Rona Wilensky « Education News Colorado Opinion & Commentary

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Why Sen. Johnston’s bill won’t work

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

I completely agree with the notion that career ladders, which allow excellent teachers to share their work with other teachers, is the best approach to thinking about ways to provide additional compensation to outstanding educators.

As long ago as 1985 I wrote a policy paper for Irv Moskowitz, then in the Colorado Department of Education, making the same point. We definitely need to find ways to allow teachers to move upward in their profession without having them leave teaching for administration. Having highly skilled teachers take on new mentoring responsibilities can revitalize their professional life and, if done well, can improve teaching throughout the system.

My concern is the means that will be used to identify these outstanding teachers. State Sen. Mike Johnston speaks of multiple measures, but in fact Colorado has only one measure, the CSAP growth model. Reliance on this single battery of tests to determine the trajectory of teacher and principal careers increases the ways in which these tests can further distort the system.

First, teachers would have even more reason than ever to teach to the test rather than to educate students. The hyper-focus on the specific reading, writing, math and science skills and knowledge tested by the exams to the exclusion of other valuable dimensions of those disciplines will accelerate. In addition, the marginalizing of social studies, the arts and the social and emotional skills that all reformers claim to value will be exacerbated.

Second, the power struggles that already exist within most faculties to determine which students are placed with which teachers will intensify to the detriment of collegiality. Demands that all classes be perfectly matched cannot be met without removing all discretion from schools and even if the outcome is accomplished it is unlikely to be in the best interests of anyone.

Classrooms are communities of learners in which personality, peer influences, and chemistry play as much of a role in student learning as demographics. Schools need to be able to shape these classrooms without worrying about distorting the outcomes of the teacher compensation system.

Third, instances of outright cheating, which have already been documented in high stakes testing around the country, will undoubtedly come home to Colorado.

I absolutely support the creation of more robust, nuanced measures of student learning and teacher effectiveness so that a new system does not have to rely exclusively on CSAP growth measures. Unfortunately, every such system that has ever been proposed or developed that is able to meet reliability and validity concerns without being a standardized test is time consuming and expensive.

Even before the current budget crisis Colorado schools were underfunded and there is no reason to assume that this will change in the foreseeable future. Until the underlying school funding system is overhauled and placed on strong fiscal footing I don’t see how we can commit to either a new teacher compensation system or to the development of high quality student and teacher assessment systems needed to undergird it. We just don’t have the money to do the job right.

Trying to do it on the cheap with the information system we have will lead to all three outcomes described above as well as other unintended consequences that we cannot yet imagine.

We have three challenges in improving the quality of teaching. The first is finding fair ways to remove the relatively small number of incompetent teachers who have managed to acquire tenure. The second is finding effective ways to continually improve the teaching skills of all current teachers who wish to remain in the system. And the third is creating a profession that is attractive to the best and brightest.

The last two are system-changing but also expensive and therefore currently unattainable. My recommendation is that legislators work closely with unions to find new ways to address the first issue that are doable within our current fiscal constraints. That will make a difference we can all be proud of.

I’m all for changing the whole system. But not when we don’t have the means to do it right.

Rona Wilensky was the founding principal of New Vista High School, a small, innovative public school of choice in Boulder Valley School District. She retired from that position last June. This year she is a Resident Fellow at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago Illinois.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Posted in Accountability, Teacher evaluation | 13 Comments »

Easy out, easy in

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

The recent report on dropout prevention and recovery from the National Governor’s Association’s Center for Best Practices has as one of its recommendations raising the maximum compulsory age of schooling to 18 and creating penalties – loss of driver’s licenses or work permits – if students leave earlier.

The goal is to create a public policy statement that staying in school matters. But the result would be a burdensome layer of record-keeping and enforcement whose fruition would be an adversarial relationship between high schools and teenagers.

Of course it is desirable for students to stay in school for as long as possible and it is better yet if they master the curriculum and graduate. But given the reasons the report itself identifies for school leaving — academic failure, disinterest in school, problematic behavior (getting suspended or expelled) and life events – mandating school retention is unlikely to make a real difference in learning even as it creates big problems for high school staff.

If we actually address the causes of dropping out it will be the rare student who leaves school before completion. So let’s put our energy into something positive instead of picking fights with young people who are practically adults.

What makes much more sense is the report’s recommendation to find ways for out-of-school youth, and particularly those most at risk, to easily return to schooling when they have figured out that going back is what they want to do. School people would much rather spend their time helping a struggling student who wants to learn than facing off with a truculent 17 year old who has been made to do what he or she doesn’t want to do.

