Before Super Tuesday

To supplement this earlier post, a nice guide from Catalyst to the candidates’ positions on education.

As TEN member jladams points out in her comment on last week’s blog post:

I don’t think it is acceptable to say, “Education has taken a back-burner in the 2008 campaign.” Why isn’t it a front-burner issue?  As educators, we should be asking the candidates about their stances on education and MAKING it a front-burner issue.

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Hundreds of excellent teachers needed

Chicago Public Schools announced Thursday that it will be completely restaffing eight underperforming schools.  This is a model they’ve tried before, particularly at Sherman School.  This time, though, they’re attempting to cluster the schools, reforming high schools along with their elementary feeders simultaneously. This will mean that hundreds of teachers, along with seven principals, will lose their jobs and be replaced.

The big question underlying all the news coverage on this is, where is CPS going to get hundreds of amazing teachers to replace the fired teachers? Feeder programs like AUSL, which will run one of the clusters, don’t turn out enough teachers each year to fill all the slots.  CPS knows it can’t just put any teachers in there.  They’re hoping for lots of Golden Apple teachers (know any?) and National Board Certified teachers.

WBEZ’s Jay Fields knows people are going to be asking “are they going to have to cherry pick the good teachers” out of other schools?  And even if they wanted to, how would they find them, and how would they entice them to leave stable positions for the chaos of a turnaround school? The Trib article does mention a $10,000 performance bonus.  I wonder what other strategies they’re planning to try.

UPDATE:
Here’s a CNN video featuring Arne Duncan and CTU Board President Marilyn Stewart having it out. I also heard they were on Chicago Tonight a few nights ago, but can’t track down the video.

Labels: News

Grouping students

I just discovered a great new blog, The Faculty Room, jointly written by a group of teachers and administrators, led by Grant Wiggins, who some of you will know from his work on authentic assessment. It’s fairly new, but the concept seems to be that they pose a big question and several of the bloggers respond over the course of a week or two.

For example…
Should we be grouping students heterogeneously, homogenously, or not at all? Some thoughts from The Faculty Room:

Grant Wiggins frames the debate by reminding everyone that,

[I]n our proper criticism of tracking we have thrown out the idea of user-friendly grouping. Tracking is not grouping. Grouping presumes that smaller affinity groups are helpful ways of helping everyone reach the same goal. Tracking, by contrast, means separate tracks with lower tracks being intellectual dead ends.

Wiggins takes the slightly controversial position that “intelligent grouping,” homegeneous grouping that is not permanent and serves a specific purpose, makes much more sense than the current vogue for throwing everyone together in a single class and attempting to differentiate on the fly:

The painfully obvious variation in human ability and background experience require us to group, if we want to make it easier for both teacher and student to make progress. Why in the world would we want to maximize heterogeneous grouping? We don’t do it in sports, music, dance, karate, computer software classes, foreign language. Intelligent grouping means we have the same hopes and expectations for all learners, but we tactfully recognize and honor where people are in their progress. Some might even say that this is more thoughtful than heterogeneous classes where people have to learn together just because they are the same age.

Several writers focused, quite rightly on the extremely central role of teacher quality in determining whether any grouping strategy will work. For instance, Devin Ozdogu:

In the end, each student should have equitable educational opportunity. If this means grouping heterogeneously, then the teachers better know how to teach well in a heterogeneous classroom. If this means grouping homogeneously, then the teachers better know how to engage higher-skilled students and provide exceptional opportunities and support for lower-skilled students. Ultimately, this comes down to resources. The real question is: How do we structure and fund schools to provide students with exceptional teachers and additional support structures?

Of course, there is no easy answer. When I taught, I absolutely never felt like I was skilled enough at differentiating instruction or in using different types of groupings to best serve the needs of my students. I wonder if there are more effective ways to teach this skill to new teachers.

