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Who Will Be Obama's Next Education Secretary?
Then, once you're finished with the Washington Wire, over yonder we have the Wall Street Journal's "CEO Council" advising Barack Obama on the schools. Forty years of reform and it hasn't worked: what is to be done?
Apparently, what is to be done is more of what has been done already. Two of the three bsd's interviewed by the Journal agree that paying "the best teachers incredibly higher salaries — $40,000 to $50,000 more than they currently can make for the very best teachers" will be just the ticket. None of these fellows has checked out the goings-on in school districts where teachers are being paid $40,000 to $50,000 more than they would make elsewhere now, but never mind. Incredible pay for teachers without incredible curricula to teach (curriculum doesn't figure in their thinking) -- sure. Why not?
The third interviewee thinks we should pay teachers incredibly high salaries and train them to "support the development of students" & "help children grow." Music to a parent's ears! Another two, three decades of developmentally appropriate practice and differentiated instruction and those SAT scores are gonna spike.
Speaking of parents, I'm now convinced that in the past one hundred years of education history, parents have so consistently been right, and educationists have so consistently been wrong, that if you really want to know how to fix the schools you should interview 3 people who actually have kids in the schools, or did have.
Reading Rudolf Flesch will do that to you.
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27 comments:
Gerstner hasn't been in a low SES district classroom in a while, methinks. He's right on that there are structural problems. There are. But then he goes on to describe a structural behemoth to replace it.
All those juicy new six figure jobs will be doled out to politically connected hacks in my state. We are soon to have tons of them looking for work after having lost their toll booth collection jobs. If you centralize control, you petrify innovation. The stringent teacher selection process would begin with your family tree and end with your political affiliations.
If you centralize the funding (which he never mentions) you lose local control. There is no way my community, an extremity in a cash strapped state, would sign up for more of our cash to go to the lecherous beauracracy in Boston.
It would be like giving our credit cards to a hooker so she could spend it on cocaine whilst teaching us sex education.
I have a warning on my website about reading too much Flesch:
"One warning about Flesch's book: it is quite negative and sarcastic. While this is understandable due to his 30+ years of trying to get phonics into schools with only limited success, William Wilberforce showed that it is possible to persevere in a positive manner. Wilberforce fought against slavery for 18 years in Parliament. I believe that we should be, like Wilberforce, positive voices for truth."
It's harder to do than to write!
You're failing to see the delayed-response benefits of higher salaries.
Do you believe that better teachers teach better?
I do. I suspect you do as well.
Now: Do you believe that enough of our best college students are choosing teaching? Heck, do you believe that any of our best college students are choosing teaching?
I don't. I have years of personal and secondhand anecdotal experience about the "difference in caliber" between, say, the elementary ed department and the prelaw, premed, or ancient Greek departments.
More to the point, I believe that college students are at least somewhat rational, and that they will generally not choose a career where they will not make much money. They will take a low salary for love (we all do) but as it happens this nonetheless tends to weed out the bad ones. You may have the English majors who can't write, but they don't end up as chief editors.
The goal of higher salaries, especially higher starting salaries, is to attract more of the best and brightest who would not otherwise enter teaching. There is a cost insofar as we also pay existing people more, who may not be as good. But you need to absorb that cost to get new blood.
If you pay all starting teachers as much as partners in law firms, you bankrupt the towns and states attempting it.
I also doubt that higher pay will increase the caliber of new teachers. The traditional tradeoffs for lower pay for government employees--which public school teachers are--have been reliable employment and government pensions.
I have children in both private and public schools. There are some wonderful teachers in the public schools, but the private school teachers are more qualified, in my opinion. They are paid less than their public school counterparts, but they are much more likely to have majored in the subject they teach.
In great part, I believe the private school can draw better teachers because the school is freed from most of the ridiculous rules politicians have seen fit to saddle public schools with. I believe many charter schools have been freed from many restrictions, as well. There could be something to that.
Now: Do you believe that enough of our best college students are choosing teaching? Heck, do you believe that any of our best college students are choosing teaching?
I don't. I have years of personal and secondhand anecdotal experience about the "difference in caliber" between, say, the elementary ed department and the prelaw, premed, or ancient Greek departments.
Well, it isn't safe to generalize too much from your own experience. In my district, the people who go into elementary teaching (at least, those that get hired) were in fact from the top tier of their college and university classes. This wasn't always the case, of course, but in the past 10-15 years I don't know of a single one who majored in elementary education (probably because the district won't hire anyone who didn't get an undergraduate degree with honors in a recognized subject area).
