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The Richardson Independent School District in Texas churned out some unbelievably impressive results on its recent teacher evaluation scores — in fact, they performed so well that reporter Jeffrey Weiss of The Dallas Morning News found himself curious, with a hint of suspicion.

The district used a program dubbed the Professional Development and Appraisal System for its evaluations. The PDAS uses eight "domains" to group teachers into four categories: Exceeds expectations, proficient, below expectations, and unsatisfactory.

Things got a bit fishy for Weiss when he began breaking down the data on a school-by-school basis. Within his data, which encapsulated results from 52 schools and 2,346 teachers, only two teachers were considered “unsatisfactory” in any of the eight domains. At most, 41 teachers in the entire district ranked below “proficient” in any domain — and even fewer ranked below “proficient” in domains more closely related to instruction. Twenty-three schools had no teachers ranked below “proficient” in any category.

“These are pretty good results, to be sure,” Weiss reflected, “But are they realistic results? RISD has a good reputation, which doesn't happen unless the teachers are pretty good.”

His post carried on with a final question: “Based on your experience, are the teachers of RISD this good? And for you teachers: Do you think this evaluation system is fair and accurate?

(Hat tip: ASCD SmartBrief)

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After laying off nearly 400 teachers in June, the Broward County, Fla., school system is now looking to fill dozens of positions, according to The Miami Herald.

At the end of June, 394 teachers were laid off due to budget cuts and low enrollment levels. The majority were elementary teachers who were in their first years of teaching in the school system. According to Broward Schools Superintendent Jim Notter, most of the 89 new positions cannot be filled by these recently laid-off teachers because of lack of certification or qualification requirements.

``It's just a huge slap in the face of all those teachers,'' said Broward Teacher Union President Pat Santeramo.

Union officials say they want the district to move currently employed teachers who are qualified into the open positions, thus opening up positions for the recently laid-off teachers.

The open positions vary from high school math and science teachers to dance, automotive technology and foreign language instructors.

Broward County school board members promised to rehire as many as teachers as possible the week after the June layoffs. So far, 133 teachers have been rehired and 18 have cut ties with the school district. The schools have also used their federal stimulus funding to hire 42 teachers as academic coaches.

Posted by Rebecca Kern at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Even as school districts nationwide continue to grapple with budget shortfalls and spending cuts, they are seeing a significant jump in federal funds for classroom technology, according to the Wall Street Journal.

For some observers, that resource breakdown is problematic. The technology funds—available to schools through the U.S. Education Department’s Enhancing Education Through Technology Program—can be applied strictly to technology expenses and development. That means they cannot be used to avert teacher layoffs, for example, or to save student after-school programs.

President Obama recently revived the EETT program, which came into existence in 2002 as part of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law — with a $650 million boost for the next two years. States will start to receive that money this week.

While school districts that have switched to high-tech instruction models boast early reports of higher achievement across the board—from test scores to graduation rates and college attendance—some remain skeptical whether this allocation of funds matches schools’ current needs.

“There’s a disconnect,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union. “People are facing huge cuts in their core programs. Technology can’t substitute for music or art programs.”

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 3:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Parents in school districts across the country have taken to raising funds to help cover school supplies, maintain programs, and even save teachers’ jobs that are being cut by financially-strapped school districts, according to The Seattle Times.

In the Tacoma, Wash. school district, parents of kindergarteners at Lowell Elementary raised $16,000 in order to save the jobs of three teacher’s aides. Meanwhile, in New York City, parent groups raised enough money to hire 200 teachers and aides this past year.

Despite its good intentions, however, parent fundraising has its drawbacks.

Some observers worry that it can widen the gap between rich and poor school systems, shortchanging schools with primarily low-income families who can’t afford to contribute to the schools. Additionally, the national Parent Teacher Association fears that school systems may become dependent on parents fundraising for teacher salaries and therefore encourages groups to get involved in lobbying state lawmakers instead.

"It is commendable that parents are so dedicated to quality education for every student that they raise money to pay for teachers and other necessary resources,” said Bill Raabe, director of collective bargaining for the National Education Association. “Yet it is deplorable that any group has to raise money to fund basic resources we know students need to succeed."

Posted by Rebecca Kern at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Orlando, 49 schools in 12 school districts find themselves with some explaining to do, as elementary students continued to use memorized phrases and sentences on state-administered writing exams, despite the best efforts from the Florida Department of Education.

