David Steiner resigns

Terrible news.

David Steiner on the state tests

This past week I presented research to the Board of Regents that clearly suggests the need to adjust the "cut scores" on the state's grade 3-8 English and math exams to more accurately indicate student proficiency on those exams. The Board endorsed the rationale I presented and I will adjust those scores accordingly.

[snip]

If our tests are to be a useful tool, they have to give us meaningful information — not only about a student's current level of proficiency, but also about that student's future prospects. So we looked at linkages and connections, to better understand the signals that indicate whether a student is on track to pass Regents exams and to go on to higher education prepared to do college-level work.

The research told us many things. Most significantly, it revealed that some students who have scored "proficient" on state exams were unprepared, without remediation, to do the work required of them when they reached college. That must change.

"Proficiency" on our exams has to mean something real; no good purpose is served when we say that a child is proficient when that child simply is not.


a sequenced curriculum

But more rigorous exams are only one piece of the Regents' broader reform vision — a vision that includes a more challenging, sequenced curriculum, stronger preparation for teachers and principals, and a world-class data system.

[snip]

We are embarking on a new era of reform, and the goal is clear: to provide all students with a world-class education that prepares them for college, work, citizenship and lifelong learning.

Changes will make New York's standardized tests more meaningful
by David Steiner
July 25, 2010

NY state tests in the TIMES

New York Will Make Standardized Exams Tougher
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: July 19, 2010

New York report is out

Regents Approve Scoring Changes to Grade 3-8 Math and English Tests
July 19, 2010

To help inform the Regents deliberations, the Department – together with testing experts Daniel Koretz and Howard Everson (both are members of the State’s Technical Advisory Group) and CTB/McGraw-Hill, the state’s assessment contractor – conducted a series of studies and surveys concerning student cut scores and student proficiency. Among their findings were the following:

• Nearly a quarter of students in all New York State two and four-year institutions of higher education take remedial coursework;

• Students taking more remedial courses in their first year of college are less likely to persist in higher education;

• Students who score below an 80 on their math Regents exam have a much greater likelihood of being placed in a remedial college course;

• Students who score above an 80 on their math Regents exam have a good chance of earning at least a C in college-level math;

• Students who score at least a 75 on their English Regents exam have a good chance of earning at least a C in Freshman Composition;

• Institutions of higher education around the state consider a score of 75-85 on Regents exams to be the bare minimum for college readiness;

• Students at the current Level 3 proficiency standard on their 8th grade math exam have less than a 1 in 3 chance of earning an 80 on their math Regents;

• Students in high need districts at the current Level 3 proficiency standard on their 8th grade ELA exam have about a 50-50 chance of earning a 75 on the English Regents;

• Students scoring below 80 on their math regents and below 75 on their English Regents exams have a high likelihood of scoring below 500 on the SAT.

"awful to be 18 and not have choices"

I was already a devoted fan of David Steiner before he was appointed New York state's Commissioner of Education. I'm rapidly becoming a devoted fan of Meryl Tisch, too.

In today's Wall Street Journal:

Acknowledging that a New York state high-school diploma doesn't mean a student is necessarily ready for college, the chancellor of the Board of Regents said she envisions the state providing two types of diplomas in the near future: one that is marked "college-ready," and one that is not.

There is no formal proposal yet to do so, but Merryl Tisch, the chancellor, said the move would be a natural extension of a broad effort by the Regents to toughen up academic standards. Those efforts are fueled by increasing evidence that even while New York students have been showing marked progress on state tests, their performance on national tests has stagnated.

"It's awful to be 18 and not have choices," Ms. Tisch said.

Nearly a quarter of students in all New York state two- and four-year colleges need to take remedial course work, according to John King, the state education department's deputy commissioner. Students taking remedial courses in their first year of college are less likely to graduate, he said.

According to research by the Department of Education, students who scored below an 80 on their math Regents exam have a much higher likelihood of being placed in remedial college courses. Students only need a 65 to pass the math Regents test in New York.

Regent Eyes New Diploma
By BARBARA MARTINEZ
JULY 17, 2010

David Steiner, David Steiner

here

here

and

here

Amazing.

advice for curriculum committees everywhere

We've got so much going on here in town (posts t/k) that I'm only dimly aware of what is or is not happening at state & federal levels .... so I was surprised to discover this Daily News editorial yesterday while paging through looking at whatever it was I was looking at post-tennis lesson, no less.

I assume this is what they're referring to.

The Regents are authorizing the development of a performance-based approach to teacher certification and inviting – on a trial basis – new entities to prepare teachers for certification. As part of this new approach, the Regents will support the development of new performance-based assessments for teacher certification (including the eventual use of value-added assessment as a component of professional certification), will develop new methods to recruit and retain teachers for high needs schools in subject shortage areas and will allow additional content knowledge demonstrations for prospective teachers to bring new talent into the teaching field.

I'm interested to hear from teachers on this.

