NCTAF News Digest:

A Weekly Digest of News Articles & Reports

Thursday May 22, 2008

In this Issue:

--NCLB Watch

--Report: Waiting to Be Won Over

--Commentary: Collaborative Teaching: The Best Response to a Rigid Curriculum

--Research: New Teachers: "I wasn't prepared for the challenges of teaching in a diverse classroom"

--Lessons From Leading Models

--Great Education Debate: Reforming the Grade System

--Teacher Contract Would End Seniority

--State Notifies Parents Before Releasing Awful Test Scores

Greetings,

This is the NCTAF News Digest, a timely news service provided to our partner states, commissioners, and the education policy community. This Digest is for the personal educational use of the recipient. At publication time, all links were active. Some publications may require free registration. You may wish to bookmark links for future reference.

Report: Waiting To Be Won Over

-Education Sector, May 2008

American public education is in the midst of intense change, and teachers, in particular, are facing pressure to produce better outcomes for students. As policymakers, teachers unions, and other stakeholders react to changing demands on the nation's public education system, there remains considerable debate about what teachers think and what they want. Too often assumptions define the conversation rather than actual evidence of teachers' views. In an effort to facilitate and inform this conversation, Education Sector and the FDR Group surveyed 1,010 K–12 public school teachers about their views on the teaching profession, teachers unions, and a host of reforms aimed at improving teacher quality.

The survey asks specific questions about the work teachers do and about reform proposals that are currently being debated. It also examines the views of new teachers and veterans. And, when possible, the survey discerns trends by asking some identical questions from a 2003 national survey of K–12 public school teachers and comparing the responses.

This report is organized into four sections. The first highlights key findings about the challenges that teachers see in their profession, including weak evaluation processes and a rigid tenure and pay system. The second section describes how teachers feel about a range of reforms aimed at improving their profession, from new evaluation approaches to differential pay proposals. The third section focuses on teachers' opinions about their union and what they feel the union role should be in improving teacher quality. The final section examines some key points of comparison between new teachers, who have been on the job fewer than five years, and veteran teachers, who have been teaching for more than 20 years.

Some key findings from the survey include:

• Seventy-six percent of teachers say that too many burned-out veteran teachers stay because they don't want to walk away from benefits and service time accrued. And over half (55 percent) say that it's very difficult and time-consuming to remove teachers who shouldn't be in the classroom.

• Only 26 percent of teachers say that their most recent formal evaluation was useful and effective in helping them to improve their teaching. Seventy-nine percent support strengthening the formal evaluation of probationary teachers. And nearly a third of teachers (32 percent) say that tenured teachers should be evaluated on an annual basis.
• Teachers are less likely today (than they were in 2003) to support paying teachers more based on test scores. Only half of teachers support the idea to measure teacher effectiveness based on student growth or "value added."
• Teachers are more likely today (than they were in 2003) to say unions are essential. The jump among new teachers (<5 yrs) who say the unions are essential is especially striking.
• Teachers say they would support the union taking an active union role in improving teacher evaluation, supporting and mentoring teachers, guiding ineffective teachers out of the profession, and negotiating new/differentiated roles/responsibilities for teachers.

Commentary: Collaborative Teaching: The Best Response to a Rigid Curriculum
-Education Week; May 20, 2008

Like many of our education colleagues around the country, we have struggled with the constraints brought on by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, initially seeing its demands for consistency as the enemy of classroom creativity and innovation. Like several of our fellow teachers, we viewed the law’s directives as threats likely to suck every shred of imagination out of our instruction. But as we persisted in our work, we discovered that we could meet the challenges posed by the law with a powerful tool honed during our collective 37 years in education: collaborative teaching. In fact, we now believe that working together creatively is the only way to meet the ambitious goals of NCLB and state and district standards. It is collaborative teaching that enabled us to draw on our individual and group strengths, divide work into manageable chunks, and conquer the obstacles of overloaded curriculum frameworks and high-stakes tests, all while holding ourselves accountable for results. Our collaborative efforts at Dutchtown Middle School in Geismar, La., also led to our selection as the first team ever to win the Disney Teacher of the Year award. While grateful for the honor and the professional opportunities that followed, we were most excited by being nationally recognized for our efforts as an interdisciplinary partnership. The centerpiece of our collaborative teaching had always been showing students how the concepts and skills they learn in one class relate to all the others—and why those ideas matter.

