Academic capital

The Illinois Education Research Council is releasing a new study on the “Teacher Academic Capital Gap in Illinois.” (Download the full study or policy brief [pdf])

Teacher academic capital is a measurement combining the mean ACT score of teachers, the percentage of teachers who failed the IL Basic Skills Test on the first attempt, the percentage of teachers who were provisionally or emergency certified, and the mean Barron’s competitiveness ranking of the undergraduate institutions attended by teachers. It represents, according to the IERC, “a collection of intellectual resources and assets that are available to schools through their teachers.”

The study found that between 2001 and 2006, schools with the highest percentage of low-income and minority students made major gains in academic capital. Though Chicago still has a lower average than the rest of the state, it is increasing faster than any other region, and increases in Chicago’s measures are the main driving force behind the statewide increase.

The report points out that Chicago’s huge increases in teacher academic capital are “largely the result of hiring inexperienced teachers with stronger academic backgrounds.”

The found that ISAT scores showed a “positive link between improvements in [academic capital] and achievement gains.” They also found that “[academic capital] gains tend to have a greater positive effect on a school’s student achievement than the negative effect associated with teacher inexperience.”

They specifically warn schools against seeking out experienced teachers as the expense of looking at new teachers with strong academic qualifications. But, to be sure, there are challenges to focusing on academic capital, as the IERC reported last year:

Unfortunately, in a recent study on teacher attrition in Illinois (DeAngelis & Presley, 2007), the IERC found that teachers with the highest ACT scores and degrees from the most competitive institutions are less likely to remain teaching in the lowest-performing schools. If this trend continues, the improvements in the distribution of Illinois’ teacher academic capital in recent years could be eroded. State and district officials need to ensure that all school leaders are implementing effective mentoring and induction support for new teachers, and striving to improve their schools’ teaching and learning climates.

Links to news coverage and related teacher achievement data in New York at This Week in Education.

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Class size, class culture

[via Joanne Jacobs]
A Los Angeles teacher talks about class size. It’s not about giving teacher fewer papers to grade or parents to call. It’s about giving teachers and students a fighting chance to fight the entrenched classroom culture that pervades high-need schools.

In Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” invisibility translates to a lack of individuality and signifies how being looked at is not the same as being seen. When one is invisible in any culture, one feels no sense of personal motivation or accountability. Class-size reduction is one very important way to change the culture. Being able to look each student in the eye, to touch each student on the shoulder, to make each student feel responsible for his or her behavior is impossible when the room feels like one huge organism that has devoured individuals and turned them into a monstrous mass. With an environment that allows us the ability to give attention where attention is needed, we can all accomplish more. With an environment that allows us the ability to see one another as individuals, despite the enforced limitations of an obsolete institution like the Los Angeles Unified School District, we might even exceed all our expectations.

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Carnival of Education

This week’s Carnival of Education at Where’s the Sun highlights a recent TEN post on standardized test score analysis.

Also worth checking out:

An (aspiring) Eduator’s Blog looks at four different personas taken on by teachers to address race in the classroom: the colorblind champion, the touchy-feely empathizer, the devil’s advocate, and the social justice league. Each has pros and cons. She says,

[A]ll of my teachers have influenced my blackness - from how I see myself as an African American to how I relate with others in and outside of my racial group. Many teachers are not cognizant of the power they have over this domain.

Tween Teacher is talking about how to find a teaching job you love. She’s got detailed steps and potential interview questions. If you’re in the market for a first (or new) teaching job, be sure to take a look! “[Y]ou are entitled to work in a place that ‘gets’ you, and wants what you have to offer.”

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What are you doing this summer?

Chicago’s Curie High School Youth Radio project wondered what their teachers do for fun and during the summer. Hear the interview here. Answers included quilting, singing, golfing, gardening, “being a soccer mom,” and moshing at heavy metal concerts.

