Category Archives: Teaching and Education Reform

Raising the Status of Teachers

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Excerpts from Sam Dillon’s March 16, NYT article, “US is Urged to Raise Teachers’ Status”.

To improve its public schools, the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession by recruiting more qualified candidates, training them better, and paying them more, according to a new report on comparative educational systems.

• Top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.

• Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation. . . . Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership.

• On the most recent international tests (Pisa), the top-scoring countries were Finland and Singapore in science, Korea and Finland in reading and Singapore and Korea in math. On average, American teenagers came in 15th in reading and 19th in science. American students placed 27th in math. Only 2 percent of American students scored at the highest proficiency level, compared with 8 percent in Korea and 5 percent in Finland.

• U.S. education reformers need to adopt common academic standards, develop better tests for use by teachers in diagnosing students’ day-to-day learning needs, and train more effective school leaders.

• The top recommendation from the report—make a concerted effort to raise the status of the teaching profession.

• Teaching education programs in the U.S. must become more selective and more rigorous.

• Raising teachers’ status is not mainly about raising salaries, the report says, but pay is a factor. According to O.E.C.D. data, the average salary of a veteran elementary teacher here was $44,172 in 2008, higher than the average of $39,426 across all O.E.C.D countries (the figures were converted to compare the purchasing power of each currency). But that salary level was 40 percent below the average salary of other American college graduates. In Finland, by comparison, the veteran teacher’s salary was 13 percent less than that of the average college graduate’s.

• Only Luxembourg among the O.E.C.D. countries spends more per elementary student — but American schools spend disproportionately on other areas, like bus transportation and sports facilities.

So maybe we do have the best school system in the world if, like Fifteen a couple of weeks ago, you want to skip a day of classes, and take a school provided bus to the state basketball tournament.

Two Roads Diverge—The Conclusion

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The conclusion—Our children and the fork.

What should our children do to increase their odds of enjoying some semblance of economic security?

For the last several years I’ve been preaching a liberal arts education gospel. The message has been that the key to success in our increasingly competitive knowledge economy is a rigorous higher education that develops analytical, writing, critical thinking, and related intellectual skills. Then this mind-blowing article appeared in the New York Times—Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software.

Fork anxiety alert.

E-discovery companies like Cataphora are forcing me to rethink many of my assumptions. In terms of employment success, a college education, even a law degree, guarantees less and less. Instead of starting over with a brand new gospel, I need to supplement my call for a rigorous college education with additional strategies.

One overlooked strategy, self-sufficiency, is beautifully described in the book Little Heathens. Each of our children have to decide whether to follow our model of pursuing competence or expertise in one particular area, and then trading that competence or expertise into money through long work hours, and then handing significant percentages of the money over to others for a litany of products and services including, but not limited to: growing and preparing food; making and cleaning clothes; entertainment; education, hair and related personal care; pet grooming and care; cleaning and repairing bicycles, cars, and homes; tax preparation; counseling and medical care; yard work; personal trainers and life coaches.

Rightly or wrongly, most modern peeps have convinced themselves that their time is worth more than it costs to pay for those types of products and services. But the fork will change that equation for some of our children. What if our children experience under or unemployment, what if their wages can’t keep pace with inflation? What if they have more time than money? Although no one is talking about it, self-sufficiency is a common sense insurance policy in an increasingly unpredictable woods.

In addition to greater self-sufficiency, young people who develop a specific craft or trade will enjoy more economic security because they’ll be able to use their craft or trade to supplement their income or weather periods of under or unemployment. If artificial intelligence or related technological breakthroughs make them redundant for six months or a year, every four or five years over the the course of their adult working lives, my daughters could teach violin to Tiger Mother offspring. Put all of your economic security eggs in the intellectual skills basket at your own risk. Teach your children to lifeguard or teach swimming, to cut hair, to repair bicycles, to landscape, to design web pages, to care for and tutor younger children.

