To Cindy Marten: how about we try to make better use of both effective and (currently) ineffective teachers?

Lincoln High School

Dear Cindy Marten,

You say, “I’m tired of the polarized rhetoric that pits teachers against administration. I’m tired of the conversation about good teachers and bad teachers. None of this is helping.”

I agree in part. I can understand why you don't want to talk about good teachers and bad teachers. It doesn't seem to get us anywhere, does it?

But what kind of operation ignores the functioning of its chief operators? That's nuts.

Cindy, how about we figure out which teachers are effective, and which are ineffective in their jobs as currently configured? And how about we make better use of both types of teachers?

Here's my plan.

Evaluate teachers--but don't fire them. Does that sound crazy? Here's why its not.

If you had a fair, effective method for evaluating teachers, teachers wouldn't feel so threatened by strong administrators--and weak administrators wouldn't feel so threatened by teachers. You could take a whole lot of the politics out of the teacher-administrator relationship.

Also, you could get a lot more value for your money from all your teachers. In the current system, the weakest teachers often rely on oppositional politics to protect themselves while the best teachers hunker down in their classrooms.

In the current situation, neither the masterful nor the mediocre are being used effectively to help kids.

Yours truly,

Maura Larkins

Cindy Marten: We’re Having the Wrong Conversation About Lincoln High
By: Mario Koran
Voice of San Diego
October 25, 2013

When Cindy Marten looks at the dust-up at Lincoln High, she said she doesn’t just see anger over a principal’s leadership style or teachers’ effectiveness.

The tensions at Lincoln — which have escalated following years of failing test scores and a mass student exodus — are bigger and deeper than both of those pressure points.

“What’s happening at Lincoln is at the heart of the struggle in America,” she said. “When we get Lincoln right, we get America right.”

At the core of the controversy, she said, is a question about how to make a high school work in a large urban district, one that struggles with the same issues facing cities across the nation: generational poverty, racial disparities and budget shortfalls.

In a lengthy interview with Voice of San Diego, Marten said she doesn’t care for the word “turnaround,” or the idea that a single person can save a district or school.

Like it or not, that’s exactly what people are hoping she can do with a school like Lincoln.

Marten evangelically believes in the need for a “shared-conversation,” in which the community airs its concerns, defines its goals and together creates a plan.

Yes, Marten said, a conversation is happening at Lincoln, but not the right kind.

“I’m tired of the polarized rhetoric that pits teachers against administration,” she said. “I’m tired of the conversation about good teachers and bad teachers. None of this is helping.” The Lincoln Monologues

When Lincoln started the 2007 academic year with a new, $129 million campus, it opened with four separate academies: a center for social justice, arts, science and engineering and public safety.

Test scores — to the degree to which they can — tell the story of a school that has sputtered academically since it opened. In 2012, Lincoln ranked last in the district in its Academic Performance Index, a number derived from statewide assessment scores.

Stacked up against high schools statewide, Lincoln ranks well below average.

Ray Adair, a former math teacher who organized and administered the California Standards Test (CST) during his tenure at Lincoln, attributes the low test scores to the fact the school had a “shotgun start,” meaning that when it opened, it took in kids from over 70 schools to fill all four grades at once.

Most new charter schools, he said, begin with a 9th grade class and grow their student bodies year by year.

Adair said he wasn’t thrilled by a recent Voice of San Diego story that cited a 300 percent proficiency gain in Lincoln’s CST math scores over the past year.

Math proficiency scores, he said, are still very low — around 15 percent. “When I was there, we had a 300 percent increase, too. But we didn’t go around bragging about it,” he said.

Almost 30 percent of Lincoln’s student body has left since 2009, and so has much of its staff. Adair said a large number of teachers left after a controversial principal, Esther Omogbehin, took over in early 2012.

Under Omogbehin, the school restructured its campus, moving from four academic centers into a single-functioning unit. And district-wide curriculum changes have further stoked the fire.

This year, Lincoln began shifting to an A-G curriculum, meaning students will be required to pass classes that are aligned with University of California admission standards.

To that end, classes at Lincoln that didn’t jive with the A-G curriculum have been cut, and many of their teachers have been excessed or have relocated.

Teachers have accused Omogbehin of bullying staff who grieved her leadership, and transferring teachers based on her personal preferences.