Everyone’s got their own special summer thing. Hope everyone’s got something relaxing, fun, and/or inspirational planned for this summer. What will you be doing?

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This just doesn’t make sense

Last week the Fordham Institute release a new study showing that, “while the nation’s lowest achieving youngsters made rapid gains from 2000 to 2007, the performance of top students was languid.” It suggests that NCLB’s focus on “closing the achievement gap” has forced teachers to pay more attention to their lowest performing students, perhaps as the expense of the highest.

The report expresses grave concern about these findings, calling them “one of [NCLB’s] unintended consequences - and one that’s worrisome for America’s future competitiveness.”

There’s something about this that just doesn’t make any sense to me. Never has. Let me see if I can break it down.

Here’s a set of scores reported in the study: in 8th grade math, the average score of those students in the 10th percentile went up 13 points, from 221 to 234, while the average score of the students in the 90th percentile went up only five points, from 320 to 325.

These scores aren’t measuring the performance of individual kids over time. They’re the 8th grade scores each year, so each year it’s a different set of kids.

I might be worried if we were talking about a single group of kids. If in the past we were able to move high achieving kids along at a certain rate over their years in school, and now we’re not because we’ve stopped paying attention to them, that would be worrisome.

But why does it make sense to expect the top scores of 8th graders to increase dramatically each year? Should each class of 8th graders be significantly more successful than the previous year’s class?

Is what we’re saying that we don’t think that 325 is a good score on the NAEP? That to be internationally competitive, 8th graders should be scoring, what, 400? 500? If they got to that score, would we then be contented if their scores stayed stagnant?

It makes me wonder what we’re really measuring. If we had some really well defined standards for what 8th graders should be able to know and do, and some really valid measuring tools, then I think you would not expect the scores of the top students to rise dramatically every year. They would just be high. Stable and high.

It’s not that I don’t think they have a point about teachers in the current test-obessed climate being pressured to pay more attention to their lowest performing students at the expense of enriching the education of the highest performing students. There’s just something really fishy to me about the expectation that all scores - even the very highest - will rise every year. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.

More on the study from Eduwonk and Eduwonkette.

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Gender and education

In May the American Association of University Women released a report that describes the amazing strides girls have made in educational attainment in the last 35 years. They pointedly argue that this has not been at the expense of boys. 

USA Today reporter Richard Whitmire disagrees vehemently, and has a new blog just to explore Why Boys Fail.

Regardless of your point of view on whether there’s a boys crisis or a girls crisis or both or neither in education today, the blog is a great source of interesting links. Check the sidebar on the right for a library of editorials and reports worth checking out if you’re interested in gender and education.

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Carnival of Education

This week’s Carnival features posts relating to the theme of youth empowerment.

I particularly liked this post from What it’s Like on the Inside, talking about her approach to end of the year assessment:

For example, I had a student who missed a lot of class not that long ago. It turned out that he was skipping school and by the time all that caught up to him, well, he had been gone a lot of days. He served a week of in-school suspension for his truancies. Five of his teachers told his parents that there was no way he could pass their classes---all those zeros in their gradebooks couldn’t be made up due to unexcused absences. It is their right to have such a policy, but I didn’t follow suit. The kid made some bad choices, to be sure. But he had a school applied punishment for that. Why should I kick him with a grade, too? I can’t imagine having to come to school for the last month knowing that nothing you would do would matter...that because of something stupid, others were going to make a mess of your transcript and condemn you to summer school for summers to come. Now, it remains to be seen whether or not he will pass my class. He is still missing several assessments, but he has the choice to show me that he has learned the material. It is definitely one of those “lead a horse to water” sorts of deals; however, in the event that an “F” shows up on his report card for my class, it won’t be because I destined him to fail. I sleep a lot better that way.

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A broader, bolder approach?

Last week, in full-page ads [pdf] in the New York Times and Washington Post, a task force commissioned by the Economics Policy Institute released “A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.” The education internet has been buzzing ever since.

