Remind me, please:

[pastwatcher]

Why do education reformers always talk about 1) resources, 2) teacher incentives and quality, but rarely about 3) teacher training? dianaelaine717, I'm looking at you.

This boils down to: Why, when we know we want to improve the skills of all the country's children, do we then turn around and say that we have to select teachers from Ivy League colleges? Why not apply that same principle to the idea of giving future teachers not just academic experience, but better training for dealing with kids and parents? A good college education does NOT, repeat NOT, cover even half the training one needs to be a teacher, and moreover, the talents that, say, an Ivy League college selects for in its students are not the same as the talents required to become a good teacher in a challenging school. This should be obvious: one needs charisma, ability (by personality or by background) to connect with (and thus lead) a broad variety of students, ability to creatively break things down into simple terms...

Wikipedia tells me that states started passing charter school laws in 1991. My mother was one of the founders of Princeton Charter School which opened in fall 1997 (6th grade for me), which was at the forefront of New Jersey charter schools. She always said that much of the point was to give local public schools (which in Princeton didn't have to expend much effort to get well-educated kids) an example to follow and a reason to care about competition. Certainly the recent national initiatives /after/ the No Child Left Behind Act share many ideas with PCS' founders, wherever those ideas come from. But speaking from what I know directly, in the Philadelphia district itself where I spent last year, charter schools come in different varieties, and provide examples that other schools and district administrators look at. I hear that in DC the entire public part of the district is trying to compete with charter schools. It's not so much that charter schools are a good thing in themselves, as that they can try out new methods some of which the districts would do well to adopt.

We all know about Teach for America, designed to send highly-educated college grads /without educational training/ into schools. This program has a lot in common with my own program of last year (City Year), in that it takes advantage of the fact that its participants are energetic young people who get a lot done before they run out of steam. Then there are alternative certification programs for college graduates career-changers, like various Teaching Fellows programs (e.g. DC), and there are programs that provide training with lots of time spent under a mentor, even summer feedback and reinforcement training for the first year or so of independent teaching.

What about the standard masters-of-education curricula? dianaelaine717 tells me the masters'-of-education program at UCSD is very good and involves a lot of student-teaching, but the teachers I talked to last year received mostly the latest theories of education and, tellingly, didn't know how to apply a new educational theory when they were presented with it.* I wish I knew more about this, but I don't think many education masters' programs are very good--indeed, they often scornfully dismissed as a joke.

Selecting talented teachers and rewarding them for good work is all very well...but when is the system of PRAXIS exams and certification requirements going to provide better mentoring, hands-on training, and guidance in charisma development for teachers? The whole /point/ of worrying about education is based on the premise that young adults need better education and support to succeed, not just incentive--well, so do teachers. Or /are/ there changes being made on a large scale?


*I was at a faculty meeting near the beginning of the year at which differentiated instruction (the idea being to give different kinds of tasks, or choice of them to different students to help them grasp the material at different levels), and it seemed that not one of the teachers there knew what to do with it when they were asked to come up with examples of implementations they might use. But maybe a month or two later, I started to see how some of the teachers were learning from each other's concrete examples, and "choice boards" of different activities started coming up. Of course, not all of them would communicate in this way: any of you who know about the stratification of my school into a "good" third and a "bad" two-thirds, note that I only /saw/ this spread in the "good" third.

Comments

[sandmantv.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm aware (and whenever I say "studies" here, know that I am too tired to dig them up but will try later tomorrow) studies show 2 things about better teachers, controlling for same resources:

-some teachers are better than others
-masters degrees in teaching don't help

So obviously we want to attract people who would be better teachers (but currently would earn more money elsewhere). This is mostly a resource question, but if we did get more money what would we want to do with it? The conventional wisdom tends to be offer money for masters degrees.

But we would get more effectiveness if we didn't encourage master degrees mills, and instead offered raises based on how the teacher is performing. Merit pay. This would encourage the good teachers to stick around, and hopefully weed out some of the bad teachers who could earn more in other fields.

Now you don't hear this much because the major voices in teacher reform (on a very broad level) are the two political directions that are influential in our country and are much more concerned about resources going where we want them.

The left has unions that want to look out for all their members keeping job security and being treated equally. Merit pay is often devastating to the cohesion of unions, so they don't want it.

The right just wants less money to go to public institutions, especially public sector unions, so any things that move money that way are frowned on. And then they make up stuff about the free market and competition (with no scientific data to back them), in order to move towards private and parochial schools.

Mostly, you can't have "charisma development" so your best hope is to have merit selection to keep the ones with charisma, dump the ones without.

There are of course many issues, especially with regard to resources. More resources would mean more teachers per pupil, better facilities, etc. But holding resources even, that's the main argument.

[pastwatcher]

So my issue here is with item #2: master's degrees in teaching don't help. That's not the same statement as "no amount of training could help"--there are some skills one should be able to train in a good master's program. It just requires changing them, a lot.

Or do you think that merit pay, in making teaching a more desirable profession, would then encourage the growth of better training programs?

