December 2011 Archives

Just in case you didn't get enough with our list of EdWeek's top ten teacher stories for 2011, all scrupulously reported by yours truly, I'm presenting here a list of the most-read blog items at Teacher Beat for the 2011 year.

Several of these rivaled "full" EdWeek stories in popularity, so getting on this list is nothing to sneeze at.

Teach For America, as always, shows up several times, as does our very popular coverage of the National Education Association's convention. In an ironic twist of fate, the not-very-PR-friendly soap opera between those two organizations also showed up.

Items on professional development also cracked the top ten list twice, and for once I have a hunch as to why. The word must be out that much of what passes these days for on-the-job training is ineffectual, and readers are hungry for information about what they can do to improve this important aspect of the profession.

Without further ado, here's the list:

1. TFA Selection Criteria Linked to Student Gains:
Say what you will about TFA, it's hard to dispute that the organization has learned some interesting things about recruiting strategies—findings that may even influence the accreditation process for teacher education.

2. NEA Delegates Take Swipe at TFA & 10: Teach For America Elaborates on its Response to NEA Criticism:
NEA delegates took a hardline stance against the alternative-route program during the union's annual meeting; TFA wrote to its constituents shortly after, offering its take. In the meantime, both NEA President Dennis Van Roekel and TFA head Wendy Kopp seem eager to end this kind of back-and-forth stuff. (After having to write about various permutations of this battle for the better part of six years, you can count me right behind them.)

3. State Case Studies Offer Professional-Development Insights.
The study suggests, though can't prove conclusively, that a handful of states do better by their teachers in offering professional development.

4. Common Standards Supports for Teachers Eyed:
Just as with professional development, readers want to know how to get teachers on board with the fewer, clearer, higher expectations called for in the common standards. Expect more coverage of this topic from me and common-standards whiz Catherine Gewertz in 2012.

5. NEA Adopts Resolution Criticizing Arne Duncan:
NEA's representative assembly passes a barn-burner of an item listing 13 different criticisms of the U.S. Secretary of Education. Shortly thereafter, the union pledged its support for his boss, President Obama, for the 2012 presidential election. Translation: Plenty of hold-your-nose voting next fall by teachers.

6. Teacher Coaching Boosts Secondary Scores:
The second PD item to make this list, a study shows that coaching linked to a teaching framework can boost student achievement. It's one of only a few studies that can claim to make this link.

7. Effectiveness Drops in Early-Career Teachers' Departure Year:
This fascinating study showed that teaching performance tended to drop off among those early-career teachers' final year, compared to teachers who stayed in the profession. It generated a lot of comments—thoughtful, nasty and everything in between. Read those, too.

8. Teachers Paid Less in Higher-Minority Districts:
This is one of two studies the U.S. Department of Education has released to push its agenda on the salary comparability issue.

9. NEA Passes Teacher Evaluation Resolution, With a Catch-22 On Test Scores
NEA formally entered the teacher-evaluation discussion with this salvo, though it insists current tests are not high-quality enough to be used in reviews of teachers.

11. States' Education Schools Backing Out of NCTQ Review:
Yes, I'm sneaking in an 11th item! Many public education schools (and private ones, too) are not participating voluntarily in a review of every education school that is being conducted by the National Council on Teacher Quality. It promises to remain a hot teacher-education story in 2012, when the review is due out.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 1:49 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Now that Congress has completed its fiscal 2012 spending bill, let's see what's what on the teacher-quality front.

(If you want an overview on the bill, check out colleague Alyson Klein's great scene-setter; at Curriculum Matters, Erik Robelen has more on the literacy, civics, and STEM programs.)

• Several of the teacher programs were effectively flat-funded at the same level as in fiscal 2011, including the $2.5 billion state teacher-quality grants, otherwise known as Title II-A.

• The Teacher Incentive Fund, which helps states and districts develop differentiated- compensation systems, took the biggest hit, dropping from $400 million to $300 million. The Education Department had made major changes to this program to emphasize the importance of aligning teacher evaluation to the new pay programs, and officials recently indicated they want to make yet more changes.

• Transition to Teaching, a program supporting career-changers to enter the profession, dropped from $41 million to $26 million.

• The Teacher Quality Partnership grant program, which doles out grants to universities, districts, and nonprofits to revamp teacher training and establish teacher-residency programs, was flat funded at $43 million. There was quite a bit of concern among teacher colleges earlier this year when the president's budget proposed zeroing out the program, which would have prevented existing grantees from receiving continuation funding.

