Teacher lottery

Interesting summary on Kane's Work on teacher effectiveness in the Harvard Review. I think the most interesting evidence found in the article is that:

• Kane and his coauthors found that schools can gain a fairly clear picture of a teacher’s effectiveness in the first two or three years. Beyond that point, the returns on experience—as teachers improve with practice—begin to diminish. “You’d expect the distribution of teacher effectiveness to get tighter as the years pass,” Kane says. “But we see the opposite. There’s a tendency for the more effective teachers to get better faster, while the weaker teachers don’t catch up.”

I am fascinated with this incredibly wide variation in teacher performance. The reason for the phenomenon above is that no one gets fired and everyone gets the same raise each year. So poor performers really have no incentive to improve. They can just continue to muddle through in their permanent state of in-house retirement.
Meanwhile, the many teachers who care continue to improve their teaching and continue to look for ways to reach more students and create more student success.

So the system will continue to harbor this wide division of teacher performance and education becomes a lottery – if you get the great, caring teachers you win – if not, you lose……for life.

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.

Let someone else do the work

It is Friday - so it is time for someone else to do the work. So I refer you to Joanne Jacob's post on a Matt Welch post on a story in the LA Times about the California crisis. It is, as always, a great summary but I also love the comments after the posting. Worth a good Friday read so head that way. I will stop being lazy on Monday.

Best Restaurants in State Capitals I have visited

Debuting at number 11 is The Oceanaire in Indianapolis which has amazing seafood flown in every day. Get the crab cake and the tower. Totally amazing!

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.

COME ON!!!

If you are not annoyed you are not paying attention. This should be the new bumper sticker of all in education – especially all of us who work in teaching.

A report by ETS that is just stunning to me - - the percentage of 8th grade math students on free and reduced lunch whose teachers left before the end of the school is year is 67%.

Breaking it down by race the percentage of white students whose 8th grade math teacher left before the end of the year is 28%. But for black students it is 52% and for Hispanic students it is 44%.

We are not going to affect the achievement gap if we can't get teachers to even finish out the year.

Now how in the world can you be college ready if two thirds of our students can’t even get an 8th grade math teacher to finish the school year. I know that some people have problems with ABCTE teachers who are alternatively certified but 85% of our teachers are still teaching AFTER THREE YEARS!!

Come on!! Get annoyed out there – this is ridiculous

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.