I would dearly love to see different teacher training programs (I'm guessing most teachers would dearly love to see different teacher training programs), and I think David Steiner is the person to do that.

But why does Kendall Hunt get off scot-free?

Or Heinemann?

Shouldn't these folks have to show a value-added value or two?

I guess this is a policy question, really. Targeting teacher-ed programs seems like a good idea to me. At least, it's a reasonably novel idea -- and I think that, historically speaking, a reform effort directed at medical schools may have had an enormous effect (yes?)

Data is good; value-added is good. In my view.

But targeting teacher ed programs and pushing through value-added measurements without reference to New York state's vendor-driven curricula is a different matter.

Have I ever mentioned my rule of thumb for school districts buying curricula?

Buy whatever homeschoolers are buying.

"Are Teacher Colleges Producing Mediocre Teachers?" TIME

TIME article by Gilbert Cruz.

Are Teacher Colleges Producing Mediocre Teachers?

OK, but is there anything constructive or promising here?

The article was based on a speech by Arne Duncan on Thursday to Columbia University's Teachers College. Duncan said:

"By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation's 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st century classroom,"

"By almost any standard."

{I'll ignore the 21st century remark.]

Then, Cruz quotes David Steiner, New York's education commissioner as saying:

"And if we can't identify the skills that make a difference in terms of student learning, then what we're saying is that teaching is an undefinable art, as opposed to something that can be taught."


"Until recently, Steiner served as dean of Hunter College's School of Education, where he was a vocal critic of the typical ed-school approach, in which teachers-in-training study theories and philosophies of education at the expense of practical, in-the-classroom experience."

Then Duncan is quoted as saying:

"I am urging every teacher-education program today to make better outcomes for students the overarching mission that propels all their efforts."

But what is the "standard" that should be used? It's one thing to argue mediocrity "by almost any standard", but there has to be some agreement over what that standard should be. The only standard that seems to be available is a mix of 50 state standards - all low. Some apologists of bad results complain that the bad scores on the tests mean that the tests are fundamentally flawed or that the schools didn't teach the specific material of any particular question. Apparently, these people are quite capable of arguing the "by almost any standard" position.

But the problem is not just poor implementation and a lack of focus on outcomes. It's philosophy. It's low expectations. The problem is that people disagree on standards. We can't even get started.

Actually, I'm more encouraged by Duncan's arm-twisting in states to force them to open up more charter schools. I can't imagine a top down solution to the problem of education that won't be watered down or manipulated. Either parents have to be allowed to send their kids elsewhere, or schools have to provide parents with choice. TERC or Singapore Math. I don't expect the education world will give up control easily. They will accept (low) accountability and weak standards first.

how did this happen?

Lynne Munson at the Common Core blog:

New York City’s Board of Regents has chosen David Steiner as New York’s new education commissioner, EdWeek reported earlier this week. Steiner’s move to Albany comes after four years as dean of Hunter College’s School of Education.

Why are we happy with the regents’ pick? Because Steiner is widely known for his commitment to a rigorous, comprehensive curriculum, and he has published quite a bit on the subject.

Don’t take our word for it, though – read how Steiner describes his schoolboy days:

“I read the classics as they were then understood—Austen, Brontë, Chaucer, Conrad, Dickens (not a favorite), Eliot, Hardy, Lawrence, Milton (sampled, and put aside for years to come), Mann, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola—and many authors of the second rank. I recall Trollope, Webster, Spencer, “modern” novelists of every hue—Fitzgerald, Roth, Updike, Nicholas Monsarrat, Storm Jameson (a close family friend), John le Carré—and so many others lost to memory.”

We’ll be watching with interest.

Boy. Me, too.

Steiner was on the board of the Core Knowledge Foundation, he did the ed-school syllabus study a few years ago, and he worked with Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First to create Teacher U at Hunter College.

Steiner's appointment has happened at the precise moment I was gearing up to lobby for adoption of the Core Knowledge curriculum here in Irvington. The precise moment. Ed says we should see if he'll come to town to give a talk.

The press release describes Steiner as "a bold and provocative education reformer."

That's something you don't see every day.

Teacher YOU Training Institute

This is a good development:

Education Week
Published Online: February 5, 2008
Published in Print: February 6, 2008

College and Charter Groups Team Up to Train Teachers

Leaders plan to expand pilot to include educators in noncharter schools.

By Bess Keller

New York

David M. Steiner ricochets from one media device to another in a classroom here, coaxing his two dozen students through a lecture on Plato with jottings in English and ancient Greek, a map of post-Classical Athens, and a stick-figure diagram of the philosopher’s famous cave allegory.

It’s not your usual Saturday-morning fare, especially for these students, who Monday through Friday put in long hours as teachers themselves. They have come to Hunter College’s education school for the day. As the pilot group for a new program being devised by their charter school employers and Hunter, they expect to earn master’s degrees in elementary education down the road.

“Our single largest challenge is … people, the challenges around human capital,” said Norman Atkins, the chief executive officer of Uncommon Schools, one of the three charter-management organizations behind the venture.