• The Obama administration got nowhere in its bid to restructure the teacher-quality programs into three new competitive programs. It has made this a core proposal in its budget request for several years running.

UPDATED: I'm told the bill also contains a set-aside from Title II to fund the Supporting Effective Educator Development grant program. Under SEED, some of the entities that lost federal funding, like the National Writing Project and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, can compete. More on that competition here.

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A new project seeks to extend the number of students that the most effective teachers reach through a number of redesigns of the profession and the school schedule.

The initiative, run by the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based consulting group Public Impact, will be supported by $1 million in funding from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Both organizations also provide support to Education Week.)

Public Impact will seek five "sites"—school districts, states, or charter-management organizations—to pilot new prototypes and then scale them up. The models are all fairly complex, so check out this summary of what they might look like.

One idea, for instance, is to allow those teachers who are particularly good to take on more students—perhaps 25 percent more—in exchange for higher pay. (Other classes would stay the same size.) Other ideas include a "time-technology swap" in which students have both live and digital learning; in the latter example, a teacher might have more than 30 students, but they'd be rotated in two groups, so a teacher would have a smaller group to work with at any given time.

The initiative builds on some of the themes of a report issued in 2010 by Public Impact's Bryan and Emily Hassel.That report, in essence, argued that efforts to recruit more promising teacher-candidates, dismiss low performers, and reduce turnover of effective teachers, while important, still wouldn't be enough to ensure that all students have contact with effective teachers—those who make more than a year's worth of progress with their students. The report said that models to extend the reach of the top quartile of teachers should also be considered.

The initiative will have an advisory team staffed by foundation officials, representatives from several alternative-route teaching programs, and experts on school budgeting and use of time.

The five sites will likely be selected next spring.

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I'm traveling home for the holidays, and while posting will continue next week, it's likely to be somewhat irregular between now and January.

So if you are wondering to yourself, "Wherever is Stephen?", don't fret. I'm just decking halls and trying to keep tabs on all those partridges in pear trees, lords-a-leaping, and swans-a-swimming. Or something like that.

As always, thanks for joining me, and my warmest wishes to you for the holidays.

Stephen

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Teacher-training group TNTP plans to incorporate a student-feedback measure into the system it's developing to evaluate its teachers, becoming one of the first organizations in the nation to use such measures formally.

Though the conversation about teacher evaluation has been dominated by talk of "value added" measures and systems for observing classroom practice, student surveys have also been identified as a promising measure. For instance, preliminary results from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching project have found a positive relationship between teachers who are identified by students as being especially good at conveying and explaining content and teachers' value-added growth measures. (The Gates Foundation provides support to the Education Week; the newspaper maintains sole editorial control.)

Surveys don't appear to be widespread in teacher evaluation at the moment, though there is certainly some interest: Hawaii has promised to pilot them as part of its Race to the Top win. In Los Angeles, Superintendent John Deasy wrote in an op-ed that he envisions including them in a new evaluation system. (The district hasn't yet reached an agreement with its teachers' union about evaluations.)

TNTP, formerly the New Teacher Project—it recently announced it'll go by its initials, to the consternation of education reporters everywhere whose editors are going to ask them to spell it out anyway—is including the surveys as part of its winning bid in the federal i3 competition.

The project will assess teachers and require them to be effective before they're granted a certification. The surveys will be one of a variety of measures, including the completion of coursework, feedback from principals, and growth in student achievement.

To incorporate and administer the surveys, TNTP is working with YouthTruth, a project by the San Francisco-based Center for Effective Philanthropy. YouthTruth has been engaged in survey work since 2008, and by the end of the year will have surveyed some 100,000 students, its vice president, Valerie Threlfall, told me.

YouthTruth's work has been focused at the school-building level; the TNTP project will bring it a notch further down, to the individual teacher level.

As for the details of the survey questions, YouthTruth will use some of the items studied in the Gates MET research, which are themselves based on Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson's Tripod Project. The organization will also supplement these with some questions of its own on students' relationships with teachers and the rigor of classes and instruction.

Have you heard of any other districts or nonprofits looking at student surveys? Write a note in the comments section and let us all know.

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There's always a lot of interest among Education Week readers in the topic of "formative assessment." And despite some confusion over the research, there is at least general recognition that this aspect of teaching and learning has a lot of promise. So how on earth do we get teachers embodying the practice of formative assessment?