When was the last time any of you tried to make a 17 year old do what he or she didn’t want to do? The fact is that they can and will just leave unless we are prepared to use substantive legal or physical force, a wasteful use of resources. And what happens if the school “wins” and forces kids to be where they don’t want to be? My experience is that angry youth have the capacity to make the lives of their peers, teachers and administrators utterly miserable. They will disrupt class, verbally abuse their teachers, harass their peers in the hallways and dare all the adults to make them behave. Eventually they will force us to suspend them and maybe they will misbehave so badly that we will have to adjudicate them. Which would be a truly tragic ending to an otherwise colossal waste of time.

These are not the kinds of relationships we should want with teenagers. We shouldn’t be in the business of trying to make them do what they don’t want to do. We should be trying to get them to want them to want to do the things that are good for them. And it can be done – by building caring, trustworthy relationships with them; by offering meaningful and interesting classes; by creating opportunities that build on their strengths and let them shine; and by helping them with the very real problems they have in their lives. We want to win them over, not knock them down. We want to stand next to them cheering them on, instead of drawing a line in the sand and trying to force them to give in. We need their boundless energy working with us, not against us.

What we need is a system of easy in and easy out. This was the conclusion of one of my teachers after yet another round of unsuccessful effort with a genuinely reluctant learner. I agree. School would be a very different place if we would let high school students go when, for whatever reason, they can’t or won’t do school and if we would genuinely welcome them back, at any time, with all the supports in the world when they are truly ready to try.

We might find that we had dramatically more energy for helping them if we didn’t spend so much of our time trying to compel them to do what at a given point in time, they do not want to do. Why, we might even have enough energy to deal with academic deficits; to create compelling learning opportunities; to prevent problematic behavior and to help them with out of school problems

Popularity: 15% [?]

Posted in Grad/dropout rates, Newsletter guest article | 9 Comments »

Everything you need to know about education reform

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

According to The New York Times[1], a new federal study shows that nearly a third of the states lowered their academic proficiency standards in recent years to stay ahead of sanctions under No Child Left Behind. And this, in a nutshell, tells you everything you need to know about conventional school reform.

Raise the standards, raise the bar, raise requirements, raise expectations, raise the stakes. This has been the mantra of school reform for the last 26 years since the publication of A Nation At Risk in 1983. And all of it is based on magical thinking that somehow raising any of these will actually change teaching and learning.

The fact is that when standards, bars, expectations, requirements and stakes are all that is really changed, there are only two possible outcomes. Either more people will get pushed out of the system for not meeting the new higher standard, or the measure of that standard will get watered down.

Not so long ago the Boulder Valley School District Board of Education was presented with a proposal to increase from two to three the number of years of mathematics required for graduation. The proposal was in response to expected changes in state standards as well to similar changes enacted in peer districts. How could Boulder Valley School District hold its head up if it required less math for graduation than was needed for college entrance?

To its credit the board voted the increase down. The reason? Board members knew that changing the way math was taught from kindergarten through high school was the only way to prepare all students to take and pass more demanding high school math requirements.

In the absence such change, the outcome of an increase in requirements would have been either a higher dropout rate, or watered down math classes that all students could nominally pass. And as hard as it was to admit, they knew they did not yet have the resources needed to make the needed changes in mathematics education.

And so they resisted the satisfaction of having done something to raise the bar until they could do something to change learning. Would that other policy makers had the same courage.

The new federal study has revealed the NCLB equivalent of watered down curriculum – lower cut scores for defining proficiency. NCLB has led to a maniacal focus on preparation for the tests, to countless episodes of cheating, and to the marginalization of recess, the arts, science and social studies. But it has not apparently led to any changes in learning. Recent NAEP data shows that there was more growth in student learning before NCLB than afterwards.[2]

Is there any hope that reformers will learn from this experience? I doubt it. There are still groups advocating ever more loudly for more rigorous graduation requirements, higher entrance requirements for post secondary education and new standards for college completion.

In the absence of the tremendous resources actually needed to change K-12 and higher education, the predictable result will be either fewer high school graduates, fewer college admissions or fewer college graduates if the standards hold, or we will see that required courses are watered down and cut off scores for alleged proficiency exams will be lowered so that the reforms will look like they have made a difference.

And meanwhile, precious resources in the system will have been diverted from teaching and learning to the requirements of playing the newest high expectations game in town. As sociologist Charles Payne has put it, so much reform, so little change.[3]

[1] Federal Researchers Find Lower Standards in Schools Sam Dillon October 29, 2009

[2] Sean Cavanagh. Curriculum Matters. Education Week. October 15, 2009 on blog by Mark Schneider former Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.