Also, and we’re nearing the end of our journey, agitate and advocate for “life-skills” in your children’s school curricula. We have to push back against the President’s and high profile business leaders’ insistence that all we need to negotiate the fork is marked improvement in math and science education. Truth be told, I’m not very self-sufficient, more handsome than handy, so for my daughters to become meaningfully self-sufficient, I need the help of teachers and other adults in the community.

Where’s the room in the curriculum? Not sure, but independent, Waldorf, and other alternative schools often find room for life skills. The publics would be well advised to turn to their smaller, funkier brethren for guidance. And since I don’t expect that to happen, parents better put their heads together to figure out how to help their little heathens become more self-sufficient.

And to borrow from Sue Sylvester (I shudder if you have adolescent children and don’t get that reference), that’s how Ron sees it.

How to Improve Your Vocabulary

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Some of my writing students want to improve their vocabulary this semester. That’s admirable, but they probably won’t like my suggestions:

1) Read more.

2) Not just Junie B. Jones and Archie comics (for Fifteen). Read progressively more challenging material. Or at least rotate in challenging stuff between the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Harry Potter (for Eighteen).

3) When reading challenging material, take time to look up some of the words you don’t know. (A favorite i-Pad e-book feature, touch the word, touch the definition tab, five-ten seconds, genius. The plus side of an admitted trade-off).

4) Integrate newly learned words into your conversations and writing even if you don’t use them perfectly initially. I called Fifteen a sycophant the other day. She asked what that meant. I told her it was the first word on the aced vocab quiz adorning the frig. That brought a smile. Use em’ or lose em’.

5) The power of osmosis can’t be exaggerated. This is the “try to play tennis with people better than you” concept. Hang with people whose vocabularies are further along than yours. In addition to Modern Family, talk about ideas, what you’re reading, North African and Middle Eastern political unrest, and the Wisconsin state legislature. You become the company you keep.

The problem with my suggestions is most young people prefer multimedia to reading, spending hundreds of hours Facebooking and watching legions of movies for every substantive book they read. Apparently blog posts are even too long. Fifteen rarely chooses to read in her free time, gravitating to Facebook and SuperNanny instead. Interestingly though, whenever she’s required to read quality literature in her English class, she always enjoys it.

In the end, there are no shortcuts. Absent immersing oneself in vocab-rich reading material, dictionary work, time spent in literate small groups, and more vocab-rich reading, don’t expect to light the vocabulary world on fire.

Wisconsin and the Great Ideological Stalemate

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Read a provocative anti-union blog post Monday about the Wisconsin state government/public employee tinderbox. And over 100+ of the first comments. I was struck by three things.

First, there’s almost no middle-ground. The vast majority of commenters are attacking the blogger and one other. Is this a uniquely polarizing issue or is the intense debate symbolic of an increasingly divided polity? I’m not sure.

Second, I’m intrigued by the sporadic pro-union commenters who irately announce they’re unsubscribing from the blog. They’re saying to the author I’m so dismayed with your position on this political issue I will no longer be associated with you or read you—nevermind the body of work that prompted them to subscribe in the first place. Some sins are unforgivable. Was there anything worth reflecting on in the anti-union diatribe? Unless you’re insecure in your beliefs, why be threatened by thinking that’s antithetical to your own? At times, all of us “unsubscribe” from the people around us by tuning them out? What does it accomplish besides increased polarization?

Third, far too many high school teachers and college professors teach discrete factual information that’s readily available on smart phones, netbooks, laptops, and desktop computers. Instead, they should use rich content as a means towards an end, the end being a greater appreciation of ambiguity. Given the widening chasm between right and left in this country, young people who learn to value contending viewpoints, think conceptually, and grow comfortable with subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity, will have a distinct competitive advantage in tomorrow’s knowledge economy whether union members or not.

School Principal Shortage

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The Obama administration wants to improve public education by removing principals from poorly performing schools. Far fewer principals than planned have been replaced because most states are suffering from a shortage of credentialed, able principals.