The principal declined to speak with Voice of San Diego, but she told 10 News in 2012 that the animosity is rooted in racial tensions that predate her arrival.

Dan Camacho, a former teacher at Lincoln, has been one of many loud voices at school board meetings for the past several weeks.

Camacho has repeatedly asked the board to conduct a “social audit” that would determine whether school administration is following the district’s ethics code.

Dozens of Lincoln students and staff have appeared at school board meetings, dressed in red shirts, demanding accountability and transparency from the administration. What, exactly, meeting those demands would look like remains unclear, but away from the public podium, teachers agree on this: Omogbehin needs to leave.

This isn’t the first turbulence Omogbehin has experienced at Lincoln. In 2012, shortly after she became principal, a student accused the principal of making physical threats against her. A school district investigation found no wrongdoing, but Omogbehin told 10 News that the damage was done.

Sally Smith, who has served on the school governance board at Lincoln, has opposed teachers and defended Omogbehin in school board meetings and after-school protests.

To Smith, the issue comes down to “bad teachers who don’t want to be held accountable.”

Marten’s Take

As superintendent, it’s Marten’s job to moderate the conversation that can transform the vitriolic bickering taking place at Lincoln into a constructive dialogue.

Part of that, she said, means not taking a side.

“I don’t think either side is right or wrong. Each point of view points to a bigger debate about what people are seeking in school,” Marten said.

Marten said there are opportunities to learn from both sides.

“You talk to teachers, you hear, ‘We need to be nurturing, we love our school and our kids, we need to build relationships, why don’t you let us do it?’ You talk to the other side, they want educated children and they want accountability,” she said. “What we’re talking about here is how to best educate our children in the community, and I believe we can achieve what both sides want. In the end, they all care about students.”

So what’s Marten going to do about the situation at Lincoln?

“I’m already doing it,” she said.

Mediations are under way, Marten said, and there’s been progress. She’s been holding town hall meetings, listening, bringing in district relations personnel to work with the staff at Lincoln.

“At the end of the day, we need to figure this out,” she said. “The students are counting on us to get this right.”

Teachers in high-scoring countries work hard to make learning interesting for kids

Teachers like to blame others, but the fact is that it's the teacher's job to make learning interesting to kids.

What High-Scoring Countries Do Right in Math, Reading, and Science
By Catherine Gewertz
Education Week
September 30, 2013

A new study analyzes the results of international math, reading, and science tests and provides a profile of the practices that schools, parents, and teachers in the highest-scoring countries have in common.

The TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center released the study today. It was made possible by the fact that the TIMSS, which assesses math and science achievement, and the PIRLS, which gauges reading skill, were given at the same time in 2011. That enabled the test administrators at Boston College to synthesize information from the two in order to make observations about what they called "the culture of educational excellence."

They used data from 34 participating countries to offer some analysis at the 4th grade level. They focused on about half of those countries, where took 90 percent of 4th graders scored at a basic level of proficiency in all three subjects, and in particular, on five nations that educated 35 percent of their 4th graders to a high level of achievement in all three: Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Finland, Hong Kong and Russia.

Ina V.S. Mullis and Michael O. Martin, the executive directors of the TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, said in a statement that while each country had its own unique strengths and approaches to education, "the analyses presented in this report suggest that, across countries, there are a number of school and home factors that can positively affect student achievement in reading, mathematics, and science at the fourth grade."

One key finding concerned the pivotal role of good reading skills. Not only do strong skills drive high achievement in literacy, but they facilitate high achievement in math and science, too, where students often must read complex material to solve problems.

Far more details are in the full report, which is on the study center's website, but here are some highlights.

School conditions that correlate with higher student achievement in reading, math, and science:

• All parties—principals, teachers, parents and students—are "equally invested" in working together to achieve success;

• Teachers understand curricular goals;

• Teachers are successful implementing curriculum;

• Teachers expect student achievement;

• Parents support student achievement;

• Students want to do well in school; and

• The school provides a safe and orderly environment by maintaining discipline and reducing frequency of bullying.

What teachers do that correlates with higher student achievement in reading, math, and science:

• Making sure students know what they're expected to do;

• Making sure students like what they're reading;

• Trying to be easily understood;

• Presenting content in interesting ways; and

• Giving students interesting things to do and read.