Some even turned down the chance to go to medical school to go into elementary teaching -- there's a young man who did just that on my school faculty.
I majored in Ancient Greek (and Latin) myself.
So, while it is true that many elementary teachers come from degree programs where their academic requirements were minimal, this is not true everywhere. Districts with fairly high salaries and generally better than average working conditions can be very selective about who they hire.
Amazingly, many people go into elementary teaching because they want to "make a difference" and -- especially in the case of women -- want to be able to combine this with a family life. It's truly unfortunate that so many enter the field poorly prepared by their preservice accreditation programs and do not know about effective teaching methods, research, cognitive science, behavior management and other important fields.
Academic background alone is not enough to make one an effective teacher, however. Of course strong literacy/numeracy skills and good background in a specialty (if appropriate) should be a sine qua non, and this is the case in places where there is a lot of competition for the available jobs.
We don't make the same money as doctors or lawyers, but it is a good salary, and the benefits are also generous. So are the rewards. The problem is that because of poor preparation, many of the best and brightest will leave because of the poor management, bureaucratic bungling, and the lack of opportunity to be effective and grow in skills and knowledge in the public system. There are many obstacles put in the way of those who want to use effective curricula, accelerate learning, and help kids maximize their potential, especially in low-SES urban schools.
You couldn't pay me enough to work in a public school. It does not matter what the salary is when the working conditions are abysmal.
Young people who are on their first professional job may not understand how much working conditions matter, but most of the rest of us do. When I interview for a position, I'm determining if they are good enough for me as much as they are determining if I'm good for them.
I like working somewhere where I agree with the company's clearly articulated vision, where i like my coworkers, like my supervisors, and respect the upper management. I expect to be treated well based on performance, to have authority to manage my own time, to have autonomy over my my work space, some autonomy over my time, to have opportunities for my own innovations--either directly, or indirectly in terms of shaping new products or even new internal process. I expect clear expectations re: performance to be articulated. I expect support -- logistical, technical, financial--from service staff or admins so that I have all the tools to do my job. And I expect that I'm given both responsibility and accountability, and so are my peers.
And it goes without saying that my workplace is one where my physical safety IS NOT IN JEOPARDY.
Pay does not matter if I lack autonomy in the classroom to handle discipline issues, lack a good curriculum, lack materials, can't assign the homework I wish to, h lack support from administrative structures, if I dislike the culture, or if I have no respect for administration or a large fraction of my colleagues. No amount of money is worth that kind of pain.
--Amazingly, many people go into elementary teaching because they want to "make a difference" and -- especially in the case of women -- want to be able to combine this with a family life.
Why is this amazing?
Isn't it obvious? Lots of young women like *children*. They wish to have their own family, and until then, they still like to be around others. Young children are fun to lots and lots of women.
Lots of young women also like "helping people" in some way or another. So they pick fields where they feel they can make a connection to someone and can get an emotional reward by doing something they see as good or honorable--be it teaching a child to read, or being the person who smiles and says "good job" when a kid draws a rainbow, giving a child a hug.
And lastly, they want a job where they can spend time with their own kids. One of the few careers where women can do that without stigmatization is teaching.
oh, and Palisadesk,
this is completely OT but:
how do you pronounce your handle?
is it
Palisades Kay?
Pennsylvania Lisa Desk?
Pal is a Desk?
something else?
PalisadesKay is correct -- though at the moment it feels like my pal (or nemesis) is a desk. Paperwork, yuk.
As for "amazingly enough," I phrased it that way because, to hear many critics, one would be forced to infer that the vast majority of people who go into elementary teaching do so because they are too stupid, too lazy, too incompetent and too poorly educated to do anything else.
I have not found that to be the case. Instead, there are many people with extremely high levels of academic preparation and competence. Importantly, this does not necessarily translate into better outcomes for students: highly educated and literate teachers using mandated lousy curricula are analogous to trained athletes running track meets wearing cement overshoes and leg irons.
Teacher quality is necessary but not sufficient. Working conditions are also very important, but vary considerably even within a district. I have been in a school where the working conditions were so abysmal the place should have been closed down (students and teachers constantly at risk of physical and sexual assault), almost no curriculum materials or even classroom furniture, heating not working, etc -- and in the same district, an excellent school where anyone would be happy to send their child -- and where we had tons of volunteers because it was such a great place to be.