[sandmantv.livejournal.com]

Could be. We should look at some studies to get some specifics.

But at some point you're optimistically trying to manage training programs for what is particularly useful, and it's possible you just can't do that with the broad brush of federal/state policy.

Whereas making teaching a more socially respectable profession (and them making more than 1/5th of a doctor or lawyer or banker would be a step in that director) would motivate progress to that.

As for your complaints about Teach for America... TfA is a hugely underfunded, undersupplied program. If they choose to only take Ivy Leaguers when they could take any number of hugely qualified candidates, it doesn't matter because they don't have nearly the room for the candidates that would qualify (from the results perspective).

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

Two things.

One, I'm actually reading The Differentiated Classroom right now, for my "Schools and Society" class, and the concept is at once both deceptively sophisticated to understand completely and deceptively simple to actually implement. The key to successful differentiation is knowing your students, every single one of them, well, and making sure that the tasks you assign are appropriate for all of them and not just for the "average" student.

As for attracting and retaining more talented teachers, it's true that the kicker is how to evaluate which ones are "good." Personally, I would argue that the first (magical, someday) influx of money should go into developing a vastly more sophisticated system for assessing student progress. Our current assessment methods are awful, and NCLB is making the situation worse, between its laser-focus on standardized testing and, paradoxically, lack of actual standardization.

It would be a lot more work to develop a system of assessment that takes into account both test scores, grades, and a smattering of subjective teacher judgment, but the result would be a much clearer picture of how individual students are progressing and learning. As a result, such a system would also allow for much more incisive evaluations of teachers.

(There's a push now, by the way, for "teacher performance" to be equated with "test results," which predictably has teachers everywhere up in arms and politicians everywhere making snide remarks about "accountability.")

I guess my point is... we really don't have any clear idea right now of how "good" or "bad" our schools are in general, because the easy, publicly accepted ways of measuring those vague qualities are incredibly narrow-sighted. This is not to say that we can't improve, because that's always true, but before we start worrying about "fixing" the "crisis," we need a much better understanding of where we actually stand, today.

Sorry, that was tangential a bit, but I've been studying a whole lot of stuff on this and related topics recently.

[pastwatcher]

Yes--differentiated instruction gives me a headache to think about, but I've seen it work.

>NCLB is making the situation worse, between its laser-focus on standardized testing and, paradoxically, lack of actual standardization.

>There's a push now, by the way, for "teacher performance" to be equated with "test results,"

True. In the schools I know about, there's definitely a ridiculous focus on standardized tests, and that doesn't even work that well. This is making the schools worse, even some of the charter schools (take a look at Mastery Charter schools, and in case it's not clear, their educational structure structure is entirely based on standardized tests) that manage to do this successfully. To be fair, there is a standardized curriculum across the whole Philadelphia district that the schools take at the same pace so that the inevitable shuffling of students does not lead to unusual gaps or repeats in their coursework. But overall I think the tests are actively doing harm, and it is for that reason that the standards should change.

The worst schools there really /are/ bad. They are trying hardest to teach testable skills, and when they're failing at that, essentially, they're not accomplishing anything. So I would venture to extrapolate that we *do* know about some of the worst cases. I agree, however, that we need better assessment overall. The thing I always hated about my school system is that it caters to active, Ph.D. parents who want challenging work for their children and will make sure they keep up, while ignoring the other half of the families, who tend to work long hours with less time for school events and less money for tutoring their kids...so the standard and remedial courses are generally taught badly and there is a terrible support system. Actually I think all this may be improving--but the thing is, there's not so much pressure on Princeton's district because they have /plenty/ of good test scores to show! Do you know what it's like in the Twin Cities?

>a smattering of subjective teacher judgment

If your hope is to evaluate what a kid needs, you'd want judgment from any adults in the school who knew a kid, even staff members--but I think that overall collection might work. I found that the smartest kids, who might learn a lot in some classes, often made the most trouble in others (and sometimes refused to "prove" that they knew their stuff by taking tests); also, some kids knew staff members who could have told you how to get through to them. If this were possible, it would be excellent, and it might even motivate students to know that they were receiving this kind of attention.

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

Charter schools are a really fascinating idea, and in my program we actually visited several, including the very first one ever (St. Paul's City Academy). They're a phenomenal idea in concept, and I saw one that I desperately want to work at, but I can't even imagine why you would make one based purely on testing, much less how you could find teachers willing to work there.

Your description of Princeton is interesting, since the sense I've gotten (primarily from my Ed Psych class, to be fair) is that there's a lot of money going to special education programs and Individual Education Plans, but almost nothing going to Gifted and Talented education. We were actually having a long discussion about how to "deal with" G&T kids, because there are a ton of failsafes and support mechanisms in place for the other end of the spectrum. Of course, it's not perfect yet, particularly for low-income families that don't necessarily have the time or money for proper diagnosis and treatment, but I don't get the sense that there's a particularly large pressure there. Of course, NCLB's absurd deadlines may start making problems, but...