What parents do that correlates with higher student achievement:

• Creating a home environment supportive of educational attainment, with a lot of books available; and

• Reading books, telling stories, singing songs, playing with alphabet toys, reading signs and labels aloud, and playing word games.

The $4 Million Teacher

The $4 Million Teacher
South Korea's students rank among the best in the world, and its top teachers can make a fortune. Can the U.S. learn from this academic superpower?
AMANDA RIPLEY
The Wall Street Journal
Aug. 3, 2013


Kim Ki-hoon [above] earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher—a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country's private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills—and he is in high demand.

Kim Ki-Hoon, who teaches in a private after-school academy, earns most of his money from students who watch his lectures online. 'The harder I work, the more I make,' he says. 'I like that.'

Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students' online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).

I traveled to South Korea to see what a free market for teaching talent looks like—one stop in a global tour to discover what the U.S. can learn from the world's other education superpowers. Thanks in part to such tutoring services, South Korea has dramatically improved its education system over the past several decades and now routinely outperforms the U.S. Sixty years ago, most South Koreans were illiterate; today, South Korean 15-year-olds rank No. 2 in the world in reading, behind Shanghai. The country now has a 93% high-school graduation rate, compared with 77% in the U.S.

Tutoring services are growing all over the globe, from Ireland to Hong Kong and even in suburban strip malls in California and New Jersey. Sometimes called shadow education systems, they mirror the mainstream system, offering after-hours classes in every subject—for a fee. But nowhere have they achieved the market penetration and sophistication of hagwons in South Korea, where private tutors now outnumber schoolteachers.

Viewed up close, this shadow system is both exciting and troubling. It promotes striving and innovation among students and teachers alike, and it has helped South Korea become an academic superpower. But it also creates a bidding war for education, delivering the best services to the richest families, to say nothing of its psychological toll on students. Under this system, students essentially go to school twice—once during the day and then again at night at the tutoring academies. It is a relentless grind.

The bulk of Mr. Kim's earnings come from the 150,000 kids who watch his lectures online each year. (Most are high-school students looking to boost their scores on South Korea's version of the SAT.) He is a brand name, with all the overhead that such prominence in the market entails. He employs 30 people to help him manage his teaching empire and runs a publishing company to produce his books.

To call this mere tutoring is to understate its scale and sophistication. Megastudy, the online hagwon that Mr. Kim works for, is listed on the South Korean stock exchange. (A Megastudy official confirmed Mr. Kim's annual earnings.) Nearly three of every four South Korean kids participate in the private market. In 2012, their parents spent more than $17 billion on these services. That is more than the $15 billion spent by Americans on videogames that year, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. The South Korean education market is so profitable that it attracts investments from firms like Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group and A.I.G.

It was thrilling to meet Mr. Kim—a teacher who earns the kind of money that professional athletes make in the U.S. An American with his ambition and abilities might have to become a banker or a lawyer, but in South Korea, he had become a teacher, and he was rich anyway.

The idea is seductive: Teaching well is hard, so why not make it lucrative? Even if American schools will never make teachers millionaires, there are lessons to be learned from this booming educational bazaar, lessons about how to motivate teachers, how to captivate parents and students and how to adapt to a changing world.

South Korean students prepare to take the standardized exam for college admissions on Nov. 10, 2011. The country has a 93% high-school graduation rate.

To find rock-star teachers like Mr. Kim, hagwon directors scour the Internet, reading parents' reviews and watching teachers' lectures. Competing hagwons routinely try to poach one another's celebrity tutors. "The really good teachers are hard to retain—and hard to manage. You need to protect their egos," says Lee Chae-yun, who owns a chain of five hagwons in Seoul called Myungin Academy.

The most radical difference between traditional schools and hagwons is that students sign up for specific teachers, so the most respected teachers get the most students. Mr. Kim has about 120 live, in-person students per lecture, but a typical teacher's hagwon classes are much smaller. The Korean private market has reduced education to the one in-school variable that matters most: the teacher.

It is about as close to a pure meritocracy as it can be, and just as ruthless. In hagwons, teachers are free agents. They don't need to be certified. They don't have benefits or even a guaranteed base salary; their pay is based on their performance, and most of them work long hours and earn less than public school teachers.