Here is what the report says:

Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning. Schools can—and have—ameliorated some of the impact of social and economic disadvantage on achievement. Improving our schools, therefore, continues to be a vitally important strategy for promoting upward mobility and for working toward equal opportunity and overall educational excellence.

Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite the impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can close these gaps in a substantial, consistent, and sustainable manner.

The broader, bolder approach includes increased investment in early childhood education; health services like prenatal, dental, and optometric care; and after school and summer services.

Successful programs do not exclusively focus on academic remediation. Rather, they provide disadvantaged children with the cultural, organizational, athletic, and academic enrichment activities that middle-class parents routinely make available to their own children.

Lots of education thought leaders have gotten behind this. You can see the original task force list here, and you can become a cosigner of the statement here.

Critics of the statement contend that it is anti-accountability and lets school off the hook for their role in the education crisis.

Here’s a typical critique, from Eduwonk:

I’m all for many of the proposals it champions, better access to health care and other social services, better access to pre-kindergarten education for low-income kids, using time more effectively....those are all vitally important.

But, the conspicuous soft-pedaling of a focus on results and the explicit rejection that perhaps schools are even a substantial part of the educational problem is unsettling. It’s as though the debates and progress of the last 25 years didn’t happen at all.

But when I read it, I didn’t see results getting soft-pedaled at all. Here’s what the report says about accountability and assessment:

The public has a right to hold schools accountable for raising student achievement. However, test scores alone cannot describe a school’s contribution to the full range of student outcomes. New accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods, and they will be considerably more expensive than the flawed accountability systems currently in use by the federal and state governments.

I’ve talked about this before: it’s time to focus on figuring out what real accountability would look like. If we want to argue that standard testing is a bad measure of student achievement, we have to offer a real replacement. A scientific, carefully reasoned alternative.

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Imaginative education system fixes

Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk is wondering, “what would you do with $5 billion to improve American education?”

Here are some of the ideas from the many comments:

• Find the best method for training teachers, and then require that the exact curriculum be implemented in every Ed School in the nation.
• I would establish a competitive master-teacher career track open to candidates with five or more years of documented exceptional impact on student achievement.
• Establish a equivalent of the medical residency “match” in the public schools. Each year, each aspiring, credentialed teacher would apply for school jobs through the same service. Schools would compete for top staff, and at the end of the selection process each teacher would receive a single school assignment where he/she would apprentice under master teachers for three years.
• Use the money to hire teachers for one-on-one home tutoring for our most disruptive students.
• I would take $3 billion and spend it buying out as many education vendors as I could, so I could streamline product development and reduce the amount of time districts and schools spend being bombarded by salespeople.
• Shift the focus from measuring test scores to measuring life outcomes, specifically: college going and persistence, entered employment, retention, and earnings gain over 1 year, and civic particpation. Provide support for developing the necessary tracking systems, provide huge incentives for districts to begin holding themselves to these broader goals, and reward those districts that make the biggest gains.
• I don’t think there’s any way to spend $5 billion nationally without it being a drop in the bucket. I’d pick a small to medium-size urban district and pour all the money into it...If spent wisely, at the end of the day we would know whether or not more money really can make a difference.
• Universal day care at no charge to parents.
• Pick middle schools in neighborhoods with the worst high school dropout rates and place counselors at those schools to specifically focus on students with low attendance.
• Have a program to create teacher’s assistants. Not teaching assistants, but Teacher’s Assistants, that is administrative professionals who can perform all that paperwork and documentation that teachers spend hours upon hours doing.

See the idea he picked as his favorite here.

What would you do?

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Big rally a big waste?

District 299, Alexander Russo’s blog about Chicago Public Schools asked teachers for their impressions of the big anti-violence-pro-school-funding rally at Soldier Field this week. (He also links to all the newspaper coverage here)

Some impressions gathered from the comments:

• “Not much substance that pertained to the kids.”
• “[I]f you were to assess what the kids learned from it, you would find they learned very little.”
• “[O]ur kids were prepped to interact with other students and found that the stadium was as segregated as our fine city.”

