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

Simple math: RTTT Chances > with ABCTE

I have been asked many times in the last few weeks if we are ‘going for’ Race to the Top (RTTT) funds as if I could just jog down to the US DOE and grab a few bags of cash. But people are right to ask about having ABCTE in the mix because the guidelines specifically say that states must have alternative teacher certification programs that are not based in higher education.

Now comes this NCTQ report that specifically recommends that Colorado adopt ABCTE to better their chances of getting access to these funds.

I hope that many more states will take a similarly hard look at their chances for tapping into these funds. This is an easy requirement for them to meet. Just adopt ABCTE for math and science teachers and your state wins, the teachers win and, most important of all, the students win with better math and science instruction.

And nothing much happened.....

I am back from vacation, and it was a great one, and I am always eager to find out what has changed in the last week or so. Of course, nothing really changes in education in July so I was not too surprised to find very little flowing in the education news arena.

I guess the two biggest stories is the NEA admitting they are a union and the a smattering of stories that the huge stimulus money in education isn’t really doing much for innovation. Neither all that surprising but both have pretty big implications.

The NEA move is actually refreshing and a continuation of improved candor. They are, and should be, focused on improving the lives of their members. I have continued to see this at the state level and continue to work much more closely with them to resolve any problems they may have with our program. It also seems like more decision makers in education have come to this understanding as well. It makes for much more productive conversations when it motivations are clear.

As for the lost opportunity for the stimulus dollars – again no shock. It will be very easy to poke holes at some issues like this, and it is a pretty big disappointment. I remember when states were required to tell the US DOE what they were doing different on teacher recruitment to get to 100% highly qualified – every single state repackaged what they were currently doing in the “innovation” banner and said that now, their same old tired techniques were going to result in more math and science teachers.

Guess I didn’t miss much at all last week – but it is good to be back and resume the fight so that every child has a great teacher.

The unprecendented leading to the dramatic

I was invited to attend the ARRA briefing over at the US DOE today. For us, the briefing actually provided a little more information than previous top line discussions. In times of great change, effective organizations over-communicate. With ARRA, the US DOE is definitely making sure that they do that and it is appreciated by many. This extra communication is certainly keeping people from finding things not to like about the recovery money (see – I didn’t call it stimulus so their communication plan is working).

There are two great things about these briefings that are very noticeable. The first is that Secretary Duncan is so careful to always start with the positives. Whatever he is talking about, he always starts with the positive and continues to prefer the carrot to the stick. In this case, states forgoing the carrot (in this case the carrot takes the form of billions of dollars) will feel like they actually got the stick since they will lose billions. The second is John Schnur – if someone in the audience brings up something they don’t like, rather than debate, he asks for input on how to handle it better. It is so refreshing to have people admit that they don’t have all the answers and really seem to want everyone involved in making the program better. It is really disarming to the questioner which makes it quite enjoyable to watch since most questions are really just a ploy to get your organization noticed (disclosure: I have done this in the past).

However, they have got to find some new words. I wish that I would have written down how many times “unprecedented” and “dramatic” were used. No one would argue that the amount of money is unprecedented and that for that much cash we do need to see dramatic results – but it became a little funny towards the end as it seemed to be used in every third sentence.

The big take away for ABCTE is the Race to the Top funds (should we call this RTTT or R3T). There are $5 billion to fund this race. Approximately $4.35 billion will be given to the states that, through their ARRA spending, really demonstrated that they are working towards true reform with increased student success. The remaining $635 million will be distributed through the Office of Innovation and Improvement(OII) through existing programs and some new programs. It is clear that Jim Shelton, formerly of Gates, is now fully in charge of OII and ready to go since he stepped up and did a lot of the talking on RTTT. We should see some RFPs flowing here over the few months. I believe that they want to have the RFP process completed by end of the fiscal year and the money distributed in spring and summer of 2010. Very ambitious.

The Secretary also continued his theme of wanting to see more local courage and less adult dysfunction. He is correct. If that actually happens maybe the unprecedented will actually lead to the dramatic.