Tag Archive for ‘teacher quality’ at The Core Knowledge Blog

Tag Archive for 'teacher quality'

2008’s Education Person of the Year: Michelle Rhee

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 1, 2009 in Education Leadership. 24 Comments

To whom much is given, much is expected. And Washington DC’s Chancellor Michelle Rhee has been given quite a bit: control of one of the lowest-performing school systems in the country, a broad mandate for sweeping reform, and the unequivocal support of her boss, Washington mayor Adrian Fenty. She’s also been given an inexhaustible work ethic, a hardcore “no excuses” management style, and an apparent immunity to criticism or the opinion of others.

Now, much is expected. Everything, in fact.

She is, in the apt description of The Atlantic, “the most controversial figure in American public education and the standard-bearer for a new type of schools leader nationwide.” Her rise in the last 18 months from relative obscurity to the cover of Time Magazine earned her the top spot in our poll to determine the most influential person in education in 2008. It wasn’t a close contest.

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post was one of many of our panel of observers to put Rhee at the top of his list of the year’s most influential people in education, citing her status as “the most visible educator of the year, pushing the discussion toward rewarding teachers and ending tenure.” The Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene and Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation likewise placed Rhee atop their ballots. Bill Jackson, founder and president of GreatSchools.net, cited Rhee’s “radical new way of thinking about the teaching profession, including tenure and compensation.”

“Love her or hate her, she is redefining the very definition of an urban superintendent,” said Patrick Riccards, author of the blog Eduflack. ”She has changed the way teachers, families, the community, and businesses think about DC Public Schools. For the first time in a long time, people have hope for schools in the District.”

Rhee’s paradigm shattering proposal for DC teachers–way higher pay in exchange for giving up seniority and tenure-has pushed her to the forefront of the national dialogue about teacher quality and compensation. In the process she has become, perhaps inevitably, the most polarizing figure in education. Her brand of education reform strikes a nerve-and a chord. She has clearly tapped into the energy and idealism of younger teachers who are often mystified by union politics and fiercely committed to closing the achievement gap. Rhee’s proposal is not intimidating, but welcome to many of the “Rhee-volutionaries” she’s attracting to the nation’s capitol. Perform or perish? Bring it on. ”If I worked my butt off, did everything I could, and got fired by an administration like Rhee’s who deemed my teaching ineffective, I would tip my hat, sigh of relief, and find a new career or job,” a first-year Teach for America corps member commented on this blog in response to the Time Magazine cover story about Rhee. A Newsweek profile, one of dozens of national news stories about the Chancellor in 2008, noted “Rhee doesn’t quite come out and say it, but she and her fellow reformers are trying to change the teaching profession, at least in the inner city, from an 8 a.m.-to-3 p.m. job with summers off, to something that bears more resemblance to joining the Green Berets.”

KIPP schools score well because teachers work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Saturday, and carry cell phones so their students can reach them any time. Summer vacation lasts only about a month. There are teachers who can maintain this pace for decades (just as there are some older Special Forces operatives in the military), but in Rhee’s world many teachers may find themselves working hard, burning out and moving on.

A fight over the teachers’ contract looms in 2009. The Washington Teachers’ Union has brought in the American Federation of Teachers, led by Randi Weingarten to address the stalled negotiations. The stakes and the rhetoric are high. “I consider this proposal to be an IQ test as to whether teachers are willing to slit their own throats,” union vice-president Nathan Saunders told Newsweek. “I believe this contract is going to pass. And I believe it is going to have a huge impact,” said Rhee. “Even if it didn’t, it would not stop me.”

That’s precisely the kind of don’t-mess-with-me rhetorical flourish that divides Rhee fans from her detractors. “Such administrators are the reason so many good teachers believe they still need unions, and need them badly,” notes columnist Julia Steiny. ”Hyper-authoritarian administrators storm the beaches, guns blazing, not much caring what dies in the crossfire. Schools may improve, but at the cost of human misery. And miserable teachers cannot foster a love of learning.”