Those things are hard to control effectively. Competitive salaries, however, do have the effect of attracting people with higher academic qualifications to start with. Those people still need excellent curricula and reasonable working conditions to be effective.
Every now and then I fantasize about quitting public education, but I don't know of any private educational enterprises that serve the clientele that I work with in the public sector. I like these children and their families and get much satisfaction out of helping at least a few beat the system.
"Do you believe that enough of our best college students are choosing teaching? Heck, do you believe that any of our best college students are choosing teaching?"
No. No, no, no. Lots of data to show it. It's been this way for decades.
Well, let's see. In my small, failing, school district's middle schools (about 20 math teachers total) I know of: 3 electrical engineers, a civil engineer, a CPA, five math majors, and a meteorologist in that cohort. We all hold at least one post graduate degree and many have more than one.
Although I'm not sure this is a typical profile, I can assure you none of these people are stupid. Let me also say that none of us were drawn here by money, marble halls, flexible working hours, cheap health care, exciting high tech infrastructure, job security, or low working hours. Did I mention the annual layoff?
I spent 35 years working on the bleading edge of technology and trust me when I say, this is the hardest job I've every held. It's also very rewarding in it's own quaint way.
I'm also quite sure that I could drop in on any of my former departments, about 15 over the course of my engineering career, and find plenty of dopes.
There's lots of data to show it and it's been that way for decades.
Aha, it isn't often I catch out the estimable Matthew in fallacious logic -- but I did this time. He and Anonymous both fell into the same trap.
Not to go into the arcane linguistics of logical fallacies ("post hoc, propter hoc"; "fallacy of the undistributed middle", etc) what we have here is a simple category confusion error. Anon and Matthew have both allowed themselves to use data and verifiable facts about a subgroup to make statements they claim to be universally applicable to a much larger group.
Something like this:
All reptiles have scales (empirically verifiable).
Reptiles are vertebrates (ditto).
Therefore, all vertebrates have scales.
Oops! You can, I trust, see the problem here.
Only their argument was in defence of a negative proposition, so here is a different example:
No emus can fly.
Emus are birds.
Therefore, no birds can fly.
Anonymous and Matthew have muddled several subgroups: elementary education majors, "best and brightest" college students and "people who go into elementary teaching." They do have decades worth of data, but not data that supports their conclusion.
Let's look at this carefully.
What data DO we have?
I'll let Matthew provide the exact cites (if he wishes) but there is plenty of data to support the contention that college students who major in elementary education are (as a group) academically weak. They have significantly lower SAT scores than undergraduates in other fields, and (when they take the test) significantly lower GRE scores -- lower by hundreds of points! The data provide averages (mean scores) so of course some students in elementary education major programs do have strong academic skills and high IQs. Others are barely literate and probably lack good elementary school skill mastery, depending on what state and program they are in. Students in elementary education undergraduate programs tend to have undemanding assignments, get inflated grades, and are not held to a high standard of written English (see black educator Lisa Delpit's comments on this in Other People's Children).
The data for people who go into educational administration -- that's the people RUNNING the system, folks, not the people teaching in it -- are even worse. These leaders of our school districts have a mean GRE verbal score of something like 419 -- equivalent to an IQ of 90 or so. If that's the mean, you can be sure that many are well below THAT -- a truly frightening prospect. But these aren't the teachers -- these are the bosses. The ones who make all those decisions about good curricula, "best practices," and how to hire and fire good teachers (would they know one if they saw one?)
Back to those who go into elementary teaching. Another data point: Many of the people who get a bachelor's degree in elementary teaching don't actually enter the field. Perhaps they took the college program just to get an "easy" college degree. We don't really know. But they don't become teachers, and that's perhaps just as well, since their preparation was inferior by any standard. The states where the elementary teaching population is heavily dominated by graduates of such programs are precisely those with very low teacher salaries. You can check out these data online if you're inclined to do so.
So -- if they didn't major in elementary education, where do elementary teachers come from? The answer: everywhere. Many other undergraduate fields -- history, English, languages, Classics (moi), mathematics, science (my minor), psychology, sociology, you name it. They went to universities of all sorts, from Ivy League to internationally famous ones like Oxford, the Sorbonne, McGill and Geneva. Many went to state colleges and universities, but took demanding academic programs. Many had other careers before going into teaching -- as a previous commenter remarked. My district aggressively recruits such people, especially at the middle and secondary levels. Some come into teaching through alternative certification programs like Teach for America or after serving in the Peace Corps. They are a very diverse bunch. Some good, some not. Some stay, some don't.
