Rational Layoffs

For the first time in over 30 years, it's a pretty definite thing that New York is going to be laying off teachers. It's not a scare tactic or a negotiating plea. It's really happening. And suddenly, the city is realizing that the method in place for laying off teachers doesn't make any sense.

In New York, layoffs are done on a last in, first out basis. In other words, the newest teachers are the first to be let go. Ultimately, that's not a very good system.

Does it make any sense to not take quality into account at all when making these decisions? Yes, seniority is important because teachers tend to get better with experience. But is anyone really willing to say that every fifth year teacher is better than every fourth year teacher? Or even every first year teacher? That just defies logic and common sense.

The problem is (and this is why I haven't written about this before), I don't really know what's better. Given the way funding works in the city, during budget cuts there's an incentive to fire more experienced teachers because their salaries are higher. Also, leaving things solely in the hands of principals could lead to abuse. I don't buy the DOE's line that no principal would fire an effective teacher because of personal issues. That just seems a bit naive to me.

So what do we do? Well, this makes pretty clear that we need a better way to look at this issue and a better way to evaluate teachers - one that takes into account seniority, but also looks at effectiveness.

As the saying goes, the time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining. We've missed that opportunity and now these discussions - which would be highly charged during the best of times - are going to be even more fraught. But it's still a discussion worth having.

Today's Zeitgeist

I knew the moment that I saw this week's copy of Newsweek arrive in my mailbox that I was going to hate it. It says, "The Key To Saving American Education" in big yellow font with "We must fire bad teachers" written over and over again on a blackboard. I tried to read it with an open mind, but sometimes you can judge a Newsweek by the cover. I hated the article.

In terms of education ideas, it wasn't all that helpful (I'll get to that in a moment). If I was looking for a bright spot, I might say that it provided a helpful glimpse into the education reporting zeitgeist of the moment. Consider, the article slams "obstructionist" unions and "insipid" schools of education. Good things include KIPP and Michelle Rhee. In other words, in 20 years when I'm trying to explain to people what the educational dialogue was like in the year 2010, I can just pull out this article and it's all there. It'll save me the trouble of needing to hunt for multiple sources.

So now back to the actual point of the article - namely, that teacher quality is the key to good education and so we should fire all the bad teachers. First, let me say that I think teacher quality is incredibly important, but I don't know that I'd label anything, no matter how important, as the only and only way to get to the promised land of educational success and parity. Trying to solve complex problems with simple solutions sounds to me like a recipe for constantly lurching from one extreme to another. (Good thing school reform has avoided that, right?)

So we've got bad teachers in the system. Okay. We don't know how many (Randi Weingarten says 2%, but the article seems to think it's probably higher), but if it's the sole reason that we have an educational achievement gap, you can bet that it's a lot. Okay, so let's fire them.

Now what?

Seriously. Think that through for a moment. Now what?

Keep in mind, we've already got our best teachers in the schools. It's not like there's a whole lot of brilliant, wonderful, dedicated, committed teachers floating around out there without jobs because all the teaching positions are being hogged by obstructionist union members with degrees from insipid education programs. Who goes into the classrooms if we fire all of the teachers who aren't up to par? And how do we ensure that those teachers are better than the ones they're replacing?

The article chose to remain silent aside from some general puffery about making teaching a more desireable job. Well, good thinking. Why don't you get right on that?

I don't mean to be doom and gloom here because I don't think educational reform is hopeless and I do think that improving the quality of our teachers is important. I just don't think it's the only important thing and I don't think that massive firings are going to be as productive as Newsweek seems to imagine.

P.S. It didn't make the printed version, but check out this Newsweek blog that maybe undermines all their doomsday talk. My favorite line: "And the fact is that success – not failure – is actually the American educational norm."

An Interesting Case in Chicago

A little bit of education trivia for you: Chicago area schools have one of the largest gaps in teacher salaries in the country. For instance, the teachers in Oak Brook make an average of over $80,000 a year while the teachers in Grayslake make an average of about $38,000 a year. Pretty striking difference. Yet, despite this yawning gap in salaries, the students in these two areas appear to be performing at roughly the same level. That's interesting to me on two levels.

First, isn't it an article of faith among the idealocrats that higher pay for teachers (particularly if it comes in the form of merit pay) is supposed to equal better results for kids? I've never liked that argument terribly. True, you may attract more high fliers to teaching if the pay is better. But the idea that teachers are just not motivated to get kids to learn unless you dangle a carrot in front of them never rang true to me. During my time as a teacher, there was literally no amount of money you could pay me to work harder because I was already going all out. I still wasn't a great teacher and more money wouldn't have made the difference. But I digress. The real lesson here is that more money for teachers doesn't necessarily equate to more achievement for kids.