While the event wasn’t, according to these witnesses, much good to the students themselves, is it possible it might have some political impact as a showpiece nevertheless? Does that kind of strategy even work to change public or political opinion? 

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Carnival of Education

This week’s Carnival of Education at Learn Me Good features, among many others, Penny Lundquist’s guest post on TEN on the role of teachers, “I’m not a social worker.”

Also worth checking out:

Reading Coach Online worries that a proposal to add suggested age ranges to all children’s book is at best unnecessary, and at worst could discourage or embarrass kids who are reading out of their publisher-selected age range.

Learning from the Experts shares some advice for teachers from middle school students, including a suggestion that teachers allow students to evaluate them sometimes. Anyone tried this?

What it’s Like on the Inside wonders how to move outside our comfortable habits and stretch ourselves as educators, not to mention helping our students to do the same.

You cannot have innovation, unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder. How do you help yourself make that move?

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Where is the career ladder for teachers?

A the blog Teaching in the 408, blogger TMAO is talking about why he’s leaving his teaching job. Here’s one reason:

What does a teacher-promotion look like? Lead teacher/ mentor teacher/ department chair tend to mean very little except occasionally more work. Instructional coach means not teaching. Vice-principal means not teaching. Coordinator of something at the D.O. means not teaching. What does a teacher-promotion look like? We don’t know, not really. What happens when I figure out my job, do it well, occasionally do it more than well? What are my options for professional growth beyond 1) stop doing the job I do well; and 2) continue to do the job I do well, without change, indefinitely?

His post inspired a great discussion about this topic on the dy/dan blog, where Dan asks,

Where, in the vast sphere of education, do you deploy someone like TMAO, someone who is more satisfied by instructional innovation than by instructional implementation? How do you play to that teacher’s strengths? How do you keep him challenged?

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“I’m not a social worker”

Today’s guest blog post is from Golden Apple’s Director of Professional Development and Golden Apple Fellow Penny Lundquist.

On a recent visit to a far south side Chicago public high school, I observed a well-spoken African-American student linger after class.  When the young man left, I commented to his teacher, “he seems to be quite interested in your class.  One of your better students?” The teacher replied.  “He’s very smart, but he’s failing my class.” When I asked him why, the teacher responded, “I don’t know why.  I don’t pry into my students’ personal lives.  I’m not a social worker.”

Far too many poor and minority students, students of promise, are also students who are beset by wide-ranging life challenges outside of school that interfere with their ability to succeed in school.  Unfortunately, far too many of their teachers view their role as purely academic and are unable or unwilling to reach out to them to build the bridge those students need.

Sarah Karp’s “Teaching Kids to Cope” in the April 08 issue of Catalyst addresses social and emotional learning:

In the first-ever districtwide survey of students last spring, CPS students were asked a number of questions about their own and their peers’ social and emotional development. … The results showed that social and emotional learning is the No. 1 area students identified as needing improvement . . . [However,] Teachers worry that social and emotional lessons will cut into time they have to spend teaching reading or math. Others don’t see the immediate impact.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, has there been a sound?  If a teacher imparts information, “teaches,” to students who are so beset by life challenges that they cannot absorb the teaching, has the teacher really taught? 

Vivian Loseth, Executive Director of Youth Guidance, explained it this way in the Catalyst article:

One of the common things you find with bad teachers is that they have not found a way to connect with students. If you can connect with kids and teach them how to manage their own behavior, then it frees up time for math and science.

Should a teachers’ role include “social work?” If so, how can we make sure teachers are getting the training and support to provide this role? What would this training look like?

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That kid

Joanne Jacobs sums up some of the coverage on the two recently reported incidents of kindergarten teachers acting cruelly toward difficult students in their classes.