It's a tough question that a few testing experts tried to tackle in a research forum held this afternoon in Washington by ETS, the nonprofit research and test-publishing organization. The forum focused on the obstacles standing in the door to preparing teachers to embody formative-assessment techniques, especially with the Common Core State Standards train approaching.

Let's back up a minute here to make sure we're all on the same page regarding formative assessment, a term about which there's a lot of debate. Formative assessment is probably better described as a cycle of instruction, immediate data-gathering to collect feedback that helps the teacher readjust instruction, and the sharing of that feedback so students themselves are engaged in the learning process.

It was clear from today's forum that, according to the experts, you can't do formative assessment on the fly: The technique has has to be planned and executed purposefully as part of a lesson using a variety of strategies (i.e., "entry tickets," questioning). Nor are they "interim" or "benchmark" assessments, which some districts give every few weeks.

But what are today's teachers actually learning about the process? That was a question that Caroline Wylie, a research scientist in the R&D division of ETS, had on her mind. To find out, she and colleagues looked at online materials, such as course descriptions and syllabi, from 22 teacher education programs in New Jersey.

"We saw that it was a fairly uneven landscape," Ms. Wylie said at the forum.

Classes taught ranged from "Assessment and Measurement for Teachers" to "Curriculum, Evaluation, and the Learner" to the seemingly overstuffed "Integrating Elementary Curriculum & Assessment for Equity & Diversity."

Ms. Wylie said she found only three instances in which formative assessment was specifically mentioned. And she added that what was taught in these classes seemed to vary based on whether a student was taking an undergraduate or graduate education course. Some of the graduate courses, for instance, were much more about the technical nature of the assessments rather than their place in teaching and learning.

It is particularly interesting to cross-reference this observation in light of the shift in teacher-training demographics. The production of education bachelor's degrees in this country has fallen since the 1970s, but the number of master's degrees has rapidly increased since then. And one of the criticisms of graduate programs, especially the Ed.D., has been a vague sense of purpose about whether they are supposed to produce researchers, practitioners, or administrators.

Second, Ms. Wylie described the challenges on the professional-development front, for practicing teachers. The best professional-development research shows that teachers need sustained contact hours (between 30 and 100) of training before altering their practices. So, she did a back-of-the envelope calculation about how much time it would take to implement 50 hours of formative-assessment training over the course of a school year.

Again, the results were not encouraging: Teachers would need about six hours a month, for eight months, which amounts to one early-close afternoon a month plus two additional hours. (Good luck with that in this economy.)

And finally, Ms. Wylie summarized, the assessment culture in the United States is not necessarily conducive to this process. In this day and age of high-stakes testing, teachers can feel stressed about the end-of-year tests, and a process that by its definition requires reteaching and altering plans may not work with tightly written pacing guidelines and so forth, she surmised.

From there, Margaret Heritage, assistant director for professional development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, at UCLA, outlined the content support teachers will need to embody formative-assessment practice.

They'll need to have much deeper content- and pedagogical-content knowledge so as to understand how students think and develop their skills in each discipline and across disciplines; to understand common errors and misperceptions; and to be able to integrate formative assessment in the "rhythm" of teaching and learning, Ms. Heritage said.

And this kind of support is not something you can package up and give to a school district, she said.

"I think we spend too much time having teachers implement programs, and not enough time studying practices, about how teachers make and use judgments about learning," she said.

For those involved in the common-core effort, the implications of these scholars' cautions are, obviously, many. Many of them are summed up in a paper Ms. Heritage wrote not long ago warning about the possibility of the assessment consortia misunderstanding the concept and missing an opportunity to put this practice on the policy radar screen.

Of the two assessment consortia, the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, is not developing formative-assessment resources as part of its federal grant. The other consortium, known as SMARTER Balanced, is.

The speakers' bottom line: If teachers are to seize the potential of formative assessment, it's time to think about the core knowledge preservice teachers need, the format and structure of professional development that will help support interpretation and action, and how the CCSS plays into those discussions.

I'll admit this is one heck of a lot to think about. Comments section is open for your ideas!

Posted by Stephen Sawchuk at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

By guest blogger Liana Heitin

A National Education Association commission issued a report today with specific recommendations for upping pre-service requirements, establishing career paths for teachers, and developing new evaluation systems.

The commission, assembled last summer by NEA President Dennis Van Roekel, was charged with examining options and making recommendations about how to help the union promote effective teaching practices.