Where Matthew and Anonymous blew their argument, logically speaking, was in asserting -- with some emphasis, in fact -- that NONE of the "brightest" and "best" college students go into teaching. NONE. They were both conflating "elementary education majors" (and the characteristics of that group) with "people who go into teaching" and making assertions about the latter that are not supported by the evidence.
Actually, arguments that purport to show something about "all" or "none" should always be examined very, very critically.
But, pace all the debate about the quality of the present teacher population, the results for students will not change significantly without changes to curricula and instructional factors. Teachers, competent or not, do not exist in a vacuum. Curricula and instructional materials, excellent or not, do not get the job done in a personnel-free void. These factors are synergistic.
There's lots of data to show it and it's been that way for decades;-)
palisadesk,
I was responding to the first part about "enough" going into teaching - I didn't take the second part ["are any?"] seriously. I thought it was rhetorical hyperbole.
One thing that neither of us pointed out is that much of the data is about applicants to education programs, not just enrolled students. I usually don't bother because ed schools aren't famously selective. If you apply, you generally get in, so I treat applicant data as being reflective enough of enrollment data.
An example where more money (in isolation) has no chance at producing more scholars....
My 7th grade class just scored a median grade of 11% on the Singapore Math 4A placement assessment. I administered this as a formative assessment to determine numeracy skills. My highest outlier is sitting at 68%, nearly 5 times the IQR, and still too low to 'enter' the program (80% is considered ready).
Appropriate curriculum is king! You could replace me with Einstein at 150k a year and (my guess) he would fall on his ass. He would likely run from the room screaming in a matter of hours. Remember, his non-negotiable objective is to deliver a 7th grade curriculum.
You can't fix this with euphemisms, silver bullets, or centralization and national standards. If this were the case, our highest paid auto workers, in their highly centralized Detroit enclaves, would also be producing the highest value cars in the world. They aren't and you can't!
Let me also add, in case you're enamored with Lou, that IBM booted the PC, mini computer, and more recently the laptop, and laser printer markets. Not faulting Lou for this of course, but it is very easy for an industrialist to criticize public schools and overlook the fact that we in public education don't get to cast off failed products or defective input materials. We are a highly regulated monopoly funded (mostly)by people who don't consume our service. This is not an environment where change is commonplace.
I would venture to say that you could pour in twice as much money, say $20,000 per student, and still get no change. Whoops, wait on that one. We're already doing that in D.C. aren't we? Hey Lou! How's that workin' out?
Paul,
What 7th grade math curriculum is your school using?
We use CMP 6-8 and Investigations K-5. I don't fault them entirely for where we are.
Our problems run much deeper even than the curriculum. Things like enourmous student churn rate (30% per year) very high ELL levels, and very high percentage of kids on ed plans are huge challenges and more teachers, money, and bureaucrats, only diddles the margins.
Thanks Paul. You do have a very difficult job.
I'm curious why you decided to administer the Singapore assessment when the students have been taught with Investigations and CMP?
(not that there is anything wrong with doing that)
7th grade math should be 7th grade math, no matter what teaching materials are used, or how afluent or poor the district.
I'm not a big fan of centralization either, but it seems to me that having clearly defined math content at every level is necessary, simple, and SHOULD NOT COST A DIME.
Equip parents with this information and they will demand an appropriate education for their child at every level.
It's not realistic to expect a 7th grade teacher to teach in half a year the skills that students should have developed over the previous five or six years.
(But you'll keep trying and I would too - for the students)
Truth in labeling...that's what we need - at every level and in every school.
The Singapore assessments are very very good in a lot of ways.
First, they ask really 'clean' questions. When a student gets it wrong you know precisely what their misconception is. I don't have to guess at two or three possibilities.
Second, they have a way of probing very efficiently to a deep level. An example is, for place value they might ask for the difference between two places in a multidigit number where the U.S. equivalent might be to ask for the names of the places. With the former I get to see that the student really has an appreciation for the values represented by place. With the latter question I only get to see the output of a (possible) memorization.
Third, they seem to use the absolute minimum of language and never waste time showing off the tester's literary acumen. It's really nice to have a multicultural question where Juan, Chee, Murial, and Genghis Khan collaborate to find the value of Yen in their safe deposit box but it's much better if my kids (who can barely request agua)are asked to find Tom and Sam's money. The PC crap gets in the way and can really discourage ELLs.