[3] Charles Payne. So Much Reform, So Little Change. Harvard University Press. 2008

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted in Reform, Teaching and learning | 1 Comment »

How principal turnover hampers high school reform

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

I’d like to connect the dots between two stories referenced in the October 30^th Ed News Colorado newsletter. The first is a new report from the National Governor’s Association on “Achieving Graduation for All”. The second is an “Eye on Research” article from Education Week related to principal turnover.

The NGA report is pretty standard education report fare. It first identifies a major problem – the large number of students dropping out of high school. Second, it identifies the causes – academic failure, disinterest in school, problematic behavior and life events. And third it recommends comprehensive solutions - promote high school graduation for all; target youth at risk of dropping out; reengage youth who have dropped out of school; and provide rigorous, relevant pathways to a high school credential.

These recommendations involve both policy levers suited to the constituency of the governors that NGA serves – raising the mandatory age of schooling to 18, forming coordinating councils, establishing early warning data systems — as well as dramatic changes in business as usual – establishing school level intervention strategies, creating new effective schools, turning around low performing schools and awarding credit for performance not seat time.

Not unlike the recent report on teacher effectiveness produced by the Colorado Legacy Foundation, the report is thorough, thoughtful and mostly accurate.[1] The major challenge, of course, remains actually getting schools and the people in them to shift from business as usual to new ways of doing school.

Let’s now turn our focus to the research report in Education Week on principal turnover. The Texas study finds that the very people who lead the schools that have to change, and who themselves have to lead the change process to create schools that do things different, don’t stick around in any given school very long.

In the Texas study of employment data from 1995 – 2008, which looked at more than 16,500 public school principals, the average tenure was about 5 years for elementary school principals, 4 ½ years for middle school principals and slightly less than 3 ½ years for high school principals, the level at which change is most notoriously difficult to achieve.

Because the NGA report focused on high schools and because, having been a high school principal, I know something about the job, let’s focus on that level. In order to get a feel for how much influence someone who stays for 3 ½ years or less might have, let me tell you something about the annual planning cycle of high schools. Now this next section isn’t very exciting, but it is the ground level reality of school change, so try to hang in there with me.

By early February of any given year most high schools are printing their course description books for the registration process that will happen shortly afterwards. In that process students put in their requests for the classes they will take next fall. Any new offerings have to be decided on by the printing deadline and any changes in the pattern of how students take classes will have to be thoroughly understood by counselors and disseminated to parents and students before the registration process actually begins.

Were a school to want to offer some new course it would typically have to be approved the previous fall by whatever version of a district’s curriculum coordinating council exists or by an education center administrator. In Boulder Valley School District those decisions are made in November.

What this time line means is that everything that happens in student programming in a principal’s first year on the job has already been decided by his or her predecessor the previous year. It also means that any changes for the second year of the principal’s tenure would have to be decided on before the first semester of or her first year on the job is complete.

It doesn’t take an organizational rocket scientist to know that a new person on the job needs to spend most of the first year in a new building, learning the culture, building relationships and figuring out what needs to change, in addition to simply learning to smoothly run the organization. Some might come in and impose big changes, but the history of high school reform suggests that such a strategy will probably not work.

So the new person on the job in their first year, merely shepherds the existing registration processes for their second year down the same path that has always been followed. That means that year two of their tenure will look a lot like year one of their tenure in terms of course offerings and core programming.

While in principle it might be possible, in the spring of year one to make changes in upcoming teacher assignments, a strategy that can make substantive differences in student learning, there are great risks in doing so. Changing who teaches what alters the most fundamental working conditions of the staff. Wisdom suggests that a new principal might want to have built up quite a reservoir of trust before taking such a potentially explosive issue on. It is possible to autocratically alter assignments, but the change won’t yield the results being sought if the teachers themselves don’t support the change.

In year two, having completed a full cycle of the school’s functioning, the principal should have ideas for making some changes. He or she will probably have fewer than five staff development days along with one two-hour faculty meeting per month, for the entire fall semester, within which to propose those changes and engage the faculty in discussion of them.

With many comprehensive high schools having over 100 faculty members that is quite a complex undertaking. What are the chances that the new principal will have obtained buy-in from the staff for new ways to do business in time for submitting new courses to the curriculum coordinating council by November or for student registration in March?

I would say the chances are slim, but let’s suppose the stars are aligned for our new principal and he or she can actually get some agreement from the staff in time to restructure some offerings for what will be his or her third year on the job. Under that best case scenario structural changes will actually begin in year three. Without the best case scenario, debate and discussion continues throughout year two and by the time the year is over the staff may be ready to commit to some minor changes so long as they don’t interfere with the master schedule which is already in place for year three.