In talking to teachers and reading the dozens of comments on my blog posts here and here, I see a pattern.

Teachers complain that more wild and crazy children are coming to school, and that there’s little that teachers are allowed to do to enforce discipline when parents are uncooperative or incompetent…

Teachers also say they’re promised training in dealing with children with disabilities or behavior problems, but they never get it. Or they get it, and it’s not helpful. They’re told special education teachers will co-teach or that aides will work with high-need children, but the extra help never appears or vanishes with the next budget cut.

Her summary of those responses is, for me, a little too close to “teachers say it’s the kids’ fault, the parents’ fault and/or the school system’s fault.” I don’t think that’s really what the teachers meant.

But, I think teachers do often feel really angry and helpless when they have that kid in class. The kid who makes it so difficult for you to teach everyone else. The kid who makes you cry after school because you have no idea how to reach her. And if you have four or five or twelve kids like that, well, then it takes more than just a devotion to your calling to survive a year. It takes strategies.

I bet a few of you had that kid in your class this year. We all know the answer to having an extremely disruptive kid in your class and terribly insufficient support is NOT to have the other kids vote him out of the class!

So, what worked for you? 

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Carnival of Education

A few highlights from this week’s Carnival, which also includes this post from TEN on interdisciplinary learning.

Lead from the Start shares a study that proves preschoolers do much better on motor skills tasks when they talk to themselves.

Andrea muses on the mixed messages we give kids:

We want you to resist peer pressure and think for yourself. We want you to believe everything we tell you about what are good values.
We want you to be a good team member. Don’t even think of asking the student next to you how they solved the problem; you do your own work.
Be responsible. Only do what we tell you to.
We want you to be compassionate and look out for each other. We want you to turn in your peers to the authorities when they are troubled.
Cooperation is the key to success. There can only be one winner, so you have to beat everyone else.

History is Elementary demands that her fellow content-area teachers “roll up our sleeves and provide more opportunities for students to have more varied literacy experiences and more practice with various reading strategies, so they will not be ‘left behind.’”

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Interdisciplinary learning

Sometimes, when he’s rereading his favorite Douglas Hofstadter book, my husband tries to get me estimate. How many blocks high is the Sears Tower? How many dumptrucks would it take to haul away Mt. Fuji?

I was thinking of those questions when I read this piece in the New York Times about a new interdisciplinary program at Binghamton University in New York that seeks to break down the never-ending divide between the disciplines:

It’s been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered his famous “Two Cultures” lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” the “hostility and dislike” that divided the world’s “natural scientists,” its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its “literary intellectuals,” a group that, by Snow’s reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn’t a scientist.

The estimation problems are an interesting bridge of this gap. I’m more of a “literary intellectual” than a scientist, and I start out frustrated because I think of them as being math problems that I simply don’t have enough information to solve. But they’re not. I have lots of information from things I’ve seen and done and read to start to figure out the answers.

Teachers talk a lot about the importance of interdisciplinary learning. But it takes a lot to figure out ways to authentically connect, say, math and literature.  The beauty of it is, once you’ve done it, the “math kids” will be more engaged with the literature and the “reading kids” will be more engaged with the math.  The Binghamton prof gives this example:

One goal of the initiative is to demystify science by applying its traditional routines and parlance in nontraditional settings — graphing Jane Austen, as the title of an upcoming book felicitously puts it. “If you do statistics in the context of something you’re interested in and are good at, then it becomes an incremental as opposed to a saltational* jump,” Dr. Wilson said. “You see that the mechanics are not so hard after all, and once you understand why you’re doing the statistics in the first place, it ends up being simple nuts and bolts stuff, nothing more.”

This is a big project for professional development providers and ed schools. Teachers need to learn to bridge between disciplines on their own before they can help their students to do it.

* A term in biology referring to an abrupt jump.

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