Posts filed under ‘Issues and Ideas’
Teaching in Never Never Land
Why do educators think that a program based on good intentions and an endless stream of New Heroes is sustainable? Like Peter Pan, each generation of New Heroes will never give up, they’ll never get old…and they will gather in large masses and clap until their dream comes back to life.
Every night I close my Twitter window after getting a glimpse of the latest pep rally of educators who are trying to stop the closing of a school, to put off a measure of accountability, or to prevent the end of funding for a good program. Nowhere do you hear anyone suggest, “I know what we should have done to save that school,”…”We should just do it – take the test and move on to teaching,”…or “That program was good enough to become a priority within our general fund.”
As new teachers become yesterday’s new kids on the block and then veterans, we stop noticing them. They fade to gray and must sustain themselves. And anyone who proposes training in a balanced life style during the school year can no longer be part of the solution. Teachers whose students do well on standardized tests are assumed to be cheating, or worse…teaching to the test. The fact that well-educated children rarely sweat the tests is irrelevant. Skilled general management is similarly suspect. Administrators offer teachers privileged peers as role models in lieu of individual feedback and motivation. Meanwhile, millions of dollars’ worth of executive talent is devoted to grant proposals for nickel and dime awards; because Special Money is better…regular dollars are always over-committed to something that only the school finance dude really understands.
Yet we are surprised when the adults act like children and pirates become the anti-heroes who would bring grown-up values to a vital milieu. We love the story. We also love Peter, Wendy, Tinker Bell, and even Hook. So why did we all grow up to be Smees?
PS, thank you, Hanna Claerbout, for your brilliant dancing as Wendy and your grandmother, Diane, who shared your review and inspired this post.
Reading for Success by 3rd Grade
To hold back or not to hold back…that is the question? Maybe it is, if you are caught up in the trap of binary debate over 3rd grade retention. It is irresistible to enter an argument with adorable children, a high-stakes reading test, and studies that would suggest that 3rd grade is second only to kindergarten in determining lifetime earnings for every citizen on the planet. But we are missing the point. We look back with regret instead of planning for success from Day 1.
Why is it that the dialogue around children who fail does not seem to lead directly to failure prevention? A child who cannot read well by the end of 3rd grade has not been able to read for four years. During kindergarten, that child was the norm, but there was a need for intervention by the end of the 1st grade. Something was not working and should have been changed and changed again through 2nd and 3rd grades until the child was a reader.
One of my sisters – a fabulous 1st grade teacher – has often seemed like my most forgiving advocate in life. It was something I took for granted without knowing why until well into adulthood when she joked about how I had taught her to read. Apparently, she had admitted to me that she couldn’t read one day toward the end of 1st grade. As a 3rd grader, I was horrified and told her to sit down and I would show her how it was done. We worked together at home for a few weeks, which I had totally forgotten over the years. One day during class transition, she decided she was ready. She got up and joined a reading group. The teacher tried to send her back to the non-readers’ group, telling her, “Now, you know you can’t read.” My little sister assured her, “Oh yes I can,” and refused to back down. Her teacher relented and let her show everyone how she could “read.” The class laughed, but the teacher was dumbstruck as a very brave little girl opened a book and read.
That story should be anachronistic, but thirty-five years later another sister was advised by a friend to get her child out of a school because of reading. The friend worked as an aid in a 1st grade classroom. She had observed with dismay as my niece and another child in the classroom were left behind. Every day when the reading groups formed, they just stayed at their desks and looked sad. No one intervened. My niece would continue to struggle in various schools for the next five years until my sister moved her family to another county to get access to a district with a good reputation in Special Education. During 6th grade, a reading specialist assessed her reading at a grade level of 2.3. She worked with her for 18 months and raised that to 6.8 before she entered 8th grade. By 9th grade she was reading well and earning a B in Latin. She is entering college in the fall and plans to become a teacher.
Last year, it happened again. A young family member was having behavior problems, getting into fights. He had been the sweetest, most enthusiastic kid. He was finishing 2nd grade with low reading scores. Again, a family moved and the new school was a better fit. Reading was within his reach, and the young man has recovered his confidence and his good nature. But, like his cousin and his aunt, he had been treated to low expectations and interventions only for the symptoms of the problem in primary grades.
