Inspired Teaching

Trying to change education when people cling to ancient rituals (like current teacher certification rules) can be discouraging. What we look for to keep us going is adults in the system who aren’t focused on what they want but are truly focused on the. So it was great to sit down with the Washington Post on Sunday morning with a great cup of coffee and enjoy this piece in the opinion section. It is not written by a think tank or someone representing the many opposing groups in education or a researcher who once again found no statistical difference between policy A or policy B. It is written by Nancy Schnog who is an English teacher finding the inspiration to continue teaching even when adults in the system make it so hard for her to keep going.

The two money quotes from the article are:
“We’re inspired and inspiring teachers. Schools don’t let us teach”
“That’s what reaches them. Caring Enough. Caring.”

It baffles the mind that people spend so much time and money looking for the hidden holy grail of teacher preparation and what works in teaching and trying to tie it to some mysterious equations involving complex statistical analysis when all we need to do is really find a way to see if people truly care about students. It is especially annoying that we keep a complex maze of restrictions to limit what groups can certify teachers when we just need to make sure caring people have the right tools to succeed.

As long as people like Nancy Schnog are in the system, we will keep fighting to find more people like her to ensure our future generations can properly communicate with the rest of the world.

Mentoring - strike 2

Mentoring and induction are one of the ‘knowns’ in education. You just know it works and the more you give the better teachers will perform and the longer they will stay in the classroom. A given – just like child psychology, the history of teaching, student teaching and other courses that are absolutely required to ensure you get a great teacher.

Except they don’t really seem to help

IES with the second year of a study on extensive mentoring and once again it shows that there is no real difference for student achievement and no impact on retention. Wow.

A while back I wrote about the first year of this study and the flaws of the study were pointed out by Liam Goldrick from The New Teacher Center. He points out that the mentoring was not the pure New Teacher Center program and it was the first year. So the first flaw still applies – but the second, not so much.

To us the headline is that big, formal, costly programs do no better then the informal, helping each other out stuff that is happening in more and more schools. However – there are still too many schools where teachers are still very much on their own.

The conclusion is: no conclusion. Generalizing from one study is not going to help anyone. Each school must look at the culture and if they have a very collaborative approach to teaching, no need for spending huge amounts on mentoring. If it is every man, woman and child for themselves – then get them some formal mentoring.

Unfortunately with the ARRA spending bubble soon to burst, mentoring will be one of the very first casualties

Blog Carnival of Education innovation!!

The new Blog Carnival of Education Innovation is up at ABCTE - - give it a read and find out what is going on in the blogosphere.

Indiana wants me, and we will go back there!

We continue to stay in the news in Indiana as SUPERintendent Tony Bennett pushes for major reforms in education. This is great to see as you have a teacher speaking out in favor of these reforms and the SUPERman himself pushing hard.

Let’s break it down – shall we?
1. Teachers have the greatest impact on students
2. The performance of our education system has become stagnant while all the other school systems of the world improve
3. There are 3.4 million teachers in the US – is there any single training method that works perfectly for 3.4 million people?
4. If our current teacher preparation programs were perfect, number 2 wouldn’t be true
Therefore, bringing in new methods that can address training for different groups of potential teachers is the logical next step

We will continue to push with Tony Bennett to make sure that every student in Indiana has a great teacher.

Drop out prevention

For those who are interested in getting more info on Colorado, you can hear the melodic voice of Dave Saba (me) on a podcast from the Independence Institute. Also a great post from ediswatching on the latest education happenings in Colorado.

We will have to develop a drop-out prevention course for all our teachers in order to meet the new law on teacher certification in Colorado. We grumbled a bit but when we saw some of the resources from CDE has already put together on this it becomes a much more exciting project. We have also talked with the Professional Association of Colorado Educators (PACE) to get some great local input.

Our intent is to make this a free program available to all teachers since there are so many great resources out there and there is such a need…..if you would like to offer your thoughts, or help, on this important project please feel free to give us a call.

Stop the Madness

Birmingham, Alabama took a very strange step last week. They decided to continue to hire teachers from the Philippines even though Baldwin County used this same route a few years ago and it didn’t work out so hot. And they are recruiting overseas in spite of the fact that so many people in this country have lost their jobs.

People wonder why we education reformers get so irate. But here we have an excellent example of maintaining the status quo just because that is what you have done in the past in spite of evidence telling you not to go down this path again. Baldwin County hired 12 teachers from the Philippines through Avenida International Consultants in 2007, and only three of those teachers remain today. That's a stunning 25 percent retention rate, yet Birmingham is ready to hire teachers through that same recruitment agency.

In the nine states where ABCTE operates, we have a teacher retention rate of 85 percent after three years. Additionally, 95 percent of principals rated American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence teachers to be as effective, or more effective, than their peers.

It seems insane that Alabama schools would go down a path that already failed them once when there are more viable options that can help them fill their math and science positions with people here in the United States that need jobs today. But maybe the administrators just like going on junkets to the Philippines with education dollars instead of dedicating them to the students.

Research that doesn't tell us anything

In education you hear “I believe” way too many times. I mock these people who think that there is no evidence required – as long as you believe it works in education it must be so. It is as if education is a religion with a prescribed set of beliefs and those of us heretics on the outside must be derided for upsetting their belief system.

On the outside we say there must be evidence – student achievement is the coin of the realm and without it you are one of the barriers to education improvement.

Lately, however, I am questioning my belief in student achievement. I am beginning to wonder if anything actually does get you student achievement that is really superior to something else.

