Bringing Ed Reform to Scale

Yet another data point on the selectivity model for improving education. By selecting teachers from top universities, charter schools in Boston are getting better results for their students. This is pointed out in an editorial over at Gadfly today by Steven Wilson from Ascend Charter schools.

There are 7 charter schools that are realizing significantly higher student learning gains on the state’s MCAS tests. Over 50% of the teachers in those schools are from elite universities compared to 19% at public schools.

But then Steven does something that most education reformers refuse to think about. Can you bring that model to scale. Can we slowly replace all 2.6 million teachers with teacher from elite schools (note I used a little thing called math to pull out the 19% already from elite schools). He thinks not.

From his editorial:“Each year, about 142,000 students graduate from highly selective postsecondary institutions (Barron's top two ranks). Even if one in every ten of their graduates entered teaching for two years (the average tenure at many no-excuses schools) before moving onto other careers, they would provide for only six percent of the 438,914 teachers currently working in the 66 member districts of the Council of Great City Schools (CGCS). Simply put, we might have enough of these teachers to staff a few hundred more No Excuses schools, but not a few thousand more, and certainly not enough to reach every disadvantaged child in America.”

This is the same problem with KIPP and TFA which are highly touted as the solution for education woes. While they are great programs we need to simultaneously invest in programs like ABCTE that can be brought to scale efficiently and effectively.

A good bottle of whine left unopened

I went to the State Policy Network program in Arizona this week and, as a new guest, had picked out a delightful and amusing bottle of “whine” to bring with me. I get pretty frustrated with education reformers at these conferences who say we are going to talk education reform – and the spend two days talking vouchers and tax credits.

But I did not get to use the bottle of whine that I brought. Because the conference opened up with various leaders talking about tackling true education reform and not being “one trick ponies”!! And now a debate on Gadfly echoing this sentiment.

Reform means reform. And the data continues to demonstrate that implementing just one reform will not improve schools. It will take serious fundamental changes in our education system to bring our performance back to the levels that our world economy demands.

So, for now, I can put the bottle of whine back in storage and let it age a little more - - I may still need it some day and a good whine always gets better with age.

Fixing Teacher Quality

Teaching quality continues to move forward in the news. Mike Petrilli has an excellent write up in the Gadfly from last week and now a new article in the Washington Post about what the newly canonized Michelle Rhee plans to do. But they are all trying to run before we learn to walk.
Management texts will tell you that you need to focus on improving staff. In teaching, the staggering numbers always tell the tale.

There are 3.2 million teachers. Jack Welch, the brilliant CEO of GE, made his managers rank all staff so that they knew the top 20%, middle 70% and the bottom 10%. The top 20% were fast tracked into leadership positions and the bottom 10% got fired.

We would have to fire 320,000 teachers per year. That would double the number of teachers we need to hire each year and since we can’t find enough to fill our positions now, we will never have enough if we start to really push an aggressive approach towards eliminating mediocre teaching.

The other problem with rating teachers is that our principals have not demonstrated that they are really all that great at rating teachers. Here I am siding with the teacher’s unions again - but we would really need some serious evaluation training for principals before we can start this type of approach.

To solve teacher quality we need to do the following:

1. Fix recruitment – have enough candidates for each position so that the principal can hire the right teacher for his/her students – we need more routes to the classroom to increase the numbers
2. Be Selective - less than 40% of our ABCTE candidates make it through the program and we are starting to see great results from our teachers
3. Train principals in hiring – ensure they know how to match the teacher to the students
   Develop great performance evaluations for teachers – outcomes and observations based and ensure the evaluation is more than once a year
4. Train principals on evaluations – ensure they know how to develop teachers
5. Develop truly great professional development for teachers – develop efficacy measure for the professional development to ensure it meets minimum standards
6. Train principals on how to assign prescriptive professional development from performance evaluations

Once that is in place, then you can start to move teachers who do not succeed with students out of the classroom. But we have a lot of work to do learning to walk before we can start running.