Articles in the Teachers category

Leadership Conference opens with John Merrow

NSBA’s Leadership Conference 2011 kicked off Saturday with a speech from  author, filmmaker, and PBS correspondent John Merrow. 

Merrow took his 14-year-old goddaughter into the depths of the New York Public Library recently and showed her a pod of hulking microfiche machines.

“What’s microfiche?” she asked.

Merrow began his opening general session talk at NSBA’s Leadership Conference Saturday morning with that story. It was a way to show how times are changing, not just for students and how they acquire knowledge, but also for school boards and their many antagonists, whom Merrow said are busy fighting yesterday’s battles.

As his godchild’s story illustrates, “Today knowledge is 24-7. Information is 24-7.” Merrow said. “By contrast, schools remain a monopolistic place where children are expected to answer questions, not ask them. I call it regurgitation education, and it’s at its apex as the tests approach.”

Schools must change, but not in the ways the Michelle Rhees of the nation would have it: by firing scores of supposedly bad teachers (as the former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor famously did) and tying the salaries and job security of the rest to students’ scores on bubble tests, Merrow said. But neither can school districts maintain what Merrow dubbed the traditional “trade union” concept of teaching, which defines a job as one that guarantees employment for life and bases salaries on years spent in front of a class.

“Neither side says much about school boards, which are being ignored,” Merrow said.

School board members accept this position on the sideline at their own peril, Merrow said. Instead, they need to embrace new ways of teaching with technology and a more vital conceptualization of the teaching profession, one that allows for more autonomy, collaboration, and personal initiative.

What should school boards do to improve the teaching profession and stem the loss of 40 percent of new teachers within their first four years — the kind of human capital loss that few professions could tolerate?

“Make it rewarding,” Merrow said. “Make it attractive. Make it a job worth fighting for.”

Change the bureaucracy so principals can hire the teacher they want, Merrow said. Create schools in which teachers and other staff members, from custodians to secretaries, are encouraged to work together.

That kind of transformation is critical, but it is not for the faint-hearted, Merrow said.

“Be bold. Take risks. Recognize that the world has changed,” Merrow said. “Or don’t.”

Earlier, NSBA President Earl C. Rickman III, who introduced Merrow, talked briefly about the serious challenges facing school boards, ones “that threaten our very existence.” Among them are mayoral takeovers, increased federal control, and commentators and pundits who mistakenly believe that schools could do better without school boards in charge.

“As state association leaders, we need to fight this battle,” Rickman said.

Lawrence Hardy|February 5th, 2011|Categories: Governance, Leadership Conference 2011, School Board News, School Reform, Teachers|

The week in blogs

Ask an 8-year-old this Sunday what he wants to be when he grows up and you might hear “a star running back for the Green Bay Packers” (or the Pittsburgh Steelers). Or maybe, if he or she is more focused on the halftime show: “A rock star like the Black Eyed Peas!”

How would you respond? Probably something on the order of, “Aww, isn’t that cute.”

But get the same response from, say, a 13-year-old – and I did once, when I visited an alternative school in Brockton, Mass., and talked to a 5-foot, 98-poundish student who wanted to be a pro basketball player — and your reaction would be more like:  ”Isn’t that sad and deluded.”

Truth is, schools need to do a better job of preparing students for careers as well as higher education. And this week the Harvard Graduate School of Education released a report outlining just how it thinks it should be done.

One big supporter is Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

“I start with the basic premise that it is the responsibility of K-12 educators to prepare all students for both college and a career,” Duncan said in a speech this week.  ”This must be ‘both/and,’ not ‘either/or.’ High school graduates themselves – not the educational system – should be choosing the postsecondary and career paths they want to pursue.”

A great idea, but what’s the track record for schools in preparing students for careers? A mixed one, notes Education Week‘s Catherine Gewertz in the Curriculum Matters blog.

What’s another way to improve career education – and, indeed, all education? “Stop driving out good teachers,” says University of Georgia Professor Peter Smagorinsky, quoted on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Get Schooled blog.  In this witty and quite opinionated piece, Smagorinsky muses about how today’s test-crazy education leaders would have reacted to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount Speech.  Hint: Think multiple choice.