I base this on a series of disappointing study results. First you had the New Teacher Center study. It seemed to indicate that an intense mentoring program didn’t yield significant results. Then you had a recent study on the TAP teacher career ladder program. Not to mention many studies on charter schools, National Board Certification, Vouchers and TFA - - none of which is a home run for opponents or supporters.

It is really beginning to appear to me that if the “gold standard” of random assignment doesn’t really seem to answer any of the real questions then why are paying researchers millions of dollars to conduct the study? Shouldn’t one of these programs have shown some really significant gains? Or is it the incredibly wide variation in student and teacher performance so far gone that we can’t really see small differences in results? Maybe the earth really isn't flat!

It is above my head – but those who are smarter than I need to come up with a better judge of results that actually tells us something and doesn’t use up millions of dollars to give us a vague answer.

ABCTE Teachers Increase Student Achievement!

Alert the Journal of Anecdotal Evidence, we have proof that ABCTE Teachers dramatically increase student achievement. Our sample size of one, Kelly Bow, an ABCTE teacher who teaches math in an Idaho middle school was able to accomplish the following:

“For the above average and advanced category, my students beat every school in the area including the very small private schools, two charter schools and a very wealthy district,” she explains. Just recently, Bow got more good news, as her students increased their ISAT scores by 22.5% versus last year.

Huge news. People always ask us about student achievement and we will continue to build our database and get a large enough sample size to ensure we get actual results to publish. But for now, we will appreciated and celebrate the anecdotal.

WSJ Nails it!!

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent summary of the recent research on teacher certification. It is great to see the Journal take on teacher quality and advocate for more alternative teacher certification programs like ABCTE.

Wall Street Journal

We responded with the following letter to the editor:

Letter to the Editor – Wall Street Journal:

As the president of a non-profit alternative teaching certification program, it is great to see the Journal weighing in on teacher quality and helping to debunk the myth of certification in “The ‘Certified’ Teacher Myth” (Dec. 13).

In all eight states where our program is now accepted I am asked why the teacher’s unions oppose us when, in theory, we create more union members. The Journal’s premise that the issue comes down to basic economics is correct and, unfortunately, while union opposition to alternative certification programs may be in the best interest of members because it limits the supply of teachers, it is not in the best interest of students; the Peterson study referenced by the Journal is shedding much-needed light on this issue.

There are other studies that demonstrate the benefits of alternative certification programs. For example, the Brookings Institution gathered performance data on over 195,000 students and found no difference between those taught by alternatively certified teachers versus those taught by teachers certified through standard routes.

State leaders need to look at the facts on alternative teacher certification, which can increase the quality and the racial diversity of their teaching workforce. They must understand the economic motivation of teacher’s unions on this issue and make the choice that is best for students.

DAVID SABA
President
ABCTE
Washington, D.C.
www.abcte.org

The American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded via a grant from the U.S. Department of Education and committed to recruiting, certifying and

Free markets in higher education

Free markets continue to infiltrate higher education. I am not talking about the proliferation of for-profit institutions, I am talking about ratemyprofessors.com. If you don’t have a kid in college, you may not be aware of the power this is bringing to college students everywhere.

My daughter is transferring to James Madison University for her second year. As a transfer student you don’t get first choice in scheduling. But for every class she schedules, she first checks ratemyprofessors.com to see if the professor is good or bad.

I have watched her become a very savvy consumer of higher education. She does not just believe the overall ratings but is now matching the professor’s characteristics to her own. She is the type that attends every class so she selects professors that give credit for that. She likes more work but does not do as well on big finals - so she will select professors who have graded work during the semester decreasing the impact the final exam will have on the overall grade. If she has a choice of two courses and doesn’t feel strongly about the content, she will take the better rated professor.

When I was going to school we just had rumors and horror stories to go by – not great information like this. Ratemyprofessors boasts over 7 million ratings in their database and we rarely find a professor that has not been rated by students.

This leads to some interesting questions such as – what happens to a tenured professor when no one takes their class because of the low ratings? Will good courses be dropped because of a perceived lack of interest when in reality it is just the professor? Will there be a Darwinian result for those ill-informed/lazy/tech adverse students who don’t bother to check the website before signing up for classes?

It is fascinating to watch. As a parent who is paying the bills, it is also comforting to know that my daughter will not be stuck in a class with a horrible professor who will wreak havoc on her GPA with unfair tests that don’t actually cover the material. And, hopefully she will take this finely honed consumer sense with her throughout her life.

Education Research Shows Nothing but High Price Tags

Two articles this week on education research with no real winner or loser in either. Shocking. The first study is the result of an exhaustive study of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Ed Week says that the results show that “National Board Teachers found to be Effective”. Wow – not exactly a resounding victory.

Next up was a study of supplemental education services (SES). In this case the results were mixed with a Rand study showing some improvement but other studies showing no real improvement. Not exactly a resounding defeat.

Notice a trend. It costs a lot of money to conduct a study to determine student achievement yet we cannot really see any truly significant results. In the case of the National Board, the effect size was .04 – this means that only 4% of the gains made by students can be attributable to the fact that the child had a National Board teacher. Even if the results are better, the samples sizes are small due to the cost and the detractors of a program will call it out based on sample size even if it is statistically significant.

There is no slam dunk in studies of student achievement. It is sad but true that the costs are too high and the variation seems to be too great to really get a feel for the success of one program or another. Maybe we need a new measure?