teach. It doesn't help me learn anything about how my students are growing that could help me change how I teach. In fact, by the time these scores come back in the fall, I'll have a different group of kids.

Yes, the majority of teachers in the room would resist being evaluated based on their current state test.

But, I'd argue that there is a common denominator across all of the teachers in the room that is far more important for policymakers to understand. Teachers want to know their impact on student learning. They want to see data, aligned to their curriculum, about the progress their students are making. They want good information that leads to opportunities to improve their practice. In broader polling we've done in three cities, 84% of teachers, on average, agree with the statement, "Growth in student learning should be a part of a teacher's evaluation." While they may hate their current state test, they are hungry for access to something better. And they have good ideas for what it should look like.

This is the critical message that is being missed. It matters because while new assessments will be rolled out in the coming years, in many states they will come after the roll out of new evaluation systems with new consequences for teachers. There is a high-risk in this sequencing. Teachers who might be enthusiastic about an overhauled student assessment and teacher evaluation system that gives them what they need to improve their work with students risk being alienated before that system is in place.

I share many reformers' concerns that we must act with a sense of urgency to help teachers improve their work with students. Yet, I hope we proceed in a way that makes such improvement possible.

*As I pointed out earlier this week on the blog, we do not aim for a representative sample of teachers. We instead seek teachers in the second stage of their careers who can show some evidence that they are helping students learn at high levels.

--Celine Coggins

Posted by Celine Coggins at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note: Celine Coggins, founder and CEO of Teach Plus, is guest blogging this week.

There's a fascinating and very worthwhile teacher quality debate that's happening in the blogosphere right now (see Rotherham versus Weingarten and Hanushek versus Ravitch). Hanushek suggests, based on economic analyses of student test score data, that up to 400,000 teachers (up to 10% of a 4-million-person workforce) should be fired. That number is scary and high for anyone who has many individual teachers in their lives whom they care about.

Because Hanushek's figure is based only on test score data, it is open to some easy criticisms. The first is that test scores, themselves, are insufficient to give a complete picture of a teacher's value to students. For me, an economic analysis conjures a cold image of faceless teachers lined up Hands-Across-America style, from best to worst. I think everyone agrees this is neither possible nor desirable.

The second criticism is that many teachers at the lower end of the spectrum could improve if given greater support. As increasingly resource-starved districts increase teacher workloads and cut supports and development, many teachers who could improve aren't being given a fighting chance to do so.

Finally, the unions, who are appropriately concerned about the size of the population on the proposed chopping block, point out that they have taken major strides of late to expedite the dismissal of persistently weak teachers.

In my view, this conversation is suffering from 35,000-foot syndrome. In the policy world, there appears to be a fixation on the anonymous "bottom quartile of teachers," with too few examples of the texture of the challenges we face within this group. Weak value-added scores are a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. It's easy to talk about teachers and their test scores. It is more difficult to talk about the varied reasons that explain those scores.

There is inspiring work happening all around the country right now to help our field get a clearer picture of what mastery looks like in teaching--and how teachers can be coached toward it. I believe the gospel of teacher effectiveness, so prevalent today, is driving the right conversation about what good teaching looks like and the power of teachers to change the lives of children.

Yet, I'm reminded of how "teacher quality" was framed in the late '90s. The focus then was on "a competent and caring teacher for every child." I believe that phrase--as weighted toward the qualitative, as effectiveness is toward the quantifiable--is still relevant too. Let me explain why from my vantage point.

At Teach Plus, the central question of our work is: What can we do to help excellent teachers extend their commitment to urban classrooms?

In surveys of teachers in regions across the country and in countless conversations, teachers tell us that colleagues are their most important working condition. It is their colleagues who help them determine whether they feel like they are part of a high-caliber, deeply-meaningful profession--or not. Colleagues are central to the "stay or leave" decision of strong teachers.

When they talk about colleagues in need of improvement, they don't tend to talk about value-added scores. Instead, they wrestle with real cases of practice that raise good questions about what our baseline for "caring and competence" should be.

Here are a few examples of statements teachers have overheard being taught to students:
• A right angle is an angle that points to the right.
• Alaska is in a box on the map because it is too big to fit otherwise.
• "Indivisible" in the Pledge of Allegiance means "cannot be seen."

Each challenges us to better define baseline competence.* If certification tests of basic skills are not picking these things up, should we assume they'll be picked up in a new souped-up evaluation process? How many promising, able teachers (the teachers at the other end of the spectrum) do we lose when teaching is not treated as intellectual work?

And what about a baseline for caring? Ask a female teacher who had to physically restrain a male student after school hours as other teachers walked by her on their way out the door. She'd tell you the bar for what constitutes a caring professional is unclear.