Let’s assume that the principal actually enters year three, with some changes in place. Again, organizational development experience tells us that things will not go perfectly. Whatever changes are implemented will face obstacles – lack of adequate training, resistance, unforeseen difficulties, new district or state mandates that suck energy away from the school’s focus, unexpected crises, budget cuts, you name it, something will go wrong.

In the best of all worlds, while the changes are being implemented staff will have a chance to focus on the problems, devise strategies for solving them and figure out how to implement those strategies the following year, while perhaps also coming to agreement on some new changes for year four of the new principal’s tenure. Some of those revisions or new programs will need to be figured out before registration in March, some may have the luxury of a longer decision time framework.

In year four of the new principal’s tenure we might begin to see smoother operations for the first small changes and a rocky start to any new programs. There might even be some evidence of success for the changes that are in their second year. But the Texas data tells us that half of the high school principals won’t even make it all the way through that fourth year.

To see real results, the principal would stay and fine tune the first reform efforts he or she has initiated. By carefully tending to this work, trust will build with faculty and the chances will increase for more substantive reform in the future. With enough time and enough skill, an administrator might actually make deep changes in how schooling is done.

But the data tells us that few administrators will stick around long enough to make that kind of difference. And so, before a reform has even had a chance to be tweaked, a new person is on the job and the cycle begins anew. Teachers in the building have yet another experience of reform that is never fully carried out. It’s easy to see why it doesn’t take long before non-probationary teachers realize that even the best ideas won’t come to fruition and a wiser strategy is to hang back and wait until “this too has passed”.

The conclusion? The intractability of high school reform is directly linked to short principal tenure.

In the Education Week article linked to by Ed News, Susan Gates, an economist at the RAND corporation suggestions that this high rate of principal turnover may be a good thing, perhaps resulting from districts holding principals more accountable for student achievement and terminating them when they don’t achieve results.

I’m sure Ms. Gates is an excellent policy analyst, but I have to say she doesn’t know much about schools. Given the planning cycle I just described how could any principal generate meaningful results in a short period of time?

Why do high school principals leave? Ed Fuller, the University of Texas researcher who did the study on principal tenure, has it exactly right when he says, “we think the job has outgrown the ability of one person to handle it”. The new principal is not just responsible for changing the way the school works, his or her first responsibility is to make sure it even works at all.

That means making sure there are teachers in every class, for every period of every school day, that there are staff in every non-teaching position, coverage for every game, and sponsors for every club, as just a start. The building has to be taken care, the books have to be ordered, the computers have to be fixed, hundreds and sometimes thousands of teenagers have to be supervised and discipline has to be taken care of.

Parents have to be responded to and the district and state to be reported to. Most high school principals start their days early and spend several nights a week on campus for one activity or another. Ed Fuller has it right. The job, whether for the principal or the assistants, is more than can be done by the number of people districts can afford to pay to do it.

But as I suggest, high schools cannot possibly change until good people are willing to stay for the long run. What happens when they don’t? Genuine problems continue to grow and fester, providing real fodder for still more policy reports. The shelves are sagging, but the reports will keep on coming until we really get serious about supporting and changing our schools.

Finding a way to keep high quality high school principals and assistant principals on the job would be a start.

[1] See my dissenting commentary on raising the mandatory age of school to 18.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Posted in High school reform, Newsletter guest article | 3 Comments »

Will, resources, time lacking to boost teacher quality

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

I just finished reading “Improving Teacher and School Leader Effectiveness: Designing a Framework for Colorado” published by the Colorado Legacy Foundation. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and thoroughness of the authors and the experts they consulted.

I would like to add my voice to the conversation by talking about some of what I learned about these issues in my 17 years as a working principal of New Vista High School[1]. My goal is to provide some ground level perspective to the statewide conversation.

My unhappy conclusions are as follows:

There isn’t a big enough pool of high quality candidates for teaching jobs;
Schools need paid instructional coaches to adequately support either the induction of probationary teachers or the professional growth of non-probationary teachers and there isn’t enough money to provide them; and
Schools don’t have enough time in the current school year to do the work reformers want us to do and there are no easy or cheap fixes for that.

The result is that most schools in the system just keep on doing what they have always done and will continue to do so. That’s the only thing they know how to do.

The Pool of Teacher Candidates

When New Vista High School (NVHS) hired a new teacher as both a subject area specialist and an advisor to a multi-age, heterogeneous group of students, we had a list of non-negotiable criteria. While the school had specialized needs, I think upon reading this list you might agree that that NVHS’ criteria could and should be the criteria we would want for any school.

