What Teacher Shortage?

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 13, 2001

Education issues aren't foremost in our minds today, but I will note that the K-12 concern that reached my ears most frequently in recent weeks is the vaunted "teacher shortage" that our schools are said to face. As summer vacation ended, the press was full of accounts of extraordinary measures that public-school systems were taking to ensure that their classrooms would have enough adults ready to receive the children. Teachers were imported from India and Austria. "Emergency" certificates were given to all sorts of people who had never taught before. Signing bonuses were paid to individual teachers-and sometimes finders' fees handed to the agencies that located them. Substitute teachers were readied for full-time classroom duty. And so forth.

Surely, the journalists said, this sort of thing will only worsen in coming years-and would I please confirm that? After all, doesn't America need to hire two million-or was it three million-new teachers in the next decade? I believe I was being invited to say that the only possible way to forestall this crisis would be to dump zillions of dollars into salaries, crash training programs and suchlike.

Talk about old-paradigm thinking! The most striking thing about the U.S. teacher "shortage" is the extent to which it has mostly been induced by rules, customs and practices that could be changed with a flick of the policymakers' wrists. But instead of changing the rules, we proclaim a crisis. One senses that some groups

» Continued

What Teacher Shortage?

From Ground Zero Plus One Mile

Diane Ravitch / September 13, 2001

On September 11 at 8:45 a.m., I was having a cup of coffee and reading the morning paper when I heard a tremendous boom behind me. I live in Brooklyn, about three city blocks from New York Harbor, and directly across the Harbor from my neighborhood is New York City's financial district.

At first I thought nothing of it (things happen in a city this big without your ever knowing where or what they were). Then a few minutes later, a friend called from work to tell me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV for a minute, leashed one of my dogs, and ran to the waterfront. I got there just in time to see the second plane hit the second tower. Flames and smoke were pouring from both towers, against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. About six other people--all strangers--stood watching with me, and everyone was in shock, some crying. Someone said, "This is terrorism," and one woman began sobbing. The wind was blowing in our direction, and the sky was filled with little bits of paper, like confetti in a ticker-tape parade; it was the paper from people's desks at the World Trade Center.

It was a terrible and frightening sight, and I could not stand to watch the flames, knowing that people were dying as I stood watching. I returned to my home and watched on

» Continued

From Ground Zero Plus One Mile

Spotlight on Cincinnati, a school district in search of a solution

September 13, 2001

Union and school district negotiators have reached a tentative agreement on changes in Cincinnati's teacher pay-for-performance plan, this in response to complaints from teachers about the evaluation process. Under this agreement, teachers will receive more training on how the evaluation system works, they'll be evaluated on more standards at a time, and more teachers with many years of experience will be able to opt out of having pay tied to their performance evaluations. It's unclear how significant these changes are, though allowing veteran teachers to opt out of the system is surely not a good sign. While Cincinnati is mostly known for its struggling performance-pay plan, the district is also embarking on a major overhaul of its neighborhood high schools this year, converting them into smaller, more specialized schools with the help of a $1.5 million grant from the federal government and a sizable grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a big believer in small schools). The high school reform effort is described in a long article by Jennifer Mrozowski in The Cincinnati Enquirer. In a separate article, she looks at the impact of a scathing report on the schools that was released by Cincinnati's business community a decade ago. Over the years, the district has embraced many of the suggestions offered by the CEOs who drafted the report, including slashing expenditures for district administration from 13 percent of the budget to 5 percent, hiring a business executive

» Continued

Spotlight on Cincinnati, a school district in search of a solution

Illinois teachers fail exams

September 13, 2001

An examination of pass-fail records from tests of basic skills and subject knowledge taken by Illinois teachers over the last thirteen years revealed that 5,243 current teachers had failed at least one exam, even though these tests are pitched at an extremely low level. Most teachers eventually pass all tests, but 868 people now teaching in Illinois schools have yet to pass the state's basic skills test. Children in high-poverty schools are roughly five times more likely to be taught by teachers who stumbled in efforts to pass these tests. After this multi-part series on teacher tests was published by the Chicago Sun-Times last week, Gov. George Ryan asked the state board of education to investigate the issues raised by the analysis.