How would we remediate these challenges? Is it possible? In many cases the answer should be "no," not simply because test scores are low but because the profession enforces certain standards for teacher practice and knowledge. This is the conversation we need to be having if we really expect to move the needle on the quality of the teaching force.

*I recognize these are one-off examples used as an illustration. I'm making the perhaps inaccurate assumption that knowledge gaps like these are akin to speeding. There are a thousand infractions for every time you get caught.

--Celine Coggins

Posted by Celine Coggins at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Note: Celine Coggins, founder and CEO of Teach Plus, is guest blogging this week.

I've had the privilege of meeting with union leaders from around the country to explain what Teach Plus is. Many love it; plenty are skeptics.

In every case, I begin with three opening points. First, I describe our mission as very similar to the union's: to retain excellent teachers in the classroom and strengthen the teaching profession. Second, I talk about our belief that leadership opportunities are a key lever to helping promising young teachers extend their commitment to the classroom. Third, I state my personal belief in the value in the role of unions and describe the role Teach Plus has been able to play in helping a subset of Gen Y teachers to see that value for the first time. We're usually off to a good start.

Then I say we focus our work on high-performing teachers* in years 3-10. It is at that point that many union leaders begin scratching their heads about whether our presence in a city will be a headache or a help. By design, our approach is not about the unity and equality of all teachers. In that way, it is at odds with an industrial union model.

I always acknowledge that the job of any union leader is much harder than mine, because of the diversity of the membership. Yet I think the pillars of our model are the basis of a worthwhile thought experiment for any union leader in the year 2011. We are an organization that operates with three important points of emphasis:
• An Emphasis on the New Majority
• An Emphasis on High-Performers
• An Emphasis on Solutions-Oriented Teachers

Oftentimes, I hear from union leaders that they are trying to orient their locals in a similar way and are wrestling with what that orientation would look like in practice. For what it's worth, here are my thoughts on the matter.

What would it mean to put an emphasis on the New Majority? After almost a half-century of baby-boomers as the dominant demographic in the teaching force, we've reached a tipping point whereby those with fewer than ten years classroom experience are now the majority in teaching. These are the teachers who are the future of the profession. These are the teachers who will determine whether the union will remain a force. Yet, they are wildly underrepresented in holding union offices and participating in union activities. Successfully getting newer teachers involved in the union would almost certainly lead to challenging debates within union halls. Union leaders must judge for themselves whether they are up for that challenge and what the future might hold if they are not.

What would it mean to put an emphasis on high-performers? To start, this bias would lead to a serious, quantified look at the proportion of time the union as an organization spends on (A) grievances and the due process rights of those with questionable records relative to (B) cultivating leadership and growth opportunities for others in the teaching force. That would open up a conversation about whether the organization could put more time and effort into those in category B. Quite possibly, the answer would be no. There may be no room to shift focus to better address the interests of high-performers. All of the other things the union does may be too important. In that case, though, the natural next question would be: how might the union benefit from an outside partner like Teach Plus to address an unmet need among an important subset of teachers?

What would it mean to put an emphasis on solutions-oriented teachers? At Teach Plus, we often hear from young teachers that they see their union as--to borrow a phrase that doesn't fit exactly--the party of "no." They see a need for reform** but don't identify their union as taking a leadership role in reform. In many cases, this reputation is undeserved. In every city where Teach Plus has had a role in helping young teachers get involved in policy decisions, it has been with the collaboration of the union. Yet, this impression is pervasive. How do we get to a place where the accomplishments of the AFT Innovation Fund and the NEA's efforts to close the achievement gap are more visible than the negative stereotype of the ever-complaining teacher down the hall who is very active in the union? I don't know; but I know Teach Plus has been able to build that type of community on a small scale.

The field of education and the role of the union are at a point of transformation. Engagement among young teachers in the policy decisions that affect their classrooms is too low. At Teach Plus, we're challenging that lack of engagement in a variety of ways, including encouraging teachers to get involved in their unions and to pursue union leadership. At the same time, all of our programs begin from the premise that differences in teacher effectiveness exist and that excellence should be celebrated and rewarded. I like to think what we're doing will build a stronger union that prioritizes the needs of 21st century professionals and their students...but imagine others may have a different point of view.

*No, we haven't found a magic bullet way to perfectly identify effective teachers, but we do believe variations in effectiveness exist, matter, and should be acted on. We've been refining our teacher selection processes since 2007 and have tried to learn carefully from over 1,000 applications to our leadership programs.

**Of course, reform means different things to different people.

--Celine Coggins

Posted by Celine Coggins at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend