Part 4: What is happening to teaching jobs

Layoffs are incredibly difficult for any organization. During a recession it takes true leadership for an organization to make it through to better times and come out stronger. Organizations with weak leadership do not survive, and if they do, aren't able to take advantage of the upcoming economic recovery.

Layoffs damage morale and if they are done wrong, can irreversibly impact your talent pool. The problem for our education system is that performance never appears to have an impact on who gets the pink slip.

On one end you have districts trying to save money by pushing for early retirement of the most expensive employees and on the other end you have layoffs strictly by seniority meaning the most junior will suffer. Unfortunately, neither option does anything to strengthen the performance of our education system because they don't focus on keeping the most talented teachers in front of our students.

The McKinsey Quarterly has a great article on how organizations can come out of a recession stronger by focusing on building the absolute best team.

First, “head count reductions provide a powerful incentive to use existing resources better”. Job redesign can increase job satisfaction and save money. Look for efficiencies in the system and look for ways to reduce overhead to improve customer focus. School districts have the opportunity to reduce overhead now and also try to find efficiencies through technology and innovative staffing models. Unfortunately – they are mainly just cutting overhead to the bone so not much is being done to improve performance.

Second, is to implement better training. There is a growing understanding in education that professional development is neither. And there certainly isn't any money to send teachers to so called "professional development". One idea that education can implement is to use your most talented teachers to help develop other teachers. This is a great time to tap into your most successful teachers and increase the performance of all your classrooms.

The third idea offered up by McKinsey is to conduct thorough performance assessments of all staff. “Companies that conduct disciplined, meritocratic assessments of performance and potential are well placed to make good personnel decisions.” Education cannot comply with this recommendation for three huge reasons. One, we don’t have great performance assessments of teachers that have been shown to directly impact student achievement. Two, we don’t have principals who are thoroughly trained in performance assessment and three, it wouldn’t matter anyway because you can’t layoff by performance because of most teacher contracts.

The fourth recommendation is to grab talent now while it is available. This is something that some school districts will be able to do to make themselves a stronger organization. The recession will not last and when things turn around, school enrollments begin to increase and the tsunami of boomer teacher retirements begins, there will be a severe shortage of talent – especially in math science. Job stability has replaced huge bonuses and pay as the organizational brand that people are searching for in a career today. Throw in retirement pay, summers off and helping students, and your pitch suddenly tops most careers out there. Recruiting career changers and displaced younger teachers now will ensure that your district is ready two years from now.

In every recession some organizations die while others come out so well positioned that their long term success is guaranteed. Charter schools are the best position to take the McKinsey recommendations and come out of this recession as some of the best schools in our country. Unfortunately, most schools will not and will lose a great opportunity to excel.

Series on What is Happening to Teaching
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Part 5

TIMMS - mediocrity reigns supreme

I was going to blog on TIMSS and talk about the mediocre performance of our schools in math and science and how we can never be competitive as a nation unless we lead in the area of technological expertise – but most other bloggers already have. So then I thought I could do a great summary of what other bloggers said about the TIMSS results and provide that to our loyal readers – but then I found that Core Knowledge already did that as well.

Based on these results, wouldn’t it be great to test all the teachers in these countries on the math and science content. I would be willing to bet a substantial sum, that the results would pretty much mirror the students. We have now highlighted the problem – now we need to come up with viable solutions and they come down to two core actions as evidenced by the McKinsey study we so often cite.

• Develop a rigorous standards based curriculum
• Be highly selective (like ABCTE) on who gets in front of our students

‘Nuff said – now have a great weekend

Malcolm Gladwell is throwing the certification baby out with the bath water

In many areas of education, it is interesting to observe how easily wrong conclusions can be drawn from data. In a recent piece in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell implies that because there is no difference in student performance between certified and non-certified teachers that we should eliminate the certification process altogether. You may label this the "Let them all in and sort them out later" strategy.

It is true that if the bar is set so low that it does not improve quality, you should eliminate it altogether. The bar is useless. But you should only do that if you are getting the quality necessary for great schools. This is obviously not the case.

We need to raise the bar, not eliminate it. The McKinsey study says that selectivity is the key to great schools. Our current teacher certification processes are anything BUT selective. Our Ed schools are not all that rigorous to get through and most state teacher tests have pass rates over 95%.

This is not highly selective. Therefore you would not expect to see much difference between a certified and uncertified teacher.