Philosophical congruence with the school
Keen, flexible, intelligence
Deeply knowledgeable in the content area
Rapport with students
Collaborative skills for work with colleagues
Cultural competence

Significantly, the possession of actual classroom experience and/or specific teaching skills and strategies was NVHS’ lowest priority. Our view was that if a candidate possessed all the non-negotiable qualifications, we could teach them to run the active learning classrooms that we wanted.

Hiring Process

To find candidates with these qualifications, the NVHS hiring process involved elements beyond the standard review of applications, interviews and reference checks. We additionally required the finalists from the interview process to teach a lesson to a group of students representative of the student body and to participate together in an observed collaborative problem solving activity.

The process unfolded over two days, providing substantial experiential evidence for the hiring committee to ponder. The diverse elements gave us a chance to gather information about all of our criteria and make the best decision we could.

The Results

It is sobering to report that even our well-regarded school in a highly regarded district found few candidates who matched our non-negotiable criteria. We counted ourselves lucky when one person, even without teaching experience, emerged from the search. There were many times when searches had to be re-opened or interim solutions devised.

There are two possible explanations for the low number of candidates who met our criteria. The first is that most teachers are not interested in a non-traditional school. The second is that the pool of teacher candidates is not very strong.

Either explanation is cause for substantial concern. With so many across the state and nation calling for the transformation of conventional schooling (and especially the transformation of high school) the absence of candidate interest in a school that has successfully implemented most of the recommendations for high school reform would be a big problem.

And of course, the absence of a large number of candidates with the qualities described above would be an even bigger concern. Solving both of these issues, but especially the second, is perhaps the greatest challenges in public schooling.

The Support

New teachers at New Vista got the following forms of support:

The Boulder Valley School District induction program
A desk in the common teachers’ room
A mentor from within the same department
An administrator responsible for evaluation.

Veteran teachers had

Each other
Periodic evaluation by an administrator
Whole staff development

The situation for both new and veteran teachers improved significantly in 2008-09 when, for the first time, the building hired a part time instructional coach using district, building and grant money.

The coach was asked to support all new teachers in the building including student teachers. Her assignment also included working with veteran teachers as a follow-up to whole staff training in sheltering strategies for linguistically diverse students.

The response from teachers to the support of the coach was overwhelmingly positive. Finally, someone really had time to spend one-on-one to help them improve their teaching. Now there was someone to plan with, someone available to observe the attempt to implement the plan or to model the new strategy, and someone who could help troubleshoot problems and support the next iteration of effort. And the result was that people started to make real changes in their classroom practice.

We know from the research[2] that teachers need personalized support in their own classrooms in order to translate ideas, suggestions or newly learned skills into their classroom practice. Change doesn’t happen when teachers have heard or learned something new from whatever source – a colleague, an online forum, a resource bank, a workshop.

Change happens when a teacher gets support throughout the challenging process of trying something new, having it fail and either adapting the idea or getting support while practicing the skills to implement it more adequately. The best established wisdom in the world of professional development still comes from Joyce and Showers and tells us that consistent classroom based follow-up is the only way to change and improve teaching practices. This is both labor intensive and time consuming.

Based on my experience as a principal and as a colleague to a whole district of principals, my conclusion is that a designated instructional coach in every school is the only viable mechanism to adequately induct new teachers and to support the growth of veterans.

Coaching needs to be the whole or a clearly defined part of someone’s job. Teachers with full-time teaching assignments do not have time to provide meaningful help to their colleagues nor do many of them have the teaching or coaching skills to do so.

Releasing talented, full-time classroom teachers for occasional days of coaching only penalizes their students and adds to their workload when they have to prepare for substitutes. And most teachers are unwilling to leave their classrooms frequently enough to provide the consistent support needed by those depending on them.

Administrators do not have the time to truly support new or veteran teachers. All the talk of instructional leadership as the primary role of administrators comes from people who do not understand how utterly consuming are the day to day operations of school. And the fact that administrators statutorily have evaluative responsibilities significantly constrains the limited help they can provide.

Whether with cause or without, most teachers distrust administrator claims that they “just want to help”. It’s like the well worn cartoon, “I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help you.” Teachers just don’t believe it.

Instructional coaches are the best answer to the question, “how do we support meaningful improvements in teacher quality?” A good coaching system would provide high quality support in every building as well as a system of support to help the coaches themselves improve their craft. But such a system is expensive. Even if the coaches are paid on the standard teacher salary schedule, with no premium for the mastery of their craft they should have, they are a non-trivial added expense to already strained district budgets.[3]

There Isn’t Enough Time

Most reports on how to improve schooling call for teachers and administrators to align their teaching with desired system outcomes, learn new skills, change existing practices and attitudes, collaborate with colleagues, participate in new networks, assess student learning in more meaningful ways and manage student performance data.