The second point that comes to me is that more experience doesn't necessarily seem to make a difference either. As the article points out, more time in the classroom (and more advanced degrees) tends to equal higher pay in the teaching profession. That's one reason the Oak Brook teachers get paid more. Yet those extra years of experience and additional diplomas also don't seem to be making a difference. The young turks in Grayslake seem to be doing just fine. Take notice all of you who say that we need to do more to value experienced teachers and ignore those young ones coming up because they aren't going to be as good.

I hate to write a post where I just tear down other people's ideas without offering up something productive of my own. So here it is. If there is a single way to predict and foster better teachers, we haven't found it yet and it may not exist. That doesn't mean we should stop trying to improve our teaching force. It does mean that we should stop looking for a single silver bullet that's going to improve all of our schools. It's just not that simple.

Using Great Teachers

The news on this has been out for a while now, but it's worth highlighting, nonetheless. A new study of North Carolina schools found that good teachers not only benefit their own classrooms, but they help improve the performance of other teachers in other classrooms. In other words, having a master teacher in a school can help all of the teachers at the school.

This was immediately spun into the debate over merit pay for teachers and both sides are using it to support their own claims. Follow the link above for all the gory details. That's a good point to consider in light of this and not surprising, since that's one of the hot button topics right now and so all discussions seem to come back to that at some point.

However, I tend to find myself thinking about the need and possibility for more professional development in schools. In all the push to get rid of the bad teachers and reward the exceptional teachers, we tend to forget about the ones in the middle who are just plain average. These are the hard workers who do good things, but are not the kind of people who are going to be in the running for teacher of the year. Frankly, this population makes up the majority of teachers and so we should probably focus some of our attention on them.

Since we know that great teachers can positively impact more average teachers, why don't we focus on mentoring programs and staff-led development on an ongoing basis. In all of our talk about reforming education, too many people are trying to work to totally reinvent the wheel rather than make what we have the best it can possibly be.

The Teacher Quality Problem

Here's the thing about President Obama's centrist "new pragmatic" approach to problems: I can never fully disagree or agree with the things he's saying. His education positions are no exception. Take some of his remarks from late last week. He says that we need to find ways to get bad teachers out of the clasroom (I agree with some qualifications) and that test scores shouldn't be the only way we measure teacher quality (agree totally).

First, the agreement. Obviously, teacher quality should be judged on more than the results of fill-in-the-bubble tests taken by students. That can be part of the equation, definitely, but even the kids taking the tests shouldn't be judged solely on them. No way should that be the sole criterion for determining who is an effective or ineffective teacher.

As for educational progress being contingent upon getting rid of bad teachers, I'm halfway there. Clearly, having ineffective teachers (however they're judged) isn't in the best interests of kids. We need to do what we can to make sure that every teacher in every classroom is a good teacher. And undoubtedly there are some people who just aren't made to be teachers and shouldn't be in the field. But I think that number is actually very low. I think (as I've written before) that most teachers are not all-stars or duds. Most teachers are average, middle-of-the-road teachers who work hard and want the best for kids. So when we look at that pool, we could draw the line at some point and say that anyone who falls below it has to find a new job. Or we can work to improve the teachers we have to ensure that they are able to be successful. The best way to get rid of bad teachers is to turn them into good teachers.

It makes more sense to me to work to improve the teachers we have rather than try to start over with a new pool in the magical hope that every one of them will be an all-star. I don't think that's a pragmatic approach at all.

Quantity or Quality

On Sunday, the Washington Post's Jay Matthews wrote his column on whether it's better to focus on class size reduction or improving teacher quality. His answer was that teacher quality has to be considered the winner.

Obviously, in the best of all possible worlds, we would recruit and develop the highest quality teachers who would then go in to teach in small classrooms. But in the zero sum game that is the budgeting process, something always has to give. The question becomes: what? (For the purpose of this post, I'm going to ignore all the other avenues for improving schools and just focus on class size vs. teacher quality.)

Matthews' conclusion that teacher quality is the bottom line needed to improve student results is something that's gaining a lot of steam across the country and makes a lot of sense. Great teachers get great results. Furthermore, as super-teacher Rafe Esquith says, "A great teacher can teach 60. A poor teacher will struggle with five." Very true. Even a small class size won't make up for someone who doesn't know what they're doing in the classroom.

But let's look a little deeper at that. The majority of teachers are not great teachers or poor teachers. The majority of teachers are average teachers. We need to be looking at what's going to best enable the average teachers in our system to become great teachers.