"5,243 Illinois teachers failed key exams," by Rosalind Rossi, Becky Beaupre and Kate N. Grossman, Chicago Sun Times, September 6, 2001, http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-main06.html

Also in this series were: "Kids take the test, say it's too easy" (Sept. 6); "Poorest kids often wind up with the weakest teachers" (Sept. 7); "Why are teacher tests secret? politicians ask" (Sept. 7); "Failing teachers spur hearings" (Sept. 9); "Other states do it better" (Sept. 9)

» Continued

Illinois teachers fail exams

Lowering the bar for high school exit in New Jersey

September 13, 2001

In New Jersey, students who flunk the state's exit exam can still receive a high school diploma if they earn passing marks on a series of performance assessment tasks drawn up by the state. Last year, 6100 students-nearly 9 percent of graduates-got their diplomas this way. Twenty-two schools in poor urban districts awarded at least 30 percent of their diplomas through the performance assessment process; five schools issued more than half of their diplomas this way. School officials defend the option as important for students who test poorly or need extra help, but Paul Reville of the Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform notes "You could argue that this is going back to essentially a two-tiered, tracked system. That was precisely what the standards movement was trying to move away from." It is impossible to determine whether the performance assessment is equivalent to the state tests because New Jersey officials refuse to release any sample performance tasks for security reasons. For details, see "Special Program Gives Kids Another Chance to Pass," by Deborah Yaffe, Gannett State Bureau/INjersey.com, September 2, 2001, http://www.injersey.com/news/story2000/0,20905,440661,00.html

» Continued

Lowering the bar for high school exit in New Jersey

New commission on school choice

September 13, 2001

The Brookings Institution has been awarded a $1 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a "National Working Commission on Choice in K-12 Education." According to The Washington Post, the commission will be managed by Paul Hill and Tom Loveless, and will tackle issues surrounding school choice such as how it affects school quality and student learning and whether it affects poor and minority access to strong public schools. (Noted in "The Ideas Industry," by Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, September 11, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/fedpage/columns/ideasindustry/A7050-2001Sep10.html)

» Continued

New commission on school choice

Taking on the achievement gap in high school

September 13, 2001

High-achieving, high-poverty schools are no longer a novelty for elementary or middle school-aged kids, but helping disadvantaged youngsters succeed in high school has been more challenging. An article in Teacher Magazine describes the efforts of an organized group of parents in California to prevent their kids from becoming high school dropout statistics. Parents of Children of African Descent (PCAD) was formed by a group of Berkeley High School parents after they learned that half of the school's African American 9th graders were flunking core academic classes. Invited by the school's principal to develop an intervention plan, the parents created an alternative learning community within the high school where failing 9th graders would be taught in small classes by hand-picked teachers. Participating freshmen would be supported by student mentors and adult learning partners, and by their parents, who would agree to respond promptly to teachers' calls home. After the first year, there were signs that many students participating in the program had turned themselves around, but the program itself was discontinued for reasons that are easy to understand but hard to stomach. For more, see "Damage Control," by Meredith Maran, Teacher Magazine, August 2001, http://www.teachermagazine.org/tm/tmstory.cfm?slug=01berkeley.h13

» Continued

Taking on the achievement gap in high school

The project method of instruction (circa 1921)

September 13, 2001

If your neighborhood school announces that it is introducing a new kind of instruction centered around student projects, you'll want to visit Teachers College Record's website, TCRecord.org, which this week reprises a 1921 symposium on the project method called "Dangers and Difficulties of the Project Method and How to Overcome Them." We recommend "Projects and Purposes in Teaching and Learning" by William C. Bagley, which discusses three dangers of relying on the project method: a reduction in our ability to retain what is learned, an exclusive emphasis on the instrumental value of knowledge, and a de-emphasis of non-purposive learning. Surf to http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=3983

» Continued

The project method of instruction (circa 1921)

Cleveland Scholarship Program Evaluation 1998-2000

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 13, 2001

Indiana Center for Evaluation
September 2001

As is well known, Cleveland is one of two cities in the U.S. with publicly funded scholarships (aka vouchers) available to low-income children whose families would like to send them to private schools. About 4000 youngsters now participate. From the program's beginning (1996-97), one of the organizations evaluating it (in this case at the behest of the state of Ohio) has been the Indiana Center for Evaluation, led by Kim Metcalf. They have now published a second major study of the Cleveland program, this one covering three school years (ending in 2000) and focusing on younger children who entered (and didn't enter) the program as kindergartners or first graders. The study looked at their achievement (and various other factors) at the beginning of first grade, the end of first grade and the end of second grade. The study is complex because it seeks to compare four groups of youngsters and to draw conclusions about the scholarship program's impact on them over two or three years. Aficionados of voucher research will want to see for themselves. The main conclusions are ambiguous. It turns out that the student populations were very similar (though the scholarship users were somewhat less apt to be minorities), that their teachers were very similar (on the few dimensions that were examined), and that their academic achievement shows no clear pattern. All groups improved as they went through school. Scholarship youngsters who began