If you want system change, these recommendations are right on target. The problem is that from the point of view of the practicing teacher and administrator there is not enough time in the school day, week or year to do this work.

An important reality to remember for those who don’t “do” school on a day-to-day basis is that child care is our bottom-line business. Teachers and administrators must be on duty when kids are in school because making sure they are safe while in our care is our legal responsibility. We run the risk of losing our jobs or winding up in jail if students are in school and qualified staff members aren’t with them. Being present with kids, whenever they are present in school, is the defining feature of our professional life.

And kids are present pretty continuously once the school year starts. Parents count on schools to take care of their children Monday through Friday from the start of the school day to its end, except for holidays. For most families, a break in this pattern causes genuine hardship and/or puts children at risk in unsupervised or under-supervised care. School districts do have professional development days and/or late starts/ early releases throughout the school year, but these are squeezed to the absolute minimum in order not to unleash a community backlash that eliminates such professional planning time altogether.

Planning periods do exist, but creating common times for teachers to work together, providing the needed leadership to keep these groups focused and productive and gaining the buy-in of all staff in a building are challenges that only a small percentage of schools have surmounted.

The cycle of the school year is experienced by school staff as a nine-month sprint. From the first days organizing the opening of the school and the re-establishment of school and classroom cultures to the last days celebrating accomplishments and turning in grades, there is little time available for reflecting on ways of doing business differently.

Throw in a crisis or two– a death in the community, particularly egregious discipline issues, an illness or two among core staff – and you have a community that is working pretty damn hard just to stay in place — to do what it has always done, the way it has always done it.

One of my teachers was grateful for winter break so she could go out and buy new underwear and new lipstick. Another staff member scheduled her annual physical on Veteran’s Day because it was the only school holiday that everyone else didn’t shut down as well, and she never felt she could justify taking time off any other day for something that wasn’t an emergency. This is the reality of schooling for dedicated educators.

There are of course teachers who are simply recycling lessons and administrators who are doing the minimum in their sphere. But the slack in the system that exists because these people don’t take their jobs seriously isn’t going to be used by these same people to engage in the school improvement activities recommended by reformers.

Reformers consistently ask teachers and administrators to fix the bicycle while we are riding downhill at full speed. Start-up schools do this for the first couple of years, drawing on the enthusiasm of a new project and the absolute necessity of figuring things out. They simply have to. But when these same start-up staffs are expected to keep up that flat out pace over the long run, they either burn out, quit, or consider unionizing to provide protection from such punishing demands.

New time must found if the work is to be done. But time, as the old saying goes, is money. Additional time for teachers to do school improvement must be paid for. And the system wide improvements that reformers seek can only occur when the vast majority of teachers participate in the renewal work.

But, as we know all too well, extending the paid work time of all teachers in the state has always been and continues to be deemed an unaffordable proposition.

Conclusion

There will always be exceptional schools which defy the patterns I have described. Many small start-ups, like NVHS, maintain a culture of continuous improvement, albeit at a more moderate pace. But the percentage of students served in such schools is tiny compared to those enrolled in conventional neighborhood schools.

We also know that among conventional schools there are those that develop similar cultures of continuous improvement. Reformers typically hold up both of types of exemplars as proof that all schools could do the same. But when we dig a little deeper we usually find that there are specific reasons that the transforming conventional schools do what they do.

Unusual histories, extraordinary leadership of administrators and/or teachers, or other unique factors are usually what make it possible for the exemplary schools to do what they do. That it can be done by some is not the existence proof that some assert. Dramatic change can only reach all schools when they are given the resource-intense conditions needed for change. Otherwise, most schools will simply reproduce the status quo.

To change all the “business as usual” schools will require more time, money and skilled practitioners than we have at our disposal. Perhaps this is why many are talking about intervening only in the relatively small number of schools which are egregiously bad, such as the so called “dropout factories”. But a focus on these schools still faces the considerable challenge of finding high quality teachers, administrators and coaches, as well as the funding to pay for the time that renewal or “turnaround” takes.

Absent a strategy for replacing the entire existing teaching force, changing schools has to be about transforming the teachers we already have as well as those in the teacher pipeline.

Reformers seem to forget that just as the deep cognitive and behavioral transformation that they want for every child only occurs when individual students are carefully nurtured by good teachers, so too, real cognitive and behavioral transformation of teachers requires individual nurturing by those I have been calling coaches. And just as we have a shortage of good teachers for kids, we probably have a shortage of good coaches (as well as an absence of coaching conditions) for teachers.