Yes, I come from a family of kids who tend to struggle verbally. However, my unrelated practice as a special educator has introduced me to far too many students who entered high school with 2nd to 4th grade reading skills. As a math teacher, I would pre-teach vocabulary and accommodate reading issues with word problems. I loved to build visual models as concrete bridges to abstract concepts. But I worried about my students’ futures as adults trying to earn a living and have families with such barriers to success.
On a hopeful note, some of the lowest performers had picked up at least a couple of grade levels in reading by the end of high school. Ironically, this was during the early years of high stakes testing. Under pressure, the system was able to deliver 2-3 grade levels of progress in 4 years. Unfortunately, there had only been a year or two of progress toward grade level in the previous 6-8 years. What had happened?
My SchoolsRetooled world view mentions my belief in miracles in Special Education. However, a truer translation would suggest that those beneficiaries of the miracles were actually children with far more ability than at least some of the adults in charge of their educations had expected. A missed intervention by 3rd grade can make a middle or high school special educator seem like a wizard. But I don’t really want the heroics; I want the best interventions in place when they still can prevent small problems from escalating into seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Update and Correction – email from my sister…
Good morning Kathleen,
I enjoyed reading your blog this morning. Its well said and to the point. I don’t mind you sharing at all. I tell my students about it every year. I tell them not to let someone else’s thoughts decide what they can do. I also tell them to take up for themselves when they need to. They are always amazed that you could teach me to read. You were actually younger. You were in second grade and I was in kindergarten, but the sentiments are the same. I should find a picture of that teacher and put her up in my room to visually remind me when I need to rethink how I’m working with my children. I bet I could get one from Fox. I may just do that. I should also post a picture of a teacher that inspired me. Thank you. You’ve given me food for thought.
Teacher Prep Needs to Lead – Not Follow
Higher education must attract talented students and prepare them for careers in their chosen fields. However, an equally important aspect of their core mission must be the genesis of new ideas and leadership in innovation. I am all for quality assurance among educators, but the current dialogue around regulation of teacher prep is the stuff of lowered expectations. How can we insist on incentives to look backward when incubation of solutions for the future is what will drive their real value-added?
Recently, I spent some time at the DesignEd Symposium learning about collaboration among Boston-area design schools. It was fascinating to explore issues of creativity, innovation, and excellence with a group of educators, students, and industry leaders. The usual issues of cost, attrition, and performance after graduation – universal themes – arose in the conversations. However, the one big takeaway for me was the need for universities to drive the process of innovation, not just deliver graduates who are career-ready. This is an important component of the mission of higher education that seems to be under-appreciated in discussions about teacher prep and quality assurance.
The Department of Education has been developing guidelines for teacher prep programs that promote quality through accountability for the performance of their graduates on the job. I remain among the skeptics when it comes to holding institutions accountable for people over whom they no longer have any direct line of authority. Beyond that, we are working with the presumption that left unregulated, the teacher prep programs will deliver substandard graduates…more lowered expectations. As if this were not enough, we add insult to injury with proposals that would leave them hamstrung by the process of constantly assessing past trainees rather than investing their resources in the future of teacher leadership.
Absent regulation, schools of education and their school district partners have long histories of collaborations. Pre-practicum experiences and student teaching allow candidates to develop relationships with future employers who will observe their performances first hand. New teacher portfolios, references, and classroom auditions offer insight for employers. There is ample opportunity for communication and feedback between teacher prep programs and school systems who hire their graduates. Neither party wants new teachers to fail. Further, creative tension between current performance and future innovations is a good thing. A visionary teacher prep program needs to be improving constantly, not waiting for instructions from their clients.
Budget limitations have created zero-sum games for most players in education. In the short-run, there will be a real loss in innovation in direct proportion to the size of the burden of teacher prep regulations. However, the long-term impact of failure to drive the industry forward will far outweigh any short-term reduction in uncertainty about the quality of new hires.
Why School Financial Statements Need an Overhaul
Wasting resources intended for our children or our retired public servants would seem to be reprehensible. Ironically, the government accounting systems that were created to protect these beneficiaries from fraudulent use of funds have become culprits. Regulatory accounting impedes analysis of the linkage between funding and mission. Further, its details are inadequate for building the robust models needed to evaluate the effectiveness of the delivery system.
