So much happening in the school news world this past week, but I've chosen to write about a topic that I think is of interest to most people who have attended public schools in America: teacher tenure.

Before that, I just wanted to write a couple of quick notes about two SCOTUS decisions handed down today. First, in Safford Unified School District v. April Redding, the Court got the big part right easily voting 8-1 that when an Arizona school conducted a strip search on a 13 year old girl to find "contraband" ibuprofen pills, it violated the girl's 4th amendment privacy rights. The court also ruled, 7-2, on the more contentious issue of whether the individual school officials who conducted the search could be sued for their involvement. The court said no, which I think is difficult to believe (did they really think it was reasonable to strip search a middle school girl over ibuprofen??) but ultimately a decision that won't hurt too many kids. After all, most principals stop short of strip searching minor student offenses for lots of reasons other than constitutional one--and the punishment of public shame and likely firing should be sufficient.

On a second note, the Court remanded (i.e. sent back to the lower court for further fact finding) the question of whether Arizona's English Language Learner funding levels were sufficient in accordance with the Equal Educational Opportunities Act. The case is far too complex to explain here in brief, but the bottom line is the issue is far from settled.

Now to teacher tenure. Here's a cartoon to provide some context:

A new report from the Center for American Progress outlines some common sense considerations we should take into account when thinking about teacher tenure. First thing it points out is that teachers in America get tenure in a hodge podge fashion without any regard for what really matters: how much students are learning. If schools were granting tenure to teachers who were producing outstanding learning gains year-in and year-out, I don't think the complaints about the system would be quite so loud.

Second thing is that once teachers earn tenure, there is nothing wrong with providing them due process protection against arbitrary firings. If a teacher has proven their ability to produce excellent learning gains, it may actually be good for kids to stop a principal or other administrator from firing that teacher without showing good cause.

Third, tenure shouldn't be absolute--at some point if a teacher stops producing outstanding learning gains tenure should be revocable so that administrators have the freedom to move that teacher around and so that the teacher himself has incentive to keep performing at high levels.

Fourth, any discussion of tenure can't be separated from a discussion of teacher pay systems and data collection regarding objective measures of what makes a good teacher.

Anyhow, bottom line is, tenure isn't working for the benefit of children at all in the current education system, but that doesn't mean the whole idea is flawed. Good teachers, like any other good employees, should feel safe in their jobs so long as they keep performing at high levels. What remains is the policy structure to create that human capital system--specifically the data to show which teachers are "good" and which are "bad" in terms of student learning to begin with...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alright, so the title is a bit misleading: this blog isn't about putting up prison-style walls around our schools as some strange school improvement plan. If anything, my position on cage free schools is the same as my position on chickens and their eggs.

But every time I read a fiercely-written op-ed like this one in the Huffington Post, from widely-respected Ed Scholar Diane Ravitch, I'm reminded of an analogy that a college professor once espoused and that has stuck with me: fixing our education system is a lot like building fences around a herd of cattle.

If you build one line of fence, say on the western front of your property, it won't be very difficult for the cattle to head north or south and find their way out of your land. Much the same, folks out there who argue that the only thing we need to fix our schools is standards and accountability based on standardized tests are going to fail in their goals of closing the achievement gap and making America's schools the best in the world.

There is no silver bullet in school reform, no single fence that can keep the cows from escaping. What we need instead is a set of fences--three, in mind--that when put together can completely encircle the problem. To me, those fences are:
(1) Sufficient resources so that all children have access to basic educational materials like decent, safe classrooms and learning materials,
(2) A quality teacher in every classroom, and
(3) High standards that every child is expected to reach and an accountability system that rewards schools and teachers who help children meet these standards while identifying those who do not for corrective action.

Folks like Diane Ravitch, who would scrap No Child Left Behind in its entirety, think you can fix the educational crisis with just the first and second fences. The logical implication of that argument, however, is that our schools were better in the 70s, 80s, and 90s when NCLB didn't exist than they are now--a fact that is plainly false given overall increases in student performance since those eras and an achievement gap that is narrower (or at worst, the same) now than it was in those previous decades. (More data here).

The anti-NCLB argument forgets the fact that because of the law, for the first time in our nation’s history, every school in the country must report how well it is teaching low-income children, minority children, English language learners, and special ed children. If a school is teaching its rich white kids wonderfully but not doing anything to provide the same educational opportunities to less fortunate children, no longer can it hide the ball and point to generally high achievement and graduation rates in claiming success. Let’s remember, the achievement gap came about during a time in America’s educational history where there were no standards and no accountability whatsoever. If Diane Ravitch thinks its best to go back to those days where we just give schools a bunch of money (and $50 billion from the federal government is hardly a paltry sum) without asking for anything in return, I know this much: the achievement gap will not get narrower. At the very least, NCLB has shined the light on the many ways that schools and districts have under-served the children who need excellent schools the most.

But, of course, the standards and accountability fence isn't enough either. And this is where the standards and accountability proponents have gotten it wrong: you can't expect schools to improve just by demanding it. We have to give every school the resources and policies they need to hire excellent teachers and provide sound instructional materials--something that simply isn't available in too many schools. Reform efforts that overlook the resource / human capital piece are just as doomed to fail as those who want to give schools a bunch of money and hope for the best.