These are not particularly happy thoughts. But knowing what I do about the day-to-day work life of teachers and administrators, there are no cheap, effective and efficient strategies to get the schools we say we want. Pulling policy levers won’t do the trick when we are trying to change complex, habitual behaviors. Neither will exhortation, shaming or punishment.

I wish I had different news to bring from the frontlines. I’m sure you do too.

[1] New Vista is a small, innovative high school of choice within Boulder Valley School District. It is not a charter school. The school opened in 1993 to provide a non-traditional option for secondary students. It serves a heterogeneous population and is not designed for at-risk students.

[2] Joyce, B. & Showers, B. (1995). Student achievement through staff development (2nd ed.) New York: Longman.

[3] A back of the envelope calculation suggests that if a half time coach was the right size for New Vista’s 25 probationary, non-probationary and student teachers (including those on less than full time contracts), then BVSD would need the equivalent of 38 coaches for its almost 1900 full and part time teachers. Using only the average cost of a teacher, which is probably low for the actual salary and benefit costs of the people who should be hired as coaches, providing enough coaches for the system, and support for the coaches themselves, would cost over $2.5 million That is an expense that neither BVSD, nor any other district in Colorado can (proportionately) afford.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Posted in Newsletter guest article, Teacher preparation and training, Teaching and learning | 5 Comments »

Memo to state: Go slow on standards revamp

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

As reported in Education News Colorado, on June 30th the Colorado Commission of Higher Education and the State Board of Education formally adopted a description of postsecondary and workforce readiness (PWR), the first major step in implementing the 2008 Colorado Achievement Plan for Kids (CAP4K).

There is much to be applauded in the adopted PWR description. There is strong recognition of the non-academic skills that students need for success in school, work and life, echoing the work of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. The listed skills in this area include creativity and innovation, global and cultural awareness, civic responsibility, work ethics, personal responsibility and collaboration skills.

There is also a strong emphasis on the use and application of knowledge in new situations, on problem solving, and on critical thinking.

I do, however, have two concerns about what happens next. My first is that these crucial new skills (more…)

Popularity: 4% [?]

Posted in CDE and state board of ed., Teaching and learning | No Comments »

Stimulus money: Less — much less — is more

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

I am writing in response to Van Schoales’ Race to the Top shopping cart.

My thought is that $300,000,000 is way too much money for way too short a time period in a state that is way too small in people resources. When I think about how long it took to build an infrastructure for the Colorado Small Schools Initiative, which had $16 million to spend over at least five years (I was a principal coach for that project), I can’t begin to fathom how any group or organization in Colorado could put together the people needed to make most of the ideas in Van’s shopping cart work and deliver results before the funds run out again.

I have been around long enough to also remember back to when Denver Public Schools adopted a site-based management model and had to bring in consultants to do quick turnaround training for school teams. This was in 1991 and I was part of one of those training teams. With haste as the primary factor, the quality was low and there was no follow-up. Nothing I have heard makes me think we had a lasting impact.

Finally, I think about the leap taken by the principal of Manual High School took when she signed on with Gates Foundation to create three small schools out of one comprehensive school between the spring of one school year and the fall of the next. She jumped because she was told the money would disappear if she didn’t. But I think all of us know now that it was the wrong decision. The school wasn’t ready for the changes and the support from the existing system wasn’t there to finish the job that the Gates money started. The three small schools were ultimately disbanded and the school re-opened on an entirely new basis.

So there are three examples of why a lot of money for a short period is a bad idea. What Colorado experiences do we have that would lead us to believe that we could effectively spend even close to $300 million in a two-year period? When I look at the shopping cart I am concerned that we don’t have the capacity in Colorado to do that much additional work in such a short time and we would find ourselves competing with other states for the national consultants.

Unfortunately, the stimulus model of infusing money quickly works when there are industrial plants idle and factory workers laid off. Or when there are bridges and roads to be repaired and road workers ready to start laying asphalt tomorrow. Where is the excess educational reform capacity that would be needed to do this job?

It would be better to ask for less and to use it well than to be drowning in money and forced to throw it at anything that moves with little hope making a lasting difference. There wouldn’t be any more for a very long time after a debacle like that.

I know I’m being disagreeable. But after all these years in the trenches tending to my school (I’ve been principal of New Vista High School for 17 years) and learning how long it takes to make change even in one small school dedicated to innovation as well as spending these same years watching mostly futile efforts to make change at other Boulder Valley Schools, the one thing I now know for sure is the thing I thought I knew when I first got started in this business working as Education Aide for Dick Lamm in 1984 – there are no quick fixes in education.