Performance evaluations are typically based on how many students sign up for their classes, their students' test-score growth and satisfaction surveys given to students and parents. "How passionate is the teacher?" asks one hagwon's student survey—the results of which determine 60% of the instructor's evaluation. "How well-prepared is the teacher?" (In 2010, researchers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found classroom-level surveys like this to be surprisingly reliable and predictive of effective teaching in the U.S., yet the vast majority of our schools still don't use them.)

"Students are the customers," Ms. Lee says. To recruit students, hagwons advertise their results aggressively. They post their graduates' test scores and university acceptance figures online and outside their entrances on giant posters. It was startling to see such openness; in the U.S., despite our fetish for standardized testing, the results remain confusing and hard to interpret for parents. Once students enroll, the hagwon embeds itself in families' lives. Parents get text messages when their children arrive at the academies each afternoon; then they get another message relaying students' progress. Two to three times a month, teachers call home with feedback. Every few months, the head of the hagwon telephones, too. In South Korea, if parents aren't engaged, that is considered a failure of the educators, not the family.

If tutors get low survey marks or attract too few students, they generally get placed on probation. Each year, Ms. Lee fires about 10% of her instructors. (By comparison, U.S. schools dismiss about 2% of public school teachers annually for poor performance.)

All of this pressure creates real incentives for teachers, at least according to the kids. In a 2010 survey of 6,600 students at 116 high schools conducted by the Korean Educational Development Institute, Korean teenagers gave their hagwon teachers higher scores across the board than their regular schoolteachers: Hagwon teachers were better prepared, more devoted to teaching and more respectful of students' opinions, the teenagers said. Interestingly, the hagwon teachers rated best of all when it came to treating all students fairly, regardless of the students' academic performance.

Private tutors are also more likely to experiment with new technology and nontraditional forms of teaching. In a 2009 book on the subject, University of Hong Kong professor Mark Bray urged officials to pay attention to the strengths of the shadow markets, in addition to the perils. "Policy makers and planners should…ask why parents are willing to invest considerable sums of money to supplement the schooling received from the mainstream," he writes. "At least in some cultures, the private tutors are more adventurous and client-oriented."

But are students actually learning more in hagwons? That is a surprisingly hard question to answer. World-wide, the research is mixed, suggesting that the quality of after-school lessons matters more than the quantity. And price is at least loosely related to quality, which is precisely the problem. The most affluent kids can afford one-on-one tutoring with the most popular instructors, while others attend inferior hagwons with huge class sizes and less reliable instruction—or after-hours sessions offered free by their public schools. Eight out of 10 South Korean parents say they feel financial pressure from hagwon tuition costs. Still, most keep paying the fees, convinced that the more they pay, the more their children will learn.

For decades, the South Korean government has been trying to tame the country's private-education market. Politicians have imposed curfews and all manner of regulations on hagwons, even going so far as to ban them altogether during the 1980s, when the country was under military rule. Each time the hagwons have come back stronger.

"The only solution is to improve public education," says Mr. Kim, the millionaire teacher, echoing what the country's education minister and dozens of other Korean educators told me. If parents trusted the system, the theory goes, they wouldn't resort to paying high fees for extra tutoring.

To create such trust, Mr. Kim suggests paying public-school teachers significantly more money according to their performance—as hagwons do. Then the profession could attract the most skilled, accomplished candidates, and parents would know that the best teachers were the ones in their children's schools—not in the strip mall down the street.

Schools can also build trust by aggressively communicating with parents and students, the way businesses already do to great effect in the U.S. They could routinely survey students about their teachers—in ways designed to help teachers improve and not simply to demoralize them.

before a teacher even enters the classroom.

No country has all the answers. But in an information-driven global economy, a few truths are becoming universal: Children need to know how to think critically in math, reading and science; they must be driven; and they must learn how to adapt, since they will be doing it all their lives. These demands require that schools change, too—or the free market may do it for them.

—Ms. Ripley is an Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, "The Smartest Kids in the World—and How They Got That Way," to be published Aug. 13 by Simon & Schuster.

Status inequality is unacceptable for high school teachers

The Inequality Map
By DAVID BROOKS
New York Times
November 10, 2011

Foreign tourists are coming up to me on the streets and asking, “David, you have so many different kinds of inequality in your country. How can I tell which are socially acceptable and which are not?”

This is an excellent question. I will provide you with a guide to the American inequality map to help you avoid embarrassment.

Academic inequality is socially acceptable. It is perfectly fine to demonstrate that you are in the academic top 1 percent by wearing a Princeton, Harvard or Stanford sweatshirt.

