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Rockin’ band teacher proves there are many ways to inspire students

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On April 4, 2012 in General, Teacher quality

A CBS News profile last night of a Miramar, Fla. teacher is one of those powerful reminders that students draw motivation in myriad ways. One doesn’t have to extol the virtues of the arts, either, to grasp how music teacher Alvin Davis has left such an imprint on the lives of his students.

Davis’ story itself is an inspiration. He was born to a Mexican mother and African-American father, grew up surrounded by drugs and gangs in south Chicago, and at the age of 10 saw his childhood friend shot to death on the porch next door. But his mother insisted he succeed in school, and his parents assigned him nightly homework in addition to what he received from school. They pushed him into summer school, as well, to keep ahead of other students.

Music was natural to Davis and ultimately led him to Florida A&M University, with its nationally renowned band, where he ran out of money his sophomore year. When he returned to Chicago, Davis says his father handed him a check, which was written off a second mortgage, and told him to head back to Florida and not return without a degree.

Davis has taught now only for 11 years, but he has turned the Miramar High School band into a musical showplace and its musicians into college-bound students. What Davis brings to his students is the ethic his parents brought to him: Academic are first and there are no excuses for failure. He describes his goal as developing an award-winning, academic-based music program and he focuses on academics, discipline and musicality. Every students receives one-on-one counseling with the band staff, and Davis reviews every band member’s report card and interim reports. Every after-school band rehearsal includes a mandatory one-hour study hall with tutoring, and he keeps a library of all school textbooks for students’ use. To remain in the band, seniors must show proof they have registered for, or taken, the SAT or ACT. By January, they must prove they have applied to college. Continue Reading →

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Teachers can fix a broken profession

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On March 14, 2012 in Achievement Gap, Teacher quality

Don’t like what an education reformer has to say? Just call them a teacher basher.

Increasingly, that’s what teachers and others are doing, with this recent blog post on CNN – “When did teacher bashing become the new national pastime?” – being the latest in a long list of examples.

Most of these articles set out straw men. There’s the frequent assertion that we only want to judge teacher performance by one standardized test score (few do). And another that teachers simply face an impossible job with students who are too damaged or too unmotivated to learn (a myth Education Trust dispelled long ago.) Most reformers assert quite properly that a teacher is the heart of the education system and the key to improving it. They should be treated better. They should be valued more highly. But the conundrum seems to be that teachers just don’t seem to believe that anyone can fairly measure what they do, so they collectively have resisted all efforts to implement meaningful performance standards. I find that odd, however, because I have never met a teacher who couldn’t tell me in a couple of minutes who the best and worst teachers in the school are

If we assume a good teacher enables a student to advance quickly and a poor teacher does the opposite, then it becomes difficult to dispute that the teaching profession is horribly broken. Continue Reading →

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Not all bad apples spoil the whole bunch

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On March 7, 2012 in Charter Schools, Education reporting, General, School Choice, Teacher quality, Unionism

A year after I began work as an education reporter, I witnessed a classroom scene so shocking, it haunts me to this day. I asked a high school teacher in a typical, normal public school if I could sit in on his class, and he said sure. He flipped on the most boring documentary ever made – a decades-old snoozer on map making, if I remember right – and turned off the lights. Heads became one with desk tops. Eyes closed. And then the really bad thing happened.

The teacher – who was also a teachers union representative – sat back in his chair, put his feet up and unfurled a newspaper with a flick of his wrists.

In the aftermath, I had to tell myself: Don’t leap to strong conclusions. Don’t let this one crazy thing unnecessarily taint the full picture about teachers and teachers unions. And I don’t think I have. As an education reporter for many years, I saw plenty of awesome teachers in public schools and a handful of really bad ones. I saw teachers unions take positions on issues that jibed with the facts, and others that were just flat ridiculous. The world of education as I’ve come to know it is often complicated and gray, and sometimes it’s hard to tell good guys from bad. With so much hanging in the balance, we should all be careful before we decide whether an obviously rotten apple is a representative example or an anomaly, or whether a small string of them is unfortunate coincidence or troubling trend.

I was reminded of that teacher and his newspaper this past week because of two story lines that have been running simultaneously in the Tampa Bay Times. Continue Reading →

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In Florida, a teachers union that doesn’t just say no

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On February 29, 2012 in General, Teacher quality, Unionism

Editor’s note: In one of yesterday’s posts, we noted how often school choice supporters are caricatured. But truth be told, we’re not alone. Teachers unions and their members are sometimes dismissed with unflattering generalizations too. Doug Tuthill, a former teachers union president himself, pauses today to spotlight a union right here in our backyard that defies the stereotype.

Jean Clements is the teachers union president in Hillsborough County, Florida, which is the eighth largest school district in the U.S. And she and her union, the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association, are unique in a way that deserves national attention – and national praise. While most teacher unions are resisting efforts to systemically improve public education, Jean and her constituents have partnered with their school district to embrace innovations that are taking on all kinds of sacred cows.