As a result, Washington State is proposing an alternative routes principal certification plan for non-educators. Yes, for non-educators. One of the first things I learned at the different schools I worked at as a beginning teacher was few of my colleagues respected my principals even though they had taught previously. The majority sentiment was they had lost touch with teaching’s challenges. Adversarial teacher-admin relations were the norm.

How on earth will non-educators earn the respect of teachers? Legions of teachers will exit faculty meetings saying, “What the hell does he/she know about child or adolescent development, about curriculum and assessment, about teaching excellence?”

One wonders, what are the sponsoring state legislators thinking?

A friend of mine is a well respected high school principal. We run together. He tells stories. I listen. Often in amazement. It’s an incredibly demanding job. Impossible if faculty don’t respect you. There are lots of ways for leaders to earn respect, but the main one is to identify closely enough with the people you lead that they conclude, “He/she gets me and gets my work. They understand.” No certification program will compensate for non-educators’ lack of classroom teaching experience; consequently, they will struggle endlessly to earn the respect of their faculty.

But the news isn’t entirely bad. In the interest of fairness, I’m sure teachers will soon have the opportunity to run businesses, work as military officers, head up police departments, pastor churches, or practice law.

The Old Young Teach Is Awakened

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Back in the day, when I was a first year teacher in South Central Los Angeles, I was at war with a few class periods. Wet behind the ears, my insecurities translated into a no-nonsense approach to classroom management. Like Bruce Lee at the end of a fight scene, I was hoping I’d outlast them. One day, in the midst of this battle royale, a challenging, outspoken female student piped up in the middle of class, “You’re just a tough young buck from UCLA!”

Two decades of teaching adults later, not so much. My classroom management skills have atrophied and my philosophy evolved. My beard is gray, I’ve mellowed, crossed over to the other side, gone all soft and mushy.

At times though, the old young teach is awakened. Fast forward to an email message I recently received from a student.

Can’t make class next week due to a “family cruise vacation”. This after a stirring start of semester talk on the importance of attendance.

It’s a small writing seminar, and therefore, impossible to replicate our discussions and my life-changing “skill sessions”.

Wrote her back and said I was disappointed and confused about why her family scheduled a family cruise vacation when she’s in school. This is a four-day weekend and spring break is in early April.

In hindsight, my response, because it assigns responsibility to her family, sucks doesn’t it? She could and should have said to her family, “Wish I could join you, but I’m not missing school.”

The Coming Ed Tech Tidal Wave

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Will smart phones eliminate the digital divide? That’s the title of an interview article with Elliot Soloway in The Journal Digital Edition. Here’s a video version of the same content. And finally, here’s his company’s website with a “contact us” tab in the upper right.

I don’t know enough about Soloway to know if he genuinely cares about improving teaching and learning or if he’s simply out to enrich himself.

Of course already extensive cell phone usage among young people is going to increase over time, but that doesn’t mean every K-12 student in the U.S. will be using a cell phone for educational purposes within five years. That’s his claim, but more accurately I suspect it’s his hope because he just happens to have created a company that outfits local districts and schools with personal cellphone learning devices.

Unfortunately, I can’t find anywhere on his website where I can place a bet on his claim. So maybe he’s just blowing smoke. I’d like to put $1k into escrow based on my belief that there will be at least one student somewhere in the U.S. in September of 2015 that isn’t using a cellphone device in their classroom. Maybe a kindergartner at a Waldorf School somewhere in Vermont?

The larger question posed by Soloway’s snake oil is whether more personal technology in the classroom is going to translate into achievement gains. The burden is on the techies to explain why that might be true. Soloway’s argument is extremely weak and only adds to my skepticism that personal technology is a panacea for improving teaching and learning.

An even more pressing question is whether more personal technology in the classroom is going to reduce the achievement gap. Again, the tech zealots have to do a much better job explaining why that might be true than Soloway does in the linked material above.

