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.

Fluff no more

Multiple posts today because there is just so much going on in education. The first concerns a great blog post and subsequent comments by Joanne Jacobs on New York City’s teacher and student requirements. The blog post is definitely worth a read as are the comments that people have left about the post.

One of the things that absolutely drives me crazy in education is the fluff that gets passed off as critical elements of the teaching practice or learning process. Joanne’s article calling out New York for excessive fluff is dead on. For me, the two most annoying terms to me are ‘reflection’ and ‘portfolio’. Only in education can going home and thinking about what you did right and wrong during the day can have a fancy term and be held in such high esteem. And only in education could you submit a collection of your best work and have it be the determination as to your ability to perform on a daily basis.

Now – both of these have a place in helping teachers become better teachers so I will end the extremist rhetoric with that thought. Yes teachers should take a good hard look at what they are doing right and wrong. And yes we should look at a portfolio of their work to ensure that we see signs of solid performance. But we should not talk about it as if this brings teaching into the highest levels of achievement. We need real performance evaluations to truly judge our teachers.

Friedman Foundation Study on Private vs Public School Teacher Satisfaction

One of the things we have noticed in recruiting people to teach is that there is a definite shift right now in the United States with people are taking a good hard look at their chosen profession. People want to do things that matter and have feel good about their work. People attending our "Become a Teacher" workshops are telling us that without job security, which no one has today, they want a job where they can make a difference and have real job satisfaction.

It appears that if you ask teachers, private schools give them the greatest opportunity to make that difference and enjoy their work. There is a new study out from The Friedman Foundation that looks at the data from the national survey of teachers and found some striking, yet not surprising, differences in private school and public school teacher opinions.

Some of the highlights –
• 62% of private school teachers want to remain teaching as long as they are able compared to 44% in public schools
• 60% of private school teachers have control of selecting content, topics and skills taught in the classroom compared to 36% in public schools
• 28% of public school teachers strongly agree that routine duties and paperwork interfere with their job compared to just 9% of private school teachers

One of the more interesting highlights is that “although salaries are higher in public schools, private schoolteachers are more likely to be satisfied with their salaries (51
percent v. 46 percent).”

Huh - job satisfaction trumps money. You can read the whole study here.