Teacher unions came into being in the early 1960s to protect teachers from management decisions, most notably in the areas of employee evaluations and compensation.  Consequently, teachers’ collective bargaining contracts today prescribe evaluation procedures that render evaluations irrelevant except in the most extreme cases, and standardized pay scales that treat every teacher the same, regardless of their effectiveness.  So, naturally,  eyebrows were raised across the country when Jean and her HCTA colleagues partnered with the Hillsborough school district to win a $100 million Gates Foundation grant to reinvent the district’s employee evaluation and compensation systems.

This wasn’t the only time Jean went out on a limb. Continue Reading →

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A modest, yet radical proposal

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On December 21, 2011 in Funding, General, Teacher quality, Testing and Accountability

Now that MacArthur “genius” Roland G. Fryer’s new paper on school inputs and effectiveness is beginning to get attention, it seems appropriate to look back at the most pioneering of studies on inputs and student achievement, the Coleman Report of 1966.

Sociologist James S. Coleman (1926-1995) released “Equality of Educational Opportunity” after conducting one of the largest studies of its kind in American history and one which ultimately found that how well we enhance school inputs — money, teacher credentials, library materials — has little correlation to how well students perform. Fryer and co-author Will Dobbie, both of Harvard University, similarly looked at the input measures at 35 charter schools and found that the most traditional measures — class size, per-pupil spending, certified or uncertified teachers — are not correlated with school effectiveness. Instead, Fryer and Dobbie show that frequent teacher feedback, the use of data to guide instruction, high-dosage tutoring, increased instructional time and high expectations “explains approximately 50 percent of the variation in school effectiveness.”

Modern-day reform critics and even historians tend to lose sight of the suggestions Coleman himself proposed in journal after journal in the years following his landmark report. In particular, Coleman took to The Public Interest in 1966 to suggest what he called “a modest, yet radical proposal” to achieve equality of educational opportunity.

Specifically, he wrote:

a) For those children whose family and neighborhood are educationally disadvantaged, it is important to replace this family environment as much as possible with an educational environment — by starting school at an earlier age, and by having a school which begins very early in the day and ends very late.

b) It is important to reduce the social and racial homogeneity of the school environment, so that those agents of education that do show some effectiveness — teachers and other students — are not mere replicas of the student himself. In the present organization of schools, it is the neighborhood school that most insures such homogeneity.

c) The educational program of the school should be made more effective than it is at present. The weakness of this program is apparent in its inability to overcome initial differences. It is hard to believe that we are so inept in educating our young that we can do no more than leave young adults in the same relative competitive positions we found them in as children.

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Quotable

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On November 2, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, School Choice, Teacher quality

“It’s unfortunate, but we saw democracy at work.”

Frank Lopez, a parent of a fifth-grader at the Bank of America Learning Academy in Jacksonville, Fla., a specialty school of the Duval County School District. The Duval School Board voted Tuesday to close the school to save $309,000 annually in its $1.7 billion budget. (Source: The Florida Times-Union)

“Sometimes the district that a bureaucrat draws that says you have to go here because it works in my bus route doesn’t necessarily translate into academic excellence.”

Bill Dunn, a Knoxville, Tenn., Republican who is sponsoring HB 388, a school voucher initiative for low-income students in Tennessee. (Source: News Channel 5)

“The very idea that we continue to restrict children from getting a high-quality education by where they live — and perpetuate Zip Code education — is absolutely senseless.”

RiShawn Biddle, editor of Dropout Nation, writing about the move of seven California families who asked a state superior court to bar the Los Angeles Unified School District  from striking a new collective bargaining agreement with the union that fails to consider student test data in teacher evaluations. (Source: Dropout Nation)

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Standing on the wrong side of empowerment

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On June 7, 2011 in Charter Schools, Education and Public Policy, General, Parent empowerment, Teacher quality

In a Wall Street Journal column today on the controversy surrounding the NAACP joining the New York City teachers union in an anti-charter school lawsuit, William McGurn writes:

For those who understand that our big city public school systems have become jobs programs for teachers and administrators, the NAACP’s response makes perfect sense. That’s because there are many African-American teachers in these systems, many of whom presumably belong to the NAACP … The NAACP is doing in New York what the United Federation of Teachers is doing, and for the same reason: protecting the interests of its members.

In an entry on redefinED last fall I discussed why middle-class African Americans feel such loyalty toward school districts and why this loyalty is fraying in Florida. Thanks to a variety of parental empowerment programs in Florida, African-American educators and local community activists are increasingly opening up financially-viable schools, and as these publicly funded private schools provide more middle-class teaching jobs, the middle class African-American community — which includes African-American politicians — is embracing them.