To recruit, keep, and improve the best people, he said, the three groups needed to come up with a better way for their busy teachers to earn the provisional certification and later the master’s degree required by New York state. Leaders of Uncommon Schools, KIPP in New York City, and Achievement First are confident that such a program will have broad appeal in this city, and envision admitting some 500 students a year in 2011 to the two-year program. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has blessed the plan.

The venture, tentatively called Teacher YOU Training Institute, follows other efforts germinated outside universities to boost the power of teacher preparation. The High Tech High charter-management organization in San Diego has notably started its own teacher-licensing program and will soon grant master’s degrees, for instance.


True Collaboration

What sets the New York institute apart is the close collaboration between the entrepreneurial groups and Hunter College, the City University of New York’s premier teacher-preparation school. And, it might be said, the involvement of Mr. Steiner, the school’s dean and a scholar known for his cutting criticisms of the teacher-training status quo.

Five years ago, as an education professor at Boston University, Mr. Steiner unleashed a minor tempest with a study of the coursework required for aspiring teachers at 16 leading education schools. He concluded that it was mostly “intellectually barren,” often ideologically skewed to the left of center, and just not very useful in the classroom.

The Hunter dean now has a chance to show how it should be done. According to his collaborators, who said they approached just about every university with a teacher-preparation program in the New York metropolitan area, he singularly embraced the new approach.

“It was hard to find a partner,” David Levin, who heads the KIPP charter schools in New York City and helped found the Knowledge Is Power Program....

It’s Hunter’s gain to work with schools “that have among the best performance in the city,” offered the dean, who decided to teach the Foundations of Education course himself—his first go at it in seven years.

That course and the 10 others required by the state are being “redesigned from scratch,” say the institute’s leaders, to fit the needs of teachers in the high-expectations climate of the three charter groups, which together run more than two dozen schools serving children from low-income families in New York and other Northeastern cities.

[snip]

The teaching course included such in-the-trenches advice as how to distribute and collect papers in the least time possible (along with an analysis of the resources saved, such as 67 hours of teaching time in a year) and how to use disciplinary measures fairly and effectively.

[snip]

As the afternoon goes on, Mr. Steiner, who studied politics and philosophy at Oxford and Harvard, seems to overflow with ways long-dead Plato can speak to the teachers occasionally fidgeting in their chairs. Would the philosopher, he asks, countenance the image of teaching as pouring stuff into kids’ heads? [ed.: I would like more pouring, please] Not at all, he contends. On the other hand, Plato was certainly a “sage on the stage,” not the “guide on the side” often commended to aspiring teachers in education schools.

“Education is about the exemplar,” Mr. Steiner advises before rushing to his next point.

[snip]

Besides being tailored to hours available to the teachers, the program is almost free, thanks to an arrangement that the institute has made with AmeriCorps, the federal program for putting young people to work in community service.

[snip]

Reflecting the results-oriented, data-driven nature of the three organizations’ schools, the institute’s leaders plan to make the final condition of earning a degree proof that the teachers’ students have grown academically. [next project: getting rid of the word "grow" used in lieu of "achieve," "learn," or "progress"]

“We’re developing standards of student-learning gains,” Mr. Atkins of Uncommon Schools said. “We’re looking for meaningful data that students … are learning.”

[snip]

In addition to teachers from the three founding charter-management organizations, the students would include teachers in other New York City schools, both charter and noncharter, most of them from the New York Teaching Fellows program run by the district to bring in high-quality beginners.

“The people from our network were seeing the training needs of our teachers, but we also felt we were developing a level of expertise we wanted to share with as many teachers as possible,” said KIPP’s Mr. Levin.

Vol. 27, Issue 22, Page 10

k9sasha on holistic teaching
Teacher YOU Training Institute

assigned reading at schools of education

In the domain of foundations of education, the books most often required by the programs we reviewed were authored by Anita Woolfolk, Jonathan Kozol, Henry Giroux, Paulo Freire, Joel Spring, Howard Gardner, and John Dewey. Woolfolk’s work is a textbook in educational psychology, and one of Joel Spring’s volumes is a textbook in educational foundations. The rest are well-known works that embrace a constructivist and/or progressive standpoint. Conspicuously absent from almost all such syllabi were works that took a very different approach to teaching, such as those by E. D. Hirsch or Diane Ravitch. (We found Hirsch on two syllabi, Ravitch on just one.) Equality of education is a central theme of these courses, as evident from the included authors. Nonetheless, not one of the foundations courses, in the 15 schools of education for which we had complete data sets for that domain, asked students to read The Black-White Test Score Gap, at the time of our review arguably the leading collection of scholarly writings on that subject. We also noted that eight of the programs of teacher certification we reviewed did not cover either the philosophy or the history of education among the courses required for certification.

source:
Skewed Perspective
David Steiner
Education Next

I'm feeling ornery today.

Then again, I always feel ornery.