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What does effective high school look like? What do our graduates need to know to succeed in college and the workplace? Are they ready for the challenges ahead?
Answers to these and many more questions can be found at the High School Toolkit, just launched this week by National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education. On this interactive web resource, you can explore the Center’s research and data around high school education.
School board members attending the Federal Relations Network (FRN) Conference had a number of opportunities to learn about the various congressional and cabinet-level efforts to improve teacher efficacy through innovative recruiting, retention, and compensation models.
Led by NSBA’s Director of Federal Programs Lucy Gettman, one of Monday’s final sessions recapped the proposed and draft versions of these federal efforts and, more importantly, drew audience members into a strategic discussion on the issue.
“What are some of the things you have done or would like to do to recruit, retain, or compensate talented instructional staff?” Gettman asked the board members in attendance.
One board member said her Arizona district had been struggling with declining enrollment and subsequent declining funding for years. To make sure student achievement didn’t decline along with it, she said star principals were identified and placed in the most difficult schools. “And good teachers will follow good principals,” she said. “It doesn’t matter they don’t get extra pay or have a challenging job, they are really happy to work with them.”
In San Francisco, one board member said that district leadership has engaged in a multi-year and multi-layered effort to improve the quality of teaching. Voter-approved tax hikes and bonds, for instance, have provided a slight increase for all staff, as well as, those who agree to work in hard-to-staff schools or fill chronically vacant positions. In return, the district has raised their standards above the state of California and made it easier to remove ineffective teachers, removing 18 of them last year alone with the union’s blessing.
“The key is you need to link higher standards to compensation,” she said.
But what happens when additional funding just isn’t available? One board member in suburban Omaha, Neb., said his district maintain its competitive edge in recruiting top-quality candidates by emphasizing its size.
“We say, ‘even though we can’t pay you what others can, we consider ourselves to be the right size district for you,’” he said, referring to its smaller student-to-teacher ratio and district population.
Research has consistently shown that an effective teacher has the greatest single impact on student achievement inside a school. But how to determine what an effective teacher is and even what impact an effective principal has on his or her faculty has been less clear. The good news is these questions are being increasingly addressed in federal and local policy and practice, and was the focus of a Monday morning session at the Federal Relations Network (FRN) Conference.
Over the last decade, what most people have considered a highly qualified teacher is someone who possesses strong credentials, is highly motivated and passionate about teaching, and cares about their students, said Jim Hull, senior policy analyst for NSBA’s Center for Public Education.
But that view has shifted as research and proposed federal legislation call for more rigor and quantitative data to measure teacher effectiveness. The House, for instance, has introduced a bill that would eliminate the provision under the No Child Left Behind Act that identifies teachers with bachelor’s degrees, state certifications, and subject matter knowledge as highly qualified, in favor of programs to develop teacher evaluation systems that would presumably rely on student achievement data like test scores to demonstrate teacher effectiveness.
“It’s going from quality to effectiveness and looking at the impact teachers have on students,” Hull said.
The problem is most states haven’t yet developed systems to quantitatively identify what an effective teacher looks like. Many of the original indicators, such as experience, teaching training, and cognitive skills, still have relevance, Hull said. But research has shown it’s the combination of these factors that is most likely to lead to teaching effectiveness and not any one in isolation. Research literature, for instance, is pretty clear that an advanced degree, in and of itself, does improve teacher efficacy — especially if the degree is not related to the subject matter taught.
“The most common advanced degree among teachers is in school administration … but there is no evidence that it improves their teaching or the performance of students,” Hull said.
And while teachers have been proven to have a tremendous impact on student success, research is just emerging that shows principals also play an important role.
“Researchers and policy makers have only recently begun to focus on [principals] and have found principals are second only to teachers in having an impact in school,” Hull said. “So what impact do principals have on student achievement? Quite a bit.”
But that impact varies between schools, with evidence suggesting that principals have the greatest impact in the most challenging schools.
“Unfortunately what we see is principal turnover at these challenging schools is twice as high then in less challenging schools,” Hull said. “We really need to find a way to keep our best principals in our most challenging schools.”
Listening to five state association leaders talk Sunday about the challenges they face might have reminded you of that purported Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
Because public schools in California, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Georgia are all living through “interesting” times. Not particularly fun times, to be sure, but definitely interesting.
Two common threads (or is that threats?) marked their presentations for the Third General Session of National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) Federal Relations Network Conference: The difficulties posed by a severe lack of money, and the challenge coming from various — and often united and well-funded — proponents of vouchers, charter schools, and privatization.
“Even if they feel they can’t get their legislation through, it still gives them a platform to attack public education and school board governance,” said Angela Palm, director of policy and legislative services for the Georgia School Boards Association.
The good news, several of the state executives said, is that the state associations and NSBA are not waiting for their opponents to define public education but are actively telling their own stories – to their constitutions, to parents, to legislators – highlighting successes, and setting the record straight.
Studies show that most citizens give their local public school “As” or “Bs” for quality.
“Then why are we having this discussion” about alternatives to public schools? asked Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees.
The reason, as Koocher and others explained, is the power and money behind public school critics. In Pennsylvania, for example, three different groups have come together to argue for more school choice: those who sincerely believe charters and other choice options will improve schools: those who are invested in attacking public education; and businesses that see public education as “a cash cow” said Thomas Gentzel, that state’s executive director. He said that, in forming your strategies and talking points, it helps to know which group you’re addressing.