The state Department of Education discovered a great deal of “template writing” while reading through the state-administered tests to Floridian students in grades 4, 8 and 10. Common examples from the 4th grade essays include, "Poof! Now I'm in dragon land," "one quintessential, supersonic day," and "a kaleidoscope of colors encircled me."

Only four schools were flagged last year, marking an alarming rise this year in the use of memorized phrases. The jump could be due to the Department of Education urging scorers to be on the lookout for certain phrases.

The department sent out a letter last Wednesday from Victoria Ash, chief of the department's Bureau of K-12 Assessment, informing districts that they would be "beginning policy discussions ... to determine appropriate consequences when template writing is identified during scoring."

The department did spare the kids, however, claiming that rote memorization was not technically cheating and that they would grade the kids’ essays based on merit.

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes who recently passed away, would always admit that his 30 years as a teacher were what made him a strong writer, The New York Times reported.

In his third memoir Teacher Man, he wrote about teaching in New York City's public schools: “Instead of teaching, I told stories. ... They thought I was teaching. I thought I was teaching. I was learning.”

McCourt first taught in 1958, at age 28, at Ralph R. McKee Vocational High School in Staten Island and then taught from 1972 to 1987 at Manhattan’s selective Stuyvesant High School. His teaching technique was based on telling stories as he said that literature was nothing more than storytelling.

McCourt became known at Stuyvesant as the go-to guy for writing. “If you were at the school and you wanted to write, you went to meet McCourt,” said author David Lipsky. “It wasn’t ‘get a computer.’ It wasn’t ‘go read the complete works of J. D. Salinger.’ It was one word: McCourt.”

McCourt’s storytelling and writing instruction seemed to rub off on his students as many became writers.

“We all thought, ‘He’s such a genius, what’s he doing just teaching us?’” said Susan Jane Gilman, a former student who has published two memoirs. “Everybody thought he was destined for bigger and better things. And when he became a global phenomenon, we felt it was justice.”

Update July 30, 2009: Sports writer Peter King makes space in this weekly NFL news column to share a reader's reflection on being a student in McCourt's class.

Photo by Mary Altaffer/AP-File

Posted by Rebecca Kern at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This summer, Matthew Robson, a 15-year-old Londoner, was awarded a two-week internship at Morgan Stanley, after his mother had a brief conversation with a senior analyst about her son’s difficulty finding real-life work experience, according to the TimesOnline.

The 15-year-old was put to work in the bank’s media and internet research department where he wrote How Teenagers Consume Media, a report that has caused a sensation among fund managers, CEOs, and analysts in Tokyo, London, and on Wall Street. The report, which Matthew says reflects the collective views of about 300 teenagers, appears to spell doom and gloom for print and traditional media. He said teens don’t read newspapers or listen to the radio because they can access this media more easily on the Web. Robson also claims that “teens don’t use Twitter,” adding that it appeals to an older crowd.

Edward Hill-Wood, Robson’s Morgan Stanley supervisor said the report proved to be “one of the clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen. So we published it.”

Trisha Jaffe, Robson’s teacher at Kidbrooke School, in the English town of Greenwich, said she was “not at all surprised” at her ambitious student’s success with the report. “He’s a very reflective young man,” she added.

Posted by Rebecca Kern at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Students at Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s alma mater in the Bronx, Blessed Sacrament School, which she attended from kindergarten through 8th grade, reflected on the school’s most famous alum in an article in the New York Times this week.

Recently, students have been talking about their future career goals, as the school’s most famous graduate could be the next Supreme Court justice. One student said she wanted to be a doctor, another a pharmacist, and a third was torn between the fields of science and aerospace. Branaijah Melvin, an 11-year-old who is one of 30 students attending summer school at Blessed Sacrament, imagines, “[Sotomayor] could have painted like me when she was my age.”

More than 40 years since Sonia Sotomayor graduated, Blessed Sacrament’s Bronx neighborhood is a place where graffiti and barbed wire have become commonplace and where students often come from public housing (with an average household income of $22,728).

As Judge Sotomayor faced congressional hearings this week, Branaijah had her own question about the former Blessed Sacrament student. Branajiah said, “Sometimes I think, ‘What if I’m sitting at the same desk she sat in?’”

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As a result of budget cuts in the ongoing economic crisis, a growing number of teachers across Minnesota are out of work and unable to find other jobs in education, according to a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The statewide teachers’ union, Education Minnesota, predicts between 500 and 800 teachers lost their jobs in June upon the completion of their contracts. The teacher supply in Minnesota massively overwhelms the demand, as the state grants around 10,000 new teacher’s licenses each year while only 1,500 teachers annually decide to retire.