Although we’d been planning our classroom units for years, the process became much more difficult when our district adopted the Louisiana Comprehensive Curriculum outlining what content students had to learn in each subject and the specific weeks in which we had to teach those concepts. We were pretty sure this rigid curriculum framework would spell the end of our interdisciplinary units, but once we rolled up our sleeves and started working with the state documents, we found that the opposite was true. Not only could we continue to create these units, we could improve them. Ironically, the inflexible curriculum helped us see the wisdom of making our lessons even more tightly focused and connected. The more we studied the documents, the more obvious it became that, in designing our interdisciplinary units, we could no longer hide behind “fluffy” activities with vague intentions. If we wanted to successfully address our individual class requirements while also showing students how the ideas from one course applied to others, we had to truly understand those connections ourselves. So we immersed ourselves in extensive curriculum mapping, looking for opportunities to build bridges from subject to subject. The process pushed us to think hard about which concepts to connect and when. The standards even provided guidance on how to pull these ideas together, by identifying universal themes—freedom, citizenship, communication—that cut across all subject areas and can capture the attention of middle-grades students at an age when they are intensely curious about the world and how they can affect it. But as we gathered that summer before the first school year with the new curricula, to spend time planning lessons and to sketch out the key themes of our interdisciplinary units, we made a horrifying discovery: We realized that our integrated units could no longer be neatly packaged and planned weeks in advance.

To view the full article, click here.

Research: New Teachers: "I wasn't prepared for the challenges of teaching in a diverse classroom."

-EdNews.org; May 20, 2008

New York City – Public Agenda and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality today released research that points to two specific areas where teacher training may be lacking, according to rookie teachers in the trenches and fresh from training: preparedness for the diversity of the contemporary American classroom and teaching students with special needs. Seventy-six percent of new teachers said that teaching an ethnically diverse student body was covered in their training.But only 39 percent say that their training in this area helps them a lot now that they are in the classroom, which puts their evaluation of the effectiveness of this aspect of their training near the bottom of the list of subjects the new teachers had studied.The survey covered 12 areas of teacher training ranging from direct instruction to their study of history, philosophy and policy debates in public education.No other factor examined in the Public Agenda research showed nearly as great a gap between how many received training in a given area and new teachers' assessments of the effectiveness of said training.

Sabrina Laine, Director of the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, which commissioned and helped to design the research said, "The 'Teaching in Changing Times' report illustrates the gap between teacher training and the realities of the classroom when it comes to teaching diverse populations and students with special needs. A highly effective teacher workforce starts with quality preparation and needs to be bolstered with good induction and mentoring programs for new teachers. The TQ Center just introduced an online discussion forum to address special education teacher preparation and also provides other resources to support beginning teachers." Many new teachers also reported inadequacies in the training they received for teaching children with special needs.Most new teachers (82 percent) say their training in had covered this aspect of teaching, but only 47 percent say their training helps a lot.This is a particularly important area for training, the report notes, because nearly every new teacher reported having at least some children with special needs in their classroom – only 5 percent reported having no students with special needs. "These subjects are being taught in teacher training," said Public Agenda Executive Vice President and Director of Education Insights Jean Johnson. "But apparently large numbers of new teachers still enter their classrooms feeling unprepared."

To download the full report, click here.

Lessons From Leading Models

-Educational Leadership Magazine; May 2008

The expectations placed on U.S. high schools have never been greater. Society now rightly expects high schools to prepare all students for success in college or a workplace that requires an increasingly high level of skills. Meeting these expectations is particularly daunting for high schools serving large numbers of low-income students—and the stakes are high. Ninth graders from economically disadvantaged backgrounds often start high school feeling unknown by teachers and peers and lacking essential literacy and numeracy skills. If their high schools do nothing to break through struggling 9th graders' isolation and academic weaknesses, students are likely to fall behind academically—and students who fail courses in 9th grade are at high risk of dropping out altogether. Low-performing high schools clearly need new models, not only to help all students graduate, but also to prepare them for life after graduation. High school administrators can find signs of hope, however, in successful, replicable strategies from three well-established reform initiatives that grapple with improving achievement in low-performing high schools—Talent Development, First Things First, and career academies. The nonprofit research organization MDRC, at which I am a senior researcher, conducted separate evaluations of these three models highlighting approaches that help low-performing high schools reshape themselves. These three programs are among the most widely disseminated high school reform models to have emerged in recent decades. More than 2,500 high schools throughout the United States implement one of the three. Each of the models combines structural and instructional changes connected by an overarching theory of action, and they share some common features.