Are there other fences that you would add to my list of necessary components of successful school improvement efforts? A bunch of ideas can be quite helpful but are not necessary in my view, but I can certainly be persuaded...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fascinating experiment going on in a New York City charter school this upcoming school year, as profiled in the New York Times. The new school, which has enrolled 120 fifth graders in the inaugural class, will have some interesting characteristics:

- Average class size of 30 students, six more than the average class size in the city
- No assistant principals or deans at the entire school
- No substitute teachers or teaching aides
- Staff works longer hours than in average city schools
- Teachers can be fired at will
- Oh yeah, and that last little devilish detail...

The eight teachers in the building will each earn $125,000 per year!

Now ask yourself two questions:
1) Would you want to work at this school as a teacher?
2) Would you want to send your kid to this school as a parent?

For me, the answer is yes to both, but there are interesting issues with both questions. For the first question, it's true that the teachers at the school--a "dream team" that was recruited by the school's founder and principal after digging through 600 applications and visiting the classrooms of 30 some finalists--will be sacrificing a bit for their higher pay. But it's not just the money that will be rewarding; it's the chance to prove that teacher quality does matter--that not all teachers are interchangeable parts because some are simply much, much better than their peers.

As far as the second question, it's a gut-level decision for individual parents to make, to be sure. But if you give a parent the choice between a mediocre (or worse) teacher in a classroom with 24 kids and a proven, high-performing teacher with 30 kids, my hope is that they would take the latter situation without pause.

Only time will tell if this little experiment in NYC will prove the power of paying excellent teachers huge salaries (or perhaps, salaries commensurate with their social value), even if it means larger class sizes and more demanding job responsibilities. There's still a chance that a much larger scale laboratory will emerge in DC, but until then performance pay advocates will watch the new charter school (named "The Equity Project") in NYC with bated breath. It's doubtful that the small school will change too many minds, however. Even if it works, people already ideologically disposed against the idea of performance pay for teachers are likely to point to the school's diminutive size as a reason to discount any lessons learned--and if it doesn't work (i.e. if students who attend the school finish their time at the school with the same levels of achievement as their cross-town peers who applied for but didn't get into the school) you can be sure that the opposition will tout it as a definitive case study.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 04:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So how about this for a blast from the past, circa 8th grade US History. What is the difference between an Eli Whitney Musket and a public school?

The answer?

One is made up of essentially identical interchangeable parts, the other is not. Yet according to a new report issued by the New Teacher Project, we treat them both the same.

There is broad consensus, you see, that one factor above all others affects the kind of education that a child will receive: the quality of their teacher. In that sense, teachers are the farthest thing from interchangeable parts imaginable because if you take one teacher out of her classroom at random and replace her with another, chances are you'll get a dramatically different outcome among the students in that classroom. But if you are tinkering with an old Eli Whitney musket and you take out the wheel lock and replace it with a wheel lock from another Eli Whitney musket... voila! Nothing changes.

Pretty elementary stuff, you'd say, right? Only the vast majority of our school policy makers either don't understand it or aren't willing to act on it (and I'm guessing it's the latter). Here's some evidence to support that conclusion, all from the above report which surveyed responses from more than 15,000 teachers and 1,300 administrators in 12 districts and 4 states:

* 99% of teachers evaluated by their administrators on a binary "satisfactory" vs. "unsatisfactory" scale received a "satisfactory" mark
* When evaluations offered more rating options than just "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory" administrators still marked 94% of teachers one of the top two ratings and only 1% as "unsatisfactory"
* 73% of teachers surveyed said their most recent evaluation did not identify any areas in need of development
* 41% of administrators say they have never denied tenure to a teacher or refused to renew the contract of a teacher who was on probation

If you looked at those statistics in isolation, you might think that America has one of the most impressive teaching forces in the world where virtually every educator is doing a solid job or better. But if you ask the same administrators and teachers some slightly different questions, it quickly becomes clear that the above statistics are hiding something very important:

~ 81% of administrators say there is a tenured teacher in their school who is performing poorly. (Really?? That means that something like four out of every five administrators who are evaluating teachers give a "satisfactory" rating to someone who they believe is doing a poor job as a teacher!)
~ 43% of teachers say there is a tenured teacher in their building who should be dismissed for poor performance (when I taught, I would have been willing to flip that number around and say that 43% of the teachers in the building should have been dismissed for poor performance, if only there were other teachers available who could do a better job!).

What's the upshot of all of this? When administrators rate everyone the same, it has two tragic effects. First, it means we can't identify the worst teachers in our schools who are failing our children and need to be replaced. But more importantly, in my opinion, it means we can't identify the best teachers either because so many teachers are getting high marks on evaluations that the praise becomes meaningless. And when you have a profession where the truly high performers aren't getting recognized--either on evaluations or in the form of increased pay--you have a profession that will be plagued by low morale and a shortage of high achievers who are interested in entering the work force. Does that sound like the teaching profession in America, generally??

The solution, of course, is to start making headway in identifying what exactly is good teaching, rewarding those who are doing it, and supporting and if need be replacing those who are not. Objective data in the form of how much students are actually learning (see my entry last week for a great example of this) would go a long way towards this end, since it'll take the subjective element out of a principal evaluation that no doubt leads them to retain and mark "satisfactory" far too many nice people who may unfortunately not be doing a good job as teachers.

But here's the rub: our policy makers have been slow to the draw in developing these data systems because of how unpopular it is among teachers unions to separate the good from the bad. Maybe hope is on the horizon, as President Obama pushes for change...

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)