“I suspect that neither (here he’s referring to Jesus and Socrates) would last long as the test-administering functionary required by Duncan.”

I think “Ouch” is the proper (and clichéd) response.

Finally, thank Alexander Russo’s “This Week in Education” for alerting us to the return of Patrick Riccard’s satirical “Edu-Pundit” on YouTube. Very clever. Very funny … but scarily close to reality? See for yourself.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

Lawrence Hardy|February 4th, 2011|Categories: American School Board Journal, Assessment, Curriculum, Dropout Prevention, Educational Research, Governance, Policy Formation, Student Achievement, Teachers, Urban Schools|

Urging more African American men to become teachers

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and filmmaker Spike Lee have teamed to urge more African American men to become teachers with the goal of recruiting and placing 80,000 African American male teachers in our classroom by 2015.

On Monday, they spoke at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, the nation’s only all-male historically African American college.

> Listen to Atlanta’s NPR affiliate’s report about the Morehouse event

Alexis Rice|February 1st, 2011|Categories: Federal Programs, NSBA Opinions and Analysis, Teachers|

The week in blogs

High School Soup had great things to say today about NCES’s new Education Dashboard, a database that looks at how students in the states and nation rank against a number of key academic benchmarks. In fact, the blog says, the new resource shows ”the Obama Administration gets it…”

All the indicators on the dashboard are connected in some way to the Administration’s signature goal of making the U.S. once again the leader in college degree attainment.  

Now, a critique: National stats are great – and a tremendous help to reporters like me – but sometimes these relentless counts and comparisons seem to focus on ends (some of them of dubious value, such as the number of states using student achievement data in teacher performance evaluations) at the expense of substance.

To which, none other than Ronald Reagan might have replied – as he did in one of his famous presidential debates _– “There you go again!” Only this time, the one saying that is Alexander Russo, taking so-called education “progressives” to task for being much better at knocking popular school reforms (the Harlem Children Zone, the educational changes in places like New York and Chicago – or, I might add, the new Education Dashboard) without coming up with better ideas of their own.

So, yes, we’ve still got a long way to go in the way of developing 21st-century skills. As one national daily put it, “Educators are hardly triumphant and say different skills are needed to compete in a global knowledge economy.”

So true. Except the above quote comes not from a U.S. newspaper but from the state-controlled China Daily, which, according to Atlantic blogger James Fallows, isn’t overwhelmed by the fact that Shanghai teenagers are outscoring the rest of the world in reading and math, and says they need to do more critical thinking and less rote learning.  

Finally, let me recommend Joanne Jacobs’ blog on the rise in “blended learning” at the K12 level, a combination of traditional and online classes that looks like a wave of the future.

 Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

Lawrence Hardy|January 28th, 2011|Categories: American School Board Journal, Assessment, Curriculum, Educational Technology, Governance, Policy Formation, Student Achievement, Teachers|

NSBA leaders, 150 school districts to attend federal labor conference

NSBA’s president and executive director will participate in the U.S. Department of Education’s Conference on Labor-Management Collaboration next month.

The Education Department has chosen 150 school districts from among the 241 applications it received to participate in what’s being billed as a historic event, scheduled for Feb. 15-16 in Denver.  A list of the 150 districts is available on the Education Department’s website.

Anne L. Bryant, NSBA’s executive director, and Earl C. Rickman III, the 2010-11 board president, will represent the association at the conference. Rickman is president of the board of Michigan’s Mount Clemens Community School District, one of the local districts that will attend.

“School board members across the country understand the importance of increasing student achievement through developing collaborative relationships in the labor management process,” said Rickman. “It is of the utmost importance that local school and union leaders come together in labor agreements to advance student achievement in the public education systems.”

To participate, the Education Department is requiring the school board president, superintendent, and teachers union leader to agree to attend. All must sign a pledge to collaboratively develop and implement policies in areas such as strategic planning and “aligning all labor-management work with this overarching focus. The alignment includes “ways to share responsibility and hold each other accountable for results; and more effectively supporting the work of teachers, leaders, and administrators in advancing student achievement by improving such systems and structures as organizing teaching and learning time and schedules, and processes for the hiring, retention, compensation, development, and evaluation of a highly effective workforce,” according to the Education Department.

http://schoolboardnews.nsba.org/2011/01/labor-conference-will-discuss-best-practices-for-boards-and-unions/

In addition to NSBA, other organizations that are co-sponsoring the conference include the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, the National School Boards Association, the American Association of School Administrators, the Council of the Great City Schools, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.