In the final analysis, Michelle Rhee is, as The Atlantic correctly concluded, carrying the very viability of education reform on her shoulders:

Rhee is confronting the great divide over American public-education reform-not between left and right but between two philosophies about education. To Rhee and her fellow reformers, schools can, by themselves, produce successful students. To her opponents (and they include liberals and conservatives), schools are not enough, however “successful” their students. They are an important, but hardly the only, means with which children are inculcated with the skills and mores of their community. The divide means that Rhee’s challenge is not just to reform one of the worst school systems in the country and, in effect, prove whether or not inner-city schools can be revived at all.”

Note: Thanks to our panel of education observers and pundits for their time and help in making the Education Person of the Year series possible: Sol Stern, Jay Mathews, Bill Jackson, Andy Rotherham, Diane Ravitch, Mike Petrilli, Jay Greene Michael Shaughnessy, Nancy Flanagan, Patrick Riccards, Corey Bunje Bower and Dan Brown.

Ed Person of the Year #5: Gates Reboots

Published by Robert Pondiscio on December 27, 2008 in Education News. 1 Comment

Until very recently, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s brand of school reform was largely associated with the small schools movement. They spent $2 billion turning big, “obsolete” high schools into smaller “learning communities.” In November, faced with evidence of diminishing returns on the strategy, Gates hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and rebooted their efforts, shifting the focus to higher standards for college readiness and improving teacher quality.

“We must give the Gates Foundation and its founders credit for their honest self-scrutiny,” wrote Diane Ravitch on Forbes.com. ”Most proponents of education reform defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.” In Fortune last month, Claudia Wallis summarized the Gates Foundation’s new direction, the goal of which is to double the number of low-income students earning a college degree by 2025.

The upshot is that Education 2.0 is bolder and more aggressive in its goals, and it involves even more intensive investment - $3 billion over the next five years. This time the focus isn’t on the structure of public high schools but on what’s inside the classrooms: the quality of the teaching and the relevance of the curriculum. It steers smack into some of the biggest controversies in American education - tying teacher tenure and salaries to performance, and setting national standards for what is taught and tested.

“One of the reasons to think that the Gates 2.0 plan will be more successful than version 1.0 is that the plan involves a commitment to measure results and follow the evidence rather than plow forward with a preconceived notion like ’small schools are better,” wrote Wallis.

Lessons Learned

“We saw that there is a big difference between graduating from high school and being ready for college,” said Gates in a speech at the Foundation’s November announcement. “In general, the places that demonstrated the strongest results tended to do many proven reforms well, all at once: they would create smaller schools, a longer day, better relationships—but they would also establish college-ready standards aligned with a rigorous curriculum, with the instructional tools to support it, effective teachers to teach it, and data systems to track the progress.” The defining feature of a great education, said Gates, is what happens in the classroom.

We’ve known about these huge differences in student achievement in different classrooms for at least 30 years. Unfortunately, it seems that the field doesn’t have a clear view on the characteristics of great teaching. Is it using one curriculum over another? Is it extra time after school? We don’t really know. But that’s what we have to find out if we’re going to not only recognize great teachers, but also take average teachers and help them become great teachers. I’m personally very intrigued by this question, and over the next few years I want to get deeply engaged in understanding this better.

Curriculum advocates, who often feel marginalized in ed reform debates about purely structural issues, were also cheered to hear Gates say “I believe strongly in national standards. Countries that excel in math, for example, have a far more focused, common curriculum than the United States does.” He also called for better use of data to drive instruction — and as the basis for merit pay. Gates, however, took pains to display a nuanced take on the potentially divisive issue.

There are two extreme sides in this debate. According to the caricature, one side just wants to turn teachers into commissioned salesmen, so their whole salary is based on how much the scores improve. The other caricature says that teachers don’t want to be held accountable, so they will reject any system that ties pay to performance. In truth, designing an appropriate incentive system is difficult, but possible. We believe in incentive systems, but we understand the concern that without the right design, they could seem arbitrary or incent the wrong things. They need to be transparent, they need to make sense, and teachers themselves need to see the benefits of the system and embrace them.