The achievement gap exists mostly as a result of outside of school factors. Uneven teacher quality also plays a large part. Soloway is silent on both of those essential factors.

Teachers and parents have to be on guard against tech salespeople who are desperate for a chunk of the textbook millions that will be increasingly up for grabs.  Headlines like this, “Georgia State Senator Hopes to Replace Textbooks with iPads” are going to be increasingly common.

At school board and related meetings a healthy skepticism requires us to ask the following types of questions:

• How will the personal technology device you’re selling improve the quality of teaching?

• How will it help students develop 21st century job and citizenship skills and sensibilities?

• Will it reduce the achievement gap? If so, how?

• What unintended negative consequences have you discovered through pilot studies and what are you doing to mitigate those things?

• If our district or school adopts your gadget, how much money does your company and your employees and you stand to make?

• If we adopt your device, what will you do to restrict image advertisement and direct marketing of commercial products to our students?

• If we adopt your device, how can we be assured you won’t try to influence the content of our curriculum?

Can Individuals Learn to Be People Smart?

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Can beginning teachers learn to interact with their co-workers, students, and students’ families more successfully? Can they improve their interpersonal skills? Can they learn to listen, to empathize, to communicate more clearly, to use humor appropriately, to caringly discipline, and in the end, to competently direct student learning? Can individuals more generally learn to be “people smart”?

Yes, to a degree, I think.

My hesitation in part is a result of working with a teacher in training a few years ago. His test scores and content knowledge were off the charts. His Aspergers didn’t surface until he was in the classroom with thirty-five diverse teens who couldn’t care less about his book smarts. Unable to decipher half of what was going on in the classroom, he washed out of his student-teaching internship.

State teacher credential bureaucrats require passing scores on content exams, but prospective candidates interpersonal skills aren’t evaluated at all. Granted, evaluating them in a valid and reliable manner would be tough, but no one is even trying. Instead, we just assume everyone with the requisite book smarts has sufficient people smarts.

Once teacher candidates are in credential programs, what should teacher educators and their classroom mentors do to help them strengthen their interpersonal skills? What about MBA students? What about doctor residencies? What do business and medical faculty do to help their students develop leadership and bedside manner skills? Like state teacher credential bureaucrats, most teacher educators focus far too narrowly on content. The thinking being, “If they just know enough about their content, curriculum, and assessment, they’ll be fine.”

But that’s not the case. The thoughtful and effective application of content knowledge requires well developed interpersonal skills.

One powerful case-study I use in my teaching requires students to role play an angry student, a teacher, and an upset parent. I use it to emphasize the importance of active listening. Even more important, beginning teachers need to see their mentors model active listening; use humor and communicate clearly; discipline in a firm but caring manner; be friendly, but not friends.

I recently finished reading an amazing book that I recommend: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. In one especially moving passage, Mukherjee’s describes Thomas Lynch’s otherwordly touch with patients. He writes, “I watched him resuscitate. He emphasized process over outcome and transmitted astonishing amounts of information with a touch so slight that you might not even feel it.”

Mukherjee was fortunate to learn from Lynch. Teachers in training get assigned mentors by the schools where they intern. It’s a serious structural impediment to improved teaching, a mentoring as turn-taking lottery where too many interns are assigned veterans with iffy interpersonal skills.

What about you? Whatever you deem to be your interpersonal strengths, have they always been built-in or are they the result of two steps forward, one back learning processes?

Winning the Future?

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Gotta hand it to the President for at least having a memorable, recurring theme in his State of the Union speech last Tuesday. We can win the future. Among other things, he used the notion of out-competing other nations to inspire young people to choose teaching as their career.

It shouldn’t be surprising that nationalism and zero-sum economic competition inform his administration’s priorities. At the same time, when he took office I held out a glimmer of hope that he would be a different kind of politician, one who would inspire us to make tangible and intangible improvements in ours and other people’s lives.

His emphasis on nationalism is problematic because national identity is both too small and too large an organizing principle.