“Successful labor-management relations must be fostered with collaboration from a broad base of support from teachers, administrators, and school board members,” said Bryant. “Effective labor-management relations are an important part to supporting school improvement and driving student success.”

Joetta Sack-Min|January 26th, 2011|Categories: School Board News, School Boards, Teachers|

The week in blogs

Many years ago, when I was a college senior in Southern California, I took a child development class connected with a wonderful campus preschool that was all the things you would expect a ‘70s-era preschool to be – discovery oriented, child centered, creative, and fun.  It guess you could call it “open classroom” as well,  seeing as the kids had the run of a multi-room former home; of course it helped, in terms of classroom control, that – in addition to having a wonderful director – there was a ratio of roughly one college student helper for every two children.

Flip ahead two years, and I was one of the teachers in a Head Start program for minority students in Boston’s South End. This was also “open classroom,” but by necessity: There was some structural problem in one classroom that forced us to combined two classrooms of 20-some students each into a mega-class of four teachers and more than 40-something children.

Yes, it was bedlam. There were just too many students – and too much noise – for much real learning to occur.

I thought about those two schools this week after reading about an experimental elementary school in Brooklyn founded by a former principal and Harvard graduate student who was trying to replicate the small discussion groups at Phillips Exeter Academy. This is analogous to my California school. But, according to a New York Times story on the project and Joanne Jacobs’ subsequent blog, instead of organizing several small groups (which may not have been possible) the founder put 60 first graders in a class with four teachers, and the results were …. yes, as the Times strongly implies, bedlam. The same thing I experienced in Boston.
(more…)

Lawrence Hardy|January 15th, 2011|Categories: American School Board Journal, Assessment, Curriculum, Diversity, Educational Research, Educational Technology, Governance, Policy Formation, School Buildings, School Climate, Student Achievement, Teachers, Urban Schools|

Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

To celebrate Martin Luther King Day, check out these education resources from the Federal Resources for Educational Excellence on Martin Luther King, Jr. and documents from the civil rights movement.

Alexis Rice|January 14th, 2011|Categories: NSBA Opinions and Analysis, Student Achievement, Teachers|

Teacher of the year finalist, also one of NSBA’s one to watch

Today the Council of Chief State School Officers announced the finalists of 2011 National Teacher of the Year Program. Besides the fact that three of the four individuals were high school teachers, one other thing stood out to me from the list: Paul Andersen.

Innovative teachers have a way of rising to the top, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that Andersen, a science teacher at Bozeman School District #7 in Montana was also named one of NSBA’s Technology Leadership Network’s “20 to Watch.”

And in Andersen’s case, he really is an individual to watch as the nearly 300,000 hits to his “Bozeman Biology” podcasts have shown. Watch him in action in this introduction to the subject.

Naomi Dillon|January 12th, 2011|Categories: American School Board Journal, Governance, Teachers|Tags: , , |

Teaching the Constitution

As the U.S. House of Representatives reads the Constitution today, BoardBuzz wanted to share with you some great resources to teach students about our Constitution:

Alexis Rice|January 6th, 2011|Categories: Curriculum, NSBA Opinions and Analysis, Student Achievement, Teachers|

Education headlines: New law allows interns to be labeled “highly qualified”

A new federal law allows states to classify teaching interns as “highly qualified,” nullifying a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that banned the practice after civil-rights advocates in California complained about poor and minority students being taught by inexperienced teachers. The legislation was passed during the lame-duck session of Congress and signed by President Obama last month, the Associated Press writes… A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad to teach subjects from history to math, the New York Times reports… And former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has joined the Washington Speakers Bureau and will be marketed as an advocate for public education and expert in reforming urban school systems, a Washington Post blog reports. Fenty’s hiring of controversial former Chancellor Michelle Rhee has been cited by many experts as a factor in his loss last year.


Joetta Sack-Min|January 5th, 2011|Categories: Announcements, School Board News, Teachers|
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