Class size proponents would argue that a limited class size would enable a run-of-the-mill teacher to more effectively manage a class and provide more individualized attention to the students who need it. This would then improve the level of their teaching and the students' learning.

Teacher quality advocates would say that adding to a teacher's "toolbox" would allow them to be more effective in running a class of any size. There's no subsitute for competence and expertise.

In rhetoric and theory those two sides pretty much battle it out to a draw. So let's look at reality where we're trying to maximize results on limited resources. Where should the money be spent.

The fact is that we're going to get more bang for our buck by working on teacher quality and turning average teachers into great teachers. The amount of money it takes to reduce class sizes by more than a marginal amount (and to the point where research shows it will actually make a difference) is staggering. In the best of all possible worlds where we have unlimited resources, that would be a worthwhile investment. But as long as we're in a world where we have to make choices, improving teacher quality is the road to follow.

Teach the Teachers

In our continuing quest to improve education for all across the country, recent reform efforts have spent a lot of time blaming teachers. Think about how often you hear about unions killing education reform efforts or protecting bad teachers who shouldn't even be in the profession. My personal take is that while there is certainly room for improvement in the teaching corps, the way to reach it is not to conduct some sort of purge. Why don't we focus on making the teachers we have better?

Turns out that the U.S. isn't so good at that. In a report from Stanford University and the National Staff Development Council, effective professional development must be "sustained, focused on important content, and embedded in the work of collaborative professional learning teams that support ongoing improvements in teachers’ practice and student achievement." When that happens, professional learning can have a powerful effect on student learning. That makes sense to me. Who's really going to argue that better teachers would be, well, better teachers? Unfortunately, professional development in the U.S. is "episodic, often fragmented, and disconnected from real problems of practice."

Think about the rhetoric you're hearing. Everyone agrees that good teachers produce good student learning. That's a given. With that as a given, which makes more sense? Should we fire every teacher who isn't a great teacher and launch a massive recruitment drive to hire an entire cohort of new teachers who will magically be better and more successful (presumably because they're being paid more and don't have tenure)? Or should we focus data-driven professional development that will turn the teachers we have into better teachers? Consider that there are over 3 million teachers in this country.

When we try to improve student outcomes, we work with the students we have, provide them extra support, and push them to achieve their best. We don't just try to expel them from school. All I'm saying is that we should extend teachers the same courtesy.

Tenure Review

And so the battle over teacher tenure continues. Courtest of the National Council on Teacher Quality, comes a report showing that most states (48) don't require any evidence of teacher effectiveness before granting tenure to the teachers. The article does mention that tenure doesn't mean a guaranteed job for life (which is more than many discussions on the topic include), but is generally critical of the system.

I have to say that I'm with the Council on this one. I'm not opposed to tenure. I'm not one of those who thinks that KIPP schools are going to be ruined now that some of them are engaging in collective bargaining. Tenure is fine and teacher unionization is fine. Neither of them are automatically opposed to successful education.

However, tenure seems to me like something that must be earned. At college campuses the tenure review committee is a big deal and the process takes years (and evidence). I don't think that the situation should be so radically different for our public schools. Let's grant tenure to the good teachers. But let them show that they've earned it first.

Also, those that are struggling, let's not just cut them loose. Just like every student has the potential to learn, let's assume that every teacher has the potential to be a good teacher. Instead of focusing on ways to make firing teachers easier, let's look at ways to make teachers better. The Gates Foundation is doing it. Maybe that will help get some of the idealocrats on board.

The Best Schools

Earlier this week, Education Week announced their rankings of all 50 states in terms of how they're doing on education. The state that was ranked number 1 in the country is Maryland. Shortly after Maryland comes Massachusetts and then New York.

To my mind, the interesting question is not so much which state is on top, it's why that state is on top. And this is where is starts to get really interesting.

According to a report by MGT of America and given to the Maryland General Assembly, the difference is more money. As the Baltimore Sun reports, "For every additional $1,000 spent per student, there was a significant increase in pass rates in [reading and math]." A very interesting finding because every Republican and a fair number of Democrats will tell you that throwing more money at education is not the solution. And yet, more money seems to have made a difference in the top education state in the country.

That being said, I think that common sense will tell us that more money alone is not the solution. What really matters is how that money is spent. Again according to the Sun, 80% of the new money was put into the teaching staff in the form of increased pay, hiring more teachers to reduce class sizes, and professional development. The money was also used in a targeted way that didn't spread it all around equally, but focused it "to provide the most help to special education and poor students and those learning English."

What a concept. Focus on the kids who most need help and use money to recruit and develop a high quality teaching staff. No wonder Maryland schools are doing so well.