Just a few of the problems with financial statements for public education…
- There is no direct link between the sources of funds and the students served.
- District accounting reflects compliance with regulations instead of education priorities. There is no standard for distribution of funds across content areas, cohorts of students, or programs (e.g., STEM).
- School-based accounting shows only a partial list of accounts. It does not capture full measure of resources invested in the educational effort or allow assessment of return on investment.
- School financial management guidelines are preoccupied with petty cash – vending machine and event cash receipts – not big picture funding of the school’s mission.
- Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) guidelines for pensions do not require accurate assessment of plan solvency.
- Lack of transparency renders fiscal oversight dependent upon translation by insiders.
Incumbents in school district finance or building leadership are specially trained in the esoteric demands of the existing regulatory model. Many have never worked outside of the industry. The echo chamber cannot be expected to identify the problems and agitate for change. Indeed, inexperience, lack of knowledge, or comfort with the status quo may conspire to obstruct progress toward a fiscal model that informs decisions without loss of integrity to regulatory intent. Nevertheless, we need change now.
Bridging the Gap…A Roadmap to Tomorrow
Play it again…this time we are going to get it right. Let’s put that stake back in the ground and make a promise to the current kindergarten class that they will be the new “no excuses” cohort. For them, there will be no achievement gap. And, because we are smarter this time around, we know we can focus on them without forgetting their older or younger brothers and sisters.
The Kindergarten-Grade Three Cluster – New World Order
Today, make the declaration for all entering kindergarten students who may be at risk that, “This ends here!” They will become the universal “no excuses” cohort across the nation for whom there will be no achievement gap.
Establish an elementary school grade cluster of K-3 with an administrative leader and dedicated team who are charged with establishing proficiency in basic literacy and numeracy by the end of grade three.
Define benchmarks for progress toward that goal and tracking systems for the whole child. Ensure alignment vertically and assign accountability clearly for academic and psychosocial SMART goals.
Plan proactively, but assess progress and remediate as necessary. Create a planning cycle of continuous plan adjustments and growth.
Offer extended day programs for play, academic support, and social skill building.
Grades Four through Eight – Catch-Up Time
Analyze data from the lower elementary grades to identify students with special needs or risk factors. Pursue academic accommodations in the general education setting. Supplement content courses with special skill-building sessions to bring entering students to a common level of proficiency.
Engage all of the children in the dialogue about their learning. Set goals with them and have them chart their own progress. Accentuate their physical, intellectual, and psychosocial growth in anticipation of puberty. Intend their self-awareness as higher level learners in upper elementary grades – especially prior to onset of puberty.
Continue to plan, defining benchmarks and accountabilities, ensuring vertical alignment, and measuring progress.
Create extended day programs that offer options for skills laboratories, homework support, and extracurricular activities. Identify students with special strengths or talents for deeper engagement and development, e.g., STEM, writing, art, or music.
High School – Rushing Toward Readiness
Engage students immediately in academics with a vision for college and career readiness. Quickly assess entering students for academic progress to date and offer remediation to bring students to a common skill base. Offer extended learning opportunities to make advanced placement accessible to a broader number of students.
Open, or continue, the dialogue with the students about their individual growth plans and goals. Integrate personal interests and objectives into discretionary assignments.
Challenge, challenge, challenge…in preparation for college.
Communicating Priorities in Education
If you want it, you have to ask for it. Let’s make it “Show Me” time to assure educators that we care about more than test scores. Ask them for details on other priorities, and support their local analyses of discretionary resource allocation in every school. In addition, update certification and facilities standards for alignment with priorities.
PreK-12 education should…
- Guarantee that every child has the foundation knowledge at each benchmark year (3, 8, 12) to continue successfully as a lifelong learner.
- Provide well-rounded instruction in English language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and technology, the arts, physical education, and foreign languages.
- Be transferable across state lines without excessive need for supplemental skill-building or redundant content.
- House the academic efforts in appropriate, safe, and efficient institutions with universal access for at-risk populations and reasonable attempts to offer flexibility to accommodate all others.
- Provide advanced placement courses in all major content areas for high achievers.
- Supplement educational efforts during out-of-school time to make it a way of life.