Ancestor inequality is not socially acceptable. It is not permissible to go around bragging that your family came over on the Mayflower and that you are descended from generations of Throgmorton-Winthrops who bequeathed a legacy of good breeding and fine manners.

Fitness inequality is acceptable. It is perfectly fine to wear tight workout sweats to show the world that pilates have given you buns of steel. These sorts of displays are welcomed as evidence of your commendable self-discipline and reproductive merit.

Moral fitness inequality is unacceptable. It is out of bounds to boast of your superior chastity, integrity, honor or honesty. Instead, one must respect the fact that we are all morally equal, though our behavior and ethical tastes may differ...

Status inequality is acceptable for college teachers. Universities exist within a finely gradated status structure, with certain schools like Brown clearly more elite than other schools. University departments are carefully ranked and compete for superiority.

Status inequality is unacceptable for high school teachers. Teachers at this level strongly resist being ranked. It would be loathsome to have one’s department competing with other departments in nearby schools...

Duncan: Teacher Salaries Should Be $60,000 to $150,000

I agree with Arne Duncan: better teachers require better pay.

Duncan: Teacher Salaries Should Be $60,000 to $150,000
By Michele McNeil
July 29, 2011
Education Week

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for a radical upending of the nation's teaching pipeline—higher salaries, improved performance-based teacher accountability, and a higher bar for prospective students to enter schools of education.

In remarks today to a conference of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, he called for teachers to start out making $60,000 a year, topping out at around $150,000. His speech comes as thousands of teachers from across the country descend on the nation's capital to protest many of the Obama administration's policies, from the increasing reliance on standardized tests to using test scores to help evaluate teachers.

"We must think radically differently," he said, according to prepared remarks. "We must ask and answer hard questions on topics that have been off limits in the past like staffing practices and school organization, benefits packages and job security—because the answers may give us more realistic ways to afford these new professional conditions."

Top salaries of $150,000 a year won't come cheap, and Duncan acknowledged as much.

"And it will cost money—and—given the current political climate with the nation wrestling with debt and deficits—I am sure some people will immediately say that we can't afford it without even looking at how to redirect the money we are already spending—and mis-spending.

He called on colleges of education to raise the bar for prospective students, to lure the brightest in. "Top undergraduates will flock to a profession that demands high standards and credentials," he said...

Keeping Great Teachers in the Classroom

See all posts re evaluating teachers.

September 22, 2010
Keeping Great Teachers in the Classroom
By Steve Owens
TeacherMagazine.org.

Teacher Leaders Network According to the United States Education Department, the country will need 1.6 million new teachers in the next five years. Yet a recent report by the nonprofit National Commission on Teaching and America's Future reports that “approximately a third of America’s new teachers leave teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost half leave during the first five years. In many cases, keeping our schools supplied with qualified teachers is comparable to trying to fill a bucket with a huge hole in the bottom.”

With two-year alternative programs like Teach for America only able to fill part of the gap, the role of teacher retention in solving our massive recruitment task becomes a key question.

A new book by Katy Farber, Why Great Teachers Quit: And How We Might Stop the Exodus (Corwin), speaks powerfully to causes and cures for teacher attrition. It’s a book that is very much of the moment in contributing to the national education policy conversation. Farber wonders: What if we shrink the recruitment problem by stopping the hemorrhage?

In a recent speech in Arkansas, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said much the same thing:

"The Asia Society recently held an international symposium on teacher quality and they found that high-performing countries put much more energy into recruiting, preparing, and supporting good teachers—rather than on the back end by reducing attrition or firing weak teachers."...

[San Diego Education Report has long advocated the recruitment and retention of good teachers as opposed to firing poor teachers.

It's the teachers, stupid! Pay $125,000 a year, and the whole picture will change

"Excellent teachers — and not revolutionary technology, talented principals or small class size — are the critical ingredient for success..."
(see full story below)

I agree with this concept. I believe that children taught by really good teachers will outstrip others within a few years.


Next Test: Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers
The New York Times
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
June 4, 2009

So what kind of teachers could a school get if it paid them $125,000 a year?

An accomplished violist who infuses her music lessons with the neuroscience of why one needs to practice, and creatively worded instructions like, “Pass the melody gently, as if it were a bowl of Jell-O!”