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What to do with $40 million

In 2002, the Chicago Community Trust began a five year infusion of 50 million dollars into Chicago schools.  On Thursday, they reported on the progress funded by their investment, especially in the areas of literacy, teacher and principal professional development, alternative school models, and support for parochial schools in underserved neighborhoods.  The full report is available for download here.

They also announced Thursday that they plan to invest another 40-45 million dollars over the next five years.

Just for kicks: if you had 40 million dollars to spend to systematically improve Chicago schools (or your school system), what kinds of programs would you support?

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Education and the Primaries

I’m curious-- as the Illinois primary approaches, are you considering candidates’ positions on education when you make your decision?  For myself, I wonder if this is even possible. The positions seem so vague and deliberately open-ended that it’s almost impossible to compare them, so I tend to make political decisions based on much more impressionistic criteria.  (Does this person seem smart, interested in exploring new ideas, likely to be more strongly influenced by people with whom I generally agree than by people whose ideas I hate?)

Interested in sorting through the issues for yourself?  Try some of these sources:

Since education has proven to be something of a back-burner issue in the 2008 campaign so far, it’s been left off some of the more helpful candidate-comparison charts (like this one in the New York Times).  EdWeek comes through, though, with this nice side-by-side comparison interface (requires an up-to-date version of Flash).  Choose any two candidates and see how they compare.  Also, via This Week in Education, try Vote Gopher‘s interface, this one letting you choose four candidates at a time.

Can’t get enough of education and politics?  Try Campaign K-12, EdWeek’s political blog.  North Carolina teacher Paul Cancellieri has made it a New Year’s resolution to catch up on ed policy issues, and has a nice list of resources on his blog, Scripted Spontaneity (via Eduwonkette).

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Rigor and Relevance

I am woefully late in pointing TEN readers to Will Okun’s writing in the New York Times.  Okun, a Chicago teacher, won a contest last year to visit Africa with the Times’ Nicholas Kristof.  He blogged about his experiences there, and then continued writing, posting a few times a month, mostly on education issues facing him in his classroom on Chicago’s west side.

This week, Okun takes on the English curriculum.  Explaining that his low-income, minority students are completely turned off by reading when forced to read classics (e.g. “The Great Gatsby"), but energized and engaged when reading books to which they can relate (e.g. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"), he wonders why we keep assigning classics instead of focusing on books the students will respond to:

The books I hope will foster the students’ love of reading are well written, intelligent, thought-provoking and clearly relevant. If these books produce more response, thought, engagement, learning and other academic results from the students, shouldn’t these writings form the backbone of my literature class? Considering my abilities as a teacher and the personal and academic interests of my students, I believe I am better serving the present and future needs of my students by offering more accessible readings that will hopefully ignite a lifelong passion for reading. After all, isn’t it better to have read and learned, than never to have read at all?

There are literally hundreds of comments at the end of his blog piece, and they are worth skimming through if you have a few extra minutes.  It seems to me the arguments tend to break down like this:

(click for larger)

Of course it’s always more complicated than a neat little chart. (Though I did have fun making it!) There’s the issue of teacher talent and training: can certain special teachers always get their kids to love Shakespeare while others will never be able to?  Is inspiring kids to love the classics a learnable skill?

Check out a few other bloggers responding to this piece:
Joanne Jacobs
Core Knowledge

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Parent Communication

The Teacher Leaders Network recently had a discussion prompted by this piece written by Bill Ferriter for Teacher Magazine.  In the article and discussion, Bill and TLN teachers discussed some of the communication gaps between parents and teachers.  Bill described the problem as a “false sense of transparency"--the feeling that parents know everything about teaching and teachers know everything about parenting.  The Teacher Magazine article includes a number of suggestions, like “recognizing that parents are valuable partners” and “admitting your mistakes.” They’re perfectly good suggestions, but nothing surprising.

I’m left wondering about the elephant in the room, something that came up last night at a fascinating National-Louis forum:  What about when teachers and parents do not communicate well, not just because they have different roles with regards to the child, but because their conversations are filtered through the lenses of their race, class, age, or language?

Labels: Conversations

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