The agreement between the schools and the teachers’ union necessitates the first layoffs coming from the pool of untenured teachers, in a state where teachers attain tenure by working in a district for three years. This means that fresh, new faces in Minnesota's teaching pool may be forced out of jobs, leaving older teaching staffs intact.

Math, science, and special education, however, are three areas in which teachers are experiencing a reprieve. Jessica Bro is a math teacher in Oakdale who lost her job in May and found a new teaching job before school let out for summer. She said, "I went into math for the security of it. Everybody needs a math and science teacher. You're basically guaranteed a job."

Posted by Bryan Toporek at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

While Michael Jackson will be remembered as the “King of Pop” to millions, few people will recall Jackson’s early school days as well as Felicia Childress, his Garrett Elementary kindergarten teacher in Gary, Ind. Childress recounted some of her fond memories of Jackson’s youth in an ABC 7 News video.

The 92-year old teacher said that she remembers Jackson as a happy kindergartener who—presaging his later life— was often the center of attention in the classroom.

She also noted that young Jackson had a slight speech impediment, common among many children.

"Michael had this stammer, but when he sang he would not miss a note and his pitch was perfect. He must have had an excellent ear because his little voice was just right on tune," Childress said.

Childress said that, unlike other people in Jackson’s life, as his teacher, she was sad when he reached super-stardom because she thought he missed out on important developmental stages of his childhood.

“He didn’t have time to be a child. He just had to leave all of that behind and go to the serious part of life. That really bothered me because I felt that that’s the way you learn about your relationships—[it’s] how you play,” she recalled.

Posted by Rebecca Kern at 4:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new study on teacher turnover found that teachers often leave the profession due to tensions with school officials and fellow educators over differing teaching philosophies and school policies, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Nationwide, one third of the teachers leave the profession within their first three years, and by the end of five years, only 40 to 50 percent of the teachers remain.

Four researchers at Georgia Southern University interviewed 134 teachers at a large metropolitan elementary school to study teacher turnover. One unique aspect of the study was that it was suggested by the schools’ teachers, who wanted to understand why so many of their colleagues have left, according to says Barbara Meyers, chair of the GSU Department of Early Childhood Education.

The teachers who remained said they did so due to close relationships with fellow teachers and administrators, the diverse student body, and the academic environment.
The teachers who left the school, on the other hand, were often those who challenged the status quo and were dubbed “troublemakers,” explained Brian Lack, one of the GSU researchers.

“People who want to bring radical forms of change are often the ones who are driven out,” he said.

Many reform models call on the principals to change the status quo, but Lack said this was not the case in the study.

“What you see is stuff coming down from the board of education and the county offices just being accepted as the status quo,” Lack said

Posted by Rebecca Kern at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Our sister publication Digital Directions, as part of its coverage of the National Educational Computing Conference this week in D.C., provides this video clip of University of Michigan professor Elliot Soloway discussing the need for the effective use of technology in the classroom. Soloway believes that schools are failing to keep up with the transition from the industrial age to the era of "the knowledge worker" who relies exclusively on mobile devices. Because computers are just an add-on in schools, he argues, we are selling students short.

Elliot Soloway: Ed-Tech Classroom Climate from Education Week on Vimeo.

Incidentally, Soloway will be one of our guests on July 23rd, 4 pm ET, for our webinar, Cellphones as Instructional Tools. Join us.

Posted by Elizabeth Rich at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Forty-one teachers from Illinois recently got a lesson in how to teach agriculture—straight from the farm. Teachers from DuPage County, Ill., participated in a four-day course on farming and food production in a partnership program between Aurora University and the DuPage County Farm Bureau, according to the Chicago Tribune. Teachers can receive graduate-level credit for the course if they create two lesson plans.

Upon completing the course, educators are encouraged to introduce students to agriculture careers by incorporating the farming lessons into math, science, social studies, and language arts classes. "There are so many things our kids in the suburbs don't know about how we get food on the table," said Gail Sanders, an 8th grade teacher who took the course. She said that most of her students had never seen a strawberry plant when she took one to class last spring and she hopes to change this.

Teachers learned about robotic milking systems and visited a company that milks cows from a carousel-like ride. Other teachers traveled to a hog farm (where 75-80 piglets are born a week) to visit with hours-old piglets and learn about confinement issues for farm animals.

DuPage County Farm Bureau's Curtis Miller, who teaches the course, said, “If teachers can find a way to bring speakers and visitors into their classroom, and incorporate this into their existing curriculum, they can impact so many students per year."

Posted by Rebecca Kern at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)