Either we have long term strategies to support change in the people now in the system or we have long term strategies to bring new people in to make a new system, but either way we need resources for the long term not a two-year spike in spending on initiatives that can’t be sustained. Short term money can build physical capacity that lasts beyond construction costs. It can’t build the systems to enhance human capacity without a commitment from somewhere to sustain that capacity over time.

All that said, I started to think about what I would do with a pretty large chunk of money for a short period of time and this is what it came down to -paying my teachers to work with each other over the summer to get better at what they do.

I would like money to pay my teachers for another month of their time at their full salary (and at their full cost to the district which includes the employer contribution to PERA) for each of two years. For three of those weeks I would have them at school over the summer working with each other doing some or all of the following:

Teaching each other their best practices both in departments and across departments. This would include things like: Socratic seminars, scored discussions, authentic assessments, useful rubrics, effective small group work structures, integrating technology into presentations, classroom management strategies etc.
Creating outstanding common assessments for departmental courses in core courses like World Geography, Algebra I, Biology, etc. so that we could really know how kids are doing on the goals that we as a school have for them. These assessments would focus, in the style of Bill Daggett, on rigor and relevance challenging students to apply knowledge and critical thinking skills to open ended problems.
Working together, by common courses, to devise lesson plans for topics that are hard to teach e.g. factoring a quadratic equation, understanding mitosis and meiosis etc.
Adapting curriculum in every course to the needs of linguistically diverse learners. That means finding supplemental high-concept material and rewriting it for English Language Learners while keeping the complexity.
Creating new courses or new units to meet the interests of students and forging linkages to organizations in the community whose real problems students could tackle in their learning.
Doing some book study groups on issues related to equity

The final week of pay would be used for half-day meetings held once a month during the school year to check in on how the implementation of all these new strategies and curricula were going and to do trouble shooting for staying the course In the second summer planning period they would continue to do this work taking it to a higher level and reaching into every aspect of their teaching.

To qualify for these funds, which would not start until summer 2010 and continue onto summer 2011, schools would have to submit a plan by January 2010 to some group (to be decided) which would evaluate the plans. Here are some bottom line criteria for qualifying for the funds.

It would be necessary to have the commitment of 2/3 of the teachers in any school willing to participate.
A building administrator would have to be available to supervise and help organize the summer work.
The school plan would detail the specific sharing, teaching, learning that would take place.
The plan would identify measures of student learning that would be used to assess the efficacy of the renewal activities. These would have to go beyond CSAP scores, which are notoriously difficulty to change without simply teaching to the test.

This isn’t radical stuff. It is based on the writing of all those folks who talk about renewal among existing practitioners rather than replacement of them. The funds should not be given to every school, but the bar shouldn’t be so high that only a tiny number of schools would qualify.

If it is stipulated that the two extra months of salary do not count toward Highest Average Salary in PERA, it might also pour some extra resources into that system and help stabilize it (This is not my area of expertise, so I wouldn’t want to be held to this idea.)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted in Reform, School funding and finance | No Comments »

Shooting holes in CAP4K underlying premise

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

Last week I gave a speech to the Washington State Association of Career and Technical Education Administrators that touched on Senate Bill 212 (CAP4K) concerning Alignment of Preschool to Postsecondary Education,as an example of public policy infatuation with higher education.

A member of the audience, Wes Pruitt, policy analyst for the Washington Workforce Training and Education Coordinating Board, shared with me two short critiques of the reports which underlie SB 212’s claim that “to be successful in the workforce and earn a living wage immediately upon graduation from high school, a student needs nearly the same level of academic achievement and preparation that he or she would need to continue into career and technical or higher education”.

These critiques were written by Bryan Wilson, Deputy Director of that same agency. They address the research studies from Achieve, Inc. and ACT which are used to justify college readiness for all. They are quite short and you can read them here and here.

Wes also alerted me to work done by Willard Daggett’s organization, the International Center for Leadership in Education, which used frameworks for analyzing the difficulty of reading and math tasks. These frameworks were developed by an organization named MetaMetrics to compare the demands of workforce and college tasks.

The conclusion reached by ICLE that the technical reading tasks of many workplaces outpace the reading demands of college courses have been widely shared. What has not been shared are their emerging findings that the math demands of the workplace are not only far lower than those of college math courses, but are as well far lower than those of high school math courses. I am in the process of tracking down an authoritative version of this study and will share it as soon as I can.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Posted in High school reform, Higher ed, Legislature 2008 | No Comments »

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