A self-described “explorer” from Arizona who spent three decades honing her craft at public, private, urban and rural schools...

They are members of an eight-teacher dream team, lured to an innovative charter school that will open in Washington Heights in September with salaries that would make most teachers drop their chalk and swoon; $125,000 is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns...

The school, called the Equity Project, is premised on the theory that excellent teachers — and not revolutionary technology, talented principals or small class size — are the critical ingredient for success...

The school’s founder, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, 32, a Yale graduate who founded a test prep company, has been grappling with just these issues...

The Equity Project will open with 120 fifth graders chosen this spring in a lottery that gave preference to children from the neighborhood and to low academic performers; most students are from low-income Hispanic families. It will grow to 480 children in Grades 5 to 8, with 28 teachers.

The school received 600 applications. Mr. Vanderhoek interviewed 100 in person.

Along the way, Mr. Vanderhoek, who taught at a middle school in Washington Heights before founding Manhattan GMAT, learned a few lessons.

One was that a golden résumé and a well-run classroom are two different things. “There are people who it’s like, wow, they look great on paper, but the kids don’t respect them,” Mr. Vanderhoek said.

The eight winning candidates, he said, have some common traits, like a high “engagement factor,” as measured by the portion of a given time frame during which students seem so focused that they almost forget they are in class. They were expert at redirecting potential troublemakers, a crucial skill for middle school teachers. And they possessed a contagious enthusiasm...

Teachers said the rigorous selection process was more gratifying than grueling.

“It’s so refreshing that somebody comes to a teacher and says, ‘Show me what you know,’ ” said Oscar Quintero, who goes by Pepe and will teach special education. “This is the first time in 30 years of teaching that anybody has been really interested in what I do.”

[Maura Larkins' comment: In all my years at CVESD, no one ever showed any interest in what I knew. Year after year I learned more and more, but both principals and teachers were interested in politics, not knowledge.]

The school will use only public money for everything but its building...

...There will be no deans, substitute teachers (except for extended leaves)... Teachers will work longer hours and more days, and have 30 pupils, about 6 more than the typical New York City fifth-grade class.

The principal, Mr. Vanderhoek, will earn just $90,000. Teachers will not have the same retirement benefits as members of the city’s teachers’ union. And they can be fired at will...

Obama takes on teachers' unions regarding merit pay

Obama eyes sweeping overhaul of education
Jonathan Martin
Mar 10, 2009

...President Barack Obama Tuesday for the first time confronted a powerful constituency in his own party: teachers’ unions.

Obama proposed spending additional money on effective teachers in up to 150 additional school districts, fulfilling a campaign promise that once earned him boos from members of the National Education Association.

“Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools,” he said in a wide-ranging education speech before a meeting of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington.

Obama’s embrace of merit pay won’t go over well among a group that often provides key funding and foot soldiers for Democratic campaigns.

Teachers’ unions say merit pay causes teachers to compete against each other, rather than collaborate, and is unfair to those who work in disadvantaged areas where it can be harder to boost student performance.

But polls show the policy is overwhelmingly supported by the public...

In addition to rewarding good teachers, Obama also said he’ll seek to push out those who aren’t getting results, another proposal that may rankle a profession that prizes tenure.

“Let me be clear: if a teacher is given a chance, or two chances, or three chances, and still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching,” he told the business group. “I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences. The stakes are too high. We can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children’s teachers and to the schools where they teach.”

The White House didn’t specify how the president would like to see poor-performing teachers removed from the classroom.

Obama did lavish praise on the profession – going off script at one point to note that his sister is a teacher...

Instead, Obama confronted the powerful bloc of his own party – one in ten delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 belonged to teachers unions – with unambiguous language.

He said the country had let its “teacher quality fall short” and said reforms were needed as much as the additional funding the unions crave.

“It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones,” Obama declared.

It wasn’t just teachers, though, that came in for some tough talk. He seemed to also address students and parents in calling for consideration of expanding the school-year into the summer and adopting a calendar that many other industrialized nations already have.

“We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day,” Obama said...

Notably, Obama said little about No Child Left Behind, the federal education standards set by President George W. Bush that are despised by teachers’ unions...

On Tuesday, he only mentioned it only to say that later this year he would see that it “live[s] up to its name by ensuring not only that teachers and principals get the funding they need, but that the money is tied to results.