Perhaps most noteworthy, all include small learning communities. Talent Development was initiated in 1994 through Johns Hopkins University's Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk. High schools in 11 U.S. states now use the model. It aims to transform urban schools facing high dropout rates and low achievement, emphasizing supports for academically struggling 9th graders. Freshmen have their own small learning community, the Ninth Grade Success Academy, in which they take math and language arts. The curriculum seeks to prepare all students for college-level work. First Things First, designed by the Institute for Research and Reform in Education, was initially implemented in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1998. By 2007, 27 high schools (as well as some middle and elementary schools) had adopted the model. First Things First's main components are communities of 200–300 students who take core classes together for all four years, a personalized student advisory system, and professional development for teachers aimed at instructional improvements. The career academy approach was first piloted in Philadelphia in 1969. The central features of this approach—a school-within-a-school structure, an integrated academic and occupational curriculum, and employee partnerships—have been adopted widely. MDRC initially evaluated each model separately to determine the effects of its package of services. I synthesized the findings of these three evaluations, identifying common elements shared across the models, as well as the components unique to each model that seem to account for positive effects. In five key areas, these initiatives provide lessons for schools seeking to better serve struggling students: creating a sense of belonging, helping freshmen with weak academic skills, preparing students for postsecondary success, improving instruction, and stimulating lasting change.

To view the full article, click here.

Great Education Debate: Reforming the Grade System

-USA Today; May 18, 2008

LAS VEGAS — When principal Debbie Brockett announced a policy last fall of not allowing teachers to issue any score less than 50 to failing students, she thought she was adopting a means of leveling out an unfair grading curve. To many outraged teachers at Las Vegas High, however, Brockett's plan amounted to fuzzy new math designed to offer unfair assistance to low-achieving students. They protested, and she backed down. But in the process, both sides stepped into one of the hottest grading debates within academic circles today. Across the USA, education experts and school administrators are trying to determine how and whether to reform grading systems to give failing students a better chance to catch up. "I made a bad call at the time, going with past experience, and I didn't expect it to become controversial," says Brockett, who had just been promoted from a middle school where her minimum-F policy was in place. "Now it's an ongoing conversation we're having." The conversation goes something like this: In most schools, an F is given to any grade below a numerical average of 60 out of 100. Brockett and others who advocate for a floor for failing grades say a student who earns, say, a 30 out of 100 in a quarter or semester almost certainly will fail the class even if the student improves dramatically in other marking periods.To them, a 50 seems like a more appropriate minimum, because each of the other intervals between letter grades is also only 10 points. Why, they ask, should an F be anything from zero to 59? It's not certain how many schools have adopted this kind of policy, but there are examples in big cities such as Dallas and small ones such as Port Byron, N.Y.Several variations of the minimum-F notion exist. Some teachers apply it to tests and homework assignments, others to quarter or semester grades.

Even proponents of the idea, such as Sally Feinberg, principal of Lehn Middle School in Port Byron, and Thomas Guskey of Georgetown College in Kentucky, agree that it can be only one component of rescuing failing students and that other programs must be in place to determine why a student is not doing work and to change that behavior. Such is the case at Glenpool Middle School in Glenpool, Okla., where school counselor Ashley Bayouth oversees a program called Zeroes Aren't Permitted, or ZAP. When students don't turn in their homework, they aren't flunked. Instead, they are forced to spend their lunch period or stay after school and do their homework under the supervision of Bayouth or principal Danna Garland. The program has been effective, Bayouth says. At the beginning of the school year, about 25 students per grade level were in ZAP sessions every day. Now it's down to four or five, she says."Last year, we had students who were failing and I would e-mail teachers to find out why, and 90% of the time, the reason was that John Doe had seven assignments he hadn't turned in," she says. "I'd contact the parents, and they'd say their kids come home and say they don't have any homework and they don't know what to do. We're telling these kids it's not OK not to do their work. Before, the kids would say, 'Eh, I'll just take a zero.' " In other cases, though, these efforts have proven to have little effect. Students who are failing severely often never know that their grades are being propped up, says principal Michael Foran of New Britain (Conn.) High School. Foran's predecessor had a minimum-F policy at New Britain, the state's largest high school, but Foran abandoned it two years ago when he took over, in part because "it became controversial within the school and among the parents."More important, though, Foran notes that "we haven't seen a significant difference in our failure rate" since switching back to a conventional grading system. "My opinion is that teachers as professionals should have a certain amount of flexibility in how they grade assignments," he says. "The one-size-fits-all doesn't work."