“The good news is that the Gates Foundation, with its vast resources, has pledged to devote its attention to what happens in the classroom,” concluded Diane Ravitch in her essay for Forbes.com. “The first thing it will learn is that there are no quick fixes. If it targets its dollars wisely, exercises a measure of humility, and continues to evaluate its efforts rigorously, it can make a positive difference.”

Brinksmanship in DC Schools?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 16, 2008 in Education News. 2 Comments

Washington, DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee have drafted a plan to dramatically expand their effort to remove ineffective teachers from DC schools by seeking federal legislation declaring the school system in a state of emergency–a move that would eliminate the need to bargain with the Washington Teachers’ Union, reports the Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the plan under the Freedom of Information Act

If adopted, the measures would essentially allow the District to begin building a new school system. Such an effort would be similar to one underway in New Orleans, where a state takeover after Hurricane Katrina placed most of the city’s 78 public schools in a special Recovery School District. About half of the district’s schools are charters, and it has no union contract.

The Post’s report notes the plan was drawn up in a statement for a news conference in September where “Rhee and Fenty were scheduled to present a series of steps they could take under existing regulations to rid the system of teachers deemed ineffective.” The news conference was cancelled and the statement never made public. But that doesn’t appear to mean Rhee and Fenty are having second thoughts. “The Mayor and the Chancellor will continue to keep these and all ideas on the table,” a spokesperson tells the paper.

“The moves could force a major confrontation with the union and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, which has denounced the changes in New Orleans,” the Post notes.

My hunch is that Rhee and Fenty are using the threat of a state of emergency to force the teacher’s union to let its members vote on their plan to give teachers hefty salary hikes in exchange for waiving tenure.

Update: Eduflack is also on this and takes the long view. “At the end of the day, once Rhee has gotten all of the change and reform she’s seeking, she actually has to work with those left standing to deliver on her promise to boost student achievement and close the achievement gap,” he writes. “That means parents and families. It means teachers and principals. And it certainly means the Washington Teachers Union. Rhee’s ultimate success will be determined by the effectiveness of the teachers and the union that supports them. And there is no working around that, no matter how hard you try.”

Magic Bullets Frustrate Reformers With Elusive Ways

Published by Robert Pondiscio on August 2, 2008 in Curriculum and Educational Policy. 8 Comments

The magic bullet for raising tests scores is….constant assessment? Tracking the progress of individual students? Parental involvement? All of the above? An AP story quotes Colorado educators who have discovered — mirabile dictu! – there is no single magic bullet.

Apropos of that, the best post I’ve read this week comes from Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, who asks on the Gadfly, “Are we sure that “improving teacher quality” is the panacea that so many have suggested? Is it possible that our current fascination with ‘human capital development’ is misguided? That both presidential campaigns’ embrace of this issue is ill-considered?”

Yes, the research is quite clear that the quality of a student’s teacher has a greater impact on that student’s achievement than anything else that schools can control. It’s also clear that low-income and minority children are much less likely to be taught by “high quality teachers” (however defined) than are affluent and white children. So reformers make the jump: If we could just fill every classroom with society’s “best and brightest,” we’d have our education problems licked. Or, they continue, if we could just get our most talented teachers to serve in our neediest schools, we’d have our achievement gap beat.

The problem obviously, is that we’re unlikley to fill every classroom with the best and the brightest–the numbers are simply too great–and other favored solutions like merit pay are equally unlikely to work at scale. “Shouldn’t we be thinking about how to make average teachers more effective, too, and augmenting them via technology and other stratagems, rather than putting all our eggs in the “superstar teacher” basket?” asks Petrilli.

Petrilli’s measured and thoughtful post offers a useful roadmap. As Donald Rumsfeld did not say, “You go to school with the teachers you have. Not the teachers you wish you had.”

Forgive the inelegant analogy, but raising student achievement may not be a disease we’re going to cure, but rather a chronic condition we can manage with a cocktail of interventions and strategies. One of those strategies ought to be a national core curriculum and common standards. It would certainly be a great help (not a magic bullet) in improving teacher quality, since it would enable teachers and staff developers on improving the craft of teaching–focus on the “how” of teaching, instead of what to teach.

More: Joanne Jacobs agrees with Petrilli on the relative lack of superstar teachers, but has questions about the efficacy of technology