If the NAACP and New York City teachers union were more enlightened, they would understand that a centralized, command-and-control public education system is not in the best interests of teachers, parents, students or taxpayers. A public education system that empowers educators and local communities to create their own schools and empowers parents to match their children with the schools that best meet their needs is the best path to equal educational opportunity. Unfortunately both the NAACP and New York City teachers union are on the wrong side of history.

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Where ed reformers should focus

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On May 12, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Parental Choice, School Choice, Teacher quality

The most interesting comment I heard at this week’s American Federation for Children conference in Washington, D.C., came from Ed Kirby, who heads up projects at the Walton Family Foundation. After listening to GreatSchools CEO Bill Jackson and me talk about the information parents need to make good schooling choices, Ed said how rare it was to hear education reformers discuss improving the demand side of K-12 education. We tend to focus almost exclusively on improving schools and teachers (i.e., the suppliers), Ed remarked, and we ignore enhancing the capacity of parents to make good choices.

This is an important insight. In most sectors of our society we rely on consumers to inform and drive improvements in products and services, but that’s not true in publicly funded K-12 education. United States automakers didn’t invest in high quality small cars until American consumers started buying small cars from Japanese automakers. Microsoft is now investing heavily in online services because its customers are increasingly purchasing online services. The collective wisdom of consumers is the most valuable asset in our country, and yet we ignore this asset in K-12 education and then wonder why productivity in publicly funded education has remained stagnant.

Tenure reform, merit pay, increased funding, and more school choice will not significantly improve student learning if we don’t if give parents access to the information and support they need to make good choices. Ed is correct. Well informed parental empowerment is a necessary condition for improving K-12 education.

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Two approaches to ed reform, but one may do little to reform

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On April 27, 2011 in Education and Public Policy, General, Teacher empowerment, Teacher quality, Testing and Accountability, Unionism

Two divergent approaches to education reform are operating in public education today. Both are focused on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of human capital, but while one seeks greater centralization of power the other seeks greater decentralization.

Recent tenure, evaluation, seniority and merit pay reforms are examples of state government trying to improve education by giving school boards more power and mandating that they use this power to increase teacher productivity. Teacher unions, which were created to curb the power of school boards, oppose this power transfer since it’s their power that is being redistributed to school boards.

School board members seem ambivalent about receiving more centralized management power. They like having this additional power but know teacher unions, which play a significant role in local school board races, will fight them if they use it. So board members are trapped between governors and state legislators who will expect them to use these new powers to improve teaching and learning and teacher unions who will demand board members maintain the status quo.

When faced with this dilemma in Florida, our school boards have traditionally followed the letter of the law to satisfy the state while maintaining the status quo in the districts to keep peace with their unions. I predict school boards in states such as Indiana and Ohio will do the same when implementing their states’ new tenure and merit pay laws. Even though these new state tenure and merit pay laws are intended to benefit low-income children, particularly low-income children of color, they won’t because low-income families lack the political clout to counterbalance the pressure school boards will receive from college-educated, middle-class teachers.

Parental empowerment is the other education reform approach sweeping the country. Magnet schools, homeschooling, virtual schools, dual enrollment, tax credit scholarships and charter schools, among others, are enabling more parents to customize their children’s education by matching them with the learning options that best meet their needs. This latter approach is shifting power from school boards to parents and is opposed by board members and teacher unions.

Ultimately parental empowerment will be what generates systemic and sustainable improvements in publicly-funded education. As parents demand more and better learning options for their children, teachers will have more opportunities to be innovative and entrepreneurial, thereby allowing them to be more empowered, also. Unleashing the knowledge and skills of teachers and parents is the best way for public education to maximize its human resources.

Why teacher unions oppose both teacher and parent empowerment is an interesting story I’ll address in a future post.

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Charter network leader Moskowitz on class sizes

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On March 28, 2011 in Charter Schools, General, Teacher quality, Technology and Innovation

“Obsession with class size is causing many public schools to look like relics,” Success Charter Network founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz writes in the Sunday Washington Post. Small class sizes are no guarantee of success, and a “19th-century school can be transformed into a well-managed 21st-century school by adding just two students per classroom.”

 As an example, she cites the makeup of the network’s crown jewel, the Harlem Success Academy Charter School:

… we’ve gotten some of the best results in New York City … some classes are comparatively large because we believe our money is better spent elsewhere. In fifth grade, for example, every student gets a laptop and a Kindle with immediate access to an essentially unlimited supply of e-books. Every classroom has a Smart Board, a modern blackboard that is a touch-screen computer with high-speed Internet access. Every teacher has a laptop, video camera, access to a catalogue of lesson plans and videotaped lessons.

Public schools are spending so much to reduce class sizes that there isn’t enough left to ensure the development of the teachers they hire, Moskowitz writes. What’s worse, she says, human capital is getting more expensive while better technology and intellectual property are getting cheaper.

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