Choose the right inputs to measure in potential teachers - the ones that lead to greater student achievement (we do). Set the bar high enough to ensure people have the skills and knowledge to perform and you will see better results. Don’t end certification. Make it relevant and make it rigorous.

Teacher testing is necessary

If you have not seen Flypaper over at Fordham – they have a lot of posts on their blog. They had a recent post about a study that will appear soon that says that teacher testing deters good people from becoming teachers. I posted the following response on their blog:

I am very curious as to how they came to this conclusion that the test is the barrier that keeps potentially great teachers from teaching. I can honestly say that after seeing 6,000 people start our program and less than 40% actually complete, that our test is absolutely necessary. This is because many of those potential teachers “whose educational backgrounds qualify them to teach” cannot compose a coherent essay and don’t have the most basic knowledge of their subject matter.

I wholeheartedly agree that a test with a passing rate of 95-99% is a useless waste of time and money. If every university had a minimum standard for graduation that meant that every teacher would have outstanding writing skills and subject matter mastery, we would be the first to push for the elimination of teacher testing. But we are nowhere near those kinds of results. The essays we see from college graduates are nothing short of dismal.

And many of the people going through our program would much rather take a test then sit through countless hours of useless classes.

The McKinseystudy of the best school systems in the world found that selectivity of teachers was a key driver of their success. We have to select the best teachers with tests that truly measure ability to very rigorous standards, like the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence exams, in order to compete in the world market.

It's Limbo Time!

Where are the teacher unions in Massachusetts? As defenders of the profession, they should be outraged by a bill that will lower the standard for getting into the profession. McKinsey tells us from their research that selectivity is how the best performing schools in the world build a world class teaching work force. Massachusetts is going to keep the bar high to get into teaching unless you can't reach the bar.

Massachusettss going to allow people to appeal if they fail their teaching exam. They will be able to meet other criteria to get their certification because too many can’t pass. My favorite quote is from a school board member Christopher R. Anderson who said: "These are people in the anecdotal cases I've seen who we don't want to see pushed out of the profession, and the lack of the appeals process has been a hurdle to retaining them"

Alert the Journal of Anecdotal Evidence – once again, we dramatically change an education system designed for large numbers based on anecdotal evidence.

And in a nod to the education groups who love to compare teaching to lawyers and physicians, Republican lawmakers put forth amendments to let doctors and lawyers practice even if they failed their certification exams. Seems that comparison is only good in certain situations.

We will never develop a world class education system without a world class teaching workforce that we will never have until we build more selectivity into the system. We are stuck in a downward spiral – we can’t get teachers who can pass a test because their education wasn’t that great so we are going to lower the bar and let them in anyway, lowering the education prospects of a new generation of students who wont be able to reach this lower bar to get into teaching – and so on.

Thank you Massachusetts for taking a giant step backwards.

Selectivity

I find the McKinsey & Company analysisof the world’s best performing school systems fascinating. The analysis and comparison of the world’s schools should create some amazing actions to help improve education in the United States. Unfortunately education is not about analysis, it is about politics.

Their number one recommendation is that we need to develop a world-class teaching work force if our schools are ever to regain their rightful place as the best in the world.

It is interesting that selectivity is a prime focus of world class school systems. However, most of the so-called “alternative teacher certification” models in use in the United States allows almost anyone into the classroom to teach. While they are teaching, in their free time, they are expected to take classes to learn the art and science of teaching. At the end of two to three years of this, they are certified teachers. The only selectivity is if you have the stamina to teach all day, do your lesson plans, grade your papers and still have enough energy to attend classes at nights and on weekends to complete your course work. However – in the ABCTE program – you have to complete your study BEFORE you get to in front of kids and only 40% make it through to the classroom. Selectivity.

Part two of the McKinsey study is ongoing professional development. Those who oppose us are worried because they know that the mentoring and professional development our teachers get once they are in the classroom to speed their development on the job is not world class. We are constantly told that the professional development is a joke and the mentoring is sketchy at best. We need a concerted effort to fix both if we ever want a world class teaching workforce.
Finally, we have to stop lowering class size until we achieve selectivity and quality in our teachers and the absolute best continued training. All we are doing every time we lower a class size is diluting the quality of the workforce we have with no solid supply to augment that workforce. The McKinsey report clearly states that you would increase student achievement if we put a few more students with our star teachers as opposed to creating smaller classes taught by mediocre teachers.

This is a great report – but as usual, the politics in education will get in the way of any progress in education.