Teachers with masters degrees are no better, and possibly worse, than other teachers

EdWeek on Charter School Hiring
Voice of San Diego
EMILY ALPERT
March 2, 2009

If you were intrigued by my recent article on the teacher hiring process at High Tech High, take a look at this article from Education Week about how charter school staffing differs from staffing in traditional public schools.

The article cites a study that shows that charter school teachers are less likely to be certified and less likely to have master's degrees than their counterparts in traditional public schools. Charter school teachers, however, were more likely to have undergraduate degrees from top colleges.

But research is raising new questions, the story states, about whether those qualifications matter:

What that research has shown so far is that some seemingly important teacher qualifications, such as having a master's degree, can actually have little, or even a slightly negative, impact on student achievement.





Charters Seen as Lab for Report's Ideas on Teachers
Differences in staffing practices at charter and traditional public schools attract scholars’ interest.
Education Week
February 23, 2009
By Debra Viadero

Devoting an entire section to the issue of teacher quality, the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk laid out seven recommendations for staffing practices aimed at ensuring that “superior teachers can be rewarded, average ones encouraged, and poor ones either improved or terminated.”

Charter schools—unfettered by some of the bureaucratic constraints of traditional public schools—are theoretically in a good position to use just the sorts of tactics the report’s authors thought were needed for hiring and maintaining a high-quality teaching staff. Charter administrators are often freer to fire subpar teachers, for instance, or offer higher pay to job candidates with greater subject-matter expertise.

Yet whether that freedom has translated to a better-quality teaching force for charter schools remains an open, and...

Will the California Teachers Association (CTA) permit real evaluations of teachers? My guess is NO.

I found this article in Voice of San Diego. Reporter Alpert tracked down some great links and included them in the piece:

How Teachers Are Like Quarterbacks
EMILY ALPERT
January 22, 2009

I'm so glad I finally have an excuse to blog about this fascinating piece by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker about teacher hiring and quality. The story I wrote yesterday about teacher evaluation on San Diego Unified touches on some of the larger points about the teaching workforce and how quality teachers are identified.

...He starts off by illustrating how difficult it is for professional football scouts to determine which college quarterbacks will make good pros...

"This is the quarterback problem. There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they'll do once they're hired. So how do we know whom to choose in cases like that? In recent years, a number of fields have begun to wrestle with this problem, but none with such profound social consequences as the profession of teaching."

And if you really want to go deeper, here is more analysis by two brothers, one an education expert, the other a professional football coach, on Eduwonk -- a blog written by Andrew Rotherham of Education Sector. (His co-director Thomas Toch had some interesting comments in my story and an analysis of his own.)






Here is San Diego Education Report's
SUGGESTED TEACHER EVALUATION PLAN:

Teachers would be evaluated through observations by experienced teachers from other school districts (to limit the role of politics). The evaluators wouldn't even know beforehand whom they're going to evaluate.

New teachers would accompany and assist the evaluators because observing and assessing is a great way to learn.

There would be a standard list of traits to look for, and every teacher would be given a score which would be based on:
I. the observations described above;
II. students' test scores;
III. standardized tests taken by the teachers themselves;
IV. interview of teacher.

The tests given to teachers would be used to determine (a) which teachers need training; and (b) which teachers can do the training.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE FINAL SCORES?

1. Average teachers would stay in the standard teaching job, but they would have the possibility of improving their scores and rising to master teacher level.

2. Every classroom would have one standard teacher, while the more effective master teachers would be given responsibility for several classrooms, teaching part time in each of these classrooms, and taking responsibility for guiding and educating the standard teachers.

3. The more effective teachers should be paid two to three times what the regular teachers are paid in order to attract really smart people--people who could have been doctors or physicists.

Pay the good teachers double or triple what they're getting now

Is Topix a cool website? I think so. Here's my December 2007 post:

"The California Teachers Association is hurting our students, teachers and schools. Its failed one-size-fits-all approach to education ignores the huge differences between teachers. Parents and teachers know all teachers do not learn in the same way or at the same pace. Some of them are far, far behind in intelligence, education, and understanding of how kids learn. They should not have full responsibility for any classroom. Pay the good teachers double or triple what they're getting now, and put them in charge of several classrooms. Each master teacher should be deeply involved in several classrooms, guiding several beginning or slow-to-learn teachers."