One of the more convoluted – and long running – budget crises is occurring in California, leading Vernon Billy, executive director of the California School Boards Avocation, to close his presentation with this tongue-in-cheek advice: If someone starts a conversation with “’Well, you know, in California’….run.”
Currently, the state is planning to cut the education budget, but it is still asking districts to fund programs as if they had as much money as last fiscal year, Billy said. This has been convenient for the state and unions and other interest groups with which it has been negotiating, but it places all the fiscal responsibility on districts, which must either plow into their reserve funds or borrow money to stay afloat.
Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed a state referendum on increasing taxes, but if it does not pass, Billy said, the state is looking at more cuts of as much as $5 billion. Still, school districts are being told to spend as if they had as much money as last year; and, meanwhile, in an effort to preserve state funds, the state is deferring scheduled payments to schools.
“We still have our electric lights to pay for. We still have our employees to pay,” Billy said. “We still have our health and welfare costs rising. Those things are not changing.”
Ken DeLay, executive director of the Colorado School Boards Association, gave a more positive report on developments in his state. As a result of hard work and continued dialogue, the legislature was able to pass new teacher evaluation rules that for the first time would provide a mechanism for districts to fire low-performing but tenured teaches without having to spend thousands of dollars in litigation costs.
Many criticisms of value-added teacher evaluations are based on misconceptions of how the systems work and how they should be used in a comprehensive teacher evaluation program.
That’s what Jim Hull, a senior policy analyst at NSBA’s Center for Public Education, points out in a series of blogs appearing this week in response to comments by education historian Diana Ravitch and Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. All totaled, the three blogs provide a good introduction to what value-added is — and, perhaps equally important, what it isn’t.
“As the Center for Public Education report Building a Better Evaluation System states, value-added scores can be an effective tool in accurately identifying effective and ineffective teachers,” Hull writes, “but they should be used within the context of a comprehensive evaluation system that includes observations and other qualitative measures of a teacher’s performance.
Is education technology the key to solving our K12 problems? That’s an exaggeration, of course, but Time columnist Andrew Rotherham says we’re often seduced by what technology can do and consider it a panacea. No Luddite he, Rotherham presents a compelling argument for being purposeful and realistic when you consider new technology for the classroom.
Lastly, read Brett Nelson on Forbes (who comes to us via Joanne Jacobs’ blog) on why students should delay college for two years and get what he calls “grownup training.”
“Specifically: six months spent working in a factory, six in a restaurant, six on a farm and six in the military or performing another public service such as building houses, teaching algebra or changing bedpans,” Nelson writes. “. . . I’d reckon that grownup training would put undergrads deeply in touch with 1) why they wanted to go college in the first place, 2) what a special opportunity college really is, and 3) more than a vague notion of what — and better yet — who they wanted to be when they grew up.”
Check out the Education Talk Radio show from Friday, January 13, 2012 with National School Board Association‘s Executive Director Anne L. Bryant discussing our upcoming 2012 Annual Conference in Boston and the importance of school board professional development and leadership.
The editors of American School Board Journal (ASBJ) have compiled their annual list of the top 10 notable books in topics related to K-12 education from the last year in the magazine’s January 2012 issue.
“Our 2011 list reflects books on education that have a major impact on public opinion and are important to school leaders,” said Kathleen Vail, ASBJ’s Managing Editor.
Topping the list is Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools, one of most talked-about education books of the year, which portrays unions as the primary obstacle to school reform.
“Teachers unions continued to take a beating in 2011 in the court of public opinion, and several books on our list certainly reflect their place on the firing line,” Vail said.
Check out the full list at ASBJ.com.
Public education, like any discipline, has accumulated a lot of truisms over the years, most of which are, well … true.
Who can challenge statements like: Parents are the first teachers. School boards should set policy, not run the district. Next to home influences, teachers are the most important factor in a child’s education.
Pretty self-evident stuff.
And then there’s this: U. S. students don’t do as well as their international counterparts because they spend less time in school. True? Well, plausible enough (and certainly repeated enough) that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made a reference to it recently, saying that students in India and China “are going to school 25 to 30 percent longer than we are,” and adding, “Our students, I think, are at a competitive disadvantage.”
Such a deficit might indeed be a competitive disadvantage — if it were true. But NSBA’s Center for Public Education examined the claim and, using the best available evidence, concluded that it was not.
For the report Time in School: How does the U.S. Compare? Senior Research Analyst Jim Hull compared the hours required in school by several nations that compete with the United States with the those required from five of the more populous states. (States were used because they set minimum hour requirements.)
His conclusion? U.S. students attend about the same number of hours as students in most of these other countries, with some variations. (Less than in Italy, for example; more than in Finland.) Moreover, Hull said, a big issue for schools is often not how much time they require, but what they do with the time they’ve got.
The report took off in the blogosphere, being featured in Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet column in the Washington Post and several other places.
“Many modern school reformers have unfortunately maintained a narrow focus about the conditions that lead to academic success, including the notion that more time is necessarily better,” Strauss said.
In an EDifier blog, Hull said he appreciated the Post’s citation, but he emphasized that “while simply adding more instructional time will not automatically improve student achievement. What gets lost is that adding time can be an effective tool to improve student achievement especially for students from low-income families.”
As they always say — truism alert! – the devil is in the details.
The study was also picked up byThe Denver Post and U.S. News & World Report.