At a press event this morning, Van Roekel promised that his union would begin a number of new initiatives based on the commission's findings—though how much sway the pronouncement will have on state and local affiliates has yet to be determined.

In a prepared statement, Van Roekel said NEA will support national standards for teacher preparation and licensing. All teacher candidates should have one full year of teaching residency, and pass a performance-based assessment before entering the classroom.

The NEA has supported teacher residency programs in the past, but has not specifically called for all teacher education programs to embrace them. It has long spoken out against alternative-certification routes that permit teachers to learn on the job without a supervised student-teaching experience.

Van Roekel called specifically for the implementation of 50 new residency programs and adoption of performance assessments in at least 10 state licensure systems.

Van Roekel also said NEA would support a career ladder for teachers, with steps including Novice, Professional, and Master Teacher. Those in leadership roles would be evaluated less frequently and earn a higher salary in exchange for working longer hours, mentoring colleagues, and taking on more challenging teaching assignments. In addition, Van Roekel said NEA will help interested affiliates adopt peer-assistance and -review teacher evaluation programs.

Career ladders are permissible under NEA policies, but for a decade, the union opposed nearly all differentiated-compensation programs. That prohibition, listed in resolution F-10, was removed during the union's Representative Assembly in 2011.

The resolution still opposes linking teacher evaluation to additional compensation. One of the recommendations in the Commission's report suggests linking peer review to higher salaries; it was not immediately clear whether the national union will seek to alter this resolution.

Van Roekel's statement did not mention the role of test scores in teacher evaluations. At its Representative Assembly in 2011, the union opened the door to linking the two, but said current tests are not high-quality enough.

The commission report, meanwhile, says teacher should be able to produce student learning outcomes as measured by "classroom, school, district, or state assessments" as evidence of their effectiveness.

Though billed as an independent body, many of the 21 educators and academics chosen to sit on the commission have held leadership positions within NEA affiliates. That said, the commission was provided assistance by an advisory committee, including Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, and Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Both of them have disputed NEA's positions on teacher policy in the past.

Stephen Sawchuk contributed.
This post originally appeared on Teacher magazine's Teaching Now blog.

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A nonprofit body set up by the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers has been granted the authority to charter schools, in what's apparently the first such arrangement of its kind in the nation.

An charter authorizer, let's be clear, is not the same thing as a charter-management organization. It does not act as management or get involved in the operations of such a school. Its main goal is to approve the new schools to open, to monitor them, and to shut them down if necessary if they fail to meet academic or financial benchmarks.

Minnesota's charter school law was updated and strengthened in 2009 (see section 41 in this link). The revisions give the state more flexibility to cut ties with an authorizer if it's not meeting its obligations.

Now, to answer the question I'm sure you have: No, the organization won't be able to give preferential treatment to schools whose staff want to organize. But authorizing schools with good teacher-management relations appears to be a priority of the body, which is named the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools.

"The guild believes that strong partnerships between labor and management foster a high-performing school culture; the guild is committed to authorizing schools that give teachers a meaningful voice," a statement from the guild reads.

(And, one presumes, any school staff that want to authorize will certainly know where to look.)

The idea is the brainchild of MFT President Lynn Nordgren, and her affiliate received a grant from AFT's Innovation Fund to set up the new nonprofit. She'll sit on the guild's board, along with a variety of other folks from business, the city department of education, and labor organizations.

We'll be waiting impatiently to see what kinds of schools the guild authorizes, and whether their teachers choose to organize.

Coming up with new ways of managing and using teacher expertise, after all, isn't an easy job: A separate report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education, also out today, finds that despite more flexibility in some areas, like work hours, unionized charter schools often contain the same kinds of step-and-lane pay scales, due process, and grievance procedures (though expedited) as those in public schools.

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Educators 4 Excellence, a New York City-based group of reform-minded teachers, has expanded its operations to begin a new chapter of activist teachers in Los Angeles.

Over 200 teachers have already signed the E4E declaration of principles, the Wall Street Journal reports.

E4E is one of several new teacher-advocacy groups—both inside and outside of teachers' unions—that have sprung up recently, as I reported recently in an Education Week story and this blog post.

Many of these groups, E4E among them, have been supported by philanthropies, which has led to some charges that they're really "astroturf" groups. (The groups dispute this label.)

There are quite a few of these groups now active in Los Angeles, including the NewTLA union caucus and a separate group that has pushed the local teachers' union to act on evaluations.

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