To view the full article, click here.

Teacher Contract Would End Seniority

-The Washington Post, May 20, 2008

The Washington Teachers' Union is discussing a proposed three-year contract from the school system that would eliminate seniority, giving Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee more control in filling vacancies, a union member familiar with the talks said yesterday. Without seniority, Rhee could place teachers based on qualifications or performance rather than years of service, said the union member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are confidential. The union member said Rhee sought the provision as a recruiting tool so she could offer talented candidates the position of their choice. She would be able to fill positions with less experienced teachers. Under the proposed contract, teachers would give up seniority in exchange for annual raises of about 6 percent, more personal-leave days and more money for supplies, the union member said. In the last contract, which expired in the fall, teachers received a 10 percent raise over two years. Rhee "does want to infuse some new blood [into the schools]. She wants to make it attractive for young people coming in to advance," said the union member, adding that the union's negotiating team will meet with her tomorrow or Friday. "We've come to realize we're going to have to give in to her." The union member said Rhee had also wanted to eliminate tenure, subjecting teachers to dismissal without cause.

In March, Rhee fired 98 central office employees after the D.C. Council gave her the authority to make several hundred of them "at-will" staff members. At a conference yesterday sponsored by the NewSchools Venture Fund, which backs charter schools, Rhee said during a discussion that she expects the new teachers' contract to be settled soon. In her remarks, she said the contract would "revolutionize education as we know it." She declined to discuss details after the meeting.  Union President George Parker said in an interview that "seniority definitely is one of the difficult issues at the table." Responding to Rhee's comment, he said, "In terms of revolutionizing education, I'm not sure I see anything at this point that will revolutionize education." About the tenure issue, Parker said, "I don't believe in at-will status for any employee."

To view the full article, click here.

State Notifies Parents Before Releasing Awful Test Scores

-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; May 19, 2008

Georgia school leaders were so shocked by dismal scores on state math and social studies tests, the state superintendent released a statement Monday to prepare parents and others for the results. According to the unofficial results, only 20 to 30 percent of Georgia's sixth- and seventh-graders passed the state social studies exam. In math, about 40 percent of eighth-graders could be held back because they failed the test. The state will release official scores from the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests next month. Parents whose children failed the math test will be notified by local schools. The state requires eighth-graders to pass the reading and math exams to move to high school. Students who failed math exams — as well as those who might have failed reading — can retake the exam this summer. Schools will provide optional free classes to get them ready. Students who failed the social studies exam don't face any consequences under Georgia law. State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox said test scores in both subjects dropped because students took harder tests to match the state's tougher and more rigorous curriculum. "When you raise standards and expectations, it is not unusual to see a temporary dip in the percent of students who are meeting those expectations," Cox wrote in a statement released Monday afternoon. "We have seen this in other grades and other areas of the curriculum."

Cox was puzzled by the drastic drop in social studies, calling it "cause for concern." Last year, about 83 percent of the sixth-graders passed the social studies test, as did about 86 percent of the seventh-graders, according to state figures.She wondered whether the new social studies standards were clear and if some of the detailed test questions caught students off guard. Cox will ask a group of teachers and curriculum specialists to determine what may have happened. "We have to do better with this," Cox said. Changes could be made to the test and to the material teachers teach, said Dana Tofig, spokesman for the state education department. Parent Stephanie Kratofil said her daughter described the seventh-grade exams as some of the hardest tests she's ever taken. The straight-A student told her mom the social studies exam included material never taught in class. "There's got to be something wrong with that test," Kratofil said. "This is showing some horrible numbers for the state. It just doesn't make any sense."

To view the full article, click here.