Accountability for baseline knowledge is well covered in the national dialogue. The Common Core is addressing the need for interstate mobility. However, there remains an information gap on additional priorities. We care but we do not document the details. It’s analogous to teaching material that never makes it into the grade book. No one believes it really matters.
The first step is to collect data on the financial investments made by every school in its content areas listed above, at-risk population, AP courses, and school facilities. In addition, information concerning enrollment, class sizes, and instructional time should be added to the attendance and graduation statistics. Participation in extracurricular activities and other out-of-school activities should be documented as well.
Tests are being given to inform us about student achievement in benchmark years. However, we do not support certification and facility standards that recognize the importance of 3rd grade. Can we make this an endpoint for classifications of professional preparation or school design?
Beyond building design for age appropriateness, what changing needs do we envision for the future of schools and their extended communities? What else do we need to track?
NCLB 50% Rule Needs a Fix
NCLB broken? Not AYP – the children cannot wait until 2055 for a growth model to see results. It’s the presumption of guilt that misses the mark. Where’s the proof that 50% of the teachers are at fault?
Schools need to turn around any of the following…
- Large numbers of students not achieving proficiency in math and literacy
- Subgroup achievement gaps
- Low graduation rates
- Poor attendance
There should be no argument that any of these indicators of failure require immediate intervention and persistent management until successfully resolved. Wildly successful schools for the privileged included. The fact that many children benefit from a school’s services does not discount the evidence of a corrupt system if it fails to include specific populations. The latter group cannot be marginalized and underserved. This is America.
That said, Americans also benefit from the presumption of innocence in the eyes of the law. Unfortunately, blame-gamers and union-busters had their way with the wording of the NCLB legislation. Teachers protected by seniority rules and union membership were presumed to be the guilty parties in the under-educating of our children. Accordingly, turnaround status for a school entitled its leadership to terminate up to 50% of the teachers. Pick 50%…any 50%…and the hands of the failed leader would be untied and success would ensue.
Teachers are very important, and every child deserves to benefit from the best instruction available. However, educators have failed to document what good teaching looks like, provide meaningful evaluations and feedback, or match motivation to the mission. It is wrong to target teachers at the whim of administrators who are postponing their own accountability. Objectivity and mutual goals must be cornerstones of education reform.
So, let’s fix this 50% rule and get on with the process of evaluating and motivating teachers with the managerial excellence we are capable of delivering.
More Musings on School Finance
School finance is definitely not mission driven and procedures reflect policy and compliance. Further, an emphasis on Federal compliance guarantees that the details do not reflect the state and local exigencies, despite the fact that most of the money and all of the children are local.
The big headings in school finance include…
- General instruction
- Student services (special ed, guidance, etc.)
- Food
- Transportation
- Facilities
These topics fit the federal funding concerns. To think and manage locally, wouldn’t it be better if the last four items were subheadings to the bigger heading of educating children at each school?
Looking at the details, or lack thereof, in the federal requirements for school district reporting…
- Details are in the sideshows, not the main event. For example, there are as many mandatory line items for the Agriculture subcategory of Vocational Education as there are for Instruction in general.
- Mandated reporting is at the LEA (Local Education Authority) or district level.
What if we changed the details to recognize priorities within the mission of education and mandated that the reporting start at the school level and build up to the LEA aggregates?
Looking at how the business management functions within school districts are managed, there is a distinct shift toward, then away from, decentralization based on school district size.
- School districts seem most like to decentralize business functions when they hit the 10,000 to 19,999 student size
- Business functions are re-centralized for districts with 20,000 students or more.
Is there a creative shift that occurs in the moderate sized districts that could be exemplary for effectiveness within functions that is lost in larger districts? Or is it that a cumbersome collection of processes can be better underwritten centrally in the largest districts?
Anyway, just a few thoughts on a topic in development. Yeah, I can be boring…but I hate wasting the money dedicated to those who are least able to defend themselves.
Mortgaging the Future of Schools
What is a healthy debt load for a school district or other education authority to carry? Taking a first glance at the funds flow and balance sheets of a handful of school districts, there seems to be a wide variation in debt and debt servicing obligations. Investments in facilities and carrying unfunded pension benefits would account for most of these liabilities. So who is minding this store?