It’s too small because our well-being is intricately linked with other countries’ well-being including Mexico’s, Canada’s, China’s, and India’s. And it’s too large because teachers-to-be are not inspired by the “global economic race” metaphor. The idea of global competition might inspire people to enlist in the military, but teachers-to-be are motivated by personal, intangible, humanitarian, community-based reasons. They don’t want to beat other nations, they want to make a positive difference in young people’s lives and their small corner of the world.

An emphasis on nationalism and zero-sum economic competition leads to a narrow math and science-based curriculum. We’ll be okay if we just produce more engineers, nevermind the universal questions posed by literature, the insight provide by historical perspective, the creativity engendered by the arts, and the struggles we have living and working peacefully together.

To earn the respect of teachers the President should have said the era of top-down federal government policy making is over. The “Race to the Top” program he described is more of the same with governors bypassing teacher leaders and pressuring school officials to adopt the reforms Arne Duncan has said will be funded. Reforms similar to the ones promoted by the previous administration.

Also, apart from a two-year freeze for federal workers, I was disappointed that the President didn’t call on us to make concrete challenging sacrifices to “win the future”. Absent calls of sacrifice, the good ideas felt disingenuous, especially in the context of the out-of-control deficit. I wish President Obama had tweaked his theme this way. Secure the future—for yourself, your family, your community, and others.

Last week, in a Florida grocery store mother-dear and I were on a mission for some non-frosted shredded wheat. There must have been ten different boxes of shredded wheat, but alas, almost all frosted. Running out of patience, she said, “There should only be two choices of each cereal.” Exaggerating, she added, “We’d all be better off if in life there were only two choices.”

When it comes to political parties, I wish there were three.

Advanced Placement—Let’s Get Real

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The single greatest challenge in teaching is helping disengaged lower performing students catch up while simultaneously challenging higher performing ones. That, pure and simple, is what distinguishes the very best teachers.

It’s so difficult a lot of times educators punt, organizing classes based upon, sorry for the jargon, “homogeneous ability grouping”. Instead of having four mixed ability classes, schools create remedial, standard, honors, and Advanced Placement (A.P.) ones.

Often within heavily tracked schools, one student ends up with nearly all remedial classes, and another, all A.P. The end result can be that the two students never interact in what is in essence “remedial” and “Advanced Placement” schools-within-schools.

The problems with Advanced Placement tracking.

1) Inaccurate perceptions crystallize and students get stuck in tracks  Also, research has shown teachers of remedial students have much lower than normal academic expectations. As a result, instead of catching up to their peers, the tend to fall farther behind.

2) Creeping arrogance. Too often, A.P. students develop a sense of superiority. They look down on their “remedial” and “standard” peers. Once when I was observing a student teacher in a “standard” or “remedial” English class, one of his A.P. students delivered a note from another teacher. After handing it over, the student asked, “What are you guys doing?” “Oh were just working our way through Chapter Two of Catcher in the Rye.” “Oh man,” he loudly announced on his way out of the room, “we finished that book last week.”

More widely discussed concerns with A.P. courses.

3) Students can earn passing scores on the end of the year exams through intensive memorization. This doesn’t prepare them well for college, the alleged purpose of the A.P. program.

4) Parents and students focus so exclusively on passing scores, that few develop any intrinsic appreciation or curiosity for the content. Just tell me what I need to memorize to pass the test. This doesn’t prepare them well for life-long learning (yikes, second use of jargon).

5) Usually, there’s a disproportionate number of Caucasian and Asian-American students in A.P. courses relative to each school’s demographics. Consequently, there’s a disproportionate number of Hispanic and African-American students in remedial courses.

A.P. programs exist because privileged parents want to extend their privilege to their children. A lot of these people are liberal progressives who talk earnestly about equal opportunity. “These people” are my wife and me and many of our friends. On this subject, we’re hypocrites. If we cared as much about other children’s futures as we do our own, we’d figure out a way to detrack our schools.