Fourth, they don't waste time with milktoast problem sets. Investigations probes 3 digit problems with things like 257 + 100. Singapore probes the same 'space' with 257 + 368. Both are three digit problems. Only one exposes weaknesses.
Lastly, they are very comprehensive and synchronous with the natural hierarchy of mathematical concepts. Decimals for example, are left out until after integer numbers and fractions are mastered. In the U.S. everything is a cow pie, smushed together in a ridiculous spiral of introductions without end. Lots of times I see questions in our program that are too clever by half and what happens with my very literal and very helpless kids in these cases is most likely no answer at all, leaving me guessing at what to learn from the response.
And oh yeh, as long as I attribute the test it is free, wonderfully formatted, and readily accessible at their website.
One more thing I forgot to mention...
I used 4A thinking, incorrectly, that this would give me a normal distribution (based on what I thought I knew about their abilities). I was floored by the skew. I think some of it was due to their tendancy to give up in the face of minimal challenge, yet even this tells me something.
My kids have an extreme level of learned helplessness when it comes to math. Most of them wouldn't hesitate to stand up to me in a brawl (I'm 200 pounds) but they melt like warm Hershey Bars in front of an addition problem.
Thanks for taking the time to explain this so clearly. I really appreciate it.
Your students are fortunate to have such a thoughtful teacher.
I'm sure you will figure out their weaknesses and do your best to help them progress.
Best Wishes!
Excellent, Paul. Catherine should pull your comments up front.
I've always thought it strange that the grade schools never ask the middle school math teachers if the kids they're sending over are ready to do middle school math.
In our district, the answer was to have the middle school "align" better with the grade schools. This meant getting rid of the accelerated 6th grade math class (pre-algebra). I imagine less and less kids were ready for it after a couple of years of the new reform math curriculum they had installed.
I hear the math teachers complain about the lack of skills coming into the schools, but no one seems to listen. It's appalling.
And like you said, the test is free and on the internet. The Saxon one is much less involved, but also can quickly show a teacher or parent what's missing pretty quickly.
Susan
Do you believe that enough of our best college students are choosing teaching?
Absolutely -- look at Teach for America. It's impossible to get into that program; it's as hard as getting into the Ivies, I believe. (Not fact-checked.)
There's a second program similar to TFA whose name I don't know; plus the Catholics have a program. Talented young college graduates compete for slots.
Talented people -- women especially -- want to teach.
What keeps them out isn't the money. It's the credentialing requirements and the "workplace environment," which runs the gamut from heterogeneous grouping of frustrated kids with few disciplinary back-ups for the classroom teacher to clueless administrators.
We have studies showing that people leave the teaching profession because of working conditions, not money.(Can't take the time to look them up right now...)
Beyond this, I've seen many, many 6-figure teachers working in public schools without accountability & with constructivist curricula.
I've now seen teachers working in a Jesuit high school who are paid far less.
Money doesn't equal quality.
I want teachers to be well paid. I would also like writers to be well paid, come to think of it.
But raising pay by $40,000 inside public schools as they are presently constituted won't fix things.
Inside wealthy districts, high pay combined with accountability won't do it, either. Responsibility for high achievement is too easily outsourced from school to family.
Parents of college graduates around these parts boast that their kids are teaching in Teach for America.
They also boast that their kids are teaching for the other group -- that's how I found out about it. I ran into a dad I know downtown & asked after his kids. He told me about his eldest child moving to Houston to work in the other program. He was bursting with pride.
More to the point, I believe that college students are at least somewhat rational, and that they will generally not choose a career where they will not make much money.
There are many 6-figure teachers in New York state. That's 6 figures with two months off in the summer, retirement age of 55, pension (not a 401-K), & lifetime health benefits.
At Back to school night in one of the wealthy districts around here parents asked the teacher why he switched careers.
"I wanted the summer off."
And welcome back, Paul!!!!
I missed you.
(I will get Paul's comments pulled up front -- )
Meanwhile, I have to repeat: I have personally experienced the reality of very, very well-paid teachers.
These teachers are far better paid than I am.
I've lived the "solution."
It's not a solution.
Not when you've got a half-trillion dollar a year government monopoly with no accountability for results.
Money can't overcome structure.
They are paid less than their public school counterparts, but they are much more likely to have majored in the subject they teach.
Exactly.
"Absolutely -- look at Teach for America."
I like TFA, TNTP, etc., but they don't satisfy the condition of "enough." We need lots, lots more alternative certs as we wait to break the ed school monopoly.
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