One of the key strategies for elementary and secondary education reform is decentralized funding of students. Directing dollars to mission just makes good financial sense. So does economic analysis of the production function that supports student learning. However, a less tangible benefit of this movement would be the improved transparency of financing decisions overall. In fact, to keep the primary mission of educating children intact, we need to get a handle on prior commitments of funds that will crowd out future investments in our children.
School districts across the nation have spent money on facilities or promised generous pensions to retirees in a manner that belies the shallow pockets of finance available to them. Cities and towns generally share control over their district school budgets and building funds with school committees, composed of elected or appointed local citizens. Often, a small number of committee members drive fiscal decisions, and they tend to be tightly aligned and like-minded incumbents. The depth of insight into the long-term financial impact of politically expedient decisions cannot be underestimated.
Decisions to mortgage the future of schools cannot go unchecked. Nor can they be swept into a blanket funding formula that rewards the highly leveraged at the expense of those who have been more prudent fiscally. We need to assess the solvency of all school systems and develop policies to serve the children equitably in the future. In the meantime, we need to go forward with attempts to develop weights for direct student funding that goes to current operating expenses, not to finance excess liabilities.
The Teacher Prep Debate – Of Double Standards and Managerial Dodge Ball
Teacher prep programs cannot be forced to maintain a longitudinal tracking system on the career progress of their alums. Such a system would violate the privacy of the individuals who were monitored, answer only genuinely academic questions – not timely solutions to problems, and crowd out more prudent investments in higher education for teachers. In the meantime, districts would be allowed to dodge accountability for talent management while sitting in the real locus of control. All the while, a revolving door of TFA darlings would bypass scrutiny as they churned through the schools with guaranteed turnover. In the end, the only real change in the picture would be a serious fracture in the long history of collaboration between teacher prep programs and school districts – one of the greatest assets we might have leveraged.
Teacher prep programs are being targeted for accountability in teacher quality. Under consideration is a Federal plan to have schools of education track their graduates for up to ten years after program completion. The goal is to sort the good from the bad and hold the prep programs accountable for any shortcomings in future teacher performance. The hair on the back of my neck is raised as I consider the Bill of Rights, school district responsibility for talent management, and the perennial boot camp teacher prep experiments. School districts and teacher prep programs have a long history of collaboration. Why kill this strength by pitting the two against one another?
Employers are responsible for hiring the best people for every job, supervising and motivating them effectively, and assessing their continuing value to the endeavor. Employees enter an organization honestly and with appropriate preparation. They share responsibility for keeping themselves whole on the job. Continuous growth and professional development must be valued on both sides of the contract. When these conditions are not met, employers and employees have a problem to solve. External parties may be asked to facilitate the process, but nowhere do labor standards call for privacy invasion or deflection of responsibility onto unrelated parties.
Teacher prep programs are supposed to get their students ready as teachers. School districts hire those people, and the locus of control over the situation is transferred. The education schools are essentially off duty with regard to specific students. In fact, just as the districts must have permission from prospective new teachers to seek information from their prep programs, the prep programs have no right to seek and track employment data about anyone except their own employees. They have no right to invade the privacy of their alums. Nor do they have any control over the conditions of employment that exist after students leave their programs.
Employment is always a “buyer beware” situation. If districts suspect they have hired teachers who are inadequately prepared for the job, they are protected by probationary employment contracts. Experienced leaders must assess the situation and, in consultation with the new hire, make a plan to remediate and reassess. A trend in bad hires from particular teacher prep programs is instructive much more rapidly than a gratuitous multi-year tracking system. In addition, prep programs may well have addressed constructive feedback from districts and improved their outcomes before the negative data stream has been aggregated, analyzed and reported.
And what about alternative pathways to credentialing of new teachers? I happen to believe many of these programs bring good teachers into the education field, but they benefit from a double standard in any regulation of quality. Teach for America (TFA) only asks for a two-year commitment, by which time novice teachers are considered barely adequate practitioners. Yet we only hear good news about their contributions and worry about losing them to what is prescribed turnover, not issues of quality.
Schools of education and school districts may continue to leverage their relationships to improve teacher prep as well as sustaining educator vitality on the job. However, their primary roles should not become blended, nor should their respective accountabilities be diffused.