» Continued

Cleveland Scholarship Program Evaluation 1998-2000

Longitudinal Evaluation of School Change and Performance in Title I Schools: Final Report

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 13, 2001

U.S. Department of Education
2001

As we near the final stage of the long-pending E.S.E.A. reauthorization process in Congress, we find ourselves presented with a long-awaited study of today's Title I schools, conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's Planning and Evaluation Service (PES) by the firms Westat and Policy Studies Associates. This is not so much an evaluation of the Title I program itself (which some people insist isn't really a "program" so much as a "funding stream") as it is a study of 71 high-poverty schools and a group of their students who moved from third to fifth grade during the course of this longitudinal project. The data were gathered between 1996 and 1999 as policy changes dictated in the 1994 E.S.E.A. amendments were beginning to kick in. The report consists mostly of information about which school policies and instructional practices seem to be related to greater and lesser pupil achievement, and you may well want to plunge into this sea yourself. (The executive summary-Volume I-is 16 pages; the technical report-Volume II-runs to 120 pages.) Two points struck me. First, not much gap-closing occurred between third and fifth grade for Title I students attending these schools. They were about as far behind national (and urban) norms in reading and math at the end of the multi-year study as at the beginning. In other words, nothing that was tried really worked very well. Second, the variables that the researchers opted

» Continued

Longitudinal Evaluation of School Change and Performance in Title I Schools: Final Report

Schools Achieving Success

Chester E. Finn, Jr. / September 13, 2001

Department for Education and Skills, UK
2001

Across the Atlantic, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has published a 74 page "white paper" that sets forth the direction it intends to move British primary-secondary education during Blair's second term. The emphasis is on high schools. The rhetorical and policy thrust-this may not surprise you-is a blend of standards, accountability, flexibility and diversity, including the creation of distinctive new schools, some of them religious. But the main controversy centers on the government's plan to outsource failing schools to private operators and to encourage other schools to outsource various services. Not bad for a Labour Government, one is tempted to say. Yet there may be less to it than meets the eye. When a school voluntarily teams up with an outside organization, for example, its staff must remain government employees. Even when a failing school is involuntarily "outsourced" to a private operator, its staff, again, may opt to remain public employees rather than employees of the private operator. And while a successful school can gain some freedom with respect to teacher pay and working conditions, there will be no individual contracts, i.e. the group-think collective-bargaining framework remains intact. In sum, there are many good ideas here but in almost every instance the government seems to have begun its journey with one leg intentionally broken. Still, we wish them well-K-12 education in Britain needs improvement as badly as in the U.S.-and will be watching

» Continued

Schools Achieving Success

Telling Lessons from the TIMSS Videotape: Remarkable Teaching Practices as Recorded from Eighth-Grade Mathematics Classes in Japan, Germany, and the US

Judy Goss / September 13, 2001

Alan Siegel
2001

The outstanding performance of Japanese students on the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) examinations has prompted numerous studies of Japanese teaching practices by researchers eager to duplicate such success in their own countries' classrooms. Now N.Y.U. professor Alan Siegel has taken a look at videotaped lessons from TIMSS classroom studies in an effort to spot the salient features of Japanese teaching. Siegel walks the reader through sample Japanese geometry and algebra lessons full of "deep and rich" content, noting the teachers' skill at eliciting and prompting responses from students. Instead of extensive group work and "discovery-based learning," which have taken hold in many U.S. schools, he says the "grapple and tell" method is extensively used in Japan. Here, students struggle with a problem in class-individually or in small groups-often without finding a solution. Then, a master teacher presents "every step of [the] solution without divulging the answer," thereby helping students to "learn to think deeply." Siegel also rebuts some misleading claims by other studies of Japanese pedagogy, such as the assertion that Japanese teachers "come closer to implementing the spirit of current ideas advanced by U.S. reformers than do U.S. teachers." You can access the study online at http://www.cs.nyu.edu/faculty/siegel/ST11.pdf

» Continued

Telling Lessons from the TIMSS Videotape: Remarkable Teaching Practices as Recorded from Eighth-Grade Mathematics Classes in Japan, Germany, and the US